Book Club Introduction. ASAP believed that endless economic growth is not only impossible, but that it is also mistakenly perceived as an indispensable prerequisite for widespread prosperity. ASAP created its book club as a means for exploring approaches to economics that recognize limits to growth, and which also envision the economy as the subset of the earth and its environment that it is. Many of book club selections also help frame the discussion ASAP wanted to see move increasingly into the foreground of related political and theoretical debates--centered on the ways in which economic history and the most insightful economic theory drawn upon it, point the way toward full employment and widespread prosperity with a stable or declining population. The book club drew its name from Kenneth Boulding's seminal 1966 essay, "The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth."
The "Book Club" page of this archive lists books read and discussed by the ASAP book club. If you are interested in economics for a finite planet, but are new to the subject, you should find some of these selections worth reading!
Book Club readings:
Cohen, Daniel., The Infinite Desire for Growth. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018.
Cohen, Joel E., How Many People Can The Earth Support? New York: W.W. Norton, 1995.
Collins, Robert M., More: The Politics of Economic Growth in Postwar America. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Czech, Brian, Supply Shock: Economic Growth at the Crossroads and the Steady State Solution. Gabriola Island, New Society Publishers, 2013.
Daly, Herman, Beyond Growth. Boston: Beacon Press, 1997.
Daly, Herman (ed.), Toward a Steady State Economy. San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1973.
Dietz, Rob, and Dan O’Neill, Enough is Enough: Building a Sustainable Economy in a World of Finite Resources. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2013.
Galbraith, James K., The End of Normal: The Great Crisis and the Future of Growth. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2014.
Gordon, Robert J., The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016.
Heinberg, Richard, The End of Growth. New Society Publisher: Gabriola Island, 2011.
Hoff, Derek, The State and the Stork: the Population Debate and Policy Making in US History. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2012.
Keynes, John Maynard, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1936.
Matsutani, Akihiko, Shrinking Population Economics: Lessons from Japan. Tokyo: International House of Japan, 2006.
Phillips, Sarah T., This Land, This Nation. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Pizzigati, Sam, The Rich Don't Always Win. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2012.
Sachs, Jeffrey, Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet. New York: Penguin Books, 2008.
Schragger, Richard, City Power. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016.
Schumacher, E.F. Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. New York: Harper Perennial, 1973.
Skidelsky, Robert, and Edward Skidelsky, How Much is Enough?: The Love of Money, and the Case for the Good Life, New York: Allen Lane, 2012.
Stiglitz, Joseph, The Price of Inequality. New York: W.W. Norton, 2013.
Stiglitz, Joseph, Making Globalization Work. New York: W.W. Norton, 2006.
Victor, Peter, Managing without Growth: Slower by Design, Not Disaster. Northampton: Edgar Elgar, 2008.
Weisman, Alan, Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future On Earth? New York: Back Bay Books, 2013.
Yan, Mo. Frog. New York: Penguin, 2014.