Reading List

The CASSE reading list includes a variety of texts, including trade books, textbooks, scholarly articles, book reviews, and other publications. Each title has been carefully curated by CASSE staff to provide you with the most accurate and current information about the steady state economy, limits to growth, and broader sustainability issues.

CASSE also maintains a more extensive bibliography. Some of our resources are available for free in pdf format. Want more information? Have a recommendation for our reading list? Contact us!

Top 5 Must-Reads Books & Textbooks Foundational Essays Journal Articles

#1. Supply Shock by Brian Czech

Cover of Supply Shock by Brian Czech, #1 on the CASSE recommended reading list.

Written by CASSE’s very own founding president and executive director, Brian Czech, Supply Shock is required reading for anyone concerned about the world our children and grandchildren will inherit. This landmark work lays a solid foundation for a new economic model, perhaps in time to prevent global catastrophes; certainly in time to mitigate the damage.

Starting with a refreshingly accessible, comprehensive critique of “the dismal science,” Czech develops a compelling argument for a steady state economy. Supply Shock succeeds at engaging readers while conveying keen scientific, economic, and political insights including:

- - - - The trophic theory of money
        
        The overlooked source of technological progress that prevents us from reconciling growth and environmental protection
        
        Bold yet practical policy objectives designed to ease the transition to life after growth

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#2. Beyond Growth by Herman Daly

Cover of Herman Daly's book, Beyond Growth, the second reading recommendation on CASSE's reading list.

Herman Daly is perhaps the most prominent advocate of the need for a new economic paradigm in response to our environmental crisis. He has a wide and growing reputation among environmentalists, both inside and outside the academy. Daly argues that if sustainable development means anything, it demands that we consider the economy as part of the ecosystem and, as a result, abandon the ideal of economic growth. We need a global understanding of developing welfare that is exclusive from expansion. These simple ideas turn out to be fundamentally radical concepts, and basic ideas about economic theory, poverty, trade, and population have to be discarded or rethought. Daly argues that there is a real fight to control the meaning of “sustainable development,” and that conventional economists and development thinkers are trying to water down its meaning to further their own ends.

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#3. Prosperity Without Growth by Tim Jackson

This book challenges the embedded, unquestioned assumptions of the global policy of growth and shows that it’s both necessary and possible to have increased and widespread prosperity without economic growth.

Our modern economy is reliant on economic growth for stability. When growth falters, politicians panic, businesses fail, people lose jobs, and recession looms. Jackson argues, however, that continual growth is just not possible, and therefore not sustainable, and to believe so is ignoring our knowledge of the finite resource base and fragile ecology in which we live.

Prosperity Without Growth sparks dialogue on the most urgent task of our time—the challenge of a new prosperity encompassing our ability to flourish as human beings within the ecological limits of a finite planet.

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#4. Doughnut Economics by Kate Raworth

Economics dominates our decision-making for the future, guides multi-billion-dollar investments, and shapes our responses to climate change, inequality, and other environmental and social challenges of our time. However, its fundamental ideas are centuries out of date, yet still taught in academic courses worldwide and still used to address critical issues in government and business alike.

Renegade economist Kate Raworth says it’s time to update our economic thinking for the 21^st century. She explains seven key ways to fundamentally reframe our understanding of what economics is and does. Simultaneously, she points out how we can break our addiction to growth; redesign money, finance, and business to be in service to people; and create economies that are regenerative and distributive by design.

Raworth incorporates the best ideas from ecological, behavioral, feminist, and institutional economics to complexity thinking and Earth-systems science to address this question: How can we turn economies that need to grow, whether or not they make us thrive, into economies that make us thrive, whether or not they grow?

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#5. Small is Beautiful by E.F. Schumacher

Time magazine celebrates E.F. Schumacher’s riveting, richly researched position on sustainability as an “eco-bible” that has become more relevant and essential with each year since its premiere publication during the 1973 energy crisis. A profound statement against “bigger is better” industrialism, Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful paved the way for twenty-first century books on environmentalism and economics. This timely book offers a crucial message for the modern world struggling to balance economic growth with the human costs of globalization.

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Shoveling Fuel for a Runaway Train

by Brian Czech

Best of The Daly News

Edited by Brian Czech

Ecological Economics: An Introduction

by Michael Common & Sigrid Stagl

From Uneconomic Growth to a Steady State Economy

by Herman Daly

Ecological Economics, 2nd Edition

by Herman Daly & Joshua Farley

Collapse

by Jared Diamond

The Entropy Law & the Economic Process

by Nicolas Georgescu-Roegen

Self-Made Man

by Jonathan Kingdon

Boulding, Kenneth. 1966. “The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth” in H. Jarrett (ed.), Environmental Quality in a Growing Economy, pp. 3-14. Resources for the Future/Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Maryland.

Czech, B., and H. Daly. 2004. The steady state economy: what it is, entails, and connotes. Wildlife Society Bulletin 32(2):598-605.

Mill, John Stuart. 1848. “Of the Stationary State,” Book IV, Chapter VI in Principles of Political Economy: With Some of Their Applications to Social Philosophy, J.W. Parker, London, England.

Schumacher, E.F. 1966. “Buddhist Economics” in Guy Wint, Asia: A Handbook, Anthony Blond Ltd., London, U.K.

Vitousek, Peter, Paul Ehrlich, Anne Ehrlich, and Pam Matson. 1986. Human Appropriation of the Products of Photosynthesis. Bioscience 36:368-373.

Clausen R. and R. York. 2008. Economic growth and marine biodiversity: influence of human social structure on decline of marine trophic levels. Conservation Biology 22(2):458-466.

Czech, B. 2019. The trophic theory of money: principles, corollaries, and policy implications. Journal and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales 152(1):66-81.

Czech, B. 2006. Steady state economy. Encyclopedia of Earth. Eds. Tom Tietenberg et al., National Council for Science and the Environment, Washington, DC.

Czech, B. 2009. Ecological economics, in Encyclopaedia of Life Support Systems. Developed under the auspices of UNESCO-EOLSS Publishers, Oxford, UK (copy compliments of UNESCO).

Czech, B. 2008. Prospects for reconciling the conflict between economic growth and biodiversity conservation with technological progress. Conservation Biology 22(6):1389-1398.

Czech, B. 2007. The foundation of a new conservation movement: professional society positions on economic growth. Bioscience 57(1):6-7.

Czech, B., and H. Daly. 2004. The steady state economy: what it is, entails, and connotes. Wildlife Society Bulletin 32(2):598-605.

Czech, B., P. Angermeier, H. Daly, P. Pister, and R. Hughes. 2004. Fish conservation, sustainable fisheries, and economic growth: no more fish stories. Fisheries 29(8):36-37.

Czech, B., P. R. Krausman, and P. K. Devers. 2000. Economic associations among causes of species endangerment in the United States. Bioscience 50(7):593-601.

Czech, B., J. H. Mills Busa, and R. M. Brown. 2012. Effects of economic growth on biodiversity in the United States. Natural Resources Forum 36:160-166.

Daly, Herman, 2008. “Towards a Steady-State Economy.” Paper presented to the U.K. Sustainable Development Commission.

Dietz, T., E. A. Rosa, and R. York. 2007. Driving the human ecological footprint. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 5(1):13-18.

Gowdy, John, and J. Erickson. 2005. The approach of ecological economics. Cambridge Journal of Economics 29:207-222.

Jackson, T. 2009. Beyond the growth economy. Journal of Industrial Ecology 13(4):487-490.

Koch, M., 2015. Climate Change, Capitalism and Degrowth Trajectories to a Global Steady-State Economy. International Critical Thought 5, 439–452.

O’Neill, D. W. 2012. Measuring progress in the degrowth transition to a steady state economy. Ecological Economics 84:221-231.

Røpke, I. 2005. Trends in the development of ecological economics from the late 1980s to the early 2000s. Ecological Economics 55(2):262-290.

Rosales, J. 2006. Economic growth and biodiversity loss in an age of tradeable permits. Conservation Biology 20(4):1042-1050.

Simms, A., V. Johnson, P. Chowla. 2010. Growth isn’t possible. New Economics Foundation, London, U.K. 144pp.

Stern, D. I. 2004. The rise and fall of the environmental Kuznets curve. World Development 32(8):1419–1439.

Trauger, D. L., B. Czech, J. D. Erickson, P. R. Garrettson, B. J. Kernohan, C. A. Miller. 2003. The relationship of economic growth to wildlife conservation. Wildlife Society Technical Review 03-1. The Wildlife Society, Bethesda, Maryland.

Victor, P. and Rosenbluth, G. 2007. Managing without growth. Ecological Economics 61:492-504.