Managing Without Growth: slower by design, not disaster by Peter A. Victor, Advances in Ecological Economics, Edward Elgar Publishing, 2008
A wonderfully well-argued and documented case for shifting countries' focus from obsessing on GDP-measured economic growth to wider, more realistic measures of material progress and quality of life. As one who has followed and contributed to the 30 year debate on these issues, I can attest to this book's creative and multi-disciplinary perspective and its realistic discussion of the range of policy options for redirecting national attention and policies toward more realistic goals of reducing inequality, limiting the throughput of material resources and restoring environmental sustainability. My only complaint was the inexplicable omission of the foundational work of Nobelist Frederick Soddy's Cartesian Economics (1913) and Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen's The Entropy Law and the Economic Process (1971), both of whose work I discussed at length in my The Politics of the Solar Age (1981, 1988), also overlooked. Overall, a great contribution and must-reading for those in the fields of sustainability and its new metrics. - - Hazel Henderson