The full title of this book by Richard Heinberg is
“The End Of Growth: Adapting To Our New Economic Realities“.
In my review posted to Amazon.co.uk, I gave the book Five Stars. This means it is Excellent and Very Highly Recommended.
Here is my book review.
Essential reading
This book is a real eye-opener and shows that the common assumption that we can continue to grow the economy at 2% to 3% per year is invalid.
In fact it is complete nonsense.
We live on a planet of limited reserves and even worse, they are being consumed fast. Not only can we not grow, we are reaching the point where contraction will be forced upon us because we’ll have run out of essential commodities or they will become so expensive to mine, we can’t afford them.
To be honest, in some ways, the message of the book is too overwhelming as it ties together so many different strands of our everyday lives and shows that even if we dodge one bullet, there are a succession of others waiting to get us.
Because of this, you might find it helpful to read Life After Growth: How the global economy really works – and why 200 years of growth are over first. This does a great job of explaining that we live in two different economies that should run parallel to each other – a money economy and an energy economy. Unfortunately they are diverging fast and that means a sharp shock downwards in prosperity.
My only criticism of these books are that they are big on problems, short on answers. To be fair, we must all understand the problem before we will accept the political and economic consequences of the viable solutions.
It’s easy to ignore the messages of these books because we don’t want the outcomes to be true.
I don’t want it to be cold and wet tomorrow but I’ll go out prepared with a thick coat and an umbrella just in case.
Anything positive and helpful we do in advance of being forced to react to the crises will help.
Read this book. It’s time to be very worried about the future.
It is available to buy from Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com.
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