Annotated Bibliography

  • Alexander, Sam. 2012, The Sufficiency Economy: Envisioning a Prosperous Way Down. Simplicity Institute Report 12s.
    • A degrowth approach that aims for a world in which everyone’s basic needs are modestly but sufficiently met, in an ecologically sustainable, highly localized, and socially equitable manner.
  • Alperovitz, Gar. 2013. What Then Must We Do? Chelsea Green Publishing.
    • Suggests that capitalism is crumbling and calls for an evolution, not a revolution, out of this old system and into a new one, which democratizes the ownership of wealth, strengthen communities, and is governed by policies and institutions sophisticated enough to manage a large-scale, powerful economy.
  • Bastani, Aaron. 2019. Fully Automated Luxury Communism. London: Verso.
    • FALC advocates a break with Neoliberalism, a shift towards worker-owned production, a state-financed transition to renewable energy and universal services — aided by tech progress (my works) – and placed beyond commodity exchange and profit.
  • Bernstein, William. 2010. The Birth of Plenty. NY: McGraw Hill.
    • A historical look that identifies four foundations of the capitalist system, which developed in synch with the industrial revolution and delivered the plenty: (1) property rights, including intellectual property (2) scientific rationalism (3) funding: capital markets (4)   communications: improvements in transportation and communication. Three of these four foundations of the “birth of plenty” are being challenged (the 4th being the exception).
  • Bishop, Matthew and Michael Green. 2008. Philanthrocapitalism: How the Rich Can Save the World. NY: Bloomsbury Press.
    • Philanthrocapitalists see a world of big problems that they, and perhaps only they, can and must put right.
  • Bollier, David. 2014. Think Like a Commoner: A Short Introduction to the Life of the Commons. Gabriola Island, BC, Canada: New Society Publishers. Kindle Edition.
    • A commons has boundaries, rules, social norms and sanctions against free riders. A commons requires that there be a community willing to act as a conscientious steward of a resource. The ambitious view put forward by the author is that the commons could be a vehicle for social and political emancipation and societal transformation.
  • Bostrom, Nick. 2014. Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, Kindle Edition.
    • Explores paths to beyond-human superintelligence, the strategic choices available to it, and what we could do to shape the initial conditions.
  • Botsman, Rachel and Rogers, Roo. 2010. What’s Mine Is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption. NY: HarperCollins.
    • Using technology to enable networking and greater sharing of resources and information among communities, including sharing, bartering, lending, trading, renting, gifting and swapping.
  • Braudel, Fernand. 1981. The Structures of Everyday Life. Vol. 1 of Civilization and Capitalism, 15th – 18th Century. NY: Harper & Rowe. AND Braudel, Fernand. 1992. The Perspective of the World. Vol. 3 of Civilization and Capitalism, 15th – 18th Century. NY: Harper & Rowe.
    • These thick volumes provide a rather mundane basics of daily life in the pre-capitalist world. Population, food, housing, clothes get really into the nitty gritty, while technology, money, and town/cities get a little higher-level. It sets the stage for the advent of capitalism.
  • Bregman, Rutger. 2017. Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World. NY: Little, Brown and Company.
    • Suggests that reduction of work first has to be reinstated as a political ideal. Makes the case for universal basic income and the need for a massive redistribution of wealth.
  • Bruntland Commission. 1987. Our Common Future. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    • Pioneered/popularized the concept of sustainability of “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
  • Brynjolfsson, Erik and Andrew Macafee. 2016. The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies. NY: W.W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.
    • Frames the debate around whether or not technological progress and automation will create more jobs than it destroys.
  • Christophers, Brett. 2020. Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for it?London: Verso.
    • Styles ‘rentier capitalism’ as ownership of key types of scarce assets – such as land, intellectual property, natural resources, or digital platforms – is all-important and dominated by a few unfathomably wealthy companies and individuals: rentiers.
  • Daly, Herman, 1994. Steady State Economics, 2nd Ed. Northhampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing.
    • A classic text on the economics of a steady-state approach characterized by relatively stable size that leaves room for nature and provides high levels of human well-being.
  • Davenport, Thomas and John Beck. 2001. The Attention Economy. Harvard Business School.
    • Value is earned by getting attention — the scarcest resource in an information-rich world.
  • De Angelis, Massimo.  2017. Omnia Sunt Communia: On the Commons and the Transformation to Postcapitalism. London: Zed Books.
    • A highly local “commoning” model in which people self-organize socially and politically within communities to pool and govern resources in common.
  • Diamandis, Peter. 2012. Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think. NY: Simon & Schuster.
    • Technological progress is such that within a generation, we will be able to provide goods and services, once reserved for the wealthy few, to any and all who need them.
  • Doctorow, Cory. 2017. Walkaway: A Novel. NY: Tor Books.
    • A fictional account in which After Capitalism is achieved by “walking away” from capitalism. It’s an interesting and plausible story of those seeking to build a post-scarcity society by in effect dropping out from the “default” world of massive inequality largely run by super-rich “zottas,” and how the system/zotttas fight back.
  • Eberstadt, Nicholas. 2016. Men without Work: America’s Invisible Crisis. West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Press.
    • Explores the increasingly difficult prospects for men finding work in the US.
  • Eisenstein, Charles. 2011. Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition. Berkeley, CA:  North Atlantic Books.
    • Describes a gift economy concept based on rethinking the economy and money; basically shrinking the formal economy and shifting money away from being a store of value to primarily a medium of exchange, including the adoption of negative interest to discourage rents.
  • Ellen MacArthur Foundation. 2013. Towards the Circular Economy: Economic and Business Rationale for an Accelerated Transition, Volume 1.
    • Helped popularize the circular economy concept in which today’s goods are tomorrow’s resources, which forms a virtuous cycle of durables designed for re-use, and consumables made of compostable materials that can be returned to the earth.
  • Ferguson, Niall. 2008. The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World. NY: Penguin.
    • A financial history of the world that provides some helpful grounding, and also illustrates the power of the “money” paradigm that is dismissive of alternatives.
  • Fioramonte, Lorenzo. 2017. Wellbeing Economy: Success in a World without Growth. Pan Macmillan South Africa.
    • Argues that society’s perverse obsession with economic growth by showing its many flaws, paradoxes and inconsistencies. He argues that the pursuit of growth often results in more losses than gains and in damage, inequalities and conflicts, and advocates instead a focus on well-being.
  • Frase, Peter. 2016. Four Futures: Life after Capitalism. NY: Verso Books.
    • Four scenarios based on uncertainties of scarcity/abundance and inequality, with automation a predetermined; includes a vision of communism.
  • Fullerton, John. 2015. Regenerative Capitalism: How Universal Principles and Patterns Will Shape Our New Economy. Greenwich, CT: Capital Institute.
    • Reformed Wall Streeter’s transition concept for reforming capitalism with sustainability as the core idea for economic-system design.
  • Gladwell, Malcolm. 2002. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. NY: Back Bay Books.
    • Describes the tipping point phenomenon, the “magic moment” when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire.
  • Hahnel, Robin. 2022. A Participatory Economy. Chico, CA: AK Press.
    • This handbook details how to reconcile comprehensive democratic planning with worker and consumer autonomy in a post-capitalist economy.
  • Haque, Umair. 2011. Betterness: Economics for Humans. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Review Press. Kindle Edition.
    • Makes case for shifting from negative to positive approach to economics that emphasized creating wealth for the common good.
  • Harari, Yuval Noah. 2017a. Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow.Kindle Edition. NY: Harper.
    • Technology-led progress is helping humanity to “reign in” famine, plague and war and even tackle longevity and even happiness. The changes ahead, such as the integration of biology and robotics, are so profound as to suggest that Homo Sapiens are effectively upgraded into a new species, Homo Dues.
  • Haskel, Jonathan & Westlake, Stian. 2017. Capitalism without Capital: The Rise of the Intangible Economy, Kindle Edition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton U Press.
    • The global economy has now shifted to be more intangibles focused, which (1) creates scale (scaling via IP, supply chains, branding, software, etc); creates spillover (easy for a firm to copy ideas from another firm); has high sunk cost (which makes banks less likely to invest, thus requiring VC), and creates incentives for Synergies (reason why cities and cultural of openness are important).
  • Heilbroner, Robert. 1996. Visions of the Future. NY: Oxford University Press USA.
    • Interesting look at the role of visions in history and the future and how they have evolved over time.
  • Hines, A. (2011). ConsumerShift: How Changing Values are Reshaping the Consumer Landscape. Tucson, AZ: No Limit Publishing.
    • Makes the case for how values are changing in a consistent direction over time. The pattern uncovered in the research, drawing upon nearly two dozen systems but drawing most heavily on the outstanding work of the World Values Survey and Spiral Dynamics, is that there are four types of values and there has been a consistent “developmental” pattern in their adoption over time, moving from traditional to modern to postmodern to integral.
  • Hines, Andy and Bishop, Peter. (2015). Thinking about the Future: Guidelines for Strategic Foresight, 2nd edition. Houston, TX: Hinesight.
    • This reference work is packed with case studies, practical tips, and 115 guidelines organized in a highly scannable format using six phases of a strategic foresight project: framing, scanning, futuring, visioning, designing, and acting.
  • Homer-Dixon, Thomas. 2006. The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization. Washington DC: Island Press.
    • Sees a transformation coming and suggests it could either be a catastrophic collapse or a healthy renewal, depending on the choices we make. A key insight is that we ought to be “planning for renewal after breakdown.”
  • Hurst, Aaron. 2016. The Purpose Economy, Expanded and Updated: How Your Desire for Impact, Personal Growth and Community Is Changing the World. Kindle Edition. Boise, ID: Elevate Publishing.
    • Suggests that purpose is replacing information as the new key source of value in the economy.
  • Jackson, Tim. 2015. Prosperity without Growth? The Transition to a Sustainable Economy. Sustainable Development Commission.
    • Emphasizes strengthening ecologically and socially sustainable practices given the physical limits of the earth.
  • Jackson, Tim. 2021. Post-Growth: Life after Capitalism. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
    • Strengthening ecologically and socially sustainable practices given the physical limits of the earth — a new macroeconomics for sustainability is not only essential, but possible.
  • Kallis, Giorgos, Federico Demaria, and Giacomo D’Alisa. 2015. Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era, 1st Ed., NY: Routledge.
    • Supports degrowth by seeking to eliminate economic growth as a social objective and favors grassroots practices such as eco-communities, co-ops, local currencies, barter, commons, etc.
  • Katz. Lawrence. 2014.
    • People use their own personal style and abilities to complement Information and Communications Technologies ICT technology and provide better experiences.
  • Kauffman, Draper and Kauffman, Morgan. 2021. Systems 1: An Introduction to Systems Thinking, 4th Edition. Houston: Center for Systems and Public Policy.
    • A user-friendly introduction systems theory that proceeds through simple steps to help the reader understand some of the more complex systems that we deal with every day. It concludes with “Kauffman’s Rules,” 30 proverbs that every systems thinker needs to know.
  • Kurzweil, Ray. 2005. The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. NY: The Viking Press.
    • Exponential technological change leads to machine intelligence surpassing humans and eventually no clear distinction between humans and machines.
  • Lanier, Jaron. 2013. Who Owns the Future? NY: Simon & Schuster.
    • Argues that there eventually won’t be enough paying customers to subsidize all the free information, thus suggests that people get nanopayments for sharing their data.
  • Lessig, Lawrence. 2008. Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy. NY: Penguin Books.
    • Builds upon both the sharing and commercial economies, one that adds value to each. This third type will dominate the architecture for commerce on the Web.
  • MacAskill, William. 2022. What We Owe the Future. NY: Basic Books.
    • Lays out a case for longtermism, ethical view that positively influencing the long-term future is a key moral priority of our time, include the dilemma between weak and strong longtermism that raises the question of the relative attention to be paid the “shorter” long term vs. the “longer” long term.
  • Mackey, John and Raj Sisodia. 2013. Conscious Capitalism: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business. Boston: Harvard Business Review Press.
    • Reinvigorate capitalism by doing business guided by principles of higher purpose, stakeholder orientation, and conscious leadership and culture.
  • Mason, Paul. 2015. Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future. NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
    • Frames the “problem” as neoliberalism, the capitalist doctrine of uncontrolled markets, in which the best route to prosperity is individuals pursuing their own self-interest. While it’s a clear and powerful idea, it is breaking down. A key driver is that I/T is moving toward zero marginal cost, and, related to that, shareable information goods are shifting the basic laws of economics based on scarcity to abundance. We need to design the transition to post-capitalism as a distributed project.
  • Mayer-Schonberger, Viktor and Thomas Ramge. 2018. Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data. NY: Basic Books. Kindle Edition.
    • Algorithms and big data will enable markets to function much better, eclipsing the role of firms and even the role of price/money in decision-making.
  • McDonough, William and Braungart, Michael. 2010. Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things. Albany, CA: North Point Press.
    • A call-to-arms to reexamine our relationship with waste, our environmental policies, and approach to manufacturing that laved the way for the circular economy.
  • McDonough, William and Braungart, Michael. 2013. The Upcycle: Beyond Sustainability: Designing for Abundance. Albany, CA: North Point Press.
    • This follow-up to Cradle-to-Cradle envisions the next step in the solution to our ecological crisis is that we don’t just use or reuse and recycle resources with greater effectiveness, we actually improve the natural world as we live, create, and build – upcycle rather than recycle.
  • Moore, Geoffrey. 1991. Crossing the Chasm. NY: Harper Business Essentials.
    • Examines the market dynamics faced by innovative new products, particularly the daunting chasm that lies between early to mainstream markets.
  • Patten, Terry.  2018. A New Republic of the Heart: An Ethos for Revolutionaries. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books.
    • Expands the scope of “activist” beyond images of sit-ins, people circulating petitions and raising money to include doing research, starting businesses, making loans, and changing one’s diet.
  • Piketty, Thomas. 2014. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.
    • A history and current assessment that suggests that left to its own devices, capitalism will tend toward inequality. It boils down to a simple fact: the return on capital investments beats economic growth, which creates an advantage for previously accumulated wealth that exacerbates inequality. He proposes a progress global tax on capital as a redistributive mechanism, which while challenging is preferable to resolving it the hard way (social unrest/revolution).
  • Pine, Joseph, and Gilmore, James. 1991. The Experience Economy: Work Is Theater & Every Business a Stage. Harvard Business Review Press.
    • Describes the shift in emphasis from goods to services to experiences in which the design of even routine interactions ought to be special.
  • Polak, Fred. 1973. The Image of the Future. NY: Elsevier.
    • A classic historical study of the role of a guiding image of the future in the success of civilization, with its absence being a factor in decline.
  • Raworth, Kate. 2017. Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think like a 21st century Economist. White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing.
    • The doughnut depicts an inner ring of a social foundation of well-being that no one should fall below and an outer ring of an ecological ceiling of planetary pressure that we should not go beyond.
  • Reich, Robert. 2013. Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future. NY: Vintage.
    • Former Labor Secretary Reich notes that reliance on the free market essentially left the middle class unprotected from the effects of global competition and automation. Nor was anything done after the Great Recession on this. The failure to address inequality will result in political backlash. He finds that the problem isn’t too little saving, but too little demand, as workers can’t afford the products they are making. Many solutions are offered with the context of a next stage of capitalism.
  • Rifkin, Jeremy. 1994. The End of Work. NY: Tarcher/Penguin.
    • Topic is the end of work, not the end of capitalism. The argument is that automation is going to force every nation to rethink the role of human beings in the social process. The challenge for the end of work is: redefining the role of the individual in a society absent of mass formal work is, perhaps, the seminal issue of the coming age. The solution is to create a vibrant third sector (public is 1st sector; market is 2nd sector; volunteer is 3rd sector), including a basic income.
  • Rifkin, Jeremy. 2014. The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism. NY: St. Martin’s Press.
    • Massive economies of scale provided by digitization push the cost of reproducing information to zero, thus enabling abundance, or an empathic civilization.
  • Scharmer, Otto. 2013. Leading from the Emerging Future: From Ego-System to Eco-System Economies. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler.
    • Describes a transition from a modern to an integral economy (my words) using his presencing approach, with the postmodern version in between those two weakly developed.
  • Schroeder, Karl. 2019. Stealing Worlds. NY: Tor Books.
    • Describes a world in which the gamer community in effect builds an informal alternative economy alongside the “official” one that eventually overtakes it.
  • Schwab, Klaus. 2016. The Fourth Industrial Revolution: What it Means, How to Respond. Geneva, Switzerland: World Economic Forum.
    • Maps out a digital revolution characterized by a fusion of technologies that is blurring the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres driving exponential change.
  • Schweickart, David. 2011. After Capitalism, 2nd Ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
    • A socialist approach with market and democratic features centered on three key concepts of worker self-management, a market for enterprises, and social control of investment.
  • Shaw, I. and Waterstone, M. (2020). Wageless Life: A Manifesto for a Future beyond Capitalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
    • An impassioned, effective, and interesting case against neoliberal capitalism.
  • Siegel, Eric. 2013. Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
    • Popular overview of the approach, which uses historical data, statistical algorithms, and machine learning techniques to make predictions about future events or outcomes.
  • Simon, Julian. 1981. The Ultimate Resource. Princeton University Press.
    • Argument against fears of population growth leading to resource depletion and poverty. Took the position that more humans increased the prospects for human ingenuity solving these problems.
  • Smart, John M. 2015. The Foresight Guide: Predicting, Creating, and Leading in the 21st Century, Foresight University.
    • A comprehensive introduction to general futures thinking and professional foresight practice available on the web.
  • Smyre, Rick and Neil Richardson. 2016. Preparing for a World that Doesn’t Exist: Creating a Framework for Communities of the Future. Winchester, UK: Changemaker Books.
    • A call for transformative change at the community level based on 14 principles of what “should be.”
  • Srnicek, Nick and Alex Williams. 2016. Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World without Work. Brooklyn, NY: Verso Books. Kindle Edition.
    • The folk politics movements of the left are ineffective and out of touch, resistance has been reactive and defensive. It needs to systematically create a vision of the future – i.e., a new hegemony to replace neoliberalism — on universal scale that can accommodate difference.
  • Standing, Guy. 2014. A Precariat Charter: From Denizens to Citizens. NY: Bloomsbury Publishing. Kindle Edition.
    • Identifies and describes the precariat as a class-in-the-making characterized by uncertain circumstances, deriving in part from utilitarian principles of winners and losers, and benefiting from the move to a new egalitarian economic order for which he describes an charter for action.
  • Sundararajan, Arun. 2016. The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, Kindle Edition.
    • Describes the sharing economy concept and the several other emerging economic ideas it encompasses, including collaborative, platform, gift, etc. It identifies that part of the concept is more market based and part is more gift-based.
  • Tepper, J. and Hearn, D. 2018. The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition. NY: Wiley.
    • Tells the story of how America has gone from an open, competitive marketplace to an economy where a few very powerful companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon dominate key industries.
  • The Future Hunters. 2015. The Metaspace Economy. Weiner, Edrich, Brown, Inc. http://www.thefuturehunters.com/our-services/metaspace-economy/.
    • The Metaspace Economy does not specifically paint a direction for the world to go, but provides a framework of ten places to look for the changes that may transform the world.
  • Van Alstyne, M. (2016). Platform Revolution. WW Norton.
    • How platform businesses bring together producers and consumers together in high-value exchanges to grow via network effects.
  • Vita-More, Natasha. 2018. Transhumanism: What Is It? New Providence: NJ: Bowker.
    • Explores the basic ideas of transhumanism and how it they relate to the future of humanity and what it means to be human?
  • Wilber, Ken. 2000. A Theory of Everything: An Integral Vision for Business, Politics, Science, and Spirituality. Boston: Shambhala.
    • Philosopher Ken Wilber’s “pop” book that presents his comprehensive framework for understanding reality, which he proposes can be understood through four fundamental perspectives or “quadrants”: the individual interior (subjective experience), the individual exterior (objective behavior), the collective interior (shared cultural values, beliefs, and worldviews), and the collective exterior (social systems and structures).
  • Wilber, Ken. 2003. Boomeritis: A Novel that Will Set you Free. Boston: Shambhala.
    • Identifies and characterizes the “mean green meme,” which is an “odd mixture of remarkably creative intelligence coupled with a dose of narcissism.” It’s also referred to as Boomeritis because the Boomer generation was the first to embrace Spiral green values, which in their unhealthy expression take pluralistic relativism to an extreme and a nasty political correctness.   
  • World Commission on Environment and Development. 1987. Our Common Future. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    • Meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs; 17 goals and 169 targets for people , planet, and prosperity
  • Wright, Erik Olin. 2010. Envisioning Real Utopias. NY: Verso.
    • Conceptualizes about creating a post-capitalist society. Rather than advocating strongly for any single particular system to replace it, Wright gives a pragmatic evaluation of several.