4799 Shattuck Ave.
Oakland
CA
We start a new book for the new year. All are welcome at host Strike Debt Bay Area’s economics book group discussion.
We meet once a month. For January we are reading the first three chapters of “Limits (Why Malthus Was Wrong and Why Environmentalists Should Care” by Giorgos Kallis (Amazon, Stanford University Press). For February, the remaing chapters. Not a problem if you will have missed January – the chapters are short and it is easy to catch up for February!
Previous books er have discussed include Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics and Ellen Brown’s Banking for the People.
“In an era addicted to endless growth, Giorgos Kallis artfully explores the power of limits and the surprising freedom that they can unleash. A compelling―and fittingly concise―read for our times.” (Kate Raworth author of Doughnut Economics)
“Western culture is infatuated with the dream of going beyond, even as it is increasingly haunted by the specter of apocalypse: drought, famine, nuclear winter. How did we come to think of the planet and its limits as we do? This book reclaims, redefines, and makes an impassioned plea for limits—a notion central to environmentalism—clearing them from their association with Malthusianism and the ideology and politics that go along with it. Giorgos Kallis rereads reverend-economist Thomas Robert Malthus and his legacy, separating limits and scarcity, two notions that have long been conflated in both environmental and economic thought. Limits are not something out there, a property of nature to be deciphered by scientists, but a choice that confronts us, one that, paradoxically, is part and parcel of the pursuit of freedom. Taking us from ancient Greece to Malthus, from hunter-gatherers to the Romantics, from anarchist feminists to 1970s radical environmentalists, Limits shows us how an institutionalized culture of sharing can make possible the collective self-limitation we so urgently need.” – Book description.
Join us!