Social Limits to Growth

Fred Hirsch's Social Limits Growth is one of the sleeper hits of economics. Its brilliant and acute insights, informed by Hirsch’s experience as a journalist at The Economist before turning to academia, have become ever more relevant as liberal capitalism confronts challenges from austerity to the global race for scarce resources.

Hirsch makes the case for what he calls "positional goods", which derive their value from being scarce in ways that can’t be relieved by technological advancement...