State of the World 2008: Innovations for a Sustainable Economy

Continued human progress— both material and spiritual —now depends on an economic transformation that is more profound than any seen in the last century. A world of limits will require a shift from the unfettered conventional economics that prevailed then to the emerging field of sustainable economics, which embraces many of the principles of market economics, including its ability to allocate scarce resources, while at the same time explicitly recognizing that the human economy is but a part of the larger global ecosystem that contains it. This new field of sustainable economics goes on to analyze the economic limits imposed by the physical world, and proposes a range of innovative ideas for bringing the economy into balance with the global ecosystem.

The focus of State of the World 2008 is on the innovations that will be needed to make a sustainable economy possible.