“As the coronavirus pandemic grows, it brings a secondary, economic disaster—unemployment, small business closings, local government budget shortfalls. Given the way our economy is structured, widespread job losses and plummeting consumer demand trigger a whole lot of suffering. But, as philosopher Barbara Muraca explained in 2013, the activist and scholarly movement known as degrowth is building a vision of a society where economies would get smaller by design—and people would be better off for it.”

Interested in this topic? Visit the Moral Markets book shelf on economic (de)growth

More time to read than usual? Verso Books, a lefist publisher of various books on rethinking the future capitalism has a 40% discount on all books and 80% on ebooks until April 2nd. Five ebooks are even for free, including The Case for the Green New Deal (2019) and Four Futures; Life After Capitalism (2016), which can also be found on the Moral Markets bookshelf.

In Big Business, economics professor Tyler Cowen puts forth an impassioned defense of corporations and their essential role in a balanced, productive, and progressive society. He dismantles common misconceptions and untangles conflicting intuitions.

Honorable Business offers an explanation of the connection between honorable business and the historically unprecedented growth of worldwide prosperity over the last two centuries. It also gives responses to central worries and objections raised to business and commercial society, including inequality, unfairness, negative externalities, and exploitation.

Interested in the topic? On our bookshelf you can find more books on business ethics & CSR, and more books defending the free market

What debates and discussions on the ethics of markets, business and economics stood out in 2019? To answer that question, we looked back at the articles that we sourced for you from a range of different websites throughout the year. The three topics we distilled:

1. Does Business Have a Purpose Beyond Profit?
2. Economic Growth: Problem or Solution?
3. Can We Make the Economy More Democratic?

In this post a quick recap of – sometimes opposing – contributions to these discussions. Where do you stand?

“Market-led proposals present a risk for how our cities function. If infrastructure is built in the interests of private actors, the outcomes will favour them, not citizens. Privatising key public assets that are natural monopolies, such as railways, opens the door to rent-seeking. While allowing governments to conveniently avoid the capital costs appearing on public balance sheets, market-led proposals seem engineered to deliver monopoly rents from users to private interests.”

How the history of technological revolutions can help us better understand economic and political polarization in the age of automation.

More books on technology and the future of markets / capitalism

According to author Nathan Schneider, “the origins of the next radical economy is rooted in a tradition that has empowered people for centuries and is now making a comeback”: cooperatives.

More books on cooperatives and the role of communities in economics