books
Members of the Bus Family have written and edited a diverse collection of books over the past decade. Some were created through direct collaborations within the Bus Family, while others reflect the individual journeys, ideas, and expertise of its members.
This page highlights selected books published by members of the Bus Family over the last ten years.
The Good Society: And How We Make It
Kate Pickett. 2026. Penguin.
A fairer, healthier, more caring and sustainable society is entirely within our grasp. This book shows us the way.
- How do we ensure that everyone has good health and receives the care they need?
- How do we provide education that allows every child to flourish?
- How do we ensure safety, justice and a sustainable environment for all?
In this inspiring book, she shows that to make a good society – in which everyone has what they need to be well, and everyone would be better off – we must prioritise the health, care, education and rehabilitation of those who have the least and suffer the most. This means confronting once and for all the fundamental problems of poverty and inequality that lie behind all the others.
Creating a Regenerative Economy for Wellbeing
Kristín Vala Ragnarsdóttir and Ásgeir Brynjar Torfason. 2026. Edward Elgar.
Kristín Vala Ragnarsdóttir and Ásgeir Brynjar Torfason bring together their interdisciplinary expertise in economics and natural sciences to rethink the unsustainable and resource-driven global economy. With an emphasis on inequalities, the authors highlight the need for a regenerative economy to achieve sustainability for the long-term wellbeing of our planet and its inhabitants.
The authors present fresh insights into creating a regenerative economy to address the impact of the economy of destruction, covering ecological crises, biodiversity loss and climate change. The book draws on international cases, particularly in leadership and science, moving the discussion from abstract critique to tangible policy relevance. Chapters forge new pathways for crafting a regenerative economy that focuses on wellbeing, incorporating new leadership, and the role of women and feminist perspectives.
Selective Empathy: The West through the Gaze of Gaza
Roberto De Vogli. 2026. Brill.
Selective Empathy: The West Through the Gaze of Gaza takes us to the heart of the greatest moral crisis of our time: the genocide in Gaza. Blending sharp political critique with psychological and global health research, haunting testimonies, and suppressed facts, Roberto De Vogli exposes the moral double standards of mainstream Western leaders, journalists, and intellectuals. The book reveals an international community that extends compassion to some victims while denying it to others. Gaza has become a mirror, a litmus test, and a moral blind spot in the West’s eye. Will our civilization survive this crisis of humanity? De Vogli challenges prevailing narratives and calls for a new solidarity grounded in universal empathy, social justice, and emotional decolonization.
Managing and Preventing Pandemics: Lessons From COVID-19
Roberto De Vogli. 2025. Routledge.
Using an evidence-based, critical, population health approach, this book provides a comprehensive analysis of the key errors and most effective interventions to contain the COVID-19 pandemic. It also examines the root determinants of pandemic risk on a global scale and addresses the policy changes to be implemented to prevent future health crises.
Part One of the book discusses the lethal errors in the management of the COVID-19 pandemic, focusing particularly on those countries that failed to limit the death toll caused by the health crisis. These mistakes include lack of preparation, disinformation, medicalization, adoption of a “laissez-faire the virus” approach and inequity. .
Addicted to Growth: Societal Therapy for a Sustainable Wellbeing Future
Robert Costanza. 2023. Routledge/EarthScan
This book takes a compelling approach to describing what is needed to create the kind of future that most people on Earth really want. Our global society is hopelessly addicted to a particular vision of the world and a future that has become both unsustainable and undesirable.
Addicted to Growth frames our current predicament as a societal addiction to a ‘growth at all costs’ economic paradigm. While economic growth has produced many benefits, its side effects are now producing existential problems that are rapidly getting worse. Robert Costanza considers lessons from what works at the individual level to overcome addictions and applies them to a societal scale. Costanza recognises that the first step to recovery is recognising the addiction and that it is leading to disaster; however, simply pointing out the dire consequences of our societal addiction is only the first step and can be counterproductive by itself in motivating change.
Toward an Integrated Science of Wellbeing
Elizabeth Rieger, Robert Costanza, Ida Kubiszewski, and Paul Dugdale (eds). 2023. Oxford University Press.
An integrated science of wellbeing connects diverse scales and perspectives to better guide research and public policy. The contributing authors are distinguished in their respective fields, and provide a synthesis of this wellbeing research. But in each chapter, they also consider the interconnections between the psychological, human biological, societal, and environmental domains of wellbeing research. Hence, while the book is divided into four sections representing each of these domains, integration across all scales is sought throughout. This integrated approach offers a first step toward a more complete understanding of wellbeing that can propel wellbeing research and initiatives in novel and fruitful directions.
Earth for All: A Survival Guide for Humanity
Sandrine Dixson-Decleve, Owen Gaffney, Jayati Ghosh, Jørgen Randers, Johan Rockström, Per Espen Stoknes. 2022. New Society Publishers.
The economic operating system keeps crashing. It’s time to upgrade to a new one.
Five decades ago, The Limits to Growth shocked the world by showing that population and industrial growth were pushing humanity towards a cliff. Today the world recognizes that we are now at the cliff edge: Earth has crossed multiple planetary boundaries while widespread inequality is causing deep instabilities in societies. There seems to be no way out.
Earth For All is both an antidote to despair and a road map to a better future. Using powerful state-of-the-art computer modeling to explore policies likely to deliver the most good for the majority of people, a leading group of scientists and economists from around the world present five extraordinary turnarounds to achieve prosperity for all within planetary limits in a single generation.
Sustainable Wellbeing Futures: A Research and Action Agenda for Ecological Economics
Robert Costanza, Jon D. Erickson, Joshua Farley, and Ida Kubiszewski (eds). 2020. Edward Elgar.
Ecological economics can help create the future that most people want – a future that is prosperous, just, equitable and sustainable. This forward-thinking book lays out an alternative approach that places the sustainable wellbeing of humans and the rest of nature as the overarching goal. Each of the book’s chapters, written by a diverse collection of scholars and practitioners, outlines a research and action agenda for how this future can look and possible actions for its realisation.
The Economics of Arrival: Ideas for a Grown-Up Economy
Katherine Trebeck and Jeremy Williams. 2019. Policy Press
What do we want from economic growth? What sort of a society are we aiming for?
In everyday economics, there is no such thing as enough, or too much, growth. Yet in the world’s most developed countries, growth has already brought unrivalled prosperity: we have ‘arrived’.
More than that, through debt, inequality, climate change and fractured politics, the fruits of growth may rot before everyone has a chance to enjoy them. It’s high time to ask where progress is taking us, and are we nearly there yet?
The Inner Level: How More Equal Societies Reduce Stress, Restore Sanity and Improve Everyone's Well-being
Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. 2018. Penguin.
Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s The Spirit Level, now published in more than twenty languages, has been one of the most influential non-fiction books published in the last decade, showing conclusively how less equal societies fare worse than more equal ones across a whole range of social measures – health, education, levels of violence, life expectancy and child wellbeing – and initiating the enormous public attention now given to the impacts of inequality.
Based on an equally impressive range of data and analysis, The Inner Level now shows the impact inequality has on individuals: how it affects us psychologically, makes social relations more stressful, undermines self-confidence and distorts natural differences in personal abilities.
A Finer Future: Creating an Economy in Service to Life
L. Hunter Lovins, Stewart Wallis, Anders Wijkman, and John Fullerton. 2018. New Society Publishers.
Humanity is in a race with catastrophe and charting the course to a regenerative economy is the most important work facing the world. A Finer Future gathers the evidence and delivers the essential blueprint for an economy that works for people and the planet.
The blueprint for an inspiring regenerative economy that avoids collapse and works for people and the planet.
Humanity is in a race with catastrophe. Is the future one of global warming, 65 million migrants fleeing failed states, soaring inequality, and grid-locked politics?
Wellbeing Economy: Success in a World without Growth
Lorenzo Fioramonti. 2017. Pan MacMillan.
Economic growth is a constant mantra of politicians, economists and the media. Few understand what it is, but they love and follow it blindly. The reality is that since the global financial crisis, growth has vanished in the more industrialised economies and in the so-called developing countries. Politicians may be panicking, but is this really a bad thing?
Using real-life examples and innovative research, acclaimed political economist Lorenzo Fioramonti lays bare 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.
The World After GDP: Politics, Business and Society in the Post Growth Era
Lorenzo Fioramonti. 2017. Polity Press.
GDP is much more than a simple statistic. It has become the overarching benchmark of success and a powerful ordering principle at the heart of the global economy. But the convergence of major economic, social and environmental crises has exposed the flaws of our economic system which values GDP above all else as a measure of prosperity and growth.
In this provocative and inspiring new book, political economist Lorenzo Fioramonti sets out his vision of a world after GDP. Focusing on pioneering research on alternative metrics of progress, governance innovation and institutional change, he makes a compelling case for the profound and positive transformations that could be achieved through a post-GDP system of development.