Review of Steven Hail’s Economics for Sustainable Prosperity

Steven Hail’s Economics for Sustainable Prosperity is a supremely ambitious book. In it, Hail collects the economic frameworks and theories that he believes are necessary to guide scholars and policymakers towards a more equitable and environmentally sound future.These topics run the gamut from micro to macro and from modeling to policy, with Hail attempting to get at not just superficial details, but the core underlying axioms of each, and do it all in under 300 pages. The author is quite self-aware of the impossibility of this feat, humbly reminding readers that his descriptions of certain topics are, for instance, “superficial and incomplete” (p.110) or “(very, very) highly simplified” (p.164). Nonetheless, this book is well-suited to somebody looking for a high-level but intensive overview into any of the literature that make up the chapter headings.