Abstract
This chapter offers an overview of economic sustainability thinking by examining in turn three economic systems from the perspective of sustainability – the household, the economy, and the biosphere. It starts with the very invention of economics in ancient Greece that focused on moral and financial limits to individual desires and makes its way up in time until the current ecological economics approach to sustainability. It shows that the three historical stages in economic thinking – microeconomics, macroeconomics, and ecological economics – differ as to how they have approached the scale of economic sustainability. It finally focuses on a new approach to economic sustainability that stresses the importance of justice issues: the “just transition.”
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Laurent, É. (2021). Introduction to Economics and Sustainability. In: The Palgrave Handbook of Global Sustainability. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38948-2_98-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38948-2_98-1
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