Updated 10 January 2020
Following is a selected list of books I have found instructive in developing a system perspective. They provide explanatory insight to help one understand why things are the way they are—what are the various mechanisms at work.
- Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Harper Perennial, 2015, ISBN 978-0-06-231611-0.
- Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, 1997, W.W. Norton, ISBN 0393317558
- Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Revised Edition, 2011, Viking, ISBN 0-14-303655-6.
- William Catton, Jr., Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change, 1980, University of Illinois Press, ISBN 0-252-00988-6
- William Catton, Jr., Bottleneck: Humanity’s Impending Impasse, 2009, XLibris, ISBN 1441522247
- Robert Sapolsky, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, 2017, Penguin, ISBN 978-0-14-311091-0.
- David Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, 2011, Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, ISBN 978-0-374-53355-7.
- Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-first Century, 2013 reprint 2017, Belknap Press, ISBN 0674979850.
- Donella Meadows, Dennis Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and William Behrens III, The Limits to Growth, 1972, Signet, ISBN 0451136950.
- Michael Hudson, Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy, 2015, ISLET, ISBN 3981484282.
- Jane Jacobs, Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics, 1992, Random House, ISBN 0-394-55079-X.
- John Michael Greer, Dark Age America: Climate Change, Cultural Collapse, and the Hard Future Ahead, 2016, New Society Publishers, ISBN 0865718334.
- Robert H. Frank and Philip J. Cook, The Winner-Take-All Society: How More and More Americans Compete for Ever Fewer and Bigger Prizes, Encouraging Economic Waste, Income Inequality, and an Impoverished Cultural Life, 1995, ISBN 0-02-874034-3
- David C. Korten, When Corporations Rule the World, 20th Anniversary Edition, 2015, Barrett-Koehler, ISBN 978-1-62656-287-5.
- Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion, 2012, Vintage, ISBN 978-0-307-45577-2.