Seven of the best books to inspire hope for the planet

Ann Pettifor is director of Prime: Policy Research in Macroeconomics and a fellow of the New Economics Foundation. She is the author of The Case for the Green New Deal.

At the Guardian she tagged seven books that offer hope for the future and the Green New Deal, including:

The Green New Deal is about system change – a struggle to subordinate the power of Wall Street and the City to the interests of society and the ecosystem. A book that inspires me to believe such a transformation possible is The Money Makers – historian Eric Rauchway’s 2015 account of how Roosevelt dismantled the privatised global financial system. On the night of his inauguration, Roosevelt began the process of ending the gold standard, by stripping Wall Street of private authority over the system, and restoring democratic, public authority. As Henry Morgenthau, then the US treasury secretary, wrote: “We moved the financial capital from London and Wall Street right to my desk at the Treasury.”

Read about more entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue