What would a sustainable economy look like? What would it take to live within our environmental means? Legacy answers these and other questions, setting out the key features of the sustainable economy. It explains what it would take to properly maintain different types of capital, why polluters would have to pay, why the current generation would have to fund the necessary maintenance of our natural assets, and why we would have to save to invest. The message is a tough one: we are way off course in terms of meeting these conditions and we cannot escape the consequences. This book explains what we would have to do to mend our ways. In doing so, it highlights the feebleness of current approaches to net zero and biodiversity loss as well as our great neglect of the core infrastructures, and why we are not meeting our duties to the next generation. This title is Open Access.

‘This is a powerful argument for valuing future generations which means saving and investing now so as to live sustainably.’

David Willetts - President of the Resolution Foundation and author of The Pinch

‘This is a hugely important book from a powerful thinker and writer. We are living with crumbling infrastructures, decaying social fabrics, excessive pollution and mass biodiversity loss. Our economies are not sustainable. Sir Dieter's sharp observation is that ‘what is not sustainable will not be sustained’. Legacy clearly and potently charts a course from dystopia to utopia. If you care about the fate of humanity, you should read this book and recommend it to others.’

Cameron Hepburn - Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, University of Oxford

‘Dieter Helm does not pull his punches in this forthright and powerful book. What is unsustainable can, he insists, not be sustained. To avoid disaster, we must transform how we live. Above all, we must all pay for the maintenance of core natural assets, instead of living well off their destruction. This will demand radical changes in how we live our lives, individually and collectively. Some will assert that the revolution he seeks is impossible. Helm counters that it is inescapable.’

Martin Wolf Source: Financial Times

‘Helm of Oxford university puts forward a passionate case for moving to a sustainable economy based on the principle that each generation bequeaths a stock of capital - physical and, far more important, natural - as good as what it inherited. To make this approach operational, we should embrace the twin ideas of ‘polluter pays’ and the ‘precautionary principle’. Helm argues that implementing such ideas requires a concept of citizenship. Unfortunately, the challenges of making this idea work globally are daunting.’

Martin Wolf Source: Financial Times - Best Economics Books of 2023

‘A revolutionary work in several senses.’

Edward Lucas Source: The Times