As an ongoing feature, staff members at the Des Moines Public Library will recommend a business-related book to add to your reading list. Find this and more books like it at any of the Des Moines Public Library’s six locations and online at dmpl.org. And find information on how to get a FREE library card and all its benefits at dmpl.org/get-carded.

Des Moines Public Library business book pick: “Growth: A History and a Reckoning,” by Daniel Susskind

Why you should read it: This sweeping analysis by economist and author Daniel Susskind, which was shortlisted for the Financial Times’ Best Business Book of the Year Award, shows how policymaking focused around greater and greater economic growth is actually a new development — barely discussed until the second half of the 20th century. Susskind argues that while economic growth has made billions of lives healthier and longer, it has also come at a price to the environment, local cultures, destabilizing technologies and more. But this doesn’t mean infinite growth as a goal should be abandoned; only that moral decisions must be added to the equation.