Ithaca Local Economy Lab · Bookstore
From the Lab’s bookshelf
An episode gets a conversation started. A good book gives you room to keep going.
Explore ideas behind cooperative businesses, community finance, shared spaces, and a life worth living. These shelves are for curious neighbors who want to understand how things work—and what they might try close to home.
The new economy is already working. We just need more of it.
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Start with a subject that interests you. Buy through Bookshop.org, ask your library, or borrow a copy from a neighbor. The point is to put these ideas to use.
SHELF 01
Start Here: The Lab’s Canon
Books to help you make sense of the experiments—and choose where to look next.
Doughnut Economics
Seven ways to picture an economy with a floor nobody falls through and a ceiling the planet can carry.
Buy on Bookshop.orgGrowing Free
Financial independence that doesn’t depend on the stock market. Grow it, share it, barter it, or cut the cost at the root.
Buy on Bookshop.orgI Survived Capitalism and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt
A punk business owner explains how she sets prices, pays her staff and stays solvent. Receipts included — the actual ones.
Buy on Bookshop.orgIt’s Not You It’s Capitalism
An illustrated field guide to why the economy feels rigged, written for people who never took an economics class and don’t plan to.
Buy on Bookshop.orgMaking Money
A fantasy novel about a con man put in charge of a national bank, and the sharpest thing on this shelf about what money actually is. Start here if the word “economics” makes you tired.
Buy on Bookshop.orgSmall Is Beautiful
1973, and still the clearest argument that scale is a design choice rather than a law of nature.
Buy on Bookshop.orgThe Beginning Comes After the End
Solnit’s follow-up to Hope in the Dark, on how change actually arrives: unevenly, from the edges, usually before anyone admits it.
Buy on Bookshop.orgThe Financial Activist Playbook
Where your money sleeps at night matters. Practical moves for banking, saving and giving that don’t quietly undo what you believe.
Buy on Bookshop.orgThis Changes Everything
The book that connects climate to economic design. Read it for the argument that the two problems are one problem.
Buy on Bookshop.orgWhat Then Must We Do?
The long view on community ownership in America: who already owns what, and what the next step looks like.
Buy on Bookshop.orgSHELF 02
Who Owns It? — Ownership Experiments
What changes when the people doing the work share in ownership and decisions.
Everything for Everyone
The cooperative internet, and the long history of people building the thing they use.
Buy on Bookshop.orgMaking Mondragón
The Basque worker-cooperative federation studied up close: how tens of thousands of people came to own their own jobs.
Buy on Bookshop.orgOwning Our Future
The difference between ownership that extracts and ownership that builds, with the structures that make each one work.
Buy on Bookshop.orgThe Citizen’s Share
Profit-sharing and employee ownership are older than the country. Here’s the data on what happens when workers hold equity.
Buy on Bookshop.orgAnother way to read: Making Mondragón at the Internet Archive. Check the archive page for current reading or borrowing access.
SHELF 03
What Is Money? — Currency & Community Finance
Local currencies, community finance, and the choices behind the money we use.
Blockchain Radicals
What if the technology got separated from the speculation? A serious look at cooperative uses of crypto, by someone who isn’t selling any.
Buy on Bookshop.orgDebt: The First 5,000 Years
Debt came before money, and it was about obligation between neighbors long before it was about interest rates.
Buy on Bookshop.orgDenationalisation of Money
The case for competing private currencies, from an unexpected direction. Ithaca HOURS was a very different answer to the same question.
Buy on Bookshop.orgMoney: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing
A Planet Money host on where money came from: invented, repeatedly, by people who needed something to work.
Buy on Bookshop.orgSHELF 04
Who Needs a Middleman? — Direct Economics
How direct relationships change the cost of health care, trade, and local investment.
From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State
Before insurance companies, Americans covered each other through fraternal societies — millions of them. What they built, and what replaced it.
Buy on Bookshop.orgGoing Local
The case that towns do better when they own their own businesses, and the numbers behind it.
Buy on Bookshop.orgGoverning the Commons
The Nobel-winning fieldwork showing communities can manage shared resources without privatizing them or calling in the state. Ostrom went and looked.
Buy on Bookshop.orgPut Your Money Where Your Life Is
How to invest in your neighbors instead of a mutual fund: the legal structures, the mechanisms, and what they return.
Buy on Bookshop.orgThe Price We Pay
A surgeon on how medical billing actually works, and what happens when a practice steps outside it.
Buy on Bookshop.orgSHELF 05
What Can We Share? — Commons & Shared Infrastructure
Kitchens, tools, land, and housing: practical ways to share costs and responsibilities.
EcoVillage at Ithaca
Thirty years of a cohousing experiment two miles from downtown, told by a founder. Ours, and still running.
Available from Thrive IthacaCreating a Life Together
The unromantic manual for starting an intentional community: land, money, decision-making, and why most attempts fail.
Buy on Bookshop.orgCreating Cohousing
The book that brought cohousing to North America, by the two architects who did it.
Buy on Bookshop.orgDesigning Creative Communities
What makes people show up, keep showing up, and start something together.
Buy on Bookshop.orgFinding Community
How to visit, evaluate and join an existing community without moving your life somewhere that won’t fit.
Buy on Bookshop.orgThe Creative Community Builder’s Handbook
Ten strategies for building a local economy around culture, with the budgets and partnerships spelled out.
Buy on Bookshop.orgThe Great Good Place
The book that named “third places”: the cafés, barbershops and taverns a town can’t function without.
Buy on Bookshop.orgThe Senior Cohousing Handbook
Growing old in a place you helped design, among neighbors you chose. Finance and development included.
Buy on Bookshop.orgThe Serviceberry
A short book on gift economies, learned from a berry. What if abundance is something you create by giving it away?
Buy on Bookshop.orgSHELF 06
What Counts as Wealth? — Value Beyond Profit
Books about care, art, land, and the things a balance sheet leaves out.
Braiding Sweetgrass
Botany and Potawatomi teaching braided together. The book most likely to change what you think you owe a place.
Buy on Bookshop.orgIndigenous Economics
Economies organized around relationship and responsibility rather than accumulation: a different starting premise, worked out in detail.
Buy on Bookshop.orgRegenerative Economics
The principles behind economies that build capacity instead of drawing it down, from a former JPMorgan managing director.
Buy on Bookshop.orgThe Art of the Commonplace
Berry’s agrarian essays in one volume: the economy as something that happens on real land, among actual neighbors.
Buy on Bookshop.orgThe Gift
Why art and gifts don’t behave like commodities, and what a community loses when everything carries a price.
Buy on Bookshop.org