Modern economics has a particular view of scarcity, in which human beings have infinite desires, and society must therefore facilitate endless growth and consumption, irrespective of nature’s limits. Yet as Wennerlind, chair of Barnard's History Department, and Jonsson, a history professor at the University of Chicago, show in Scarcity, this vision is historically novel, and was not inevitable even in the age of capitalism. It reflects the costly triumph of infinite-growth ideologies across centuries of European economic thought—at the expense of traditions that sought to live within nature’s constraints. The dominant conception of scarcity today holds that, rather than master our desires, humans must master nature to meet those desires. Jonsson and Wennerlind argue that this idea was developed by thinkers such as Francis Bacon, Samuel Hartlib, Alfred Marshall, and Paul Samuelson, who laid the groundwork for today’s politics of growth. Proponents of infinite growth have long faced resistance from agrarian radicals, romantic poets, revolutionary socialists, ecofeminists, and others. These critics—including Dorothy Wordsworth, Karl Marx, and Hannah Arendt—embraced ideas of scarcity in which our desires, rather than nature, must be mastered to achieve the social good. In so doing, they re-envisioned how humans might interact with both nature and the economy. Following these conflicts into the 21st century, Jonsson and Wennerlind insist that we need new, sustainable models of economic thinking to address the climate crisis.