Development as Limits is not simply a critique of Amartya Sen's framing of development as freedom, although it offers one. Freedom, to be real in a world bound by limits, must be as well bound by the limits of the world. We cannot start from an unrealized ideal of freedom that we might never attain.Development as Limits argues that our thinking about development needs to force us to confront this reality. Development needs first, to be framed within the space of possibilities given by the relative and absolute limits that govern the natural and physical aspect of the world. These limits, while dynamic, are nevertheless tangibly real and temporarily fixed at any given moment in time. True and pragmatic freedom can only be understood within such limits. We can both, improve our individual and collective freedom within these limits, or through science and technology, expand such space of possibilities to consequently expand our individual and collective freedoms; but we certainly must not start our journey from a utopic view of freedom that cannot be realized today, or that may be impossible to realize in the future. Progress is an expanding process through time from within the realities that bound us today.Once such space of possibilities is clearly defined, the book argues, development is the continued optimal handling of three contextual critical decisions a functioning society needs to make within the limits it exists, if it is to ensure its survival and wellbeing (the true principal ends of development): the decision of how much value to extract throughout time from the limited assets that it possesses; the decision of how to allocate such limited extracted value among competing uses (as it is by means of this value that survival and wellbeing can be attained throughout time); and, the decision of how much room to allow for the creative-destruction that a free and thriving society inevitably requires-generates in limping its way towards progress.Development as Limits argues that what is urgently needed is the setting of additional labelling standards and improved national accounts that unlike existing ones, can enable us to, transparently and explicitly, take on those three decisions that are key for our survival and wellbeing. Just as our labelling of nutritional values have empowered individual consumers and societies to make better decisions about their food intake, a set of labelling standards that describe the content in terms of assets (the wealth of nations) embedded in goods and services, as well as the allocation of these assets implied by public policy, could have similar empowering individual and social effects.By creating strong micro-foundations for national wealth accounting, such labelling standards could help improve our understanding of intra- and inter-country flows of wealth, as well as of the limits within which we need to operate today. Supplementing our current systems of prices and international exchange rates with one that anchors them on corresponding flows of wealth, could fundamentally improve the effectiveness of markets, as well as the quality of information available to engage, not in ideological but in fact-based national and international debates that are essential in the making and adjustment of those three critical decisions upon which our survival and wellbeing hinge on.Development as Limits offers a simple solution which strength comes from its empowering of every human being to make better individual decisions, as well as more meaningful contributions into collective ones. Development is a social task. There are no alchemist formulas or shortcuts to make our individual or social challenges dissolve. We cannot forlorn our responsibility to change ourselves and, together, change the world we live in. We can, however, make these tasks possible by acknowledging the limits within which realistic progress can take place.