Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century

Category: Book
By (author): DeLong, J. Bradford
Subject:  BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Economic History
  BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Economics / Macroeconomics
  HISTORY / Modern / 20th Century
  HISTORY / World
  NON-FICTION / General
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: September 2022
Format: Book-hardcover
Pages: 624
Size: 9.55in x 6.50in x 2.15in
Our Price:
$ 44.00
Availability:
In stock soon

Additional Notes

From The Publisher*From one of the world's leading economists, a grand narrative of the century that made us richer than ever, yet left us unsatisfied  

Before 1870, humanity lived in dire poverty, with a slow crawl of invention offset by a growing population. Then came a great shift: invention sprinted forward, doubling our technological capabilities each generation and utterly transforming the economy again and again. Our ancestors would have presumed we would have used such powers to build utopia. But it was not so. When 1870–2010 ended, the world instead saw global warming; economic depression, uncertainty, and inequality; and broad rejection of the status quo. 
 
Economist Brad DeLong's Slouching Towards Utopia tells the story of how this unprecedented explosion of material wealth occurred, how it transformed the globe, and why it failed to deliver us to utopia. Of remarkable breadth and ambition, it reveals the last century to have been less a march of progress than a slouch in the right direction. 
Review Quote*"A magisterial history…asks the right questions and teaches us a lot of crucial history along the way." -Paul Krugman
Review Quote*"I've been waiting for Brad [DeLong]'s big economic history opus for a long time now." -Ezra Klein
Review Quote*"An unmissable book … The strength of the book-as well as its immense scope and depth … is that it's a work of political economy, braiding the different strands of ideas, Hayek, Polanyi and Keynes … Definitely one to read."-Diane Coyle
Review Quote*"This is a brilliant and important book. It offers an original and penetrating analysis of what its author calls ‘the long twentieth century,' the period of unprecedented economic advance that began roughly in 1870 and ended, he asserts, in 2010. Material abundance poured upon humanity. Previous generations would have thought such wealth to be a guarantee of utopia. Yet the age of material progress has ended not in a utopia, but in recrimination and discord. No book has explained the successes and failures of this extraordinary period with comparable insight."-Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator, Financial Times
Review Quote*"The author conveys a wealth of information in elegant, accessible prose, combining grand, epochal perspectives with fascinating discursions on everything from alternating-current electricity to the gender wage gap. The result is a cogent interpretation of economic modernity that illuminates both its nigh-miraculous achievements and its seething discontents."-Publishers Weekly, starred review
Review Quote*"[T]he author ably anatomizes his subject with admirable clarity, offering accessible and illuminating explanations of key historical shifts and the socio-economic forces driving them… A sprawling but carefully argued, edifying account of modern economic history and its impact on global well-being." -Kirkus Reviews
Review Quote*

"Brad DeLong learnedly and grippingly tells the story of how all the economic growth since 1870 has created a global economy that today satisfies no one's ideas of fairness. The long journey toward economic justice and more equal rights and opportunities for all shall and will continue."

-Thomas Piketty, #1 New York Times–bestselling author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century
Review Quote*"What a joy to finally have Brad DeLong's masterful interpretation of twentieth-century economic history down on paper. Slouching Towards Utopia is engaging, important, and awe-inspiring in its breadth and creativity."
 -Christina Romer, University of California, Berkeley
Review Quote*"History provides the only data we have for charting a course forward in these turbulent times. I have not seen a more revealing and illuminating book about economics and what it means in a very long time. Slouching Towards Utopia should be required reading for anybody who cares about the future of the global system, and that should be everyone."
 -Lawrence H. Summers, Harvard University