J. Bradford DeLong

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 uncovers the last century to have been less a march of progress than a slouch in the right direction.

An Economic History of the Twentieth Century

Slouching Towards Utopia

An attempt recast what De Long calls “The Long Twentieth Century” from 1870 to 2010 in terms of political economy, rather than ideological battle or global warfare.

De Long argues that central to our story during this period are the R&D lab, globalisation and the modern corporation, as well as constant tension between free markets and state intervention.  

It’s a lengthy but enjoyable book and while it might feel somewhat disheartening to think of the 20th Century as a story of economic change given the amount of death and destruction it brought, De Long makes a convincing argument while still acknowledging the pain caused along the way.

Daniel Bower

An attempt recast what De Long calls “The Long Twentieth Century” from 1870 to 2010 in terms of political economy, rather than ideological battle or global warfare.

De Long argues that central to our story during this period are the R&D lab, globalisation and the modern corporation, as well as constant tension between free markets and state intervention.  

It’s a lengthy but enjoyable book and while it might feel somewhat disheartening to think of the 20th Century as a story of economic change given the amount of death and destruction it brought, De Long makes a convincing argument while still acknowledging the pain caused along the way.

Slouching Towards Utopia An Economic History of the Twentieth Century

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