Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century

This instant New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller from one of the world’s leading economists offers a grand narrative of the century that made us richer than ever, but left us unsatisfied.

“A magisterial history.” —Paul Krugman

Named a Best Book of the Year by Financial Times * Economist * Fast Company

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. This is a book of remarkable breadth and ambition, revealing the last century to have been less a march of progress than a slouch in the right direction.