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Slouching Towards Utopia

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What to expect

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.

Critics Review

“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
“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
“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
Author J. Bradford DeLong
Narrator Allan Aquino
Duration 20 hours and 13 minutes
Release Date
ISBN 9781668611777
Format Audiobook
Publisher Hachette Audio
Genre Economic history, General and world history, History of the Americas, Macroeconomics
Availability US

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