AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES AND WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER LONGLISTED FOR THE FINANCIAL TIMES
BUSINESS BOOK OF THE YEAR A FINANCIAL TIMES BEST ECONOMICS BOOK OF THE YEAR AND THE ECONOMIST
BOOK OF THE YEAR From one of the world's leading economists a sweeping new history of the
twentieth century - a century that left us vastly richer yet still profoundly dissatisfied.
Before 1870 most people lived in dire poverty the benefits of the slow crawl of invention
continually offset by a growing population. Then came a great shift: invention sprinted forward
doubling our technological capabilities each generation and creatively destroying the economy
again and again. Slouching Towards Utopia tells the story of the major economic and
technological shifts of the 20th century in a bold and ambitious grand narrative. In vivid and
compelling detail DeLong charts the unprecedented explosion of material wealth after 1870
which transformed living standards around the world freeing humanity from centuries of poverty
but paradoxically has left us now with unprecedented inequality global warming and widespread
dissatisfaction with the status quo. How did the long twentieth century fail to deliver the
utopia our ancestors believed would be the inevitable result of such material wellbeing? How
did humanity end up less on a march to progress than a slouch in the right direction? And what
can we learn from the past in pursuit of a better world?
