Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century by J. Bradford DeLong

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?

The low rating for this book is really an average, because there’s some five-star materials in here, and some one-star sections. Maybe there is simply no way to have a good Econ history book within the conventions of popular publishing, which says that anything that smacks of a text book costs you sales — so this book which is constantly making comparisons and drawing analogies, and comparing different eras and places is entirely devoid of graphics to make those things memorable. So it’s really a much harder read than it needs to be. And way longer than it needs to be.

Overall this book was a slog, but I think a slog worth making for some of the insights I just wish it has been boiled down to two or three long read articles and handed to a gifted graphic designer who could have done some explainers to go along with it.

This book is to Economic/world history what a chess book would have been with no chess diagrams and the moves all described in words, rather than in compact and standardized chess notation - bulks up the product considerably, and makes it a lot more work for the reader to identify the insights.