First published 2022
Before 1870, humans scraped by in crushing poverty while invention crawled at a snail's pace. Then everything changed. Technology began doubling each generation, creating wealth beyond imagination and reshaping economies repeatedly. Our forebears would have expected such power to build paradise on earth. Instead, the period from 1870 to 2010 delivered global warming, economic crashes, rising inequality, and widespread anger at existing systems. Economist Brad DeLong examines how this explosion of material prosperity happened, how it remade the world, and why it fell short of delivering utopia. The book spans remarkable territory and reveals the past century as less a steady march toward progress than an unsteady shuffle in the right direction. DeLong tells the story of humanity's greatest economic transformation and grapples with why unprecedented wealth creation left so many people dissatisfied.
Genres: history, 20th-century, economics, non-fiction, 21st-century, academic
Vibes: thought-provoking
Tropes: historical-non-fiction
Period: 1870-2010
624 pages · Hardcover · Basic Books