Financial Issues Forum: J .Bradford DeLong on Slouching Towards Utopia an Economic History of the 20th Century

Before 1870, much of 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’d use such powers to build a utopia. But it was not so. Instead, when the period between 1870 and 2010 ended, the world saw climate change; 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. Of remarkable breadth and ambition, it reveals the last century to have been less a march of progress than a slouch in the right direction.

This event is co-sponsored with the CFA Society New York and the Museum of American Finance.