Slow Boring Book Club: Slouching Toward Utopia
A conversation between Matt and economic historian Brad Delong
We’re excited to announce our second Slow Boring Book Club Thursday, October 13 at 8:30pm Eastern.
We’ll be joined by Brad Delong, economic historian and professor of economics, to discuss his new book Slouching Toward Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century. You can purchase the book online or at your local bookstore.
This event, which will feature a conversation between Matt and Brad followed by an audience Q&A, is for paid subscribers. Between now and October 1, we’re offering 20 percent off a yearly subscription for anyone who’d like to attend — and we always offer discounts for students, teachers, and government employees.
If you have any questions about subscriptions, please reach out to kate@slowboring.com.
About the book
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. 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.
About the author
J. Bradford DeLong, an economic historian, is a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley. He was a deputy assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury during the Clinton administration. He writes a widely read economics blog, now at braddelong.substack.com. He lives in Berkeley, California.