On Thursday, August 17 at 10AM EDT (7:00AM PDT) the 1818 Society World Bank History Thematic Group, the World Bank Group Archives, and the World Bank Group Library will sponsor a webinar with Professor J. Bradford DeLong, who will discuss his recent book Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century.
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. It reveals the last century to have been less a march of progress than a slouch in the right direction.
In a review essay in Foreign Affairs, Liaquat Ahamed writes, “Slouching Towards Utopia is as much about politics as economics, and DeLong obviously relishes telling the story. His distinctive voice, with its exuberant vocabulary and wonderful cadence, familiar to the many thousands who have been reading his widely followed economics blog for the last 20 years, makes the book a joy to read. Few economic historians have as fluent a grasp of political or military history or, more important, write as lucidly and with such great flair about these subjects.”
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.
A Q&A session will follow Professor DeLong’s presentation.
Slouching Towards Utopia can be ordered from Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Economic-History-Twentieth-Century/dp/0465019595
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On August 17, 2023, you can join the session directly using the following link/or details:
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