
Slouching Towards Utopia
An Economic History of the Twentieth Century
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Narrated by:
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Allan Aquino
About this listen
From one of the world’s leading economists, a grand narrative of the century that made us richer than ever, yet left us unsatisfied
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.
©2022 J. Bradford DeLong (P)2022 Basic BooksListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“Brad DeLong learnedly and grippingly tells the story of how all the economic growth since 1870 has created a global economy that today satisfies no one’s ideas of fairness. The long journey toward economic justice and more equal rights and opportunities for all shall and will continue.”—Thomas Piketty, #1 New York Times-bestselling author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century
“What a joy to finally have Brad DeLong’s masterful interpretation of twentieth-century economic history down on paper. Slouching Towards Utopia is engaging, important, and awe-inspiring in its breadth and creativity.”—Christina Romer, University of California, Berkeley
“History provides the only data we have for charting a course forward in these turbulent times. I have not seen a more revealing and illuminating book about economics and what it means in a very long time. Slouching Towards Utopia should be required reading for anybody who cares about the future of the global system, and that should be everyone.”—Lawrence H. Summers, Harvard University
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Listen for Nixon's Sake
- By Tricia on 10-26-22
By: Alan S. Blinder
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The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order
- America and the World in the Free Market Era
- By: Gary Gerstle
- Narrated by: Keith Sellon-Wright
- Length: 13 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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To be sure, neoliberalism has contributed to a number of alarming trends, not least of which has been a massive growth in income inequality. Yet as the eminent historian Gary Gerstle argues in The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, these indictments fail to reckon with the full contours of what neoliberalism was and why its worldview had such persuasive hold on both the right and the left for three decades.
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Cursory, unoriginal, class-blind
- By A Reviewer on 10-24-22
By: Gary Gerstle
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The Burgundians
- A Vanished Empire: A History of 1111 Years and One Day
- By: Bart van Loo, Nancy Forest-Flier - translator
- Narrated by: Nigel Patterson
- Length: 21 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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At the end of the fifteenth century, Burgundy was extinguished as an independent state. It had been a fabulously wealthy, turbulent region situated between France and Germany, with close links to the English kingdom. Torn apart by the dynastic struggles of early modern Europe, this extraordinary realm vanished from the map. But it became the cradle of what we now know as the Low Countries, modern Belgium and the Netherlands. This is the story of a thousand years, a must-listen narrative history of ambitious aristocrats, family dysfunction, treachery, savage battles, luxury, and madness.
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Extraordinary story, expertly told and skillfully narrated
- By Daniel Vergara on 03-01-24
By: Bart van Loo, and others
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Lords of Finance
- The Bankers Who Broke the World
- By: Liaquat Ahamed
- Narrated by: Stephen Hoye
- Length: 18 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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It is commonly believed that the Great Depression that began in 1929 resulted from a confluence of events beyond any one person's or government's control. In fact, as Liaquat Ahamed reveals, it was the decisions made by a small number of central bankers that were the primary cause of the economic meltdown, the effects of which set the stage for World War II and reverberated for decades.
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interesting insight into interwar period!
- By Toru on 11-27-09
By: Liaquat Ahamed
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Trade Wars Are Class Wars
- How Rising Inequality Distorts the Global Economy and Threatens International Peace
- By: Matthew C. Klein, Michael Pettis
- Narrated by: Bob Souer
- Length: 8 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Trade disputes are usually understood as conflicts between countries with competing national interests, but as Matthew C. Klein and Michael Pettis show in this book, they are often the unexpected result of domestic political choices to serve the interests of the rich at the expense of workers and ordinary retirees. Klein and Pettis trace the origins of today's trade wars to decisions made by politicians and business leaders in China, Europe, and the United States over the past 30 years.
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Narrator is robotic
- By dugmartssch on 05-22-20
By: Matthew C. Klein, and others
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Why Nations Fail
- The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty
- By: Daron Acemoglu, James A. Robinson
- Narrated by: Dan Woren
- Length: 17 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Brilliant and engagingly written, Why Nations Fail answers the question that has stumped the experts for centuries: Why are some nations rich and others poor, divided by wealth and poverty, health and sickness, food and famine?
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Pros and Cons of "Why Nations Fail"
- By Joshua Kim on 05-01-12
By: Daron Acemoglu, and others
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The End of the World Is Just the Beginning
- Mapping the Collapse of Globalization
- By: Peter Zeihan
- Narrated by: Peter Zeihan
- Length: 16 hrs and 44 mins
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For generations, everything has been getting faster, better, and cheaper. Finally, we reached the point that almost anything you could ever want could be sent to your home within days - even hours - of when you decided you wanted it. America made that happen, but now America has lost interest in keeping it going.
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Everyone dies except Americans
- By preetam on 06-22-22
By: Peter Zeihan
Long, sweeping anti-capitalism opinion piece without sourcing or a coherent structure
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The weakest points — and some of the strongest points — occur during DeLong’s occasional tangents. Sometimes you get wonderful little biographical anecdotes of historical figures that delight and enlighten. Other times you get excessively detailed extensive descriptions of battlefield strategy that have seemingly no connection to the big (economic) ideas that undergird the book. These flaws are excusable though. This will probably be regarded as a classic in decades to come.
Take a tour of Brad DeLong’s mind palace
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On the other hand, let’s see how the market resolves issues. I recalled a prolonged strike at Caterpillar’s facility at York, PA, where I lived for a number of years. As the conflict was not resolved for three years, the company eventually closed down the factory. It was a loss for both parties. No external invention, and the market took care of it. A recent example, successful one, of a labor-company conflict that was resolved by the market itself is the resolution of the 2023 conflict between the Writers Guild of America (WGA) and the major Hollywood studios, represented by the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP). The market dynamics here were critical—both sides were motivated by the economic reality that the strike was costing the industry billions in lost production and wages. The resolution came not through legal compulsion but through negotiation shaped by the market's need for content creation and the writers' bargaining power, bolstered by their ability to disrupt the production pipeline. Both labor and management recognized the mutual benefit of coming to terms in a competitive media landscape. This is a good example of how market forces—such as the economic need for skilled labor and the financial cost of the strike—can lead to conflict resolution without external interventions.
The age-old conundrum of freedom versus order, both in economic and political terms, has been challenging elite politicians, economists, and philosophers, as well as layman like you and me, from the moment homo sapiens walked out of the caves. On the one end of the spectrum is the totalism, and the other anarchism. I have no answers. Humans may never have a definitive answer. But I am a firm believer of humanisms. We will progress no matter how incrementally and slowly, as the book title says, “Slouching”.
Order and Freedom, it's economic!
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The author believes and communicates that the challenge of the world, countries, leaders, economics, etc goal should be to make the world a livable place for all, enough food, shelter and opportunity to that everyone has a decent life. He pulls together many of the historical happenings of this time and writes how it all moves forward for the most part but with many steps backwards along the way.
what is utopia
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Excellent
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Recommend it for sure
Advanced high school economics and history
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oversimplified
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Well done
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The big picture of political economy expertly drawn
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Great economic review of where we are …
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