Slouching Towards Utopia : An Economic History of the Twentieth Century / J. Bradford DeLong.

Introduction: My grand narrative;
Globalizing the world;
Revving up the engine of technology-driven growth;
Democratizing the global north;
Global empires;
World War I;
Roaring twenties;
The great depression;
Really-existing socialism -- Fascism and Nazism;
World War II;
The Cold War of hostile yet coexisting systems;
False (and true) starts to economic development in the global south;
Inclusion;
Thirty glorious years of social democracy;
The neoliberal turn;
Reglobalization, information technology, and hyperglobalization;
Great recession and anemic recovery;
Conclusion: Are we still slouching towards Utopia?

"For millennia, most human beings lived in dire poverty. Around 1870, that began to change, as the rise of the modern corporation, the industrial research laboratory, and globalization combined to spark an unprecedented explosion in economic growth and material wealth. Where once 70 percent of the world lived on $2 a day or less, now fewer than 10 percent do. For the first time in human history, we produce more than enough food, shelter, and clothing for everyone. Such a world, our ancestors would have assumed, must be a paradise-a utopia. But for all its miracles, the period from 1870-2010 also witnessed exploitation, domination, and tyranny without historical parallel, and it ended with the world facing destabilizing political unrest and its leading economies unable to rebound from the Great Recession of 2008. In Slouching Towards Utopia, acclaimed economist J. Bradford DeLong tells the dramatic story of the long twentieth century, explaining why this explosion of material wealth occurred, how it transformed the globe-and why it failed to bring us within sight of any of our utopias. Decade after decade, spurred by new technological knowledge, the market economy produced supercharged growth that revolutionized the world, driving dramatic changes in politics, society, and culture. But the market could not produce community, equality, or stability, prompting a search for solutions that ranged from the fascism of Italy and Germany to the socialism of the Soviet Bloc. By and large, though, the world's governments struggled to regulate markets to maintain prosperity and ensure opportunity for all. But after World War II, the countries of the North Atlantic embraced developmental social democracy, with restrained governments focusing and rebalancing market economies in order to secure more rights for more citizens. That arrangement produced growth so dizzying and expectations so high that it could not be sustained for more than a generation, undone by dissenters from the left and the right amid the turn toward neoliberalism. Yet it was still, DeLong argues, the closest humanity came to achieving something like utopia. These "thirty glorious years" underline the twentieth century's economic lessons: among them, the importance of economic improvement, the power and limitations of markets, and the urgency of competent government management. A book of remarkable breadth and ambition, in the tradition of Guns, Germs, and Steel and Capital in the Twentieth Century, Slouching Towards Utopia is an authoritative new narrative of most consequential single period in human history. This marvelous, terrifying century was less a triumphal march of progress than it was a slouch in the right direction. Yet as we enter an even more uncertain new era, we must heed the lessons of the long century just past if we hope even to keep slouching forward"-- Provided by publisher.