Slouching Towards Utopia
Every few years, elites anoint an economics book as a “must read.” In 2013 it was Thomas Piketty’s Capital. Four years later it was Robert Gordon’s The Rise and Fall of American Productivity. Now it’s Berkeley economics professor Brad DeLong’s Slouching towards Utopia. In The Atlantic, Annie Lowry gushes that the book is “sweeping and detailed, learned and accessible, familiar and strange.” (It certainly is sweeping and strange.) Vox calls it a “magnus opus.”
As Rob Atkinson writes in Regulation, Piketty, Gordon, and DeLong all argue that economic growth is no longer an engine of widespread prosperity. This is a big reason for their books’ acclaim: rejecting growth and markets is now de rigueur among much of the Western intelligentsia.
Slouching is a fundamentally subversive book because it seeks to undercut the core Western values of economic growth and advancement. If enough believe that the West had a good 140‐year run but now “it is over,” as Lowry apparently does, then the path to rejecting entrepreneurs, firms, and markets is clear. We can transform the economy into a system focused on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, redistributing income, and engendering small‐scale localism. We may not, however, have much to redistribute or localize.
