The 2022 UC Berkeley Annual Stone Lecture: Slouching Towards Utopia
November 29, 2022
5:10 p.m.
UC Berkeley
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.
In this lecture, Economist Brad DeLong discusses the research behind his new book, Slouching Towards Utopia. The book 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.
This event is sponsored by The James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center on Wealth and Income Inequality at UC Berkeley.
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