Please join KPFA Radio at The Back Room on Tuesday, September 13th at 7:00pm when we welcome UC Berkeley professor Brad DeLong to celebrate the release of his most recent book, Slouching Towards Utopia. This live, in-person event will feature Brad DeLong in conversation with Michael Mechanic, author of Jackpot and senior editor at Mother Jones.

“The author conveys a wealth of information in elegant, accessible prose, combining grand, epochal perspectives with fascinating discursions on everything from alternating-current electricity to the gender wage gap. The result is a cogent interpretation of economic modernity that illuminates both its nigh-miraculous achievements and its seething discontents.” Publishers Weekly, starred review

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.

J. Bradford DeLong is an economic historian who is a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley. DeLong served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Department of the Treasury in the Clinton Administration.

Michael Mechanic is a longtime senior editor at Mother Jones magazine, where he writes and edits everything from breaking news to award-winning essays and feature stories. He is the author of Jackpot: How the Super-Rich Really Live – and How Their Wealth Harms Us All.

EVENT DETAILS:

Tuesday, September 13th at 7:00pm

Brad DeLong book release for Slouching Towards Utopia

The Back Room 1984 Bonita Avenue. Berkeley, CA, 94704

Tickets $10.00 in advance / $15.00 at the door (discounted student and fiscally challenged available)

     TICKETS / MORE INFO AVAILABLE HERE