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 book, an economist 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, this book reveals the last century to have been less a march of progress than a slouch in the right direction.

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?