Narrator: Imagine an unskilled worker in London in the year 1600. With a full day's wages, they could afford to buy just enough coarse bread to consume about 3,000 calories. Two centuries later, in 1800, that same day's labor would buy them 4,000 calories. By 1870, it had inched up to 5,000. For millennia, humanity was trapped in a cycle of grinding poverty, where economic growth was so slow it was nearly imperceptible within a single lifetime. Now, consider that same worker today. Their daily wage could purchase a staggering 2.4 million calories worth of bread. This explosive leap in material wealth, a change that dwarfs all prior human history, is the central puzzle explored in J. Bradford DeLong's sweeping economic history, Slouching Towards Utopia. The book investigates the "long twentieth century," the period from 1870 to 2010, to understand how humanity unlocked the secrets to unprecedented wealth, yet somehow failed to build a truly equitable and satisfying world, leaving us still just "slouching" toward a better future.

Narrator: For most of human history, economic life was governed by what Thomas Robert Malthus described in the late 18th century: any gains in productivity were quickly swallowed by population growth, keeping the vast majority of people at a subsistence level. The first Industrial Revolution, from 1770 to 1870, began to change this, but its effects were surprisingly limited. It was around 1870 that humanity truly broke free from the Malthusian trap.

DeLong argues this was driven by three key innovations that created a powerful engine for growth. The first was the rise of the modern corporation, which allowed for the large-scale organization of capital and labor. The second was the industrial research lab, which systematized the process of discovery and turned invention into a continuous, reliable process. The third was the expansion of a globalized market, supercharged by new technologies like the steamship and the submarine telegraph cable, which connected economies and ideas as never before.

This era was defined by figures like Nikola Tesla, a brilliant but eccentric inventor who immigrated to the United States. His work on alternating current (AC) electricity was initially dismissed by his one-time boss, Thomas Edison, who favored direct current (DC). But Tesla’s vision, backed by the corporate power of George Westinghouse, ultimately triumphed in the "war of the currents." The AC system was far more efficient for long-distance power transmission, and its adoption electrified the world, revolutionizing industry and daily life. This interplay of individual genius, corporate implementation, and systematic innovation was the true engine that powered the unprecedented growth of the long twentieth century.

Narrator: The optimism of the pre-1914 world, where many believed in inevitable progress, was brutally shattered by World War I. The conflict was a catastrophic failure of politics, driven by a toxic mix of nationalism, militarism, and imperial rivalries that overrode rational economic calculations. The war not only resulted in immense loss of life but also destroyed the intricate web of global trade and finance that had underpinned the previous era's prosperity.

In the aftermath, the victorious powers failed to build a stable and equitable peace. The Treaty of Versailles, as economist John Maynard Keynes furiously argued at the time, was a disaster. By imposing crippling reparations on Germany, it sowed the seeds of economic instability and political resentment. Keynes resigned from the British delegation in protest, warning in his book The Economic Consequences of the Peace that impoverishing Germany would lead not to peace, but to a "final civil war between the forces of reaction and the despairing convulsions of revolution."

His prediction proved tragically accurate. The 1920s saw rampant inflation across Europe, culminating in Germany's hyperinflation of 1923, which wiped out the savings of the middle class and destroyed faith in democratic institutions. The subsequent attempt to restore the pre-war gold standard was a failure, leading to the Great Depression. This global economic collapse demonstrated that the old order was broken beyond repair, creating a vacuum that would be filled by radical new ideologies.

Narrator: The failure of the liberal market order in the 1930s gave rise to two powerful and destructive alternatives: fascism and really-existing socialism. Both ideologies offered a totalizing vision to cure society's ills, promising national unity and economic security in place of the chaos of capitalism and the perceived weakness of democracy.

In Italy and Germany, fascism and Nazism emerged, fueled by nationalism and a contempt for limits. These movements critiqued capitalism for creating class conflict and moral decay, promising to unite the nation under a powerful leader. Adolf Hitler's rise was propelled by Germany's economic recovery in the 1930s, achieved through massive military spending and the brutal suppression of dissent. His ideology was a dystopian blend of Malthusian fears about "living space" and a virulent antisemitism, which ultimately led to World War II and the Holocaust.

Meanwhile, the Soviet Union presented the world with "really-existing socialism." After the death of Lenin, Joseph Stalin consolidated power and launched a series of brutal Five-Year Plans. His goal was to achieve rapid industrialization by "squeezing" the peasantry. This involved the forced collectivization of agriculture, which led to a catastrophic famine that killed millions. Those who resisted were executed or sent to the Gulag. While the Soviet Union did achieve stunning industrial growth, it came at an almost unimaginable human cost, creating a totalitarian state that was, in the words of one observer, the most "murderous of the totalitarian ideologies of the twentieth century."

Narrator: Out of the ashes of World War II, the Global North entered a period of unprecedented prosperity and stability known as the "Thirty Glorious Years" (roughly 1945-1975). This era was defined by a unique and successful political-economic arrangement: social democracy. DeLong describes this as a "shotgun marriage" of three competing ideas. It embraced the dynamism of the market (the Hayekian view), managed it with government spending to ensure full employment (the Keynesian view), and cushioned its sharp edges with strong social safety nets and protections for workers (the Polanyian view).

In the United States, this took the form of the New Deal order, which even a Republican president like Dwight D. Eisenhower accepted as a political necessity. In a letter to his brother, Eisenhower bluntly stated that any party trying to abolish social security or labor laws would "not hear of that party again in our political history."

This compromise was perhaps best embodied by the "Treaty of Detroit." In 1950, Walter Reuther, the powerful leader of the United Auto Workers (UAW), negotiated a landmark contract with General Motors. It went beyond simple wage increases to include company-financed healthcare, retirement pensions, and cost-of-living adjustments. This agreement gave autoworkers a stable, middle-class income, allowing them to buy the very cars they built. This model, which balanced corporate profits with worker security, was replicated across industries and became a cornerstone of the post-war boom, compressing inequality and creating a broad, prosperous middle class.

Narrator: The social democratic consensus began to fray in the 1970s. The oil shocks and the end of post-war catch-up growth led to "stagflation"—a toxic combination of high inflation and high unemployment that the Keynesian model seemed unable to solve. This economic crisis, combined with a cultural backlash, created an opening for a new ideology: neoliberalism.

Championed by figures like Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the United States, neoliberalism called for a return to market fundamentalism. Its prescription was deregulation, privatization, tax cuts for the wealthy, and a frontal assault on the power of labor unions. The goal, its proponents claimed, was to unleash economic growth and shrink the size of government.

In practice, the results were mixed at best. The policies did succeed in breaking the back of inflation, but at the cost of a deep recession. And while they failed to significantly boost overall growth or shrink government, they were spectacularly successful at one thing: transferring wealth and income upward. The share of income going to the top 1% skyrocketed, while wages for ordinary workers stagnated. The era of hyperglobalization, powered by container shipping and the internet, further accelerated these trends, hollowing out manufacturing communities in the Global North. The long twentieth century, which had begun with such promise, ended not with a bang, but with the 2008 financial crisis—a Minskyite depression born of financial deregulation—and a subsequent decade of anemic recovery that left the world more unequal and politically fractured than it had been in generations.

Narrator: The single most important takeaway from Slouching Towards Utopia is a profound paradox. The long twentieth century was the first time in history that humanity solved the problem of production. We created an economic engine capable of generating more than enough wealth to provide a comfortable, secure, and fulfilling life for every single person on the planet. Yet, we comprehensively failed to solve the far more difficult problems of equitable distribution and wise utilization. The market proved to be a powerful servant in creating wealth, but it became a terrible master when left to its own devices, unable to provide the justice, security, and community that people crave.

DeLong leaves us with a challenging question. If the economic problem is largely solved, why does utopia feel further away than ever? The history of the long twentieth century suggests the answer is no longer about economics, but about politics, morality, and our ability to make wise collective choices. We possess godlike powers to shape our environment and our societies, but we still have not learned how to use them to live wisely, agreeably, and well. The slouch continues, and the direction we are heading is dangerously uncertain.