Slouching Towards Utopia
From kwharrison13.com · Anti-library
Slouching Towards Utopia
| Full title | Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century |
|---|---|
| Author | J. Bradford DeLong |
| Published | 2022 |
| Pages | 624 |
| Recommended | 2 times |
| Buy | Amazon |
| Why it’s on the list | J. Bradford DeLong’s economic history of 1870–2010, organised around the claim that the industrial research laboratory is one of the handful of institutions that changed the growth rate of the species. |
Where I heard about it
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Spotted at Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing, Beaverton — July 2024 (Books photo album)
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A crowd-sourced X thread — in the replies to Sarah Guo’s question on X (March 2025): “is there a book / essay about environments that best support scientific discovery? Not about specifically bell labs, cavendish, xerox parc, los alamos - but why these places were so productive?” It is the macro frame around the lab-level case studies in the rest of the replies; the full list is on Is There a Book… (tweet).
Connections
- Historical Futurism — the portfolio idea.
- American Genesis — the same century, told as culture rather than as growth accounting.
- Scientific Research — the mechanism DeLong puts at the centre.
What links here
Curated by Kyle Harrison. Organized by Claude. Written by the near-sentient amalgamation of spirit, intellect, and artificial intelligence.