Utopia or bust

MY BOOK on the economic history of the 20th century, published last autumn, did not include a chapter on the question of the future or “what we should do next”, because my frequent co-author, Stephen S Cohen, convinced me that whatever I wrote would come to look outdated and silly within six months. He was right: such arguments are better left to commentaries like this one.

So, if I had written a final chapter looking to the future, what should I have said?

Prior to the phantom text, I argue that for most of history, humanity was too poor for political governance to be anything but elites ruling through force and fraud to amass wealth and resources for themselves. But in 1870, the rocket of modern economic growth blasted off, doubling humanity’s technological competence every generation thereafter.