J. Bradford DeLong, Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century (2022)

While this was a fun read, it was ultimately a disappointing book. DeLong, an economist at Berkeley, is very smart (and knows it) and widely read. He writes in a very conversational way and, in the acknowledgements, even thanks the Committee on Degrees in Social Studies at Harvard, his undergraduate major (and where I developed a love of teaching 20 years after DeLong was a student there) - a rare acknowledgement by an established scholar. I learned quite a bit from the book and jotted down quite a few notes. But DeLong's reputation as a brilliant thinker, the blog posts of his which I've read, and the intriguing title led me to expect a tour de force. Instead, his arguments are often too informal - his account, for example, of why the near-utopia under the Bretton Woods system ended amounts to a listing - not even a weighing - of familiar culprits. Perhaps more fundamentally, his focus is on material well-being (economic output and standards of living) - understandably, for an ecobomist. But while he briefly acknowledges that material well-being is insufficient to human flourishing, he never explores the other elements - for example, the kinds of social relations and communities people live in; the role of rising expectations and positional, zero-sum competition.