"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,...

"In An Extraordinary Time, acclaimed economic historian Marc Levinson recounts the global collapse of the postwar economy in the 1970s. While economists struggle to return us to the high economic growth rates of the past, Levinson counterintuitively argues that the boom years of the 1950s and 1960s were an anomaly; slow economic growth is the norm-no matter what economists and politicians may say. Yet these atypical years left the public with unreasonable...

Tells the story of the conservative economists espousing free market and deregulatory policies during the four decades between 1969 and 2008. Leading figures such as Milton Friedman, Arthur Laffer, Walter Oi, Alfred Kahn, and Thomas Schelling believed that government should stop trying to manage the economy, and that markets would deliver steady growth and ensure that all Americans shared in the benefits. But, Applelbaum argues, these policies failed...