Slouching Towards Utopia

The low rating for this book is really an average, because there’s some five-star materials in here, and some one-star sections. Maybe there is simply no way to have a good Econ history book within the conventions of popular publishing, which says that anything that smacks of a text book costs you sales — so this book which is constantly making comparisons and drawing analogies, and comparing different eras and places is entirely devoid of graphics to make those things memorable. So it’s really a much harder read than it needs to be. And way longer than it needs to be.

Overall this book was a slog, but I think a slog worth making for some of the insights I just wish it has been boiled down to two or three long read articles and handed to a gifted graphic designer who could have done some explainers to go along with it.

This book is to Economic/world history what a chess book would have been with no chess diagrams and the moves all described in words, rather than in compact and standardized chess notation - bulks up the product considerably, and makes it a lot more work for the reader to identify the insights.