Þe Annual Stone Lecture: "Slouching Towards Utopia"
Þe Annual Stone Lecture: "Slouching Towards Utopia"
2022-11-29 Tu 17:00 PDT
Nov 29
The Annual Stone Lecture: Slouching Towards Utopia
Join us for the annual Stone Lecture, featuring economist J. Bradford DeLong
By UC Berkeley, College of Letters & Science
Tue, November 29, 2022, 5:10 PM – 6:30 PM PST :: Sibley Auditorium [virtual option available] UC Berkeley Berkeley, CA 94720
Around 1870 came a great shift: invention sprinted forward, doubling our technological capabilities each generation, utterly transforming the economy again and again. The possibility of being able in the not-too-distant future of baking a sufficiently large economic pie for everyone to someday have enoughcame into view. Surely then we would be able to shift governance and politics so that we could collectively build a utopia? Surely it was the baking of the sufficiently large economic pie that was the large problem. Surely the slicing and tasting the pie—equitably distributing humanity’s immense technology-enabled wealth, and utilizing it so that people felt safe and secure and were healthy and happy—were second-order, more-easily-solved problems?
Join us for a talk by Berkeley Economics Professor Brad DeLong, followed by audience Q&A. The event will be followed by a reception. Live-streaming available as well.
This event is sponsored by The James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center on Wealth and Income Inequality at UC Berkeley.
‘Learnedly and grippingly tells the story of how all the economic growth since 1870 has created a global economy that today satisfies no one's ideas of fairness. The long journey... will continue…’—Thomas Piketty
"A magisterial history."—Paul Krugman
“If you want to follow the conversation right now on global economic history, you should check out Brad DeLong’s Slouching Towards Utopia.”―Adam Tooze, on The Ezra Klein Show
“Deeply engaging…a work of strikingly expansive breadth and scope.”―Benjamin M. Friedman, Harvard Magazine
“Slouching Towards Utopia is an impressive achievement, written with wit and style and a formidable command of detail.” ―The Economist
The James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center on Wealth and Income Inequality at UC Berkeley was created to serve as a research hub for campus and beyond, enabling UC Berkeley’s world-leading scholars to deepen our understanding of the inequality in society and formulate new approaches to address the challenge of creating a more equitable society. The Center serves as the primary convening point at UC Berkeley for research, teaching and data development concerning the causes, nature, and consequences of wealth and income inequalities with a special emphasis on the concentration of wealth at the very top. Learn more
I hope you focus on inflation, why a target level is needed to maintain full employment outcomes, why it is difficult for mortal central bankers to get this level and proper deviations from it right, and the political consequences of getting it wrong in both directions. Reprise the Ezra Klein interview. :)