The other major publishing event of the year is happening this week. Arnold Kling’s and my book From Poverty to Prosperity will be out in stores. Arnold describes it as “intellectually heavy” and “not the sort of thing that can be digested in a single plane ride” (in our view that’s a feature, not a bug). Simon Johnson, who kindly blurbed the book, describes it as for anyone seeking “compelling visions for the future.”
Just this morning David Brooks laments that America seems to have lost its love affair with the future, and I agree that there’s a palpable sense throughout the political culture of limits and decline (there’s a reason people keep comparing today to the ’70s). But the thinkers we discuss in this book have not at all given up on the future, and the ideas we advance constitute a compelling case that you shouldn’t either.