Every few years, elites anoint an economics book as a “must read.” In 2013 it was Thomas Piketty’s Capital. Four years later it was Robert Gordon’s The Rise and Fall of American Productivity. Now it’s Berkeley economics professor Brad DeLong’s Slouching towards Utopia. In The Atlantic, Annie Lowry gushes that the book is “sweeping and detailed, learned and accessible, familiar and strange.” (It certainly is sweeping and strange.) Vox calls it a “magnus opus.”

Piketty, Gordon, and DeLong all argue that economic growth is no longer an engine of widespread prosperity. This is a big reason for their books’ acclaim: rejecting growth and markets is now de rigueur among much of the Western intelligentsia.

Slouching is a fundamentally subversive book because it seeks to undercut the core Western values of economic growth and advancement. If enough believe that the West had a good 140-year run but now “it is over,” as Lowry apparently does, then the path to rejecting entrepreneurs, firms, and markets is clear. We can transform the economy into a system focused on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, redistributing income, and engendering small-scale localism. We may not, however, have much to redistribute or localize.

A slouch at best? / DeLong dismisses growth and rejects markets for two reasons. First, he believes that market economies are illegitimate. He writes, “Capital is dead labor, which vampire-like lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.” Oops, my mistake; that was Marx. But DeLong seems to channel Marx when he asserts:

Unmanaged, a market economy will strive to its utmost to satisfy the desires of those who hold the valuable property rights. But valuable property owners seek a high standard of living for themselves… Moreover, … the market economy sees the profits from establishing plantations.

Plantations?

He goes on to claim that “the only conception of ‘justice’ that the market economy could deliver was what the rich might think was just, for property owners were the only people it cared about.” Beside anthropomorphizing the market, this is a strange notion because unless capitalists care about providing value to customers, they will soon go bankrupt. For DeLong, the “creative destruction” that Joseph Schumpeter said powers growth is not creative but is destructive: “Great wealth is created by the creation. Poverty is imposed by the destruction.” How does he square that contention with data showing the increasingly capitalistic world’s poverty is declining? The reader can’t tell because, annoyingly, the book is not footnoted.

To be fair, DeLong is right to criticize those who either ignore public goods and economic fairness, or who claim—with little or no evidence—that any and all “interventions” in the market harm growth. But he goes much further in fundamentally rejecting market economics and growth. Reading Slouching makes one wonder how he lasted two years as an economic official in the centrist Clinton administration. The answer, of course, is that over the last two decades many once-center-left economists have lurched far leftward as they have abandoned growth in favor of redistribution and become anti-business.

DeLong rejects growth because he has concluded it has failed to provide the promised utopia. He writes:

Suppose we could go back in time to 1980 and tell people how rich, relative to them, humanity would become by 2010…. They would surely think the world of 2010 would be a paradise, a utopia…. What went wrong?

For him, a nearly ninefold increase in world per-capita income is not really progress, but “a slouch. At best.” Moreover, the “market economy solved the problems it set itself, but then society did not want those solutions—it wanted solutions to other problems, problems the market economy did not set for itself.”

Perhaps, but the market did solve arguably the most pressing problem of human existence: how to improve living standards. Describe for typical middle-class Americans what life was like for their great-grandparents’ generation in the 1880s, then ask if they are more satisfied with what they have today, and most would laugh at the mere thought of going backward.

DeLong seems not to appreciate that humanity’s material wants are pretty vast, and it takes a lot to satisfy them. Even an economy that has grown 8.8 times larger in the last 130 years is still not big enough. We might reach economic utopia when everyone has a hot tub, a personal trainer, a really nice car, takes nice vacations, and has kids in private school. But we need a lot more than 8.8 times economic growth to get that. How about 50 times more output? So rather than reject market-based growth because most Americans still would love to consume much more, DeLong should be asking how to reignite economic growth rates that have become anemic.

We get to the crux when DeLong writes that the “market economy was more problem than solution” and “material wealth is of limited use in building utopia.” Once you have discredited growth as a goal and the market as a means of achieving it, abandoning markets and rejecting entrepreneurs and corporations is easy.

Permanent stagnation? / What does all this have to do with a 624-page economic history? It’s hard to say because Slouching mashes together a long book and a short essay. The short essay is about why capitalism and growth are bad and why growth is over. The long and largely unrelated book is an attempt to present an economic history of the 20th century. But while DeLong’s long and wide-ranging history—sweeping in everything from late 1800s industrial development to the world wars, the rise of the Soviet Union, the period of post-war growth, and more—is interesting, it is disconnected from any real thesis. What does a long narrative of the Korean War have to do with economic growth and its demise? The reader is left to wonder. It’s just 605 pages of economic history that is sometimes interesting, often repetitive, and frankly not very convincing in its explanation of why growth accelerated.

DeLong does argue that growth picked up around 1870 and ended in 2010, and that this period was transformative. But the reader doesn’t need 605 pages to learn that. More troublingly, DeLong provides neither evidence nor logic to explain why he claims growth is over. He simply observes that productivity growth rates have fallen since 2010 and asserts that this is permanent. Someone writing in 1938 or 1978 could have written a very similar book, having surveyed the economic malaise around them at those times and concluded that growth was then over for good. In fact, many wrote such books in those periods, and they all turned out to be wrong. The onus is on DeLong to explain why this time is different and the slow growth that immediately followed the Great Recession should be deemed permanent. Yet, he fails to do this.

Perhaps the biggest disappointment in a book that purports to explain economic growth over the last 140 years is the lack of analysis of technological change. Indeed, DeLong admits that “I have not written much in this book about precisely how new technologies have advanced human collective powers…. I have simply written about their rate of growth.” A better appreciation of these technologies would make one less pessimistic. Artificial intelligence, robotics, autonomous systems, quantum computing, and biotechnology all have the ability, once they mature, to rev the world’s growth engine, just as the industrial, electric, and computer ages did before.

It is unwise to bet against markets and entrepreneurs’ ability to produce growth and innovation. As Schumpeter once wrote, “The possibilities of technology are an uncharted sea.” Sadly, DeLong and many left-leaning economists seem to prefer staying hunkered down in a sheltered harbor where markets and businesses are held fast, no one is rich, and nothing changes.