If you had told people 150 years ago how well off the world would become, they would have anticipated paradise. So why do things feel so broken? A former advisor to President Clinton and a professor of economic history at Berkeley, Brad DeLong's magnum opus Slouching Towards Utopia is a big 150 year history of the creation of the modern world. It begins in 1870, with the birth of free market capitalism and the industrial research lab, and takes in the rise of globalisation and the multinational corporation before bringing us to the present.