As we approach the twenty-first century, many see a world beset by economic stagnation and explosive population growth. Based on the historical experience of both developed and developing nations, this book offers a sharply differing view. Although the future is not without serious dangers, Easterlin sees rapid economic growth as successfully sweeping the world, with explosive population growth as a passing phenomenon. The question remains, what will the world be like when economic growth is triumphant?

Will humanity, freed from material need, turn to nonmaterial pursuits, as many have envisaged? The answer suggested by experience to date is No. Instead, the world will be one in which ever-growing abundance is continually outpaced by ever-rising material aspirations, a world stuck on a hedonic treadmill.

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Taking a longer-term view than most literature on economic development, Easterlin stresses the enormous contrast between the collective experience of the last half century and what has gone before. An economic historian and demographer, the author writes in the tradition of the "new economic history," drawing on economic theory and quantitative evidence to interpret the historical experience of economic and population growth.

He reaches beyond the usual disciplinary limits to draw, as appropriate, on sociology, political science, psychology, anthropology, and the history of science. This work will be of interest not only to social scientists but to all readers concerned with where we have been and where we are going.