Slowdown

A powerful and counterintuitive argument that we should welcome the current slowdown—of population growth, economies,

and technological innovation

Drawing from an incredibly rich trove of global data, this groundbreaking

book reveals that human progress has been slowing down since the early

1970s. Danny Dorling uses compelling visualizations to illustrate how fertility

rates, growth in GDP per person, increases in life expectancy, and even the

frequency of new social movements have all steadily declined over the last

few generations.

Perhaps most surprising of all is the fact that even as new technologies frequently reshape our everyday lives and are widely believed to be propelling

our civilization into new and uncharted waters, the rate of technological progress is also rapidly dropping. Rather than lament this turn of events, Dorling

embraces it as a moment of promise and a move toward stability, and he

notes that many of the older great strides in progress that have defined recent

history also brought with them widespread warfare, divided societies, and

massive inequality

DANNY DORLING is the Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography at the University of Oxford, UK. His previous books include Inequality and the 1% and The Equality Effect.

With others, he created the website Worldmapper.org, a digital collection of demographic maps. He lives in Oxford, UK.