Progress and the Invisible Hand - Hardcover

Bronk, Richard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0316643777 ISBN 13: 9780316643771

Publisher: Little, Brown & Company, 1998

Synopsis

What is "progress"? In Richard Bronk's analytic study of this concept, he separates the material progress of a nation from the more problematic progress in human happiness and welfare. He wonders how a feel-bad factor can exist in a country with a steadily increasing GDP. Bronk then looks at other times and mind-sets (the Ancient World, the Early Christian, the Renaissance and the Enlightenment) to discover why their particular economic progress eventually failed, or (in the case of the Enlightenment) was ultimately successful. Among the conditions which he believes must be met before a belief in, and drive towards progress can result include: experience of positive change in one lifetime; knowledge of, but critical relationship with, the past and faith in the power of human reason and skills to engineer and control change. The text questions many of the basic assumptions behind our headlong pursuit of progress and may provoke and disquiet in equal measure.

About this title

Review

'wideranging and thought provoking..'. -- John Gray, author of FALSE DAWN

About the Author

Born in New York in 1960, Richard Bronk was educated at St Peter's School, York, and at Merton College, Oxford. After leaving Oxford, he was trained as a financial analyst at the Bank of England and worked at N M Rothschild & Sons and ING-Baring, which he left at the end of 1995 to write this book.

Edition details

• Publisher: Little, Brown & Company
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0316643777
• ISBN 13: 9780316643771
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288