Cover; Title; Copyright; CONTENTS; Preface; Introduction: Advent of the Modern Economies; PART ONE The Experience of the Modern Economy; 1 How Modern Economies Got Their Dynamism; 2 Material Effects of the Modern Economies; 3 The Experience of Modern Life; 4 How Modern Economies Formed; PART TWO Against the Modern Economy; 5 The Lure of Socialism; 6 The Third Way: Corporatism Right and Left; 7 Weighing the Rivals on Their Terms; 8 The Satisfaction of Nations; PART THREE Decay and Refounding; 9 Markers of Post-1960s Decline; 10 Understanding the Post-1960s Decline 11 The Good Life: Aristotle and the Moderns12 The Good and the Just; Epilogue: Regaining the Modern; Timeline: Modernism and Modernity; Bibliography; Acknowledgments; Index.

In this book, Nobel Prize-winning economist Edmund Phelps draws on a lifetime of thinking to make a sweeping new argument about what makes nations prosper--and why the sources of that prosperity are under threat today. Why did prosperity explode in some nations between the 1820s and 1960s, creating not just unprecedented material wealth but ""flourishing""--meaningful work, self-expression, and personal growth for more people than ever before? Phelps makes the case that the wellspring of this flourishing was modern values such as the desire to create, explore, and meet challenges.