The Post-Widget Society Economic Possibilities for Our Children

Lawrence H. Summers presents a new paradigm for thinking about the current economic and technological revolution

We are buffeted by the sense that everything is accelerating: digital technology is changing the way we work, shop, and socialize. And yet for all the talk about disruptive innovations, economic growth is largely stagnant. We are told that with new technologies average citizens are empowered as never before, and yet wide swaths of the population feel powerless and can no longer count on stable careers and a better life for their children. As Lawrence H. Summers shows in The Post-Widget Society, these are the paradoxes that define the economic revolution that is transforming our world.

At the heart of this revolution are two dramatic developments in Western economies: the declining significance of widgets (mass-produced goods) and the rise of design goods (products that cost a lot to design but little to produce); and the controversial prospect of secular stagnation, the long-term phenomenon of negligible economic growth and depressed employment in a dynamic market economy. Written with Chrystia Freeland, Summers’s trenchant analysis of these trends reveals that they have profound implications not only for the future of jobs and widening income inequality but also for the nature of the state and the very stability of society.

A bold, path-breaking book by one of our most important economists, The Post-Widget Society is necessary reading for every American concerned about our economic and political future.

Lawrence H. Summers is the Charles W. Eliot University Professor and president emeritus of Harvard University. During the past two decades, he has served in a series of senior policy positions in Washington, D.C., including as the seventy-first secretary of the Treasury for President Clinton, the director of the National Economic Council for President Obama, and the vice president of development economics and chief economist of the World Bank.

Chrystia Freeland is Canada’s minister of international trade and an MP for the University-Rosedale district of Toronto. She has worked as a journalist and editor for the Financial Times, The Washington Post, and The Economist, among others. Her books include Sale of a Century: The Inside Story of the Second Russian Revolutionand Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else.

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