What was life really like before economic growth? Join us for a book forum offering a tour of a thankfully lost world of bloodletting, filth, destitution, and famine-induced cannibalism, dispelling the idea that the Industrial Revolution failed to improve living standards for ordinary people. Nobel Prize–winning economist Joel Mokyr says the book should be “mandatory reading” for growth skeptics, and Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist George F. Will calls it a “powerful demolition of capitalism’s critics.” The author and other speakers will relate the book’s message to modern skepticism about the value of economic growth and broader distrust of free markets and technologies that are said to hold the promise of potentially bringing about the “next industrial revolution.”

Reception to follow.