The Great Delusion: A Mad Inventor, Death in the Tropics...

The mirage of unlimited economic growth has become one of the pervasive ideologies of our time. That the quest for ever-increasing profit and productivity can be dehumanizing and heedless of the planet's ecology is of no concern to the wise guys of Wall Street. According to The Great Delusion, it's also a daft dogma. Fordham University historian Steven Stoll writes with a sharp pen about the 19th-century materialist philosophies that undergird the economic world order of nowadays and examines its implications through the life of an obscure German-American crackpot, John Etzler. The founder of failed Utopian communities and inventor of failed perpetual energy machines, Etzler becomes an object lesson in the application of ideas that continue to shape society. Prosperity, abundance and happiness were Etzler's themes, and like the financiers at the helm of the global economy but on a small scale, his fantasies were harmful to whomever they touched.