Surplus: The History of Too Much and the End of Economic Primacy

Summary

What happens when capitalism becomes so successful that the problem is no longer too little—but too much?

In Surplus, economist and market strategist Marc Chandler traces the extraordinary rise of economic abundance from the earliest agricultural civilizations to today’s world of overflowing capital, soaring asset prices and unprecedented productive capacity. He argues that many of the forces destabilizing modern societies—from widening inequality and financial speculation to political discontent and environmental excess—are symptoms of a profound transition: we have created an economic system extraordinarily good at producing wealth, but have yet to build institutions capable of managing its abundance.

Drawing on economics, history, politics and philosophy, Chandler shows how earlier surpluses transformed civilizations—and argues that today’s surplus gives us an opportunity to do so again. Provocative and ultimately hopeful, Surplus asks what comes after scarcity, and how we might build a society that measures progress not simply by how much wealth it creates, but by what that wealth makes possible.