The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America’s Politics and Culture

In The Age of Abundance, Brink Lindsey offers a bold reinterpretation of the latter half of the 20th century.

Brink Lindsey

Brink Lindsey is vice president and director of the Open Society Project at the Niskanen Center. He is the author of several books, including Human Capitalism: How Economic Growth Has Made Us Smarter—and More Unequal and The Age Of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America’s Politics and Culture.

David Boaz

David Boaz was a distinguished senior fellow of the Cato Institute and played a key role in the development of the Cato Institute and the libertarian movement. He was the author of The Libertarian Mind: A Manifesto for Freedom and the editor of The Libertarian Reader.

Boaz was a provocative commentator and a leading authority on domestic issues such as education choice, drug legalization, the growth of government, and the rise of libertarianism. Boaz was the former editor of New Guard magazine and was executive director of the Council for a Competitive Economy prior to joining Cato in 1981. The earlier edition of The Libertarian Mind, titled Libertarianism: A Primer, was described by the Los Angeles Times as “a well-​researched manifesto of libertarian ideas.” His other books include The Politics of Freedom and the Cato Handbook for Policymakers.

His articles have been published in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, National Review, and Slate, and he wrote the entry on libertarianism for Encyclopedia Britannica. He was a frequent guest on national television and radio shows and has appeared on ABC’s Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher, CNN’s Crossfire, NPR’s Talk of the Nation and All Things Considered, The McLaughlin Group, Stossel, The Independents, Fox News, BBC, Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and other media.

David Brooks

A Cato Institute Book Forum featuring the author, Brink Lindsey, Vice President for Research, Cato Institute, with comments by David Brooks, New York Times. Moderated by David Boaz. In The Age of Abundance, Brink Lindsey offers a bold reinterpretation of the latter half of the 20th century. In this sweeping history of postwar America, the tumult of racial and gender politics, the rise of the counterculture, and the conservative revolution of the 1980s and 1990s are portrayed in an entirely new light. Readers will learn how and why the contemporary ideologies of left and right emerged in response to the novel challenges of widespread prosperity—and how a new, more libertarian consensus is forming that mixes the social freedom of the left with the economic freedom of the right. Commenting on Lindsey’s provocative interpretation of mass affluence will be David Brooks, columnist for the New York Times and author of Bobos in Paradise.