Darwin's Progress

What would a future traveler discover in an America that has taken its money-based society to the extreme? Michael Brown, our hero from the first book of the trilogy, is now 35 and sets out to explore this new world. In America, he encounters ‘pecuniocracy,’ a system where the rationality of money governs all aspects of life: contract marriages, commercial families, custody battles with financial stakes, and other bizarre phenomena stemming from the belief that money is the cornerstone of humanity and society. Through a series of thrilling adventures and unexpected twists, Michael must navigate and ultimately escape from this dystopian future America.

“A monumentally amazing story…”

– Ellen Balthazor, University of Wisconsin.

The author obtained his Ph.D. from UCLA in 1975 in sociology and is the author of 15 books of social criticism. One of his earlier books, The Dead End, appeared in TIME magazine in 1980 which called it “important and brilliant” for prophesying America’s consumer individualism as its eventual “national death wish.” After teaching sociology for the last 25 years at the U.S. military bases around the world, he retired from the University of Maryland in 2019 and is currently living in Greenfield, Massachusetts.