The Price of Tomorrow

A quick tour through macro, debt, deflation and its debt-rich legacy.

Jeff Booth’s *The Price of Tomorrow* is a concise, provocative argument that technological deflation is colliding with a debt-soaked, inflation-dependent financial system, and that ignoring this clash is driving inequality, instability, and a coming reckoning. It is part diagnosis of a “sick” economic model, part warning about debt and social fracture, and part (imperfect) manifesto for embracing deflation and redesigning money for a world of digital abundance.

I have enormous respect for the project Booth undertook, and admiration for the business(es) he has built during his career. The breadth of the undertaking is huge. At times, I felt as if the content was a macro mile wide and a densely-packed inch deep. Let’s unpack that inch.

Core thesis

Booth’s central claim is simple: technology is inherently and increasingly deflationary, while our economic architecture is structurally addicted to inflation and credit growth. The book argues that this tension between exponential tech and exponential debt defines the macro backdrop of the coming decades.

He frames current policy as an attempt to paper over tech-driven price declines with ever-larger doses of monetary stimulus and lower rates, which keeps the game going but at the cost of rising leverage, asset bubbles, and fragility. He pinpoints the collusion between the vote-buying fiscal excesses of politicians, and the market-led monetary actions of central banks.

Technology as deflation engine

The strongest sections are Booth’s explanations of how scaled innovation drives prices toward zero marginal cost in sector after sector.

He illustrates this with familiar case studies—Kodak versus digital photography, the collapse in computing costs, Amazon’s retail efficiency, and the cost curve of renewables and AI—to show that more of the economy is entering “software-like” deflation over time. The conclusion is that betting on sustained, broad-based inflation in a world of accelerating automation is wagering against the core logic of technology itself.

At the time Booth wrote the book—2018—AI had not begun to explode as it did in 2025, but his analysis is directionally spot-on.

Debt, inequality, and social strain

Against that backdrop, Booth argues our growth model has become almost entirely debt-fueled and dependent on currency debasement to avoid acknowledging deflation. The incremental growth-payoff from ever-increasing amounts of global debt is diminishing dramatically as the debt piles up ($350 trillion and counting). Suppressing deflation via money printing and credit expansion props up asset prices, protects incumbents and “zombie” firms, and turns capitalism into what he calls a form of crony capitalism.

He links this regime directly to widening wealth inequality—asset owners win, wage earners lag—as well as to rising polarization, “us versus them” politics, and the historical risk of extremism, revolutions, or war when debt and inequality stretch too far.

Style, strengths, and weaknesses

The book is short, accessible, and tonally a mix of alarm and cautious optimism, which makes it readable even for non-economists. Its strengths are clarity and synthesis: Booth takes quantitative easing, technological disruption, AI, and inequality and weaves them into a coherent narrative that feels intuitive once stated.

The weaknesses show up on the prescriptive side. Critics note that his policy and monetary “solutions” are more gestural than concrete, hinging on embracing deflation and, implicitly or explicitly, on new monetary arrangements like Bitcoin, without offering a detailed transition path from today’s system. At times the argument can feel repetitive or deterministic about tech and unemployment, and some reviewers see the final chapters as less rigorous than the diagnosis that precedes them. I agree. The arguments about the potential of renewable energy are naive, leaning, as they do on such imperfect measures as LCOE (levelized cost of energy), and the potential for batteries to smooth the challenges of intermittency. Those simply won’t work in the usefully foreseeable future.

Who should read it

*The Price of Tomorrow* is most useful for readers thinking about macro at the intersection of technology, money, and social stability rather than as a technical economics text. For those already steeped in the language of macro, there will be no surprises. For those who aren’t, this is well worth the short time it will take to read.

For investors, policymakers, and technologists, its value lies in reframing deflation not as a bug to be fought at all costs, but as a feature of an abundant, automated future that current institutions are structurally unprepared to handle. Even if one disagrees with Booth’s emphasis on deflation or his preferred monetary answers, the book succeeds as a clear, thought-provoking prompt to reassess how sustainable the existing debt-and-inflation paradigm really is.