The Price of Tomorrow

Reviewed by Diario de un Inversor · UpdatedJune 13, 2026

Our review

«The Price of Tomorrow», published in 2020, is the most provocative and original economics book of recent years. Jeff Booth, a Canadian tech entrepreneur who founded BuildDirect, begins from a premise that conventional economics systematically ignores: technology is deflationary by nature — it produces more goods and services at lower cost with each cycle of innovation — but the world's central banks have spent decades fighting that deflation with monetary expansion, artificially maintaining prices and nominal GDP growth. Booth's central argument is that this tension between technological deflation and monetary inflation is unsustainable: the global financial system is accumulating debt that can never be repaid in real terms, and the only exit without collapse is to embrace technological deflation and redesign economic systems accordingly. The book has a genuine intellectual virtue: it raises questions that conventional economists rarely ask. Its limitations are also evident: Booth is not an economist and some of his claims lack the necessary technical precision. Furthermore, his declared sympathy for Bitcoin as a solution to the monetary problem colors the final analysis. A book to read with active critical thinking.

Key takeaways

• Technology systematically reduces the marginal cost of production; fighting that deflation with monetary expansion is a race the global financial system cannot win indefinitely.
• Nominal GDP growth sustained by rising debt is not genuine prosperity: it is a deferral of an adjustment that becomes costlier with each cycle.
• Wealth concentration in the digital economy is not a market failure but a structural consequence of businesses with network effects and increasing returns.
• Technological deflation, if allowed to express itself without monetary intervention, would redistribute productivity gains to consumers rather than concentrating them among capital owners.

Fact

Jeff Booth published «The Price of Tomorrow» in January 2020; Booth was co-founder and CEO of BuildDirect, an online building materials company that reached a valuation of over CAD 1 billion.