Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century

Mr. DeLong marks our slouch towards utopia as beginning in the year 1870 and ending in 2010. Now, what does he mean by the term “slouching towards utopia.” Well, before the year, 1870, mankind was basically, just surviving. Whatever energy that was gained through increased agricultural production was put toward the production of more babies. Beyond that point, malnutrition would set in. Babies died and women could no longer ovulate. It was a one-to-one ratio so to speak and this had been going on since the beginning of time. It was the world written about by Thomas Malthus back in 1798. So, essentially, man’s existence had been rather miserable. And then, suddenly, in the year, 1870, production began to exceed consumption. Technology had created a situation such that humans in countries like the U.S. produced more food than needed so they could, well, just relax. They could have more babies and feed them or not. What made this possible? Well, according to Mr. DeLong, it was the corporation, global transportation, global communications, and falling trade barriers. With the corporations came the industrial research lab. Guys and gals could devote all their time inventing. Bradford calls it the invention of invention. If you look around your room, pretty much everything you see would be the result of these research labs. Its filled with stuff our ancestors wouldn’t dream of possessing and we accumulated with a fraction of the effort required by them simply to survive, utopia if you want to think about it that way. Of course, the corporation reproduces these inventions in mass numbers and can send them all over the world using steel shipping containers such that the movement of these products accounts for about one percent of a good’s retail value. The slouch towards utopia since 1870 has moved in fits and starts. Utopian began with a start that introduced trade on a global scale as never seen before and instant communication through the telegraph cable. Then came World War I followed by a spurt of growth and productivity followed by the depression and then World War II. Post-war economic growth has been tremendous bringing increased prosperity to most of the world. And then, 2010 when Barrack Obama had a choice to invest in America and bring it out of a financial crises caused by the very institutions responsible for its stability followed by the election of Donald Trump and a move backward away from increased prosperity to the opposite. This a book to read if you want to understand our prosperity as compared with our ancestors and possibly, our progeny.

This book did not live up to its hype. It tries to cover too much ground and therefore provides cursory coverage of hundreds of issues. His grounding in history is not as firm as I had expected it to be. The writing is awkward. He frequently uses the term ‘really existing.’ I have no idea what that means.

Even though recent history has been, written, interpreted, debated and poured over in so many ways, there is always room to approach things with a twist, and in this case one with very sound underpinnings. Bradford DeLong brings forth his grand narrative of what he terms the long twentieth century. The cornerstone, the fundamental explanatory root of his overarching telling is the examination of the causes and consequences of the extraordinary economic growth, which began in 1870. The political economy lens allows the author to explore how and why, with all this wealth, humankind has not even come close to making this an utopian world. John Maynard Keynes wondered, back in 1930, if once freedom from pressing economic cares was achieved, we could live wisely, and agreeable, and well. The question remains open, and sometimes, it is hard to be optimistic.

It was a Christmas present for someone. I hope he likes it as I read all the reviews etc.

This erudite and masterful economic history uses a framework to document and explain what the author calls the long 20th C, a period from 1870 to 2010 which experienced extraordinary economic and material wealth for everyone (at least in the Northern Hemisphere), yet only partially delivered what should by now have been a utopia by any prior standards. The period is chosen at its start the rate of economic growth rapidly increases, and for the first time, allows the population to escape from the Malthusian trap that was the lot of humans from prehistory, and certainly since the start of civilization. While before then the upsetting of our ape-evolved social hierarchies was the only way for individuals and groups to improve their lot by getting a larger share of resources, but by and large, elites controlled the social system in a variety of ways ensuring that most of the population remained poor and at the mercy of those elites. After 1870, the wealth rapidly improved for most of the population, although the inequality seemed to increase, except for 2 periods, most recently for the 30 years after WWII. However, since 2010, after the financial collapse of 2007, growth has returned to a slow, pre-1870 rate, and inequality has increased with a vengeance. The author uses the framework of Hayek (the market is all) and Polyani (other rights to wealth and status) is important to show how different political systems have managed their economies, with some moderate, but variable success. [ I well recall a British tv political show that at the beginning of the Thatcher era suggested that the government should stop trying to make teh population happier and focus on wealthier - a Hayekian ideal that was the start of the neoliberal in the US and Britain.] 2010 saw the end of any success of the neoliberal experiment, and populations have been turning back to authoritarian/fascist approaches, last seen between WWI and WWII, and what the socialist systems of the USSR and China evolved into. DeLong has no answer for the why's of this history, nor any prescription to get societies moving forward toward a utopia again. [This is unlike Piketty's "Capital in the Twenty-First Century". DeLong wisely just provides a rich, beautifully written, economic history that could easily become a required reading, and rather than like many historians make historical events seem inevitable with hindsight, he acknowledges that how the twists and turns of history have resulted are not clear and that he may even be an imperfect historian as events overlap with his experiences. For myself, I think that the struggle of individuals and groups to ascend our evolutionary-determined social pyramid explains some of why various systems resulted in wealth inequality, either stably or by revolution. Whatever the system, some will always do anything to ascend to te...