Feminism, the demographic transition, the science-engineering-lab-corporation-globalization innovation chain, tyrannies empowered by technological & organizational force multipliers, the emergence of truly extraordinary gulfs in wealth across people in countries, governmental inability to understand & apply even the most basic principles of managing economies to damp instability, & more—those are not the most important themes of the economic history of the long 20th century…

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2018 DRAFT: Slouching Towards Utopia?: An Economic History of the long Twentieth Century

Chapter II. Themes

J. Bradford DeLong

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The well-worn grooves of our thinking lead us to focus on narratives—stories, plots of cause-and-effect or disturbance-and-new-equilibrium or transgression and retribution. The well-worn grooves of our thinking also lead us to focus on morals: themes, what the stories mean, what the elevator-pitch version happens to be.

“The Boy Who Cried Wolf” is a (short) narrative, with the story adding punch to its moral, which William Caxton[1] put as: “For men bileue not lyghtly hym/whiche is knowen for a lyer”.[2] And the themes—the morals—direct our attention to what is or what someone, at least, are the most important elements of the narrative.

• These themes are what you try to communicate when you have an unwilling audience trapped with you in an elevator, and you know that they are going to flee as soon as the elevator doors open.

• These themes are what you try to recommunicate to your class on the final day before the exam, in the hope that every exam that comes in will have some words on it that makes sense.

Suppose we cast ourselves forward in time a millennium, to 3000—a time in which we will appear as small and as distant to them as the conquest of England by William the Bastard of Normandy[3] appears to us. Survey history courses in 2500—if they even have survey history courses—in universities—if they even have universities—will then in their final lecture—if…—have at most one single paragraph to spend on the twentieth century.

What will they try, one final time, to get into students’ heads? We cannot know. What will be important to them depends on who they will be, which depends on what happens next. But if I had to bet, I would bet that they would see two supremely important and six very important themes to the economic history of the Long 20th Century.

As I assess their relative importance, the two supremely important themes are:

1. History was economic: The Long 20th Century was the first century ever in which its history was predominantly economic history, for the economy was the dominant arena of events and change, and economic changes were the driving force behind other changes in a way never seen before in any single century.

2. Explosion of wealth: The Long 20th Century saw the material wealth of humankind explode beyond all previous imagining: we—at least those of us who belong to the upper middle class and live in the industrial core of the world economy—are now far richer than the writers of even previous centuries’ utopias could imagine.[4]

And the six very important themes are:

1. The arrival of feminism: The Long 20th Century saw the substantial liberation of women from the role imposed by patriarchy enabled by biology Malthusian pressures. At the start of the Long 20th Century the typical woman spent about 20 years eating for two: pregnant or breastfeeding. At the end of the Long 20th Century the typical woman spent about 4 years. Should this be theme number one? Perhaps

2. The demographic transition: The Long 20th Century saw, we think, the approaching end of the era in which technology and biology increased human numbers: it looks like the world is headed for zero population growth at a population of roughly 10 billion in 2050. And during the Long 20th Century the population explosion that carried the earth from 1 to 7.5 billion people placed huge demographic burdens on poor countries—burdens now ebbing as the demographic transition to low fertility and extended lifespan finish their spread across the globe.

3. The cornucopia of technological knowledge: Enabling the enormous increase in material wealth—its essential prerequisite, in fact—was the explosion in human technological knowledge. This required not just a culture and educational system that created large numbers of scientists and engineers, and means of communication and memory so that they could stand on each others’ shoulders as well as those of earlier giants, but also that the market economy be structured in a way that made it worth people’s while to funnel resources to scientists and engineers so that they could do their jobs.

4. Tyranny: The Long 20th Century’s tyrannies were more brutal and more barbaric than those of any previous century—and these tyrannies were in strange, complicated, and confused ways somehow closely related to the forces that made the explosion of wealth so great.

5. Wealth Gulfs: The Long 20th Century saw the relative economic gulf between different economies grow at an astonishingly rapid pace as the world became, relatively, a more unequal place than ever before—save possibly for the days when some East African Plains Apes knew how to make fire and others did not. It is a scandal and a disgrace that today one-quarter of the human race have lives that—save for public health—are not that distinguishable from the lives of our Agrarian Age predecessors

6. Mismanagement: The governments of the Long 20th Century had little clue as to how to regulate the un-self-regulating market to maintain prosperity, or ensure opportunity, or produce substantial equality.

We have already seen the first two supremely important of these—they were covered in the last chapter. The other six merely very important, however, are worth restating here at greater length:

2.1. The Arrival of Feminism

In 1764 in Britain’s Massachusetts colony Abigail Smith was 20, and had had no formal education at all: girls weren’t worth it. In that year married a man she had known for five years: the up-and-coming 30-year-old lawyer John Adams. Their daughter Nabby was born the following year, in 1765. There followed John Quincy (1767), Suky (1768, who died at the age of 2), Charles (1770, who died at the age of 10), Thomas (1772), with high probability a couple of (very early) miscarriages from 1774-6, then the stillborn Elizabeth (1777), and (perhaps) another miscarriage afterwards—but I suspect not. She ran their Boston-Braintree household and property operations while he played his role on the large political-intellectual stage, becoming second president of the United States. 3 Slouching Towards Utopia?

Death and disease were, as was the case in the Agrarian Age, omnipresent. One letter to her husband in 1776 contains: “our Neighbour Trot whose affliction I most sensibly feel but cannot discribe, striped of two lovely children in one week…”, “Betsy Cranch has been very bad…”, “Becky Peck they do not expect will live out the day…”, “The Mumps… Isaac is now confined with it…”, and “your Brothers youngest child lies bad with convulsion fitts…”[5]

Her letters tell us that she badly wanted to know what was going on in the world outside her household and the Boston-Braintree circle: “I wish you would ever write me a Letter half as long as I write you; and tell me if you may: Where your Fleet are gone? What sort of Defence Virginia can make against our common Enemy? Whether it is so situated as to make an able Defence? Are not the Gentery Lords and the common people vassals? Are they not like the uncivilized Natives Brittain represents us to be?…” and “I have sometimes been ready to think that the passion for Liberty cannot be Eaquelly Strong in the Breasts of those who have been accustomed to deprive their fellow Creatures of theirs…”

And Abigail Adams was not happy about the position of women in society:

By the way in the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If perticuliar care and attention is not paid to the Laidies we are determined to foment a Rebelion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.

That your Sex are Naturally Tyrannical is a Truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute, but such of you as wish to be happy willingly give up the harsh title of Master for the more tender and endearing one of Friend. Why then, not put it out of the power of the vicious and the Lawless to use us with cruelty and indignity with impunity? Men of Sense in all Ages abhor those customs which treat us only as the vassals of your Sex. Regard us then as Beings placed by providence under your protection and in immitation of the Supreem Being make use of that power only for our happiness…

Her husband thought this was a great joke:

As to your extraordinary code of laws, I cannot but laugh. We have been told that our struggle has loosened the bonds of government everywhere; that children and apprentices were disobedient; that schools and colleges were grown turbulent; that Indians slighted their guardians, and negroes grew insolent to their masters. But your letter was the first intimation that another tribe, more numerous and powerful than all the rest, were grown discontented.

This is rather too coarse a compliment, but you are so saucy, I won't blot it out. Depend upon it, we know better than to repeal our masculine systems. Although they are in full force, you know they are little more than theory. We dare not exert our power in its full latitude. We are obliged to go fair and softly, and, in practice, you know we are the subjects. We have only the name of masters, and rather than give up this, which would completely subject us to the despotism of the petticoat, I hope General Washington and all our brave heroes would fight…

Abigail Adams was not typical: literate, smart as a whip, upper class, married to a husband she could talk to. In other ways she was very typical: subordinated to her husband (and to other male relatives), many of her concerns given little weight, embedded in a social network in which aiding other mothers as they watched and desperately tried to stop their children get sick and die, pregnant (5 years; I don’t know whether she nursed or not, but somebody or somebodies nursed her children for perhaps fourteen years), and, of course, desperate concern for “our own little flock… My Heart trembles with anxiety for them…”

Being female in the Agrarian Age back before the Long 20th Century was not for sissies.

Why male supremacy was so firmly established back in the Agrarian Age is something that is not obvious to me. Yes, it was very important that people who wished to survive should they reach old age—especially women who did not want to be burned as witches—to have surviving descendants. The pressure at all levels of society was immense: Queen Anne I Stuart (1665–1714), the last British monarch of the Stuart dynasty,[6] was pregnant eighteen times: eight miscarriages, five stillbirths, George (who lived only minutes), Mary (premature: lived only two hours), Anne Sophia (who lived only nine months), Mary (died of smallpox before she would have turned two), and William (died at 11 of strep throat).

Anne Stuart survived all eighteen pregnancies. Many of her fellow-queens were not so lucky. Of the 45 queens and female heirs-apparent of England from the Norman Conquest through Victoria, seven died in childbed: 15.5%, more than one in seven, among the most cosseted and best-nourished women in England. In the horrible run from Isabelle de Valois in 1409 through Anne Hyde in 1671, six of twenty died in childbed. The last to die in childbed was Crown Princess Charlotte Augusta of Wales in 1817.

Yes, back in the Agrarian Age the biological requirements of obtaining a reasonable chance of having surviving descendants to take care of one in one’s old age meant that the typical woman spent 20 years eating for two: 20 years pregnant and breastfeeding. Yes, eating for two is an enormous energy drain, especially in populations near subsistence.

Yes, Agrarian Age populations were near subsistence —my great-grandmother Eleanor Lawton Carter’s maxim was “have a baby, lose a tooth” as the child-to-be leached calcium out of the mother to build her or his own bones, and she was an upper class Bostonian born in the mid-1870s.

Yes, breastfeeding kept women very close to their children, and impelled a concentration of female labor on activities that made that easy: gardening and other forms of within-and-near-the-dwelling labor, especially textiles.[7]

Yes, there were benefits to men as a group from oppressing women—especially if women could be convinced that they deserved it: “Unto the woman he said, ‘I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband; and he shall rule over thee’…[8]

But surely even in the Agrarian Age a shift to a society with less male supremacy would have been a positive-sum change: women who are not kept illiterate, barefoot, and pregnant as a matter of course can do more, and we—optimistic— economists have a strong bias toward believing that people in groups will find ways to become, collectively, more productive and then to distribute the fruits of higher productivity in a way that makes such a more productive social order sustainable. But not.[9]

Being an Agrarian-Age woman was not for sissies.

2.2. The Demographic Transition

There were signs of erosion in the bio-demographic underpinnings of high male supremacy even before the Long 20th Century began. But it was over 1870-2016 that these underpinnings dissolved utterly. The number of years the typical woman spent eating for two fell from twenty—if she survived her childbed—down to four, as better sanitation, much better nutrition, and more knowledge about disease made many pregnancies less necessary for leaving surviving descendants and as birth control technology made it easier to plan families. The number of babies per potential mother dropped by about two-thirds.

Thus reductions in infant mortality, the advancing average age of marriage, and the increasing costs of child raising together drove a decrease in fertility. And, after exploding in the Industrial Age, rate of population growth in the industrial core slowed drastically. The population explosion turned out to be a relatively short run thing. And so human population growth went from an approximate doubling each generation to a rate approximately consistent with zero long-run population growth in the advanced industrial economies, with the rest of the world now following along behind. I world that had had perhaps 750 million people in 1800, 1.1 billion in 1870, and 7.4 billion in 2016 now appears headed for a stable population of about 9.5 billion come 2050.

The path of within-the-household technological advance worked to the benefit of the typical woman in the Long 205h Century: dishwashers, dryers, vacuum cleaners, improved chemical cleansing products, other electrical and natural gas appliances, and so on, especially clothes-washing machines—all these made the tasks of keeping the household clean, ordered, and functioning much easier. Maintaining a nineteenth century, high-fertility household was a much more than fulltime job. Maintaining a late twentieth century household could become more like a part-time job. And so much female female labor that had been tied to fulltime work within the household because of the backward state of household technology became a reserve that could now be used for other purposes.

My great-great grandmother Florence Wyman Richardson was born in 1855 in St. Louis, MO, a privileged scion of what then qualified as St. Louis’s upper class.[10] Unlike Abigail Smith Adams, she received an education—but not a college degree. Unlike Abigail Smith Adams, she was not limited to writing private letters to her husband asking him to please “Remember the Ladies”. 1882 finds her lobbying for raising the age of consent in Missouri, then 12. 1908 finds her on the executive board of the St. Louis Woman's Trade Union League. 1910 finds her, with her daughter and my great-grandmother Florence (“Fonnie”) Richardson Usher, organizing the St. Louis Women’s Suffrage League. And the system… responded: the 19th Women’s Suffrage Amendment, which had first been introduced back in 1878, was ratified on August 20, 1920.[11]

In response to the declining time demands of within household work and the expanding set of outside opportunities, female participation in the paid labor force surged. In the United States female levels of formal education are now poised to soon surpass male levels.

The move of women from largely within-the-household, unpaid to largely outsidethe-household, paid work catalyzed an increase in women’s material welfare and social status. As Betty Friedan wrote in the early 1960s, women could advance toward something like equal status only if they found “identity…in work… for which, usually, our society pays.” As long as women were confined to separate, domestic, occupations which the market did not reward with cash, it was easy for men to denigrate and minimize their competence and accomplishments. As the labor requirements of running a household fell, the wide separation of men’s from women’s roles became harder to maintain—and with it the belief that biology imposed a different, lower status on the female half of the human race.

Institutions and practices derived under the assumption that the overwhelming bulk of the outside-the-household paid labor force is male, attached to employment full-time over the long term, and has minimal child care and household-maintenance responsibilities held back progress toward something like full economic equality between men and women. Nothing like full equality has yet been established. Male wages and earnings still appeared higher than female wages and earnings by more than could be easily accounted for by differences in education, training, and degree of labor force attachment. There is still substantial discrimination visible, especially in the form of a “break in labor force participation” penalty. Today in Denmark—one of the most gender-equal countries in the world, mothers have a 7%-point lower chance of being employed, work an average of 7% fewer hours conditional on being employed, and receive an average of 7% less in compensation conditional on being employed and on working their hours.

In my intellectual discipline, economics, and in my labor market status group, tenured professors, we are now grappling with one of these institutions and practices: that, in the word of my friend and teacher ex-Harvard President Larry Summers, people deciding whether you are going to receive tenure expect that candidate professors in their 20s and 30s have “near total commitments to their work… a large number of hours in the office… a flexibility of schedules to respond to contingency… a continuity of effort through the life cycle, and… the mind is always working on the problems that are in the job”.[12]

But requiring such total commitment up through one’s 30s does not fit easily or well with female parenthood.

The response of universities was to give mothers extra time—extra years to prepare their portfolios for the tenure review. And then gender equality seemed to demand that universities give fathers—especially those who would certify that they had been primary caregivers—extra years on their tenure clocks as well.[13]

The effect of this facially-neutral pro-parent policy? Men whose wives gave birth and so got extra time on their tenure clocks saw their chances of getting academic tenure increase by 20% . Women who gave birth and so got extra time on their tenure clocks saw their chances of getting academic tenure decrease by 20%. The men had spent the extra time writing more articles. The women had spent the extra time eating for two under the heavy biological load of mammalian motherhood.[14]

I see the centrality of the economic and the extraordinary upward leap in prosperity as the principal news that the future will remember from the history of the Long 20th Century. But I am male. If I were female, would I see the demographic transition—the shift of the typical woman’s experience from one of eating for two for twenty years (and of having one chance in seven of dying in childbed) to eating for two for four years—and the rise of feminism as the biggest news?

Quite possibly.[15]

Perhaps we move from “possibly” to “probably” here when we reflect on the connections between the rise of feminism and the demographic transition. As the world became richer—and as knowledge about how to manage public health was slowly and painfully developed—the world saw first a population explosion: The world had grown from 170 million in the year 1 to 425 million in 1500—growth at the very slow walking pace of 0.06% per year that corresponded to the very slow pace of pre-Commercial Revolution technological development. The Commercial Revolution era of 1500-1800 saw population more than double and grow to 900 million. The British Industrial Revolution era of 1800-1870 saw population increase half again to 1.3 billion. And the Long 20th Century saw human population nearly sextuple to 7.5 billion. By and large, even as mortality fell men still wanted many, many children. Women, first, did not have the knowledge that changing public health meant that many pregnancies were no longer necessary to give at least some confidence of great-grandchildren. And women, second, did not have the social power to set their fertility at levels that seemed good to them. Feminism gave them both the knowledge and the social power.

Thus we now appear to be on track to a world with its population peaking at between 9.5 and 10 billion around 2050.

That feminism came late to the initially-poorer regions of the world has been a major cause of the Long 20th Century’s global divergence in living standards and productivity levels. It was not the most important cause: the most important cause was communist central planning—Vladimir Lenin’s belief that one should run an entire economy by generalizing what he saw and guessed about German mobilization for World War I was not the brightest light on the tree of humanity’s good ideas. It was not the second most important cause: that was the slowness with which modern industrial technologies were diffused around the world. But that feminism came late, and so the demographic transition came late, to the poorer regions of the world was the third most important cause: the demographic burdens placed on poor countries by the continued population explosion were heavy—but they are now ebbing, as we now see the demographic transition to not just extended lifespan but to low fertility finish its spread around the globe.

2.3. The Advance of Technological and Organizational Knowledge

Enabling and powering the enormous increase in material wealth—its essential prerequisite, in fact—has been the explosion in human technological knowledge, the creation of this explosion requiring not just scientists and engineers and means of communication, but also a market economy that made it worth people’s while to funnel resources to scientists and engineers so that they could do their jobs. We, however, have had not just technological breakthroughs, but a breakthrough in the creation of the research laboratory—a breakthrough in that we have now routinized the process of creating constant and successive technological breakthroughs.

The consequences have been overwhelming.

Growth economists make truly heroic assumptions to construct very rough estimates of a quantitative index of the value of the human race’s collective knowledge of technology and organization in the broadest sense—the value of the ideas about how to manipulate nature, about what people find useful for life or entertaining or useful for status, and about how humans either as individuals or production teams or societies can productively organize to make and distribute. In the framework I find most useful, they calculate output per worker Y/L as an increasing function of the capital stock per worker K/L —how much in the way of produced means of production the typical worker is assisted by—and the efficiency of labor E. Holding the capital-output ratio K/Y constant, a 1% increase in the efficiency of labor E drives a 1% increase in production per worker Y/L . Holding the efficiency of labor E constant, a 1% increase in the capital-per-worker K/L ratio drives an 0.4% increase in production per worker Y/L.

They—we—then posit that the efficiency of labor E is itself a function of the value of the human race’s collective knowledge H and of the natural resources at the disposal of the typical worker N/L. The baseline assumption I use is that natural resources are half as important as knowledge: a fall of 3% in the natural resources at the disposal of the typical worker if balanced by a 1% increase in the value of knowledge leaves the efficiency of labor unchanged; and a 1% increase in both the value of knowledge and in resources per worker raises the efficiency of labor by 1%.

This strikes most people—this strikes me—as a somewhat odd way to proceed.

The real value of production per worker and of natural resources per worker seem to be somethings we could measure and get our hands dirty calculating. But [16] efficiency of labor? Value of ideas? Eighty years ago John Maynard Keynes warned us economists against excessive quantification of the not properly quantifiable that would make a mockery of true quantitative analysis:

Approximate statistical comparisons depending on some broad element of judgment rather than of strict calculation… may possess significance and validity within certain limits. But the proper place for such things as net real output and the general level of prices lies within the field of historical and statistical description, and their purpose should be to satisfy historical or social curiosity.… To say that net output to-day is greater, but the price-level lower, than ten years ago or one year ago, is a proposition of a similar character to the statement that Queen Victoria was a better queen but not a happier woman than Queen Elizabeth—a proposition not without meaning and not without interest, but unsuitable as material for the differential calculus. Our precision will be a mock precision if we try to use such partly vague and non-quantitative concepts as the basis of a quantitative analysis…[17]

Real scientists calculate quantitative values for abstract things that cannot be seen: the change in momentum is the force times the time over which it is applied; the change in kinetic energy is the force times the distance over which its is applied; an electron or positron absorbs or generates a photon (and a photon either splits into an electron and a positron or an electron and a position collide and annihilate each other, producing a photon) in a process governed by the fine structure constant, which is a value estimated by experiment of 0.007297351 ± 0.000000006. These laws hold, as best as we can tell, exactly: they are inscribed in the deep structure of the universe, and hold for all forces, all momentums, all kinetic energies, and all photon-electron-positron interactions.

By contrast, the claim that output-per-worker Y/L varies systematically with capital-per-worker K/L with a quantitative coefficient of 0.4 is a rough rule of thumb. The claim that, holding the capital-output ratio K/Y constant, the efficiency of labor E is proportional to production-per-worker Y/L is a definition. The claim that labor efficiency E, the value of knowledge H, and natural resources per worker N/L are such that if the second and third grow at the same rate the first grows at the same rate as well is a definition. And the claim that knowledge H is thrice as important as resources N/L in advancing the efficiency of labor E is not even a rough rule of thumb: it is a guess.

There is no machine buried deep inside the earth emitting some kind of force field penetrating the universe that generates as a natural law the aggregate production function which growth economists like me like to write as:

with α=0.4 and φ=3.

And so any quantitative conclusions reached by using them should be taken with many, many grains of salt. Nevertheless, I find the framework very useful in organizing my thoughts, in generating questions to investigate, and, yes in producing very rough approximate magnitude. Queen Victoria does not appear to have been a much better queen than Queen Elizabeth. But from all historical accounts Gloriana appears to have been a much happier woman than the Widow at Windsor.

So set our quantitive index of the global value of human knowledge H equal to a value of 1 back 10000 years ago, at the end of the Gatherer-Hunter and the beginning of the Agrarian Age. Then by the year 1 this value index stood 3.5. By the year 1500 the index of the value of knowledge stood at 4.75: given similar resources, because of more knowledge about how to use nature and organize humans one worker in the year 1500 could produce things of the value it would have taken 4.75 typical workers of the year -8000 to produce.

Calculating the average rate of growth of the value of the knowledge gets us a growth rate of 0.02% per year—0.5% per generation—for the entire span years from 1 to 1500. We also see an average population growth rate for the world over this time span of 0.06% per year—1.5% per generation—as increases in technological prowess were soaked up by higher populations and thus greater resource scarcity, leaving little or none to improve humanity’s lot.

From 1500 to 1800 to 1870 our quantitative index H grows from 4.75 to 9 to 16— average proportional rates of annual increase in H of 0.2% per year over 1500-1800 and of 0.8% per year over 1800-1870. These are vastly greater than the 0.02% per year of 1-1500 or the 0.035% per year of 1000-1500. However, even the 0.8% per year of growth in human knowledge over 1800-1870 did little to raise human material well-being. Humans were perhaps 40% better off in 1870 on average than they had been in 1800—a growth rate of 0.48% per year. And, as John Stuart Mill had observed, little of this increase in production per worker trickled down to the working classes of Britain, and still less trickled down to the working classes of the rest of the world.

To a large extent, Malthus still ruled the human world of 1870. World population had grown from perhaps 900 million in 1800 to 1.3 billion in 1870—an average growth rate of 0.5% per year—and was about to grow from 1.3 billion in 1870 to 1.625 billion in 1900—an average growth rate of 0.75% per year. Contrast these population growth rates to the 0.25% per year of 1500-1800 and the 0.06% per year of 1000-1500, and see that the somewhat richer world of the Commercial Revolution and British Industrial Revolution eras was producing a substantial population response. People still had little access to effective family limitation planning. And for most people the need and desire to have surviving descendants was driving a plan to have many children—and in the richer world more of these children were surviving.

What would the world today look like if the British Industrial Revolution had not happened—if the rate of growth of the value of human knowledge H had remained after 1800 at its rate of 0.2% per year that it had attained over 1500-1800? We cannot know, but my view is that the balance of the probabilities is that the world today would look at lot like the world of 1800, or 1500, or even 1000. There would have been continued technological development at a pace four times that of 1000-1500: a rate of progress that took 100 years in the Middle Ages would have been accomplished in 25.

But the world would never have become rich enough for people to begin thinking in large numbers and to substantial degrees that they should make more serious efforts to limit their fertility. And it is likely the global population growth would have reached the 0.6% per year at which essentially all of technological improvement would have gone to increasing human populations, and next to none to raising output-per-worker.

Picture a world today of 3.3 billion people, a little less than half of our current population. Picture a world today with a value-of-knowledge index of 14: the level attained, historically, in 1865—a steampunk world. And picture a poor steampunk world: human real income per capita would then have been on the order of a thousand dollars per year. It would have been a world where the average person lived on 3 dollars a day, rather than our world where the average is ten thousand dollars per year and 30 dollars a day.[18]

What would the world today look like if the British Industrial Revolution had been what there was—if the rate of growth of the value of human knowledge H had remained at its rate of 0.8% per year that it had attained over 1800-1870? We cannot know, but we can project forward. We would then see a a world today with a value-of-knowledge index of 50—the level of technology and organization that the world, roughly, attained in 1930: automobiles, not Ford’s Model T but his Model A; rural electrification a pressing issue in the United States; home appliances—even washing machines—as unusual things; radio as high-tech; radar as the frontier; the build-out of public utility networks in an attempt to capture economies of scale the hot sector for investment banking and Wall Street; no jet aircraft; no antibiotics.

How rich would such a world be? Perhaps the most relevant economist would still be Malthus. At living standards of two dollars a day with pre-industrial public health conditions human populations appear essentially stagnant. At the living standards of three dollars a day of 1800 or so human populations appear to have grown at 0.5% per year. At the living standards of four dollars a day of 1870 or so human populations appear to have grown at 0.75% per year. By the time average living standards hit 10 dollars a year after World War II the global population growth rate was 1.85% per year. Only thereafter, since 1975, have we seen population growth rates begin to slow.

In our counterfactual world with no acceleration in technological and organizational progress after 1870, does the world as a whole ever get rich enough for population growth to begin to slow? Perhaps. Perhaps not. We can construct scenarios, the more pessimistic of which would see a counterfactual world today with our value-of-knowledge index at 50 and with 6 billion people on it. That would generate standards of living averaging perhaps 6 dollars a day: the level of prosperity the world saw in 1900. And that world might then have a future in which subsequent growth in living standards was slow, as global populations continued to grow rapidly and yet technological progress was not fast enough to leap far ahead. At a rate of growth of the value of ideas of 0.8% per year and a relative salience of ideas relative to resources parameter φ, that rate of discovery, invention, and innovation would be neutralized in its effect on the efficiency of labor by population growth of 2.4% per year.

At the 1800-1870 rate of increase of the global knowledge stock, the world would not attain today’s actual level of the value of knowledge until 2360. If the world had never grown rich enough to set the demographic transition in motion, what would the corresponding population be? How scarce would natural resources be? How rich could the world be?

But that is not the world we live in.

In 1870, our economists’ heroic-assumptions index of the value of knowledge index stood at 16 for the 1.3 billion people alive then. And human life was still overwhelmingly, in Thomas Hobbes’s phrase: “nasty, brutish, and short”.[19] The Agrarian Age that had begun with the development of agriculture and the domestication of the goat in the year -10000 was still a reality for most of the world.

Then came the explosion.

Our 7.5 billion people today have a global value of knowledge index of 421 and an average income of 30 dollars a day—10000 dollars per capita per year. The value of knowledge about technology and organization grew at an average rate of 2.3% per year over the Long 20th Century. And it is still growing. Meanwhile, humans appear to be converging on a fertility of two children per potential mother, or fewer. And human population appears to be headed for a peak around 2050 of between 9.5 and 10 billion.

That something truly big was going on was not obvious to mid-19th century economist John Stuart Mill or to late-19th century economist Alfred Marshall. But it had become very obvious by the team early-20th century economist John Maynard Keynes sat down to write, looking backward from 1919 at the pre-World War I era 1870-1914:[20]

After 1870… developed… an unprecedented situation…. The pressure of population on food… became for the first time in recorded history definitely reversed. As numbers increased, food was actually easier to secure…. With the growth of the European population there were more emigrants on the one hand to till the soil of the new countries, and, on the other, more workmen were available in Europe to prepare the industrial products and capital goods which were to maintain the emigrant populations in their new homes, and to build the railways and ships which were to make accessible to Europe food and raw products from distant sources…. In this economic Eldorado, in this economic Utopia, as the earlier economists would have deemed it, most of us were brought up. That happy age lost sight of a view of the world which filled with deep-seated melancholy the founders of our Political Economy…. Malthus disclosed a Devil. For half a century… he was chained up and out of sight….

What an extraordinary episode in the economic progress of man that age was!… The greater part of the population, it is true, worked hard and lived at a low standard of comfort, yet were, to all appearances, reasonably contented with this lot. But escape was possible, for any man of capacity or character at all exceeding the average, into the middle and upper classes, for whom life offered, at a low cost and with the least trouble, conveniences, comforts, and amenities beyond the compass of the richest and most powerful monarchs of other ages. The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep; he could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world, and share, without exertion or even trouble, in their prospective fruits and advantages…

Keynes feared, in 1919, that World War I had broken this marvelous machine of economic growth and human happiness, and that the world might face a reversion to some Malthusian dystopia. 11 years later he had seen the demographic transition coming and was pleased by the progress of technology, and had veered to optimism. He then foresaw that we today would be—in material things—in utopia:[21]

Let us, for the sake of argument, suppose that a hundred years hence we are all of us, on the average, eight times better off in the economic sense than we are to-day…. The needs of human being… fall into two classes—those needs which are absolute in the sense that we feel them whatever the situation of our fellow human beings may be, and those which are relative in the sense that we feel them only if their satisfaction lifts us above, makes us feel superior to, our fellows. Needs of the second class… may indeed be insatiable…. But this is not so true of the absolute needs…. Assuming no important wars and no important increase in population, the economic problem may be solved, or be at least within sight of solution, within a hundred years. This means that the economic problem is not—if we look into the future—the permanent problem of the human race….

Will this be a benefit? If one believes at all in the real values of life, the prospect at least opens up the possibility of benefit. Yet I think with dread of the readjustment of the habits and instincts…. To use the language of to-day-must we not expect a general “nervous breakdown”? We already have a little experience of what I mean -a nervous breakdown of the sort which is already common enough in England and the United States amongst the wives of the well-to-do classes, unfortunate women, many of them, who have been deprived by their wealth of their traditional tasks and occupations—who cannot find it sufficiently amusing, when deprived of the spur of economic necessity, to cook and clean and mend, yet are quite unable to find anything more amusing….

I see us free, therefore, to… once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful. We shall honour those who can teach us how to pluck the hour and the day virtuously and well, the delightful people who are capable of taking direct enjoyment in things, the lilies of the field who toil not, neither do they spin.

But beware! The time for all this is not yet. For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight…

How did the world accomplish its further threefold leap, relative to what had taken place in the British Industrial Revolution era of 1800-1870, in the underlying fundamentals of economic growth? And how did what was originally a geographically-concentrated surge become global, albeit unevenly global? Why, instead of the British Industrial Revolution growth surge petering out and being followed by a return to the Commercial Revolution era—itself a positive historical anomaly—did the rate of human progress leap ahead at a tenfold pace? Why does one year since 1870 see the relative technological and organizational progress of three years over 1800-1870, of ten years over 1500-1800, and of a hundred years over 1-1500? Just what happened around 1870 to make this shift? And what has happened between then and today to sustain it?

I see three factors as key:

1. Industrial research laboratories headed by the likes of of Edison and Tesla and more, and the subsequent bureaucratization and generalization of the idea. This rationalizing and routinizing and thus revolutionizing the process by which the findings of science were then further discovered and developed into useful commodities and useful production mechanisms was absolutely key.

2. Corporations as we have come to know them: the development of organizational bureaucracies of command-and-control to organize production and distribution. But they are complex beasts: not really command-and-control, are they? It is true that inside the corporation resources and time are not allocated through any kind of market access. The process consists of individuals who (a) want to accomplish the mission of the organization, (b) please their bosses so they get promoted or not get fired, and (c) assist others. Accomplishing these missions, they: (a) swap favors formally or informally, note that particular goals and benchmarks are high priorities for bosses who will be displeased if they are not accomplished, (c) use social engineering and arm-twisting, (d) ask for permission to outsource, or (5) dig into their own pockets for incidentals. Market, barter, blat, and plan—this last understood as the organization’s primary purposes and people’s allegiance to it, always rule, albeit in different proportions. Furthermore, a corporation is embedded in a much larger market economy, always facing the make-or-buy decision, and sometimes facing the be-efficient-or-die conundrum. This rationalizing and routinizing and thus revolutionizing the process by which useful commodities and useful production mechanisms were then further developed and deployed was absolutely key.

3. Globalization—in transport, in communications, and in policy. In transport, it came in the form of the iron-hulled screw-propellered ocean-going steamship linked to the railroad network, and subsequent developments. In communications, it came in the form of the global submarine telegraph network linked to landlines, and subsequent developments. And in policy, it came in the form of the openness of the world: genuinely (semi-)open borders for (much) migration[22], as one in fourteen humans changed their continent between 1870-1914; and also and closely linked to the ideas that countries open to ideas and trade would grow and become more powerful, more masters of their own destiny, while those that were closed were not. These powerfully extended the scope of influence of (1) and (2), and provided very powerful incentives to push them forward. This rationalizing and routinizing and thus revolutionizing the process by which useful commodities and useful production mechanisms were then further deployed and diffused across the entire globe was absolutely key.

The first greatly increased the pace of technological growth as inventors and innovators were no longer forced to be both lone wolves and to also be promoters, projectors, financiers, and managers. The second meant that a good idea for production was no longer confined to a single enterprise or factory or region, but could be replicated and deployed over and over again. The third created the possibility of making the world economy, for the first time, a single system: the earnings of a rubber tapper in Brazil would be powerfully influenced by things happening continents away—by the economic growth and demand for rubber in North America and in western Europe and by the success of the British imperial project in Malaya and the Belgian in the Congo, to name four. The fourth realized the possibility of an integrated world economic system.

Moreover, together these transformed the U.S. from likely fifth fiddle to lead violin among the Long 20th Century’s global powers.

These all three together emerged around 1870. They were, I think, much more likely than not enough to be the tipping point. Thus, I believe, 1870 was truly the most important date to see as the hinge of history.

2.4. Tyrannies

The twentieth century’s tyrannies were more brutal and more barbaric than those of any previous age. And—astonishingly—they had much of their origins in economic discontents and economic ideologies. People killed each other in large numbers over, largely, questions of how the economy should be organized. Such questions had not been a major source of massacre in previous centuries.

Twentieth-Century governments and their soldiers have killed perhaps forty million people in war: either soldiers (most of them unlucky enough to have been drafted into the mass armies of the twentieth century) or civilians killed in the course of what could be called military operations. But wars have caused only about a fifth of this century’s violent death toll.

Governments and their police have killed perhaps one hundred and sixty million people in time of peace: class enemies, race enemies, political enemies, economic enemies, imagined enemies. You name them, governments have killed them on a scale that could not previously have been imagined. If the twentieth century has seen the growth of material wealth on a previously-inconceivable scale, it has also seen human slaughter at a previously-unimaginable rate

Call those political leaders whose followers and supporters have slaughtered more than ten million of their fellow humans “members of the Ten-Million Club.” All pre-twentieth century history may (but may not) have seen two members of the Ten-Million Club: Genghis Khan, ruler of the twelfth century Mongols, launcher of bloody invasions of Central Asia and China, and founder of China's Yuan Dynasty; and Hong Xiuquan, the mid-nineteenth-century Chinese intellectual whose visions convinced him that he was Jesus Christ’s younger brother and who launched the Taiping Rebellion that turned south-central China into a slaughterhouse for decades. Others do not make the list. Napoleon does not make it, and neither does Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar.

By contrast the twentieth century has seen five or six people join the Ten Million Club: Adolf Hitler, Chiang Kaishek, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Tojo Hideki. Hitler, Stalin, and Mao have credentials that make them charter members of the Thirty Million Club as well—and perhaps the Fifty Million Club. A regime whose hands are as bloody as those of the 1965-1998 Suharto regime in Indonesia—with perhaps 450,000 communists, suspected communists, and others in the wrong place at the wrong time dead at its creation in 1965, and perhaps 150,000 inhabitants of East Timor dead since the Indonesian annexation in the mid-1970s—barely makes the twentieth century's top twenty list of civilian-massacring regimes.

What does this—bloody—political and secret police history have to do with economic history? It seems at first glance that, while deplorable, it has little to do with the story of how people produced, distributed, and consumed the commodities needed and desired for their material well-being.

But it is not possible to write economic history without taking the bloody hands of twentieth century governments into account.

First, the possibility that the secret police will knock at your door and drag you off for torture and death is a serious threat to your material well-being. The seventeenth-century political philosopher Thomas Hobbes wrote that people are motivated by sticks and carrots: “the fear of violent death, and the desire for commodious living.” In a century where the chance that a randomly-selected person will be shot or starved to death by his or her own government approaches two percent, the fact of large-scale political murder becomes a very important aspect of everyday life and material well being.

Second, the shooting or starvation was often part of the government’s “management” of its economy: the stick used to compel the people to perform service or labor as the government wished. The economies of the Soviet Union in the 1930s and of China in the 1960s cannot be understood without understanding how mass terror was used as a social discipline device.

Third, and most extraordinary, the twentieth century is unique in that its wars, purges, massacres, and executions have been largely the result of economic ideologies. Before the twentieth century people slaughtered each other for the other reasons. People slaughtered each other over theology: eternal paradise or damnation. People slaughtered each other over power: who gets to be top dog, and to command the material resources of society. But only in the twentieth century have people killed each other on a large scale in disputes over the economic organization of society.

When you think about it, killing people on a large scale over what social mechanisms should coordinate economic activity is profoundly stupid: we want social mechanisms that will work in the sense of delivering prosperity, progress, and a reasonably egalitarian distribution of income.[23] Combinations of mechanisms that fail to accomplish this should be rejected; combinations that succeed should be approved; but the stakes are not overwhelmingly large.

Moreover, the power of tyrants and leaders does not depend on the balance of command or market mechanisms in the economies that they govern. Fidel Castro would rule in Havana whether farmers are allowed to sell their crops in roadside stands, or whether they are prohibited from doing so—forced to sell to government monopoly bureaucracies. The power or personal status of leaders or the eternal salvation of peoples had little to do with twentieth century episodes as the Soviet collectivization of agriculture, the Cuban suppression of farmers' markets, the Khmer Rouge's forced emptying of Cambodia’s cities, or the disaster of Mao’s Great Leap Forward. All were in large part attempts to guide and shift the economy along the lines dictated by ideology. Other twentieth century disasters had equally strong roots in economic ideology: it is hard to see World War II in the absence of Adolf Hitler's insane idee fixe that the Germans needed a better land-labor ratio— more “living space”—if they were to be a strong nation.

The last appropriate word here should be Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s:

The imagination and inner force of Shakespeare's villains stopped short at ten or so cadavers, because they had no ideology.... It is thanks to ideology that it fell to the lot of the twentieth century to experience villainy on the scale of millions. And it is certainly one of the most bizarre—as well as one of the most important— things about the history of the twentieth century is that so many of these deadly ideologies were economic ideologies. One might have thought that a richer world—the richer world made possible by the, for the first time, rapid outrunning of population growth by technology— would be a kinder, gentler world. One would have been wrong.

2.5. Wealth Gulfs

Those economies relatively rich at the start of the twentieth century have by and large seen their material wealth and prosperity explode. Those nations and economies that were relatively poor have grown richer, but for the most part slowly. The relative gulf between rich and poor economies has grown steadily over the past century. Today it is larger than at any time in humanity’s previous experience, or at least larger than at any time since only some tribes knew how to use fire. The gulf across which the world’s rich and poor regarded each other exists in every dimension: how much people consume, whether they can read, what tools they use, and how they make their living.

This glass can be viewed either as half empty or as half full. It is half empty because we live today in the most unequal world ever. It is half full because most of the world has already made the transition to sustained economic growth; most people live in economies that (while far poorer than the leading-edge postindustrial nations of the world’s economic core) have successfully climbed onto the escalator of economic growth and thus the escalator to modernity. The economic transformation of most of the world is less than a century behind the of the leadingedge economies—only an eyeblink behind, at least from the millennial perspective. However, the millennial perspective is one that human beings can adopt only when contemplating the long-dead past—not when thinking about their present or their children’s future.

On the other hand, one and a half billion people live in economies that have not made the transition to economic growth, and have not climbed onto the escalator to modernity. The median inhabitant of Africa has access to modern public health and to a village cell phone. But do they have higher real incomes than did their predecessors of two generations ago? It is not obvious that the answer is “yes”.

From an economist’s point of view, the existence, persistence, and increasing size of large gaps in productivity levels and living standards across nations seems bizarre. We can understand why pre-industrial civilizations had different levels of technology and prosperity: they had different exploitable nature resources, and the diffusion of new ideas from civilization to civilization could be very slow. Such explanations do not apply to the world today. The source of the material prosperity seen today in leading-edge economies is no secret: it is the storehouse of technological capabilities that have been invented since the beginning of the industrial revolution. This storehouse is no one’s private property. Most of it is accessible to anyone who can read. Almost all of the rest is accessible to anyone who can obtain an M.S. in Engineering. Because of modern telecommunications, ideas today spread at the speed of light. Governments, entrepreneurs, and individuals in poor economies should be straining every muscle—should in fact have long ago strained every muscle—to do what Japan began to do in the midnineteenth century: acquire and apply everything in humanity's storehouse of technological capabilities.

This “divergence” in living standards and productivity levels is another key aspect of twentieth century economic history: economies are, by almost every measure, less alike today than a century ago in spite of a century’s worth of revolutions in transportation and communication. Moreover, there seems to be every reason to fear that this “divergence” in living standards and productivity levels will continue to grow in the future. A number of factors have kept economic growth slow in today’s poor countries in the past: high rates of population growth that restrict growth in the capital-output ratio, high relative prices of capital goods that constrain investment, governments that (like most governments throughout history) take the short view in an attempt to maximize chances of survival and the perquisites of office, and traditional elites (religious and cultural) that fear what they will lose from a richer country more integrated into the twenty-first century world. These factors are still operating today, and likely to operate in the future as well.

This is a potential source of great danger, because today’s world is sufficiently interdependent—politically, militarily, ecologically—that the passage to a truly human world requires that we all get there at roughly the same time.

Compared to this, within-nation inequality is small potatoes relative to global inequality—albeit within-nation inequality looms very large in the reality and perception of affected individuals’ life chances, and thus in its impact on political-economic stability.

2.6. Management—Rather, Mismanagement—of Economic Policy

The management of economies by governments in the twentieth century was at best inept. And, as we have seen over 2007-2018, little if anything has been learned about how to regulate the un-self-regulating market in order to maintain prosperity, or ensure opportunity, or produce substantial equality.

Before 1800 there were markets but there was not really a market economy—and the peculiar dysfunctions that we have seen the market economy generate through its macroeconomic functioning were, if not absent, at least rare and in the background of attention. Wars, famines, government defaults were threats to life and livelihood. The idea that Alice might be poor and hungry because Bob would not buy stuff from her because Bob was unemployed because Carl wanted to deleverage because Dana was no longer a good credit risk because Alice had stopped paying rent to Dana—that and similar macroeconomic processes are a post-1800 phenomenon.

The problems of economic policy in the modern age are, speaking very broadly, twofold: the problem of managing fictitious commodities, and the problem of managing aggregate demand.

Policy: the management of economies by governments in the twentieth century was at best inept. Little was known about how to manage a market economy. Lessons learned from experience were often forgotten quickly. There was an extraordinary disjunction between the power of twentieth-century economies as social-calculating and behavior-conditioning mechanisms and the ineptness with which these economies were managed.

Management of growth; management of stability; management of distribution.

The twentieth century has seen the century-long economic disaster of communism, and the quarter-century-long disaster of fascism. It has also seen many governments that appear singularly inept at managing market economies: inept at coping with economic shocks that threaten to cause mass unemployment or raging hyperinflation.

Some of it is because twentieth century economists did not know what to prescribe: the history of economic policy reads like alchemy, not chemistry. Often proposed remedies made economic problems worse. Many times one current generation’s proposed solutions to the problems of how to manage domestic and international macroeconomic policy turn out to lay the groundwork for the next generation’s problems of macroeconomic management. And it is not always the case that larger problems are replaced by smaller ones over time. As the salience of different problems—inflation, unemployment, unstable capital flows, unstable exchange rates, the sacrifice of domestic to international interests, the focus on domestic interests which means that the international system is left ungoverned and unmanaged—has changed over time, the movement of economic policy has looked less progressive and more circular. Theoretical doctrines like the Keynesian “liquidity trap” that were last applied to the U.S. in the 1930s, and thereafter dismissed as theoretical curios of no practical importance, are dusted-off and revived for the analysis of Japanese stagnation in the 1990s. When Argentinian technocrat Domingo Cavallo reassumes the post of Minister of Finance in early 2001, some of the policy proposals that he advances to deal with Argentina’s thenmacroeconomic problems appeared remarkably similar to policy proposals that John Maynard Keynes had advanced at the end of the 1920s to deal with Great Britain’s similar macroeconomic problems.

Some of it is that politicians did not like to follow their economists’ advice, or at least sought for a more complaisant set of economists who would give advice that would be more politically pleasing and palatable to follow. And some of it is simply that while it may be true that those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it, this aphorism does not stress the fact that that means that the rest of us are condemned to repeat it with them.

The twentieth century economy has been a tremendously powerful, efficient, and productive social mechanism—the market system. Yet few, or few of those in power, have known how to operate or fix it. Moreover, learning does not appear to take place—or if it does take place, it does not take place at more than a glacial pace. The inescapable image is of an ocean liner crewed and steered by chimpanzees. The failures and half-successes of economic policy together make up another key facet of twentieth century economic history: how governments have managed or mismanaged their economies, and how knowledge of how the 23 Slouching Towards Utopia? 2: 10357 words DRAFT 4.01 July 15, 2018 economic system works has been painfully gained and then painfully lost.

2.7 Other Themes as Well

There are other themes as well: shifts in the distribution of relative wealth and economic power from rich to middle-class and back again, along with the advances and retreats of democracy, all as the waves of social democracy sloshed back and forth across the world in the twentieth century; the Great Depression, the defining moment of twentieth century economic history; the rise to economic preeminence of the United States, and the recent end of America’s role at the leading technological and econo-cultural edge as “the furnace where the future is being forged,” to name three.

All these other themes are important strands in twentieth century economic history. But from the perspective of a millennium hence, the most important aspects of twentieth century economic history cannot help but be those sketched above. Indeed: eight is almost surely too many themes.: the dominance of economic events in twentieth century history; the tremendous surge of material prosperity; the coupling of productive power and economic ideology with mass murder; the bizarrely uneven distribution of economic growth and prosperity around the world; and the failure of economic policy to advance from the stage of alchemy to chemistry.

But since we are narrative animals, our tolerances for thematic overviews are limited: it is time to tell the story.

Notes

1. William Caxton (1422?–1491?), perhaps the first printer in England

2. Laura Gibbs: Aesopica: Aesop’s Fables in English, Latin, and Greek

3. King William I of England (1028?–1087), Duke of Normandy from 1035, son of the unmarried Duke of Normandy 3 Robert I and his mistress Herleva

4. For a declaration that the history of monarchy must be more important than the history of menarche (though I can find no clear explanation of why), see Gertrude Himmelfarb (1987), The New History and the Old (Cambridge: Harvard University Press: 0674615816).

5. Abigail Smith Adams (1776): Letter to John Adams 31 Mar-5 Apr 1776

6. In the Protestant line. The last Catholic Stuart dynasty claimant was Henry IX Stuart, died 1807.

7. See Elizabeth Wayland Barber (1994): Women's Work: The First 20,000 Years : Women, Cloth, and Society in 7 Early Times (New York: W.W. Norton: 0393313484)

8. Genesis 3:16 (King James Version)

9. Or do we economists? See Adam Smith (1776): An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (London: W. Strahan and T. Cadell). Smith, at least, grappled hard with the question of why human elites resorted to what he saw as the extremely unproductive system of slavery. His answer was the “domination” was something humans enjoyed for its own sake: “In ancient Italy, how much the cultivation of corn degenerated, how unprofitable it became to the master when it fell under the management of slaves, is remarked by both Pliny and Columella. In the time of Aristotle it had not been much better in ancient Greece. Speaking of the ideal republic described in the laws of Plato, to maintain five thousand idle men (the number of warriors supposed necessary for its defence) together with their women and servants, would require, he says, a territory of boundless extent and fertility, like the plains of Babylon. The pride of man makes him love to domineer, and nothing mortifies him so much as to be obliged to condescend to persuade his inferiors. Wherever the law allows it, and the nature of the work can afford it, therefore, he will generally prefer the service of slaves to that of freemen. The planting of sugar and tobacco can afford the expense of slave-cultivation. The raising of corn, it seems, in the present times, cannot. In the English colonies, of which the principal produce is corn, the far greater part of the work is done by freemen. The late resolution of the Quakers in Pennsylvania to set at liberty all their negro slaves may satisfy us that their number cannot be very great. Had they made any considerable part of their property, such a resolution could never have been agreed to…”

10. Florence Wyman’s father, Edward Wyman, was a graduate of Amherst College and himself an educator. In 1848 he built Wyman’s Hall: a then “impressive four-story building” on Market Street opposite the courthouse, where now the Gateway Arch stands. The third and fourth stories of the building housed Wyman’s Classical High School. The first story was for retail. The second story held a concert hall, at which Jenny Lind “the Swedish Nightingale”, then the most prominent vocalist in the world, performed when she came to St. Louis in 1851.

11. After the passage of the 19th Women’s Suffrage Amendment, Fonnie turned her energy to Black civil rights as a prominent member of the St. Louis Urban League.

12. Lawrence Summers (2005): Remarks at NBER Conference on Diversifying the Science & Engineering Workforce

13. An example of how at times feminism came into conflict with social democracy: the desire to use women’s “specialness” to win regulatory benefits conflicted with the feminist principle that “special” was code for “low status”.

14. Antecol, Kelly Bedard, and Jenna Stearns (2016): Equal but Inequitable: Who Benefits from Gender-Neutral Tenure Clock Stopping Policies? Using a unique data set on the universe of assistant professor hires at top-50 economics departments from 1985-2004, we show that the adoption of genderneutral tenure clock stopping policies substantially reduced female tenure rates while substantially increasing male tenure rates…

15. Shelly Lundberg comments that I need "more skepticism about the 'institutions and practices derived under the assumption that...the labor force is male'" and to follow "Claudia Goldin... in her Presidential Address": Claudia Goldin (2014): "A Grand Gender Convergence: Its Last Chapter", American Economic Review 104:4 (April), pp. 1091-1119

16. However, do not underestimate the magnitude of the index number problem. More on the index number problem anon.

17. John Maynard Keynes (1936): The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (London: Macmillan), Chapter 4: The Choice of Units

18. Elite standards of living

19. Thomas Hobbes (1651): Leviathan; Or the Matter, Forme, & Power of a Common-WealthEcclesiastical and Civill (London: Andrew Crooke)

20. John Maynard Keynes (1919): The Economic Consequences of the Peace (London: Macmillan)

21. John Maynard Keynes (1930): Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren ()

22. Note that the temperate migration-receiving regions of Australasia, the southern cone of Latin America, and North 22 America were, by and large, open only to migrants originating in Europe. This played perhaps the major role in making globalization over 1870-1914 a force making the world more unequal. See W. Arthur Lewis (1978): The Evolution of the International Economic Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press) .

23. Graydon comments: “A reasonably egalitarian distribution of income, yeah, no, people do not want that. It'd be a good thing if people did want that, but people want a stable hierarchy that they're not at the bottom of. The events of the 19th century, culminating in the Great War, destroyed the legitimacy of pretty much every previous stable social hierarchy; nothing that could end in the Great War could possibly be legitimate, on the one hand, and the power relations and relative economic standing of societies, already disordered by economic development, got utterly scrambled by trying to continue prosecuting the war. It took... well, really, I can argue that people STILL can't cope with going off the gold standard/money is not a thing in any material sense, and that got done during the war in months. (This is much weaker in the US, the only major industrial power not involved. Japan wasn't a major industrial power for the Great War, wasn't much involved, and then had the roughly equivalent "all past is dust" experience when the US crushed them in the Great Pacific War.) So there's a view of the 20th century as a scramble to establish a new basis for legitimacy. (I think this entirely failed, and that the problem has if anything become more acute in the present.) The various attempts try to be sciency; the various attempts try to use economic language because the thing that creates legitimacy is general prosperity, and there's this vague sense that getting the economy right will do that. But they're new, and no one involved knows a system from the hidden name of God, so no only are there no customary social constraints, no one is thinking in terms of needing constraints. (Old moral thinking has usually developed a few caveats as a consequence of persisting; new moral thinking is trying to enact absolutes.) Lack of constraints, post-industrial populations, and post-industrial resources in situations where there's an attempt to create legitimacy through force lead to very large death tolls. No one knows what they're doing in an if-thisthen-that sense and no one knows how to stop…”

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From spears to steam engines: what in the experience of a society based on exploitation can illuminate the workings of a society based on technology? The interplay of power, technology, & ideology in shaping the past makes using pre-steam engine history as a potential source of illumination particularly hazardous…

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III. How Can the Experiences of Past Societies of Domination Be Relevant for Us?

The past was very different from us in another dimension as well.

Suppose under conditions of dire Malthusian poverty you wanted to have enough for yourself and your family. You could try to invent a better mousetrap, make it, sell it, become a very productive person, and become a rich possessor of great resources as the world beat a path to your door. That was very hard back then. And what happened if you succeeded? Well, then you found yourself a very soft and attractive target for those who had chosen a different strategy.

What was that different strategy? Who were those people?

The different strategy was to focus not on becoming skilled producers of commodities but skilled practitioners of coërcive violence. Then they would say to you: give us a third of your crops, a third of your craftwork, or else. And be grateful that we leave you two-thirds if you keep your head down because you are our sheep and we want to shear you again in a year. Be grateful we do not take it all now, and that we leave you and your family alive.

These people were the gang: thugs-with-spears (and later thugs-with-gunpowder-weapons), their bosses, plus their tame accountants, propagandists, and bureaucrats, and exceptionally skilled artisans of items of war and peace who caught their eye. Looking out at you, audience, I think that had you lived in that age you, like, me would be frantically trying to sign up as one of those tame accountants, propagandists, or bureaucrats, for few among us are sufficiently gym rat-like to have done well marching the Spanish Road in the Tercio de Flandes to join the army of Alessandro di Parma. Joining that gang that runs the society of domination taking one-third of the crop and one-third of the crafts by force and fraud is about the only way to get enough.

My guess is that the relative contrast in benefits between joining the élite gang on the one hand and becoming more productive on the other is one of the things at the root of the discrepancy between the rate of technological growth now and that of previous civilizations. In all other civilizational accomplishments besides the growth of technological knowledge productive for the making of necessities and conveniences they are our equals: their art, their literature, their politics, and even their rate of advance of technologies of domination and war. But not the rate of growth of technologies of win-win productivity and coöperation.

There are, however, I guess, other reasons for why we are so blessed in terms of our rate of advance of technology.

One that I guess is absolutely key is this: The members of the élite gang neither toiled nor span, they reaped where they did not so, and they gathered where they did not scatter. But they then had to live with themselves.

We all are, as East African Plains Apes (or perhaps as cultural descendants of the Yamnaya), very sociable creatures who create and maintain our networks of solidarity via practicing gift-exchange. We want all such relationships to wind up with each of us feeling profoundly indebted to the other for all we have received. We profoundly dislike feeling that the relationship is unbalanced—that someone who should be our gift-friend has always taken, or that we have always taken from someone who should be our gift-friend. Hence ideology is needed as a psychological support—both for the victims and perpetrators of the force-and-fraud exploitation schemes of the élite gangs that run societies of domination. Sheep who are in some way soothed are easier to shear. Bandits—mobile or stationary, foreigners or local notables, individuals or state functionaries—sleep easier when they can reassure themselves at night that their victims had it coming.

Hence Aristotélēs’s declaration that while a more detailed and minute examination of the various forms of “acquisition”:

might be useful for practical purposes… to dwell long on them would be in poor taste…

Hence Seneca’s declaration, contra Posidonios of Rhodios, that:

Mechanical inventions were [not] the invention of wise men… [but] by some man whose mind was nimble and keen, but not great or exalted… [with] a bent body and… a mind whose gaze is upon the ground…

Systematic focus by those who could direct civilizational energies on technological advance was thus heavily discouraged by the psychological need for the élite to sharply degrade those from whom it took. Productive activities that did not involve the creation of necessities and conveniences that made up the plunder of the gang—painting, sculpture, architecture, literature, fine dining—these were proper ornaments for a civilization, and acceptable occupations and concerns. Public works of peace, administration, and war—these were also great. And this discouragement did not mean that commerce and industry could not flourish to some degree. Especially under the ægis of a pax imperia, commerce and the division of labor with their additions to productivity could indeed advance, in what John A. Goldstone calls an “efflorescence”, as you could produce and trade without worrying about disorganized roving and stationary bandits, but only had to keep the Big Bandit viewing you as a valuable sheep.

But there was a definite limit to how much such a civilization could progress in the way of advancing technology if it spent much energy degrading the idea that the pieces of the productive and distributive economy other than how to boss your slaves were proper concerns for a gentleman.

This character of past civilizations raises substantial problems if we attempt to appropriate their history and use it as a source of useful analogies for us and for our successors, living as we do not in societies of domination with near-static technology under conditions of dire Malthusian poverty, but rather under conditions of modern rapid technological and economic growth. The gulf between us and them is thus made remarkably large by three factors. The first is that they were societies of domination. The second is that because their technology was near-stagnant their institutions were near-static. The third is that their level of technology—of arranging things to make nature dance and humans pull together coöperatively—was so much lower than ours. All of these are stumbling blocks.

First, their status as societies of domination ruled by an élite gang. What useful analogies for 2055 can we draw from historical episodes springing from a culture where it is assumed without question that somebody with a bent back and their gaze on the ground might be clever—and probably in a cheating, dishonest, ridiculous way—but cannot be great, exalted, or indeed have any rights at all that an aristocrat need respect? What useful analogies can come from a culture where the belief that slaves should be grateful to be slaves—for, except for the accidents and injustices of history and fortune, slaves are slaves by nature—goes without question? For that was, overwhelmingly, the attitude of the élite gang.

This aspect of the gulf does indeed make it difficult and hazardous. But it does not make it impossible. The total membership of the gang of the upper class and the prosperous middle class can be large. It thus has its own internal arrangements for how it organizes itself and does its business. Yes, its business is primarily that of taking from others and then dividing the spoils. But taking is a form of “production” from the standpoint of the élite gang. Distribution is distribution. And arranging coöperation is arranging coöperation.

I think we can learn a lot in terms of useful analogies from the history of what went on within past élites. And, indeed, that is nearly all of past history that we have, at least of past written as opposed to past archeological history.

Within the élite, the ways they run their internal affairs are either better or worse, easier or harder, more vicious or less vicious.

Suppose, in one ancient society, you cross Shahanshah Khashayarsha of the Hakhamanishiya, of the Parsa—Basileus Basileōn Xerxes the Achæmenid, of the Persians—the King of Kings “Ruler of Heroes” of the Loyal-Spirit clan, of the Righteous People—by requesting that he exempt not your youngest but your eldest from the army levy. You might then find that your eldest son has been cut in two. You might find then that half of him has been placed on the left and half of them placed on the right side of the road. And Shahanshah Khashayarsha then further accomplished his purposes by making Putiya of Sfarda then watch the army march between the two halves of his dead son.

Alternatively, in another ancient society, you might have in some way crossed the politician-boss Anytos. He might then have thought to intimidate you by having Meilētos and Lykon prosecute you for impiety. You might then have expressed your contempt for the jury that found you guilty and the prosecution that has asked for the death penalty for your “crime”. You might have proposed, as an alternative punishment, that you be given the high honor free meals for life in the Prytaneîon, sitting alongside all of the city’s olympic-game champions. The jury, choosing between the two proposed punishments, might then have said “death”. But even after that you would have been allowed and strongly encouraged to flee to Thessaly before they come around with the deadly hemlock for you to drink. And they might then be taken somewhat aback at your actions: that Sokrates chose to die at the age of 70 in order to make points about justice and fairness and reason.

The land empire run by the Parsa Hakhsamanishya clan and the seaborne empire run as the demokratia of the Athenai handled their dissenters in very different ways. Comparing and contrasting their intra-élite human affairs with each other and with ours could be a very fruitful source of historical examples and social theories relevant to us and to 2055. But always remember that the élite society’s internal workings cannot but be profoundly affected by the fact that it is, at bottom, an extortion gang ruling over a mass population of slaves or near-slaves. Aristoteles thought that it would always be such—that civilization was only possible when there was a class that had enough, and thus had enough leisure to think, but that was impossible unless in some way we could have the miracles in which:

every instrument, at command, or from a preconception of its master's will, could accomplish its work (as the story goes of the [robot blacksmith] statues of Daeidalos; or what the poet tells us of the [self-propelled catering-cart] tripods of Hephaistos, “that they moved of their own accord into the assembly of the gods”), the shuttle would then weave, and the lyre play of itself; nor [then] would the architect want servants, or the master slaves…

But we do have such miracles. And our possibilities for the self organization of humanity as an anthology intelligence in our day should profit thereby.

The second stumbling block to using theory based on analogies from the distant past is that back in their day because their technology was near-stagnant their institutions were near-static.

For us, Schumpeterian creative destruction is a thing: every generation since 1870 human technological competence has more than doubled. And the “destruction” aspect is very real: every generation tasks, jobs, occupations and professions, livelihoods, industries, sectors, communities, and regions have found themselves in its bullseye. This has been the case since late-1700s England. There and then the “poor stockingers” found that their skilled profession was no longer needed because of improvements in knitting technology, and that even though they had Acts of Parliament setting out for them and their employers their standard conditions of work and pay, those Acts could and would be repealed or ignored because there was enough money to be made by allowing the forward march of knitting technology. The march of technology had given to them 200 years ago, creating the stocking-frame that allowed for a large enough fall in the price of stockings for there to be a mammoth boost in demand as they became middle-class conveniences rather than pure upper-class luxuries. But in the late 1700s the march of technology taketh away. And General Ned Ludd could not help them.

This type of technocrisis was not something any society before ours ever had to deal with. And even where Schumpeterian creative-destruction is overwhelmingly creative, it is still change. And change has to be managed—again, something with no close analogue before. No history of any time before the invention lf the steam engine can help us here: no useful analogies can be found. As the underlying techno-economic foundational hardware of their societies changed, they did indeed have to rewrite the socio-econo-political-cultural societal software of human interaction patterns that runs on top of the hardware so that things would not crash, or at least not crash often. But this was a process of slow, if bumpy, adjustment. Our quantitative index H of technological prowess is indeed 2.5 times as large in the year -500 of Classical Antiquity as it had been in the year -3000 at the dawn of the Bronze-and-Writing Age, and still 2.5 times higher in the year 1500 at the dawn of the Imperial-Commercial Age. But the first took 2500 years and the second 2000. We cover the same amount of apparent transformation in 40 years. and then we do it again. General Ned Ludd could not help the poor stockinger. And no past historical examples can help us deal with the types of problems that brought him to the forefront.

The third stumbling block is that the pre-Modern Economic Growth level of technology—of arranging things to make nature dance and humans pull together coöperatively—was so absurdly much lower than ours. Most of what we call “work” would be close to incomprehensible to people in previous centuries. And many of the institutional pattern of exchange and direction would leave them similarly flummoxed.

As for myself, I am flummoxed by the extraordinary differences in prosperity and in the pace of technological progress. I am thus truly convinced that 1870 is the real hinge of history. After it, from the perspective of all previous history, things become truly rich and strange.

So how then would we start constructing a social theory based to any substantial degree on pre-1970 history to help us in 2055? How to understand societal differences across ages? We understand that technology is structuring daily life. And we understand that as technology changes, daily life changes. And we understand that daily life shapes people's ideas of how things should, must, ought to be. Perhaps something can be learned from intra-élite affairs. But perhaps the ultimate lesson from our history is that we and those in our future ought not to think we must operate under the constraints that they were under, because we do not have to.

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References:

• Aristoteles. 1946 [-86]. Politics. Ed. Andronicos of Rhodios. Trans. Ernest Barker. Oxford: Clarendon Press. <https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.50166/>.

• Bacon, Francis. [1627]. The New Atlantis. New York: W.J. Black. <https://archive.org/details/essaysnewatlanti00baco>.

• DeLong, J. Bradford. 2024. “The Poor Stockinger”. In What Rough Beast?: The 21st-Century World in Political-Economy Polycrisis. Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality. July 17. <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/21-the-poor-stockinger-what-rough>.

• Herodotos. 1858 [-420]. The History of Herodotus. Trans. George Rawlinson. London: John Murray. <https://archive.org/details/historiesofherod00hero>.

• Mauss, Marcel. 1954. The Gift: Forms & Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies. Trans. Ian Cunnison. London: Cohen & West. <https://archive.org/details/giftformsfunctio00maus>.

• Platon. 1897. Apology, Crito, & Phaedo of Sokrates. Trans. Henry Cary. Philadelphia: David McKay. <https://archive.org/details/platosapologycr00broogoog>.

• Seneca Minor, L. Annæus. 1917 [64]. “On the Part Played by Philosophy in the Progress of Man”. Moral Letters to Lucilius,. Trans. Richard Gummere. London: William Heinemann. 90. <https://archive.org/details/adluciliumepistu01seneuoft>.

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Imagine standing in 1905, looking back at ancient agrarian poverty in the year -3095 at the start of the Bronze Age, then peering ahead to 2055—and recognizing that the rough proportional difference in human technological mastery across the first 5000 years is the same as over the next 150. To call technoeconomic change in the past 150 years truly seismic is to massively undersell it. It is very likely that the magnitude of that shift is the most important thing from which to start deriving lessons from and of history…

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II. From -73000 to 2055: Malthusian Poverty to Modern Economic Growth:

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How, then, are we today to think about the world as it will be 2055?

2055 is far from today, and is much farther from the 1905 that I think is still the focal point of what American academia teaches and thinks about. How far is it? I am going to claim that 2055 is as far from 1905 as 1905 is from the year -3000.

Let me now try to justify this very large and unsettling claim.

We have knowledge about human population and prosperity today: total world gross product of $130 trillion a year, a human population of 8 billion, and thus an average—but extraordinarily unequally distributed—income per capita of $16,000 per year.

We have guesses about human populations earlier, informed guesses but guesses. And we have guesses about prosperity—or rather its lack—in the pre-1500 and before world, largely Malthusian as it was, back in the days when the overwhelming bulk of the people were working class between 30 and 80% of working class resources had to be spent for bare necessities. By “bare necessities” I mean enough shelter that you don’t spend two hours a day worrying about how wet you are, enough clothing you don’t spend three hours a day worrying about how cold you are, plus your 2000 calories a day so you don't spend four hours a day unable to think about anything other than how hungry you are; the world in which the typical woman undergoes eight pregnancies, yet population growth averages 2.5% per generation—so that those eight pregnancies yield only 2.05 people who themselves survive to reproduce, weith rates of pre-birth, stillbirth, miscarriage, and then infant and child that horrify us.

The world as a whole is much, much better off today than it was back in the day, in terms of our ability to command nature and to coöperatively and productively organize ourselves. Less than 5% of us today who have a standard of living within shouting distance of what was the typical working class standard of living back before 1500. Even those 400 million have access to modern public health, which has driven infant mortality down to what earlier societies would have regarded as absolutely god-blessed levels. Those 400 million also have access to the village cell phone and the knowledge it can transmit.

We are today so much richer than people were in 1500 and before. But how much? What happens when we quantify this?

It turns out that it is surprisingly difficult to make solid the quantification of how much richer we are than people were in the past. I like to think of this in the context of James I and VI and The Scottish Play—Macbeth—that he semi-commissioned.

Suppose you want to watch MacBeth in your own house, or in your hotel room, tonight. No problem. You have a choice of 20 versions. You might get dinged for $3.99, the same share of average income today $0.20 back then would have been. You might not—it might only cost you pennies for electricity.

Suppose you want to watch MacBeth in your own house in the year 1606. Well, you had better:

• be named James Stuart.

• be the principal occupant of Whitehall Palace.

• have $5,000 of today's values of loose coin to finance it, even given the very low real wage levels back then.

• have Shakespeare's Company of Actors on retainer

• have thought of it a month ago so that The Kings’ Men Players would have time to put it in repertory.

In either case you have the experience of watching MacBeth—of having the experience that evokes pity and terror and that both entertains and informs, in a way that rich people in earlier civilizations were willing to pay a fortune for. But for us it costs 1/40000 as much. And there is an enormous gain in flexibility because you did not have to plan to do this a month beforehand.

On the other hand, if I wanted to watch a professional live theatrical performance of MacBeth, it would cost me $100. You can bet that there were 50 or so people crowding into Whitehall Palace when Shakespeare's company put on MacBeth, even in a private show for King James I and VI of England and Scotland. From that perspective, the real price of watching Macbeth live has not in fact declined. Besides, they got to see Shakespeare in person.

The first of these points suggests that standard calculations are a massive understatement. They say that we today are, maybe,13 times as rich as humanity was on average back before 1500. But buy there has since 1606 a 40,000-fold fall in the real price of getting all pity and terror and catharsis and entertainment and insight into the human condition you get from MacBeth, and you have to conclude that any accurate quantitative metric would show a difference much more than 13-fold.

But the second suggests, to the extent that it leads to the conclusion that things are less important while relationships between people are key, that the differences between us and them are not, in fact, worth so much.

I am on the side of the first. But I see these as knotty problems with no good and solid resolutions. Personally, I think this Gordian Knot can be cut only if I make precise distinctions between wealth, utility, and eudaimonia that economists are the most ill-equipped people in the world to ever possibly make. So what I really want to do is to throw questions of the proper measurement of economic growth questions over the wall for you to deal with.

However, for the purpose of this talk, I take the economists' numbers seriously. And I also take seriously the idea that perhaps a sufficient difference in quantity has a difference of quality of its own.

So take our numbers on human population and human prosperity. Use them to construct a crude quantitative index of human technology—the value of the stock of ideas deployed across the human race with respect to our ability as an anthology intelligence to manipulate nature to our purposes and productively and coöperatively organize ourselves to pursue our goals.

Let me assert, uncontroversially, that this quantitative index should be proportional to our prosperity in terms of valuable things we can create and utilize: that is just a normalization.

Let me assert, more controversially, that this quantitative index should be prosperity multiplied by the the square root of the human population. Why the square root? If we ignore population entirely and just say technology is proportional to prosperity, we are saying that resource scarcity is not a thing—that it requires no greater level of human competence and command over nature and ability to organize to support our 8 billion people at our current level of prosperity than it would to support 400 million people. That cannot be right. Resource scarcity is a thing.

On the other hand, taking technology to be equal to multiplying prosperity by population implicitly says that eyes plus brains plus hands are not a thing, that the only thing that is valuable is the ideas and the brains of humanity as an anthology intelligence and not individual workers. That also cannot be right. Individual human productivity is a thing.

Square root is a compromise in the middle. And if you have a better idea I would love to adopt it as an alternative to what we have.

So we get a very crude quantitative index, which I call big H, of the level of the value of the stock of Human ideas deployed across the world. And we also get this proportional growth rate, little h, of our technology. I propose to take this seriously.

When we take this seriously, we see the past really is another country, and a very different country. It is so much more another country that the differences between then and now are ones so great that Silicon Valley TechBros currently raving about forthcoming “singularities” when they will have succeeded in building and then worshipping machines made of stone that think with AGI would have a difficult time wrapping their heads around their magnitude.

We see a past of everywhere before 1500—and note, in many parts of the world long after that—characterized by three salient features:

• Malthusian dire poverty.

• Extremely low technology relative to us.

• Exceedingly slow rates of growth of technology relative to us.

We see Malthusian dire poverty. Our guesses set typical world incomes before 1500 during the long Agrarian Age at around $1200 per capita per year. At that level of poverty the risks, unless you are part of an élite, that you will go very hungry sometime next week and die of famine sometime in the next decade are not things you dare ignore. You see the typical woman among you having eight pregnancies, yet raising only 2.05 children on average to survive to reproduce in the next generation. You see the typical woman who happens to survive to late middle age as having one chance in three of not having a surviving son—which means that, in heavily patriarchal societies, she needs a son-in-law who really likes her to an unusual degree, or she may well face very significant sociological trouble. Hence where there are extra resources families are pushed to try to have more children, to try to buy more insurance against her being left alone in a patriarchal society.

We see extraordinarily low levels of technology compared to our standards. Compared to our H(today) = 23 and H(1870) = 1, we have H(1500) = 0.4 and H(-3000) = 0.07. The powers of the anthology intelligence that is humanity are, in comparison, truly godlike. Óðinn had a spear, Gungnir, unstoppable, fatal, and inerrant; and had two ravens, Huginn and Muninn, who whispered in his ear the news from places far out of his sight. Þórr had a magic hammer, Mjǫllnir, that struck anywhere within his eyesight with the force of a lightning bolt, and then returned to his hand so he could strike with it again. (He also had a two-wheeled cart drawn by two magic self-reviving goats, Tanngnjóstr and Tanngrisnir, who could provide a feast one night and yet be ready to pull the cart the following morning; but the cart was so underlubricated that the noises it made as it bumped along the skyways were the thunder.) Compared to what we can and do accomplish for good and for ill, they were helpless and hapless.

We also see extremely slow technological progress by our standards. From the invention of writing and bronze around -3000 to the 1500 start of the transition from the Agrarian Age to Commercial-Imperial Society, the average annual proportional rate of increase h of the technology of humanity as an anthology intelligence was only 0.04% per year: 50% per millennium. We see more proportional technological change than that each and every generation, and have since 1870 or so. That is also an extraordinary difference.

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History offers useful analogies, and theory distills their lessons, but are today’s classrooms addressing tomorrow’s realities? It is a great challenge to try to teach students how to understand and maneuver in what will be their world in the future. So please tell me what in the way of theory I should assign to deal with what they will face in the human societal world in 2055:

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I. What Do I Ask My Students to Read so That They Will Understand the World of 2055?

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1. The Utility? of History

Thank you very, very much for that introduction, for this crowded room, and for the opportunity to take a trip to New Orleans in the fall.

I apologize that I am here a year late. And I apologize that the talk I have this year has many fewer answers than the talk I had ready to givelast year. It has very many fewer answers, largely, because I concluded that the answers I had last year were not right.

Thus, this is going to be a talk that ends up with questions, not answers. It will end with a frantic attempt to pass the baton to all of you—especially the younger ones among you who still have time to think new thoughts and to change their minds—and demand that you come up with the answers. All of you together are certainly wiser than me alone.

Our students are human beings who will spend their lives engaging in human affairs. We should try to teach them how to do this well. In order to gain insight into “human affairs” in general we are led to study history. And from history we are then led to think about and study and create this thing that we call theory: philosophical theory, political theory, economic theory, social theory, and so forth.

I think, at bottom, that it is a question of cognitive load. In this I agree with Dan Davies: is much easier to either dismiss or utilize an analogy than to model a situation from scratch. Our history is great at providing us with a very large library of potential analogies and analogues. We can then run through them, thinking: "no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, maybe, maybe, no, no, no, no, maybe, yes." That this is an important use of history has long been known. In the introduction to his The History of the Peloponnesian War, Thoukydides of the Athenai set it forth as the reason that people should study his book, for he had written his book for:

such as shall desire to gain a true picture, both of the past and of what is likely hereafter, which in accordance with the course of human nature, to prove either just the same or very like it…

Then comes the single most arrogant statement I have ever read from any author anywhere anywhen. He writes that he has succeeded in writing something that is:

not written for a prize composition to please the ear for a moment, but rather is a treasure for all time…

Thrown out of Athens by the twists and turns of Athenian politics, hanging out in exile in weird barbarian places as an ex-Athenian aristocrat, too close to various Spartan sources for the liking of many people in his home city—not a guy doing conspicuously well as an Athenian aristocrat. And yet the guy still is, or at least presenting himself as, the most self-confident individual alive.

2. The Necessity of Theory

Back in the early -300s we had two works of what we call history: Herodotos and Thoukydides. But he started a fad, and the result was a flood of Hellenistic-era histories—nearly all of which are not lost to us, alas!, save as they were compressed into and show up summarized in the biographies of Plutarkhos of Khaeroneia. And people kept writing, and many of what they wrote has survived. So by now we have far too damned much history.

Thus we need theory. We need theory to direct us where to look in the histories in our attempts to find analogies. We need theory because we have no choice but to try to take all the various analogies and to distill them down. I know that this is a very dangerous thing to do. Distilling down all the potential lessons of history into theoretical propositions may wind up giving you something both flat and hallucinatory like Chat-GPT. Worse, perhaps, you wind up taking a fine Bordeaux and turning it into white lightning. It is certainly true that when you imbibe too much theory too quickly, you wind up the following morning with a huge headache, and greatly regretting what you said and did while under its influence.

Nevertheless, we must have theory. We cannot do without it. We are, after all, East African Plains Apes of very little brain, and there is so much that we might choose to try to learn and know.

So: which history, and whose? The answer to that is theory. But at that level thje problem repeats itself: which theories, and whose?

My theoretical education came from the Harvard Social Studies undergraduate concentration circa 1980. Even today, there is a core of me that still is the Michael Walzer version of the Harvard Social Studies interdisciplinary curriculum circa 1980: Smith, de Tocqueville, Mill, Marx, Weber, Durkheim. In junior tutorials and elsewhere people tried to force-feed me more theory: Nancy Chodorow, Franz Neumann, Machiavelli, Keynes, Polanyi, Frieden, Fanon, Wallerstein, Foucault—a whole bunch of others, some of which took and some of which didn't.

The net effect of all of this? It was to prepare me perfectly to understand human affairs, and to maneuver as a male citizen and as a bourgeois thinker, in an area centered around Köln on the Rhine in the years around 1905. I would have been so damned effective as a bureaucrat, as a political actor, as an intellectual back then. I could have absolutely wowed the world.

3. Our Current Problem: Drowning in too Much Theory

But in the 1990s I was 5,000 miles and perhaps three and a half mode of production shifts away. And so my theoretical education was not all that relevant. That problem is constant. Today when I teach, I find myself drifting back to teaching largely what I was taught. And then I find myself frantically trying to update it. And when I come to the end of the course, I look back and find I have prepared people to analyze the 1980s, the fall of the Mass-Production Society social-democratic New Deal Order and the rise of the Globalized Value-Chain Society Neoliberal Order. That is a very important topic. (I think it has been best covered by Gary Gerstle).

But is my preparing people to analyze that really me serving my students? Does that prepare my students to understand human affairs and maneuver as citizens in the world as it is likely to be for them? They are going to attain their peak influence on society and take actions that have consequences in 2055? No, it does not. I am making them skate to where the puck was 40 years ago, not to where the puck will be thirty years hence.

We need to do better. I need now to be teaching my students theoretical perspectives that will enable them to understand what is going to be going on in 2055.

I warn you now that that point—I need a reading list to assign my students if I am to do my job—is where I am going to stop this talk. I do not have a reading list. I have ideas, but I do not trust them. So I am passing the baton to you. I charge you, each of you, to come up with a reading list, and to email it to me.

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References:

• Davies, Dan. 2023. “The Valve Amplifier of History”. Back of Mind (blog), May 3. <https://backofmind.substack.com/p/the-valve-amplifier-of-history>.

• Gerstle, Gary. 2022. The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era. New York: Oxford University Press. <https://archive.org/details/rise-fall-neoliberal-order>.

• Thoukydides. -431 [1910]. The History of the Peloponnesian War. Trans. Richard Crawley. London: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1910. <https://archive.org/details/thucydidestrans00thucgoog>.

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I am so extremely grateful to Simone Wegge, Jari Eloranta, Emily Klancher Merchant, and Barry Eidlin for all the time, effort, thought, and genius that they all put into their comments:

• DeLong, J. Bradford. 2024. “Response to Comments on Slouching Towards Utopia”. Social Science History. 48:3 (Fall: October 10), pp. 588-92. <https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/social-science-history/article/response-to-comments-on-slouching-towards-utopia/78A3CBDDB79075E03CAABD8EFD99CC71> <https://doi.org/10.1017/ssh.2024.12>.

• DeLong, J. Bradford. 2022. “Slouching Towards Utopia: The Economic History of the 20th Century”. New York: Basic Books. <http://bit.ly/3pP3Krk>.

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We had a symposium in Chicago for Social Science History on my Slouching Towards Utopia. That symposium is now “in print”. So let me introduce my response by noting five things wrong with the book:

1. Technological Progress Underemphasized: Jari Eloranta highlights that I underplay the role of technological progress, and would have been well-advised to do more to follow the lead other historians like Joel Mokyr and Alexander Field.

2. Demographic Transition Largely Overlooked: There is a significant hole in the book with respect to demographic histor—the complex changes in fertility, population growth, and female social power all of which which were critical to the twentieth century's transformations.

3. Omission of Environmental and Energy Issues: The absence of detailed discussions on oil, fossil fuels, and global warming is a substantial gap. I decided that those issues are more for the 21st century than the 20th, but that may well have been the wrong decision

4. Labor-Capital Struggles Minimized: Barry Eidlin notes that the struggle between labor and capital is not given its due attention as it is taken out of focus by my stress on the ideological contest between Hayekian and Polanyian perspectives. To this, my response is yes and no: the labor-capital struggle was very important, but as a source of energy for “Polanyist” movements that were, for the most part, interested more in attaining a different power distribution than an equal wealth distribution.

5. The Scandinavian Model Deserves Greater Attention: The Scandinavian countries’ remarkable success in balancing economic growth with social equity certainly deserved more focus, as perhaps the closest human societies managed to get to utopia in the 20th century.

May I do better next time!

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Response to Comments on Slouching Towards Utopia:

I blush at the extremely high praise that the commenters give my book Slouching Towards Utopia: The Economic History of the 20th Century. And I am over the moon at how seriously they take it, and my less-than-adequate attempt to find a framework that we can use to productively think more deeply and insightfully into the global political-economy history of the years 1870–2010. It is a treasure of inestimable value that these four have given me and that other people have given me as well.

Jari Eloranta said, during the session, that “in some parts of the globe… utopia is already here, and yet in others very, very far…” I disagree. In my view, utopia is for everyone, or it is not. Marlowe’s Tamburlaine at his exaltation, riding in triumph through Persepolis and crowing how it is passing brave to be a king, is not a utopian scene. Half a mile from where I live in prosperous and smug liberal Berkeley, California, there are people living in cardboard boxes.

That simply should not be. The hard problem should have been this: Given human fecundity and resource limitations, baking a sufficiently large economic pie so that everyone could have enough. The problems of slicing and tasting the pie—of equitably distributing it, and utilizing our wealth to live wisely and well—were supposed to be more straightforward problems. They are not. The biggest fact of my 1870–2010 twentieth century is that it is the century in which the prospect that humanity could achieve any past proposed utopia became clear. The second biggest fact is that as of 2010 we could only claim that we had slouched towards that particular Bethlehem.

Too much was said for me to comment on it all, so let me just comment on one or two things from each of my four commenters.

I do think that Jari Eloranta is correct when he complains that the book has too little on the “technological and societal progress… [that fill] the visions of… historians like Joel Mokyr and Alexander Field…” and rather more on the “political economy narrative… the struggle… which… has resulted in somewhat underwhelming compromises, hence the ‘slouch’…”. The balance of the book is off. I can only plead that I had to get the book package down to 600 pages, and did not have a steady-enough hand in doing so to avoid cutting not just into but through muscle to the very bone. I would plead that I can only do what I can, and that I was really not up to the task I attempted.

I do think that Jari Eloranta and Simone Wegge are correct when they complain about the lack of demographic history. In my book, the demographic transition is essentially offstage: humans get rich, infant mortality falls, you no longer need nine pregnancies to have a 2/3 chance of having a son who will outlive you, and so fertility declines. And so, in the end, technology wins its race against fecundity. After the population explosion that has carried our numbers up to more than 8 billion, we approach zero population growth. That is not an adequate treatment at all of what is one of the very most important pieces of twentieth-century human history.

I find myself standing before the ghost of my great-grandmother Florence Wyman Richardson Usher, who was expelled from St. Louis’s Veiled Prophet Débutante Society because she had chained herself to the Missouri Statehouse for women’s suffrage. She might say: This is not adequate to what we did and how we do it. And don’t think you can escape into some Oded Galor-like—brilliant as Oded is—all of a sudden the marginal return to investing in the quality of your children goes up and investing in the quantity of your children goes down. She might say: That increase in female social power—I did that. And your sister and your daughters and granddaughters benefit from it. Don’t you dare neglect the fact that I, your great grandmother, and all my sisters did this!

Simone Wegge is also disturbed by the absence of oil and global warming. I say that the coming of global warming to the fore is one of the big signs that the grand narrative of the twentieth century no longer applies. And, as part of that decision, the fossil-fuel industrial-structure pages all got left on the cutting room floor. I had 20 descriptions and examples of wonderful technologies in the long twentieth century. I cut those 20 back to 2, leaving only Nikola Tesla and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (TSMC). She is right to be disturbed.

And note that it is not just Simone who is annoyed. I think this is the principal reason for Adam Tooze’s conflicted reaction to this book—on the one hand, saying it’s one of the three must-reads of the fall of 2022; on the other hand not liking any particular chapter in it much.

I do think that Barry Eidlin is correct when he accuses me of evading the key role played by labor and capital and their struggles over distribution in the twentieth century. I see the Hayek-Polanyi axis of contestation as a genuine quest for the best way of organizing human society as we move from imperial-commercial through steam power, applied science, mass production, global value-chain, and not into information-attention modes of production. He sees it as, in large part, the matador’s cape distracting the poor from organizing against the rich for what is their key need: abolishing debts and redistributing resources. My sleight-of-hand in shuffling who-whom offstage so quickly is not excusable.

And, yet, to call the neoliberal order’s 1970s coup against social democracy simply a victory for plutocratic capital against labor unable to organize itself is, I think, too simple. I would like to call the ghost of Eric Hobsbawm as witness. Remember Eric Hobsbawm’s “The Forward March of Labor Halted?” denouncing labor unions that based their social power not on their ability to add to production and thus assist the forward march of humanity, but rather on their ability to inconvenience the populace? And I would point to the passage in Hobsbawm’s Age of Extremes where he says that even the British left grew to recognize that much of what Margaret Thatcher had done was necessary—as the good ship mixed economy needed a thorough neoliberal barnacle scrub. There is something deeper in the neoliberal turn than simply the triumph of reactionary capital.

I do think Emily Merchant is correct when she notes that the book gives “no sense of the complexities of… technologies.” Technology, in Slouching Towards Utopia, is a deus ex machina that since 1870 descends, doubling human productive potential every generation. I give no sense of how we have, within limits, chosen which technologies to develop, or what we are then to produce with them, or whom we are going to burden with the heaviest loads in that production. Here, too, the balance is off. I do quote Richard Easterlin about how modern economic growth has turned not into a triumph of humanity over material want, but rather a triumph of our material wants over our humanity—we are, indeed, substantially trapped on the hedonic treadmill.

And, yet, on the other hand, I would like to call as a witness my 89-year-old mother-in-law, Barbara Marciarille, who forced to drop out of high school at 16 back in Providence, Rhode Island to take care of her younger siblings. The thing that she values most every single day is the clothes-washing machine. That changed her life.

Last, given how it has come closest to reconciling Polanyian and Hayekian imperatives, Scandinavia in the twentieth century deserves something more in the book than an aside about how it was so poor that a quarter of young men migrated to the U.S. upper Midwest in the 40 years before 1914.

Again: I can only plead that the book has 600 pages as it is, and Basic’s editors got increasingly nervous with each page past 350.

Now let me again take the offensive, and remind you of what my book’s grand narrative is, and die on the hill that this grand narrative is the least-false one we can tell about history between 1870 and 2010. It tells a story of:

• Humanity, before 1870s, ensorcelled by the Devil of Malthus, desperately poor, spending hours a day thinking about how hungry you are, watching half your babies die, unable to even think about baking a sufficiently large economic pie for everyone to have enough.

• Humanity, after 1870, escaping as wealth and productivity explode; indeed, people looking back a generation or two later talk about 1870 as the beginning of “Economic El Dorado.”

• After 1870 it becomes clear that humanity will relatively soon have the productive mojo to bake a sufficiently large economic pie for everybody to have enough—at least by all previous societies’ definitions of enough.

Thus by now, all that should remain are what our predecessors would have seen as the second-order problems of slicing and tasting the economic pie – of equitably distributing it, and of utilizing our fabulous wealth to live “wisely and well.”

Those problems should have been easier to solve than the problem of production. After all, the problem of equitable distribution was a consequence of pre-1870 Malthusian-era poverty. Back then the only way to get enough for yourself and your family was to join a gang: become part of an élite and successfully run a domination-and-exploitation game on the rest of humanity. Those in charge and their bully-boy thugs, assisted by their tame accountants, bureaucrats, and propagandists, reaped where they did not sow and gathered where they did not scatter. That was much of what was wrong with human society back before 1870.

But after 1870 the road opens to the recognition that nobody any longer needs the government of men in order that the small élite grab one-third of everything for itself. Instead, all we need is the administration of things, which should be technocratic and unproblematic: private activity where it belongs, public activity where it is needed, with circumstances-altering cases.

And yet, in spite of our wealth being fabulous from historical perspective, what were supposed to be second-order problems continue to completely flummox us.

In large part, they flummox us because technological progress has been so fast. Every single generation we have Schumpeterian creative destruction revolutionizing economy and society. Every generation it gives us a brand-new set of forces-of-production hardware. We then have to frantically write new socio-econo-political-cultural relations-of-production, -communication, -organization, -and-so-on software to run on top of it so the whole thing doesn’t crash. We try to figure out how to get the proper benefits of decentralization and incentivization on the one hand, while on the other hand not reducing society to a state where the only rights that are recognized are property rights and thus the only people who have any social power are those who have been lucky or who chose the right parents.

This was the point at which I started writing my book. I could have looked backward from 1870: asking the question of how we got to the point of explosion. But that sector is very crowded indeed. I could have looked forward from 1870: asking the question of how scientific research, technological development, corporate distribution, and market diffusion interacted to grow our wealth after 1870, and what the consequences of the five great waves of Schumpeterian creative destruction since 1870 have been. I hoped that Landes-Schumpeter-Gordon thread of narrative would be a major part of this book. I was unable to execute that and stay within 600 pages. I do mourn my failure.

So I looked forward from 1870: asking about the working out of the logic of unprecedented, revolutionary, economic growth generation after generation, and that growth’s political-economy consequences. I know that this book turned out to be the only book I could execute.

I look forward with great eagerness to others with their proposed alternative Grand Narratives—about 1870–2010, and beyond.

Refer a friend

References:

• DeLong, J. Bradford. 2024. “Response to Comments on Slouching Towards Utopia”. Social Science History. 48:3 (Fall: October 10), pp. 588-92. <https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/social-science-history/article/response-to-comments-on-slouching-towards-utopia/78A3CBDDB79075E03CAABD8EFD99CC71> <https://doi.org/10.1017/ssh.2024.12>.

• DeLong, J. Bradford. 2022. “Slouching Towards Utopia: The Economic History of the 20th Century”. New York: Basic Books. <http://bit.ly/3pP3Krk>.

• Eloranta, Jari. 2024. “Comment on J. Bradford DeLong’s Slouching Towards Utopia”. Social Science History 48(3): 576–580. <https://doi.org/10.1017/ssh.2024.15>

• Hobsbawm, Eric. 1978. “The Forward March of Labour Halted?” Marxism Today. 22:9 (September), p. 284. Google Scholar.

• Merchant, Emily Klancher. 2024. “Science, Technology, and Utopia”. Social Science History. 48(3): 581–584. <https://doi.org/10.1017/ssh.2024.14>

• Tooze, Adam. 2022. “Slouching Towards Utopia by J Bradford DeLong—Fuelling America’s Global Dream.” Financial Times. <https://adamtooze.com/2022/09/27/slouching-towards-utopia-by-j-bradford-delong-fuelling-americas-global-dream/>.

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The great Simon Kuznets, winner of the Economics Nobel Prize in 1971, may or may not have been the first person to say: "There are four kinds of countries: rich countries, poor countries, Argentina, and Japan". Whoever said this was right: Japan's economic experience since the late 1800s is the most impressive and the most heartening thing in all the economic history of the 20th century. And the political history of Japan since 1870 has a very good middle and end as well, after a beginning it which it unfortunately catches the virus of modern imperialism from the European countries that break open Tokugawa-era isolationism. The future of Japan? That is large in the hands of my Japanese readers and their compatriots.

Japan is the prime example of one of the four patterns followed by 20th century economies. It is a remarkable example, a heartening story, and an impressive accomplishment.

It has spurred many others--South Korea, Taiwan island, Hong Kong, Singapore in the first wave; Malaysia and Thailand in the second; and now coastal China and Vietnam in the third--to successfully accomplish the very difficult task of becoming rich by deploying modern industrial and post-industrial technologies. So one would think that Japan would play a very prominent role in an economic history of the 20th century. And yet "Japan" appears on only 49 of 580 total pages--less than half of what one might think of as its appropriate share. For this I apologize: in spite of the attempts of Henry Rosovsky and others, I learned less and now know less about Japan than I should, and I found myself focusing in the writing on stories and episodes where I was overwhelmingly confident that my insights were accurate and worthwhile.

But this skimming lightly over Japan in this book is not a defect for a typical Japanese-language reader, who knows more about Japanese economy and history than I do and is likely to wince at my errors and misjudgments. The principal use of the book for the typical Japanese-language reader is as a baseline to use for understanding the remarkable story of Japanese economic history since the beginning of the Meiji Restoration.

And what an astonishing story it is!

For Japan, the long 20th century began with the country establishing itself as an industrial force, a process that accelerated with its victory in the Russo-Japanese War. That conflict signaled Japan's arrival as a modern imperial power in East Asia, reshaping the geopolitical landscape, providing Japan with additional opportunities for economic growth and development, and focusing the attention of many on Japan as showing a way that countries could escape the role into which the North Atlantic was trying to cast them as poor hewers of wood and drawers of water. But as bright as the pre-WWII period was for the economic development of Japan in productivity, trade, and macroeconomic stability—Japan's successful avoidance of the Great Depression could have taught powerful lessons to the rest of the world, had that success been registered and studied—no other economy up until 1960 was able to even begin to follow in its footsteps.

After World War II Japan showed the world how great the potential for economic growth could be, and how that potential could be realized. The enormous death and devastation rained down on the entire Japanese population—military and, more so, non-military—by American strategic bombing the war gave way to a period of unprecedented economic growth that was the Japanese economic miracle. "Slouching Towards Utopia" situates this recovery and boom within the broader context of global economic trends, including the Cold War's influence on trade policies and technological exchange. For Japanese readers, this comparison not only highlights the unique aspects of Japan's economic policies but also integrates Japan's experience into the larger narrative of post-war recovery and growth experienced by other industrial nations.

And after 1960 the lessons of Japan's extraordinary economic success began to be learned outside. It is not overstatement to say that emulation of the Japanese model, allowing for local conditions, was the key link in making the sun of economic growth rise so conspicuously and shine so brightly along the whole Far East that is Asia's Pacific Rim. The combination of government intervention, private sector innovation, and stakeholder-centered management was a very sharp counterpoint to the more laissez-faire approaches that took hold in the North Atlantic, especially after the Neoliberal Turn of the 1970s. Japanese readers will recognize how distinctive and effective the Japanese approach of both guidance by an embedded-yet-autonomous state and immediate profit-driven decision-making by the market was at national economic management. And the contrast with the exaltation of more laissez-faire oriented policies under the Neoliberal Order in the North Atlantic will be clear.

But the changed global order after the Neoliberal Turn was not one in which Japan could continue to flourish economically as much as it had before. The book provides considerable insight into the turn in the 1970s away from the social-democratic New Deal Order to the Neoliberal Order, and the resulting disruptions of the global economy that did so much to impose substantial economic drags upon the Japan. The Nixon shock of 1971. The oil shocks of 1973 and 1979. The extra shock administered to the global economy by a U.S. Reagan administration that seemed out of its depth—the explosion of U.S. government deficits and the consequent rise of the dollar in the early 1980s and the failure of the U.S. to keep its deficit-reduction commitments made in the Plaza Accord in 1985.

These factors more than set the stage for the collapse of the Japanese real-estate market in 1991. The burst of Japan's asset bubble in the early 1990s and the subsequent "Lost Decade" are critical to understanding the vulnerabilities and resilience of the Japanese economy. The subsequent period of secular stagnation that substantially reduced Japan's rate of economic growth. Indeed, Japanese per-capita economic growth would remain profoundly unsatisfactory until well after the launch of Shinzo Abe's "three arrows" macroeconomic policy reforms in 2012.

In the most recent decades, the narrative of "Slouching Towards Utopia" explores the implications of globalization, the rise of the information economy, and the hyperfinancialization of global markets. For Japan, these phenomena have presented both challenges and opportunities. The book provides a background framework for examining how Japan's economic policies have adapted to the shifting paradigms of global finance and trade.

The trajectory of Japan's economy in the future is an issue of great importance and a subject of keen interest and speculation. Given Japan's aging population, its innovative approaches to technology and health care, and its strategic positioning within Asia, drawing the right lessons from the past century are invaluable. Japan's future economic path must involve navigating tensions between national policy priorities and global economic pressures, with potential leadership roles in technology, environmental sustainability, and multilateral trade agreements.

Japan was derailed in the 1980s from the possible future in which not California's Silicon Valley but Japan's Greater Tokyo was at the leading edge of the global economy. It took on an economic role in manufacturing much like that of Germany, as the world leaders in taking pains to produce commodities of extremely high quality and reliability if not able to produce the most innovative or to push the product innovation—as opposed to the process development—frontier out as far and as fast as possible. And outside of manufacturing the Japanese economy remains high-touch rather than unusually efficient.

But this can very easily be the springboard for much more than satisfactory economic growth over the next several generations, especially given the large numbers of talented and industrious people born elsewhere for whom the opportunity to work and live in the built environment of with the accumulated industrial capital stock of Japan would be of enormous value.

Remember: post-bubble Japan remains an amazingly productive economy in world context. It ranks significantly higher in most quality-of-life metrics than it does in income comparisons. Japan today has many lessons to teach the rest of the rich world on living wisely and well. The differential deadliness of the COVID plague in Japan and the United States should make all of us Americans think very hard about the societal choices that we have been making, and reconsider whether in fact Japan might not in fact be #1.

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References:

• DeLong, J. Bradford. 2022. Slouching Towards Utopia: The Economic History of the 20th Century. New York: Basic Books. <https://archive.org/details/slouching-towards-utopia>.

• Haass, Richard. 2024. "Blocked Sun, Rising Sun." Home & Away. April 12. <https://richardhaass.substack.com/p/blocked-sun-rising-sun-april-12-2024>

• Taylor, Alan. 2014. “The Argentina Paradox: Microexplanations and Macropuzzles”. NBER Working Paper No. 19924. February. <https://www.nber.org/papers/w19924>.

• Yglesias, Matthew. 2012. "The four types of economies and the global imbalances." Slate, April. <https://web.archive.org/web/20230412215407/https://slate.com/business/2012/04/the-four-types-of-economies-and-the-global-imbalances.html>.

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First, and no surprise to you all, comes my 600-page book, published year before last. I see it as an essential resource for those interested in the economic history of the 20th century and its consequences. Indeed, I see it as potentially a treasure for all time.

Moreover, the book serves as a more complete and well-organized guide to my views on the century’s economic history than do the lectures I have given in this course. The lectures aim to illuminate other perspectives, and to build on the central argument threads presented in the book. They do not simply repeat those threads—given that the book exists, that would have been a waste of time:

• DeLong, J. Bradford. 2022. Slouching Towards Utopia: The Economic History of the Twentieth Century. New York: Basic Books <http://bit.ly/3pP3Krk> <https://bcourses.berkeley.edu/files/87705514/download?download_frd=1>

Second comes Simon Kuznets’s 1971 Nobel Prize Lecture. It is pivotal in defining what modern economic growth actually is. Kuznets was the first to powerfully articulate that the Industrial Revolution was not the most significant event; instead, the critical development occurred in the 1870s with the advent of steam power, railroads, coal, and steel, which initiated a continuous process of technological change, transforming economies every generation:

• Kuznets, Simon. 1971. “Modern Economic Growth: Findings & Reflections”. Nobel Media AB. Lecture to the memory of Alfred Nobel, December 11. <https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/1971/kuznets/lecture/>.

Third comes Ronald Lee’s article on the demographic transition. It is crucial. The demographic transition is both understudied and underappreciated. The transition from an agrarian age—where the typical woman underwent eight if not more pregnancies—to our modern era has profoundly changed human experience to a remarkable degree. Yet many of us remain insufficiently aware of its deep impact:

• Lee, Ronald. 2003. “The Demographic Transition: Three Centuries of Fundamental Change.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 17 (4): 167–190 <https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/089533003772034943>

Those are by far the three most important things to reread during RRR week. Be sure you get through those.

Moving on to less central, though still vitally important, works on the reading list:

Patricia Crone and Patrick Wyman provide baseline insights about human economies and societies back in the long Agrarian Age. We need that baseline to serve as a background against which the remarkable nature of the twentieth century stands out in bold relief. Crone’s is the best survey I have found of Agrarian Age economy and society. Wyman’s is a bold and remarkably successful exploration of the growth of the entrepreneurial and experimental spirit that emerged after 1500 in, roughly, a circle around the port of Dover at the southeastern corner of the island of Great Britain. As Crone says, other societies as of 1500 were on a trajectory to become more like themselves—to deepen and cement their operation as relatively stable societies of domination. Only Western Europe was in the process of reaching for alternative modes of human organization via a very unusual degree of institutional plasticity. It was, as of 1500, failing as a stable society of domination. And so it, most strongly inside the Dover Circle, started the process of becoming something else:

• Crone, Patricia. 2014. Pre-Industrial Societies: Anatomy of the Pre-Modern World. Oneworld Publications. <https://openlibrary.org/books/OL34028800M/Pre-Industrial_Societies>.

• Wyman, Patrick. 2021. The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, & Forty Years that Shook the World. New York: Twelve <https://www.amazon.com/Verge-Reformation-Renaissance-Forty-Years-ebook/dp/B08P1MF813>.

Next on my list of key readings come five pieces:

One is Arthur Lewis’s theory on how the extraordinary growth in global inequality in the 20th century was triggered by globalization and racial impediments to migration post–1870. He offers a profound and, I thin, largely correct explanation for how today’s immense wealth disparities between countries came about:

• Lewis, W. Arthur. 1978. The Evolution of the International Economic Order. Princeton: Princeton University Press. <https://archive.org/details/evolutionofinter0000lewi>.

Another is Barry Eichengreen’s article on the Great Depression, the defining moment of 20th-century and, I think, future history as well. That the Great Depression in the United States spurred the creation of FDR’s New Deal Order kept the history of the 20th century from being much more tragic than it in fact was:

• Eichengreen, Barry J. 1992. “The Origins and Nature of the Great Slump Revisited.” Economic History Review 45, no. 2: 213–239. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/2597621>.

Yet another is Robert Bates’s take on the exceptional economic-development retardation of Sub-Saharan Africa in the Post-Colonial—or perhaps the Neocolonial—Age. Due to the semi-stalled fertility transition in much of Sub-Saharan Africa, it is projected to constitute 30% of the human race by the time that you students become old men and women. Getting Sub-Saharan Africa back on track is going to be the principal economic development challenge of your lives. And figuring out how it got off track is essential to figuring out what is to be done:

• Bates, Robert H. 2008. When Things Fell Apart: State Failure in Late-Century Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. <https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/when-things-fell-apart/AFC9C7AE3AF742A5C5ECEF95EC72E77C>.

Two more are our readings looking at inequality within individual nations—Piketty and Saez on disparities of wealth, and Wilson on race-linked disparities in status and opportunity

• Piketty, Thomas, & Emanuel Saez. 2014: “Inequality in the Long Run.” Science 344 (6186), pp. 838–843. <https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1251936>.

• Wilson, William Julius. 2011. “’The Declining Significance of Race’: Revisited & Revised.” Daedalus 140 (2): 55–69. <https://direct.mit.edu/daed/article/140/2/55/26886/The-Declining-Significance-of-Race-Revisited-amp>.

The next set of the assigned readings that I pick out as truly essential are the readings that focus on our current situation: Gordon on whether the epoch that began in 1870 of humanity’s collective wealth doubling, or more than doubling, every generation might be coming toward an end; Auffhammer on how we need to start assessing how much of the next two generations’ technological dividend will be consumed by dealing with the damage from global warming; Eichengreen on the strength, meaning, and prospects for the contemporary movements that are variously called illiberal democracy, plebiscitarian authoritarianism’s or neofascism; and Brynjolfsson, Rock, and Syverson on the characteristics of the next “mode of production” into which human society is currently moving—the Attention-Info-Bio-Tech economy:

• Gordon, Robert J. 2015. “Secular Stagnation: A Supply-Side View.” American Economic Review 105 (5): 54–59. https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.p20151102.

• Auffhammer, Maximilian. 2018. "Quantifying Economic Damages from Climate Change”. Journal of Economic Perspectives. 32 (4): 33–52. https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.32.4.33

• Eichengreen, Barry. 2018. The Populist Temptation: Economic Grievance & Political Reaction in the Modern Era. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://openlibrary.org/books/OL26958152M/The_populist_temptation

• Brynjolfsson, E., Rock, D., & Syverson, C. 2019. “Artificial Intelligence & the Modern Productivity Paradox”. In Agrawal, Ajay, Joshua Gans, & Avi Goldfarb, eds. The Economics of Artificial Intelligence: An Agenda. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. https://www.nber.org/papers/w24001

Somewhat of a sidetrack—but included on this list simply because I find the subject of comparative economic systems in the 20th century so fascinating—is Robert Allen’s relatively positive, contrarian, and somewhat troll-ish assessment of the Soviet economic experience 1917–1991:

• Allen, Robert. 2001. “The Rise & Decline of the Soviet Economy”. Canadian Journal of Economics 34, no. 4: 859–881 <http://www.jstor.org/stable/3131928>.

And last on my list of truly essential readings is the core reading for the alternative version of this course, the one that is taught most years, the version that Barry Eichengreen teaches. That version of the course focuses much more on world monetary affairs as the nervous system of humanity considered as a productive anthology intelligence. And Barry’s book is the best short overview of that take on the economic history of the 20th century that I know of:

• Eichengreen, Barry J. 1998. Globalizing Capital: A History of the International Monetary System. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. <https://archive.org/details/globalizingcapit00eich_0>.

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Ask it questions about my book Slouching Towards Utopia: The Economic History of the 20th Century <https://www.amazon.com/Economic-History-Twentieth-Century/dp/0465019595/>. And please tell me how it does as a first-line responder to give quick yet high-quality answers.

I am going to have 150 students in this 20th Century Economic History class next semester. At five hours of office hours per week, that is two minutes per student per week—half an hour over the entire semester. That really is not enough for anything like a proper education…

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2023 10 04 Delong Afterthoughts Modes Of Production

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It is time to change the slide deck I use for my general-audience 20th-century-history talks:

My hope is to advance beyond the schema. I had set out in slouching towards Utopia: that with Schumpeterian creative destruction revolutionizing the economy every generation, no political-economy arrangement of society could be stable; and attempts to form new such arrangement—to rewrite the econo-socio-political software code of society running on top of the forces-of-production hardware so that things did not crash—were caught between the poles of von Hayek and Polanyi, with the need for the market but also with the need to somehow protect from the market the rights that people thought they held other than property rights.

The idea of trying to trace links from successive yet overlapping configurations of the forces-of-production (and -distribution, -domination, and -communication) to constraints and opportunities for societal organization seems a good idea. I am not sure that I have gotten it right: either the implications, or even the classification of forces-of-production:

• agrarian-feudal

• commercial-imperial-gunpowder

• steampower and machinery

• applied-science

• mass-production

• global value-chain

• attention-info-bio

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I was on a panel on a very nice recent book by Alan Bollard: Economists in the Cold War: How a Handful of Economists Fought the Battle of Ideas. A kind of group semi-biography of fourteen Cold War-era economists: White vs. Keynes; Lange vs. Friedrich von Hayek; von Neumann vs. Kantorovich; Erhard vs. Monnet; Robinson vs. Samuelson; Suburo Akita vs. Chou Enlai; & Prebisch vs. Rostow:

Economists in the Cold War: How a Handful of Economists Fought the Battle of Ideas:

Monday Oct. 2, 2023 4:00pm – 5:30pm ET

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What did I say on the panel? I did answer a question about my zoom background:

This is an artificial [zoom] background I have behind me, but it is a picture of the real view from my back deck looking south. The problem is that right now the sun makes this camera angle infeasible...

I did ask my one big question. My question-as-a-panelist, as transcribed by MacWhisper:

Was it [Joan] Robinson [writing] to [Paul] Samuelson or [Paul] Samuelson [writing] to [Joan Robinson who said, "I would not be so rude if you were not so pig-headed"? I forget which....

Let me start with my windup. Let's go back to Rostow and Prebisch:

[Walt Whitman] Rostow: In a thumbnail, any country that guarantees property rights and maintains full employment can develop as a democratic, market, capitalist society, as long as it boosts its savings rate and invests at scale. Investment brings capital; capital brings engineers; engineers bring technological advance and productivity, and you get the takeoff into self-sustained growth. That’s Rostow.

[Raúl] Prebisch: In a thumbnail, supply of primary commodities is elastic while demand is inelastic. That means a developing country that accepts its place in the world capitalist division of labor cannot get self-sustained growth. Why nor? Because the benefits from its technological advances all flow to the core, and none of them remain in the periphery. Hence developing countries cannot rely on the market to generate self-sustaining growth, but must subsidize, plan, and socialize. That’s Prebisch.

Now, the United States did over the course of the Cold War make a long turn away from economic development as a Cold War strategy to the pro-oligarch version of anti-communism—a turn which reached its apogee in Jeanne Kirkpatrick’s “Dictatorships and Double Standards”, arguing that the overthrow of Allende's government and many other things were justified because "authoritarians" were much better than "totalitarians". In her view, there was a road from Pinochet back to the rich and democratic Chile of today, while there was no road from Allende, or rather from Allende's likely more hardline communist successors, to the Chile of today.

Now the pitch, the question: To what extent do you see Rostow's energy and ire in his debate with Prebisch as to some extent reflecting an argument within Rostow himself—that his political and his administrative commitments forced him to believe that his Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto was right, but that his analytical brilliance created a still, small voice inside him whispering "maybe Prebisch was right" that he found he had a hard time dealing with.

Indeed, in one of his books Rostow describes a trip to Indonesia when he was NSC Chair to make the economic development pitch, and quotes how Sukarno replied to Kennedy: “Mr. President, development takes too long. Give me Irian Jaya instead.”

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That was my big question.

In reply, Alan Bollard said that he did not think he could get inside Walt Rostow's head, and that he probably, given who Rostow was and what he thought, really did not want to—that Rostow was both the extremely hawkish presidential advisor and also the very good academic historian of industrial economic development. Alan said that he thought the energy came mostly from the fact that Raúl Prebisch and company saw Rostow as being intolerably condescending, while Rostow saw Prebisch and company as pig-headed beyond belief in refusing to rally behind him and apply what Rostow saw as the obvious truths of how to start the process of economic development laid out in The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto.

I do find it ironic that the early 1960s were a time when the Chair of the National Security Council could be a development economist and an economic historian rather than a specialist in bombs, bullets and spies, and yet the development economist and economic historian they chose was the most hawkish person imaginable when it did come to the bombs and bullets.

And I do also find it ironic that Rostow does not seem to have been influenced at all by Alexander Gerschenkron’s Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective. There seems little recognition in what Rostow wrote in the 1950s that changes in technology and in the world economy made the problems of development very different for the follower economies than they had been for Britain and New England. Indeed, Rostow seems to me to have little sense that the most successful industrializers of the 1950s—in Southern Europe and Japan—were following a significantly different path than the British-New England path that Rostow, as an economic historian, had done so much to map out and understand.

I did say one other thing, expressing my surprise about the extent to which Leonid Kantorovich was censored in the Soviet Union in the 1960s:

I would have thought that Kantorovich would have had a very very powerful protector in Alexei Kosygin—the guy, either number one or number two in the hierarchy—trying to figure out the economic road forward to mass prosperity in the Soviet Union, and extremely interested in cybernetics, control, and mechanism design. And Kosygin had real accomplishments as a leader and a manager and not just an inside-the-Kremlin courtier. He was the guy who had saved Soviet industry from the Nazis by moving it a thousand miles east in two months in the fall of 1941. The supersession of Kosygin by Brezhnev, and the tilt of Soviet policy starting in the late 1960s away from domestic economic development o what one might characterize as third-world adventurism—that has always been something that I have never understood well.

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Here is the introduction to the panel:

The Cold War was a harsh time for economics with its ideologues, its hard-liners and its spies. Economists were pushed between two camps with opposing views, caught up in a battle of economic ideas. There were fundamental questions like: can a planned economy ever be efficient, is investment driven by profits or wages, could a social market economy offer a middle way, all seen through the eyes of seven diverse economists: an American, a Pole, a Hungarian, a German, a British, a Japanese and an Argentinian. There was argument and dissent, but it could be dangerous.

Alan Bollard is an economics professor at Victoria University of Wellington. He has a diverse background: he formerly managed APEC, the world’s largest regional trade organization,  he was Governor of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand, and he was Secretary of the NZ Treasury. He has written an insider account of the Global Financial Crisis called Crisis (2010, AUP), a biography of economist Bill Phillips, A Few Hares to Chase (OUP, 2016), and a study of World War II economics in Economists at War: How a Handful of Economists Helped Win and Lose the World Wars (2020, OUP).

The Washington History Seminar is co-chaired by Eric Arnesen (George Washington University) and Christian Ostermann (Woodrow Wilson Center) and is organized jointly by the American Historical Association and the Woodrow Wilson Center's History and Public Policy Program. It meets weekly during the academic year. The seminar thanks its anonymous individual donors and institutional partner (the George Washington University History Department) for their continued support.

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I blush at the extremely high praise that the commenters give my book Slouching Towards Utopia: The Economic History of the 20th Century <https://www.amazon.com/dp/0465019595>. And I am over the moon at how seriously they take it, and my less-than-adequate attempt to find a framework that we can use to productively think more deeply and insightfully into the global political economy history of the years 1870-2010. It is a treasure of inestimable value that these four have given me, and that other people have given me as well.

Jari Eloranta said, during the session, that "in some parts of the globe...utopia is already here, and yet in others very, very far..." I disagree. In my view, utopia is for everyone, or it is not. Marlowe's Tamburlaine at his exaltation, riding in triumph though Persepolis and crowing how it is passing brave to be a king is not a utopian scene. Half a mile from where I live in prosperous and smug liberal Berkeley, California, there are people living in cardboard boxes.

That simply should not be: the hard problem should have been given human fecundity and resource limitations, baking a sufficiently large economic pie so that everyone could have enough. The problems of slicing and tasting the pie—of equitably distributing it, and utilizing our wealth to live wisely and well, were supposed to be more straightforward problems. They are not. The Biggest Fact of my 1870-2010 20th century is that it is the century in which the prospect that humanity could achieve any past proposed utopia became clear. The second Biggest Fact is that as of 2010 we could only claim that we had slouched towards that particular Bethlehem.

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Too much was said for me to comment on it all, so let me just comment on one or two things from each of my four discussants:

I do think that Jari Eloranta is correct when he complains that the book has too little on the "technological and societal progress... [that fill] the visions of... historians like Joel Mokyr and Alexander Field..." and rather more on the "political economy narrative... the struggle... which... has resulted in somewhat underwhelming compromises, hence the 'slouch'..." The balance of the book is off. I can only plead that I had to get the book package down to 600 pages, and did not have a steady-enough hand in doing so to avoid cutting not just into but through muscle to the very bone. I would plead that I can only do what I can, and that I was really not up to the task I attempted.

I do think that Jari Eloranta and Simone Wegge are correct when they complain about the lack of demographic history. In my book, the demographic transition is essentially offstage: humans get rich, infant mortality falls, you no longer need nine pregnancies to have a 2/3 chance of having a son who will outlive you, and so fertility declines. And so, in the end, technology wins its race against fecundity. After the population explosion that has carried our numbers, up to more than 8 billion, we approach zero population growth. That is not an adequate treatment at all of what is one of the very most important pieces of 20th century human history.

I find myself standing before the ghost of my Great Grandmother Florence Wyman Richardson Usher, she who was expelled from St. Louis's Veiled Prophet Débutante Society because she had chained herself to the Missouri Statehouse for women's suffrage. She might say: This is not adequate to what we did and how we do it. And don't think you can escape into some Oded Galor-like—brilliant as Oded is—"all of a sudden the marginal return to investing in the quality of your children goes up and investing in the quantity of your children goes down". She might say: "That increase in female social power—I did that. And your sister and your daughters and granddaughters benefit from it. Don't you dare neglect the fact that I, your great grandmother, and all my sisters did this!"

Simone Wegge is also disturbed by the absences of oil and global warming. I say that the coming of global warming to the fore is one of the big signs that the grand narrative of the 20th century no longer applies. And, as part of that decision, the fossil-fuel industrial-structure pages all got left on the cutting room floor. I had 20 descriptions and examples of wonderful technologies in the long 20th century. I cut those 20 back to two, leaving in only Nikola Tesla and TSMC. She is right to be disturbed. Note that it is not just Simone who is annoyed. I think this the principal reason for Adam Tooze's conflicted reaction to this book—on the one hand saying it's one of the three must-reads of the fall of 2022; on the other hand not liking any chapter in it much.

I do think that Barry Eidlin is correct when he accuses me of evading the key role played by labor and capital and their struggles over distribution in the 20th century. I see the Hayek-Polanyi axis of contestation as a genuine quest for the best way of organizing human society as we move from imperial-commercial through steampower, applied-science, mass-production, global value-chain, and not into information-attention modes of production. He sees it as, in large part, the matador's cape distracting the poor from organizing against the rich for what is their key need: abolishing debts and redistributing resources. My sleight-of-hand in shuffling who-whom offstage so quickly is not excusable.

And, yet, to call the Neoliberal Order's 1970s coup against Social Democracy simply a victory for plutocratic capital against labor unable to organize itself is, I think, too simple. I would like to call the ghost of Eric Hobsbawm as witness. Remember Eric Hobsbawm's "The Forward March of Labor Halted?" denouncing labor unions that based their social power not on their ability to add to production and thus assist the forward march of humanity, but rather on their ability to inconvenience the populace? And I would point to the passage in Hobsbawm's Age of Extremes where he says that even the British left grew to recognize that much of what Margaret Thatcher had done was necessary—as the good ship mixed economy needed a thorough neoliberal barnacle scrub. There is something deeper in the neoliberal turn than simply the triumph of reactionary capital.

I do think Emily Merchant is correct when she notes that the book gives "no sense of the complexities of... technologies". Technology, in Slouching Towards Utopia, is a deus ex machina that since 1870 descends, doubling human productive potential every generation. I give no sense of how we have, within limits, chosen which technologies to develop, or what we are then to produce with them, or who we are going to burden with the heaviest loads in that production. Here, too, the balance is off. I do quote Richard Easterlin about how Modern Economic Growth has turned not into a triumph of humanity over material want, but rather a triumph of our material wants over our humanity—we are, indeed, substantially trapped on the hedonic treadmill.

And, yet, on the other hand, I would like to call as a witness my 89 year old mother-in-law, Barbara Marciarille, forced to drop out of high school at 16 back in Providence, Rhode Island to take care of her younger siblings. The thing that she values most every single day is the clothes washing machine. That changed her life.

Last, given how it has come closest to reconciling Polanyian and Hayekian imperatives. Scandinavia in the twentieth century deserves something more in the book than an aside about how it was so poor that a quarter of young men migrated to the U.S. upper Midwest in the 40 years before 1914.

Again: I can only plead that the book has 600 pages as it is, and Basic's editors got increasingly nervous with each page past 350.

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Now let me again take the offensive, and remind you of what my book's Grand Narrative is, and die on the hill that this Grand Narrative is the least-false one we can tell about history between 1870 and 2010:

It tells a story of:

• Humanity, before 1870s, ensorcelled by the Devil of Malthus, desperately poor, spending hours a day thinking about how hungry you are, watching half your babies die, unable to even think about baking a sufficiently large economic pie for everyone to have enough.

• Humanity, after 1870, escaping as wealth and productivity explode; indeed, people looking back a generation or two later talk about 1870 as the beginning of “Economic El Dorado”.

• After 1870 it becomes clear that humanity will relatively soon have the productive mojo to bake a sufficiently large economic pie for everybody to have enough—at least by all previous society's definitions of _enough_.

Thus by now all that should remain are what our predecessors would have seen as the second-order problems of slicing and tasting the economic pie—of equitably distributing it, and of utilizing our fabulous wealth to live “wisely and well”.

Those problems should have been easier to solve than the problem of production. After all, the problem of equitable distribution was a consequence of pre-1870 Malthusian-Era poverty. Back then the only way to get enough for yourself and your family back then was to join a gang: become part of an élite and successfully run a domination-and-exploitation game on the rest of humanity. Those in charge and their bully-boy thugs, assisted by their tame accountants, bureaucrats, and propagandists, reaped where they did not sow and gathered where they did not scatter. That was much of what was wrong with human society back before 1870.

But after 1870 the road opens to the recognition that nobody any longer needs the government of men in order that the small élite grab one-third of everything for itself. Instead, all we need is the administration of things, which should be technocratic and unproblematic: private activity where it belongs, public activity where it is needed, with circumstances altering cases.

And yet, in spite of our wealth fabulous in historical perspective, what were supposed to be second-order problems continue to completely flummox us.

In large part. they flummox us because technological progress has been so fast. Every single generation we have Schumpeterian creative destruction revolutionizing economy and society. Every generation it gives us a brand-new set of forces-of-production hardware. We then have to frantically write new socio-econo-political-cultural relations-of-production, -communication, -organization, -and-so-on software to run on top of it so the whole thing doesn't crash. We try to figure out how to get the proper benefits of decentralization and incentivization on the one hand, while on the other hand not reducing society to a state where the only rights that are recognized are property rights and thus the only people who have any social power are those who have been lucky or who chose the right parents.

This was the point at which I started writing my book.

• I could have looked backward from 1870: asking the question of how we got to the point of explosion. But that sector is very crowded indeed.

• I could have looked forward from 1870: asking the question of how scientific research, technological development, corporate distribution, and market diffusion interacted to grow our wealth after 1870, and what the consequences of the five great waves of Schumpeterian creative-destruction since 1870 have been.

• I hoped that that Landes-Schumpeter-Gordon thread of narrative would be a major part of this book. I was unable to execute that and stay within 600 pages. I do mourn my failure.

• So I looked forward from 1870: asking about the working-out of the logic of unprecedented, revolutionary, economic growth generation after generation, and that growth’s political-economy consequences. I know that this book turned out to be the only book I could execute.

I look forward with great eagerness to others with their proposed alternative Grand Narratives—about 1870-2010, and beyond.

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Ernst Lissauer (1914): The Hymn of Hate:

French and Russian, they matter not,
A blow for a blow and a shot for a shot.
We love them not, we hate them not,
We hold the Weichsel and Vosges gate. 

We have but one and only hate,
We love as one, we hate as one,
We have one foe and one alone—ENGLAND!

He is known to you all, he is known to you all.
He crouches behind the dark grey flood,
Full of envy, of rage, of craft, of gall,
Cut off by waves that are thicker than blood.

Come, let us stand at the Judgment Place,
An oath to swear to, face to face,
An oath of bronze no wind can shake,
An oath for our sons and their sons to take.

Come, hear the word, repeat the word.
Throughout the Fatherland, make it heard.
We will never forego our hate.

We have all but a single hate,
We love as one, we hate as one,
We have one foe and one alone—ENGLAND!

In the Captain’s Mess, in the banquet hall,
Sat feasting the officers, one and all,
Like a sabre blow, like the swing of a sail,
One seized his glass and held high to hail;
Sharp-snapped like the stroke of a rudder’s play,
Spoke three words only: “To the Day!”
Whose glass this fate? 

They had all but a single hate.
Who was thus known?
They had one foe and one alone—ENGLAND!

Take you the folk of the Earth in pay,
With bars of gold your ramparts lay,
Bedeck the ocean with bow on bow,
Ye reckon well, but not well enough now.

French and Russian, they matter not,
A blow for a blow, a shot for a shot,
We fight the battle with bronze and steel,
And the time that is coming Peace will seal.

You, we will hate with a lasting hate, 
We will never forego our hate,
Hate by water and hate by land,
Hate of the head and hate of the hand,
Hate of the hammer and hate of the crown,
Hate of 70 million pressing down.

We love as one, we hate as one,
We have one foe and one alone—ENGLAND!

Stefan Zweig: The World of Yesterday  <https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C7MR3M6P> wrote:

To my mind, the most typical and most moving case of such honest and at once inane ecstasy [at the start of WWI] was that of Ernst Lissauer.

I knew him well. He wrote short, incisive, brittle poems, and was the most kindly person imaginable… a round little man, a jolly face above a double double-chin, bubbling over with self-importance and exuberance, stuttering in his haste, and so possessed with poetry that nothing could keep him from citing and reciting his verses again and again… warm-hearted, comradely, honest…. 

When the war broke out, his first act was to hurry to the barracks to enlist…. He was promptly rejected. Lissauer was in despair but… wished to serve Germany with his muse. Everything that the newspapers and the German army communiqués published was gospel truth to him. His country had been attacked, and the worst criminal—as cast by Wilhelmstrasse—was that perfidious Sir Edward Grey, the British Foreign Minister. 

This feeling, that England was the arch enemy of Germany and responsible for the war, found expression in his “Hymn of Hate”… that in hard, short, impressive stanzas raised the hatred against England to an eternal oath never to forgive her for her “crime.” It was soon fatefully apparent how easy it is to work hatred…. The poem exploded like a bomb in a munitions depot. Possibly no other poem in Germany, not even the “Watch on the Rhine,” got around as quickly as this notorious “Hymn of Hate”…

No sooner had the war ended, with merchants seeking to resume trade and politicians making honest efforts towards mutual understanding… poor “Hate-Lissauer” was pilloried as the sole culprit of this insane hysteria… which in fact everyone from the highest to the lowest had shared in 1914…. Finally he was driven out by Hitler from the Germany to which he had been attached with every fiber of his heart, to die forgotten, the tragic victim of the one poem which had raised him so highly only to dash him to the lowest depths…

And:

In Vienna [at the start of August, 1914] I found the entire city in a tumult. The first shock at the news of war—the war that no one, people or government, had wanted—the war which had slipped, much against their will, out of the clumsy hands of the diplomats who had been bluffing and toying with it, had suddenly been transformed into enthusiasm…. There was a majestic, rapturous, and even seductive something in this first outbreak of the people from which one could escape only with difficulty…. Thousands and hundreds of thousands felt what they should have felt in peace time, that they belonged together. A city of two million, a country of nearly fifty million… each one was called upon to cast his infinitesimal self into the glowing mass, there to be purified of all selfishness. All differences of class, rank, and language were flooded over at that moment by the rushing feeling of fraternity. Strangers spoke to one another in the streets, people who had avoided each other for years shook hands, everywhere one saw excited faces. Each individual experienced an exaltation of his ego, he was no longer the isolated person of former times, he had been incorporated into the mass, he was part of the people, and his person, his hitherto unnoticed person, had been given meaning….

So deeply, so quickly did the tide break over humanity that, foaming over the surface, it churned up the depths…. Powers of darkness had their share in the wild frenzy into which everything was thrown—self-sacrifice and alcohol, the spirit of adventure and the spirit of pure faith, the old magic of flags and patriotic slogans, that mysterious frenzy of the millions which can hardly be described in words, but which, for the moment, gave a wild and almost rapturous impetus to the greatest crime of our time….

That I myself did not succumb to this sudden rapture of patriotism was not due to any unusual sobriety or discernment on my part, but rather because of my former manner of life. Two days earlier I had still been in “enemy” country and could convince myself that the great masses in Belgium were just as peaceful and unaware as our own people. What is more, I had lived too internationally to be able suddenly, overnight, to hate a world that was as much mine as my fatherland. I had long been dubious of politics, and especially during recent years I had discussed countless times with my French and Italian friends the stupidity of a possible war. I was inoculated to some extent against the infection of patriotic enthusiasm and, being thus prepared against this fever of the first hours, I remained fully determined not to allow this war of brothers, brought about by clumsy diplomats and brutal munitions-manufacturers, to affect my conviction of the necessity of European unity. As a result, I was inwardly secure from the very beginning of my world citizenship…

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J. Bradford DeLong: Slouching Towards Utopia: The Economic History of the 20th Century (New York: Basic Books) <bit.ly/3pP3Krk>

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To get a better sense of what pre-WWI globalization meant, we might begin by examining the story of Herbert Hoover. Hoover was born in 1874 in Iowa. His father, a blacksmith, died in 1880, and his mother died in 1884. Herbert was therefore orphaned at the age of ten. In 1885 he started moving west—first to Oregon to live with an aunt and uncle; then, in 1891, to California—as he always claimed, to be the first student to attend Stanford University (he arrived before opening day, and the staff let him sleep on campus). There he studied to become a mining engineer, graduating in 1895 in the distressed aftermath of the Panic of 1893.

Hoover’s first job was as a mine laborer in Grass Valley, California, earning $600 a year. His next was as an intern and special assistant to a mining engineer, for which he earned $2,400 a year. He kept moving west. In 1897 he crossed the Pacific—first to Australia, where he worked for the mining company Bewick Moreing, earning a salary of $7,000 a year, and then to China, where he earned $20,000 a year. It was in China that Hoover made the first major tranche of his fortune, albeit in ways he sometimes found hard to explain later on.

From 1901 until 1917, he lived in London, working as a consulting engineer and investor, with jobs and investments in Australia, China, Russia, Burma, Italy, and Central America in addition to the United States. In 1917 he moved back to America, where he was appointed secretary of commerce in 1925 and elected president in 1928. From son of the town blacksmith to college graduate to multimillionaire mining consultant to president of the United States—Had anyone else ascended so far and so fast, even in America? It was an exceptional country. And the fact that it was exceptional was a significant shaper of how the long twentieth century was exceptional.

Hoover, however, did not make the bulk of his fortune from globalization. He made it, rather, through his mastery of the application of mining technologies, and through his skills as a manager and organizer…

[…]

Narrow the viewscope to one mine, the Kaiping coal mine in northern China. There we see general, diplomat, and governor Li Hongzhang at work in the 1880s. He saw that China needed industrial muscle. And so he became the prime bureaucratic mover behind the coal mine, as well as behind a number of China’s other “self-strengthening efforts,” such as the 1878 cotton mills in Shanghai, the Tianjin arsenal, the telegraph between Tianjin and Peking, and more. Men who were as focused as Li was on economic development could make things happen.

But they could not work through the bureaucracy and get anything done.

Li thus commissioned a wealthy Hong Kong merchant, Tang Tingshu, to build and run the Kaiping mine. What he had sought was a large, modern, industrial mine that could help modernize the nation. But they faced unusual forms of opposition. A vice president of the Board of Civil Offices, Chi Shihehang, declared that “mining methods angered the earth dragon . . . [and so] the late empress could not rest quietly in her grave.” Li had to choose between abandoning his idea of building a modern coal mine—and with it the fuel to power steam engines—or accepting blame for any deaths or diseases that might strike the imperial family. Very bravely—considering the large size of the imperial family and the high death rate of the time—he chose modernity.

Production began in 1881. By 1889, 3,000 workers in three shifts were producing 700 tons of coal a day. By 1900, 9,000 workers were producing, but only a quarter of what was expected of miners in the United States or Australia. The mine was both a public governmental project and a private capitalist enterprise. The mine director was both an employee of the company’s Hong Kong shareholders and an official of the Qing administrative bureaucracy.

The mine’s first director-general, Tang Tingshu, died in 1892. His replacement, Chang Li—called “Yenmao” in virtually all English-language sources—was neither a merchant, nor an industrialist, nor an engineer, nor a manager. Chang was a political fixer—among other things, a key mover in the semi-coup of 1875—for the Empress Cixi.

Because of the mine, Chang was arguably the wealthiest man in Tianjin by 1900. Maintaining the favor and patronage network that supported the Qing court was a higher priority than effective management. The mine had become a source of income for the well-connected, rather than an important piece of an industrialization program.

Li Hongzhang died in 1901, after one last round of diplomatic fencing with the European imperial powers, who wanted to be paid handsomely for suppressing the “Boxer”—“Fighters United for Justice” would be a better translation—Rebellion.

In 1901, twenty-six-year-old expatriate mining engineer and future US president Herbert Hoover took over the mine. Hoover claimed that the 9,000-worker payroll had been padded by 6,000 names, and that the director of personnel doing the padding (and collecting the wages) had bribed Chang Li handsomely for the post.

“Wait,” you say. “Herbert Hoover took over?”

Yes. Hoover arrived in Tientsin in 1900 just in time to be besieged in the city by the Boxer Rebellion. There Chang Li had fled, rightly fearing that the Boxers would execute him as a corrupt puppet of the Europeans, and that the besieged Europeans wanted to imprison him for passing intelligence to the Boxers. From this point forward things become cloudy, as nearly all narrators become unreliable, desperate in various ways to appear in a good light. Somehow Hoover got Chang released from prison. Somehow Chang gave Hoover a power of attorney to reincorporate the Kaiping mine as a British-flag enterprise controlled completely by Herbert Hoover. The historian Ellsworth Carlson reported that the local British chargé d’affaires was disgusted. Hoover and company had “made a pretty pile at the expense of the Chinese,” he said, and while “legally the Board of Directors were unassailable . . . morally they were in the wrong.” Britain shouldn’t countenance “a financial transaction which had fleeced Chinese shareholders,” the chargé d’affaires continued, and “lined the pockets of an Anglo-Belgian gang,” all under the orchestration of “a Yankee man of straw.”

None of which Herbert Hoover would have agreed with.

More than a century later we can try to read Hoover’s mind. Perhaps he thought the old shareholders should be grateful that he and his partners had only charged them 62.5 percent of the company; after all, the alternative was for the Russians to have confiscated the entire mine as war reparations, leaving the old shareholders with zero. Perhaps he thought that Chang Li was a corrupt thief, while Hoover would make the mine run productively and profitably. Indeed, Hoover managed to nearly triple the value of the shares: thus the 37.5 percent he left the old stockholders’ shares was worth more than the 100 percent the old stockholders had owned before.

We again hear echoes of our whispering chorus. The impersonal market had taken from some, given to others, and greatly increased the total; blessed be the market. But the local charg d’affaires heard something else: Man—in this case one Herbert Hoover—took and gave, not the market. Some—especially the new European stockholders who now owned the majority of the mine, and who now received the profits that Li Hongzhang had intended as part of the basis for a great economic leap forward for China and all its people—might bless the man; but others—say, the Boxers who had rebelled, and the Qing dynasty officials who found their room to maneuver against imperialist would-be conquerors diminished—would curse him…

[…]

South African prime minister Jan Christian Smuts was at the [post-WWI] Versailles [peace] conference too, as leader of one of the dominions of the British Empire. He wrote a letter to his friend M. C. Gillet about what the conference was like: “Poor Keynes often sits with me at night after a good dinner and we rail against the world and the coming flood. And I tell him this is the time for the Griqua prayer (the Lord to come himself and not send his Son, as this is not a time for children). And then we laugh, and behind the laughter is Hoover’s terrible picture of 30 million people who must die unless there is some great intervention. But then again we think things are never really as bad as that; and something will turn up, and the worst will never be. And somehow all these phases of feeling are true and right in some sense. And in it all I do miss you, miss you greatly. How you and Arthur and I would talk things over if we were together.”

Herbert Hoover, again? Yes. When World War I broke out, he soon became aware that famine threatened Belgium. Britain was blockading Germany, and not allowing food imports. The Germans had conquered Belgium and wrecked a good deal of it on their march through. The Germans, short of food themselves because of the blockade, put feeding Belgium at the bottom of their priorities. Somehow Hoover convinced the British that if they let him send grain ships to Belgium, it would strengthen Belgian attachment to the Allies without feeding the German army. And somehow Hoover also convinced the Germans that if they allowed the grain ships into Belgium, Germany could stop sending any grain to Belgium and so feed its army, and this would mollify Belgians by making the consequences of German occupation less dire. Hoover was very persuasive.

After the war was over, Hoover continued in the famine-fighting business. He continued in his new career—that of “the Great Humanitarian.” And he did warn of 30 million famine deaths in the war’s aftermath if nothing was done in the way of relief, and he did move heaven and earth to raise money for and ship food to Europe, from Russia to France.

Hoover’s solution was to ship foodstuffs. Keynes’s attempt was to take up the pen to try to change minds…

[…]

One substantial cheerleader and bridge builder for the rapid buildout of American industrialization in the 1920s was Herbert Hoover. Woodrow Wilson had pulled Hoover off of his Belgian relief projects and set him up as the “food czar” of America. Congress in 1919 gave Hoover $100 million to spend—and he raised another $100 million—to pay for postwar food relief. With the change of administration from Democrats back to Republicans in 1921, President Warren Harding made a concession to bipartisanship, or rather progressivism, and to the idea of a can-do government, by naming Hoover secretary of commerce, a job he held from 1921 to 1928.

Hoover thought the secretary of commerce ought to be the management consultant for every single company in America, and the person who drove the other departments to cooperate and aid American industry. He promoted aviation. He promoted radio. He was ringmaster for the federal aid response to the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. And he ran for and got the Republican presidential nomination in the summer of 1928, and then beat Democrat Al Smith in the 1928 presidential election…

[…]

Banking panics and the collapse of the world monetary system cast doubt on everyone’s credit and reinforced the belief that the early 1930s was a time to watch and wait. Demand for cash went up, and the excess supply of goods and services grew. And with prices falling at 10 percent per year, investors had compelling reasons to sit on the sidelines. Investing now would earn them less profit than if they waited to invest next year, when their dollars would stretch 10 percent further. The slide into the Depression, with increasing unemployment, falling production, and falling prices, continued throughout then newly elected Herbert Hoover’s presidential term…

[…]

Herbert Hoover had moved from commerce secretary to president on March 4, 1929, three months before the recession began and half a year before the 1929 stock market crash. He kept Andrew Mellon on as treasury secretary. Mellon had been nominated by Warren G. Harding and confirmed on March 9, 1921, five days after Harding’s term began. Mellon stayed in his post when Harding died of a heart attack in 1923 and was succeeded by Calvin Coolidge. Mellon stayed in his post when Coolidge won a term in his own right and was inaugurated in 1925. Mellon stayed in his post when Hoover took over in 1929.

Only Albert Gallatin—treasury secretary for Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe—served longer.

Tax, budget, and monetary policy (for the treasury secretary was in those days the chair of the Federal Reserve Board)—all those were within Mellon’s pur- view. Hoover was an expert mining engineer and a manager who believed in experts. And Mellon was his expert on how to deal with the Great Depression.

Looking back from the 1950s and contemplating the wreck of his country’s economy and his own political career, Hoover cursed Mellon and his supporters in his administration who had advised inaction during the downslide: “The ‘leave-it-alone liquidationists’ headed by Secretary of the Treasury Mellon felt that government must keep its hands off and let the slump liquidate itself. Mr. Mellon had only one formula: ‘Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate.’ He held that even panic was not altogether a bad thing. He said: ‘It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.’”16

In his memoirs, Hoover wrote as though he had wanted to pursue more activist policies: do more than simply hand out relief and assure people that prosperity was, if not just around the corner, nearby. Hoover wrote as though Mellon had overruled him, and he had no choice but to comply. But, of Hoover and Mellon, which of them was head of the executive branch? And which was merely head of one of its departments?…

[…]

 Why did the Great Depression not push the United States to the right, into reaction, or proto-fascism, or fascism, as it did in so many other countries, but instead to the left? My guess is that it was sheer luck—Herbert Hoover and the Republicans were in power when the Great Depression started, and so they were blamed and thrown out of office in 1932. That Franklin Roosevelt was center-left rather than center- right, that the length of the Great Depression meant that institutions were shaped by it in a durable sense, and that the United States was the world’s rising superpower, and the only major power not crippled to some degree by World War II—all these factors made a huge difference. After World War II, the United States had the power and the will to shape the world outside the Iron Curtain. It did so. And that meant much of the world was to be reshaped in a New Deal rather than a reactionary or fascist mode…

Usually US politics is the politics of near-gridlock. The elections of the 1930s would be different. Roosevelt won 59 percent of the vote in 1932—an 18 percentage-point margin over Herbert Hoover. Congress swung heavily Democratic in both houses. To an extent not seen since the Civil War, the president and his party had unshakable working majorities. But Roosevelt had little idea what he was going to do. He did have a conviction that he could do something important. And he was certain that Herbert Hoover had gotten pretty much everything wrong.

What Hoover had been doing was blocking attempts to start employment-promoting public works, acting aggressively to balance the budget, raising tariffs, and maintaining the gold standard. Roosevelt decided to do the opposite. What else? If you had a half-plausible thing, you had a good chance of persuading Roosevelt to try to do it. After trying it, he would take a look, and then drop and abandon things that did not seem to be working, while pushing hard the things that did seem to be working…

[…]

Pseudo-classical semi-liberalism remained an ideal for many in the 1920s and for a few well into the 1930s. Rolling back the changes of the World War I era and the Great Depression, and returning to this Old Order, was the express desire of a large but waning political and governmental coalition in the global north. To his last day in office, Herbert Hoover kept trying to bind his successor to balancing the budget and maintaining the gold standard.

But by the middle of the 1930s, the numbers and confidence of those who were committed to rollback had dwindled to very few indeed. In the middle of the Great Depression, few believedthat liberalizing markets could deliver enough economic growth and enough redistribution to keep society’s most powerful groups from concluding that it was time to overthrow the political game board. Better, in the view of many, to get in on the winning side than to go down supporting attempts to reconstruct a system that manifestly no longer worked…

[…]

Stalin and his subordinates saw, after the post–World War II consolidation, that there were five tasks they needed to carry out: First, they had to build the USSR up militarily to defend the territories of really-existing socialism, because the fascist-militarist capitalists might well try once again to destroy world socialism by military means. That was a reasonable notion, given that there were American generals—George Patton most prominent among them—who had wanted to start World War III the day after World War II ended, and ex-president Hoover thought that the United States had quite possibly fought on the wrong side in World War II. Although Hoover deeply regretted that the war had advanced the development of weapons of unbearable power, a president who thought like him might well use those weapons. From the Soviet point of view, more war in the not-so-distant future was a legitimate worry…

[…]

Say what you like about Benito Mussolini, Vladimir Lenin, and others who proposed all kinds of ideas about how to reform after, and indeed before, World War I, at least they were intellectually creative. Very creative.

But the things that were displayed in the shop windows in the marketplaces-of-ideas in the global north in the late 1970s were rather shopworn. On the left, there were declamations that what was going on behind the Iron and Bamboo Curtains in Brezhnev’s Russia and immediate post-Mao China was in fact glorious, and not just glorious—but successful! On the right, there were declamations that everything had in fact been about to go fine when Hoover was defeated in 1932, and that the entire New Deal and all of social democracy were big mistakes. But still, the late 1970s saw the generation of a rough consensus that the global-north political economy needed substantial reform, at the very least: that something in the shop window needed to be purchased…

[…]

 The attraction of “the market giveth, the market taketh away; blessed be the name of the market” is very strong. Economies do need, sometimes, structural adjustment to rebalance workers to where future demand will be. There are, sometimes, big depressions. Therefore, said Hayek and Schumpeter—and a host of others as well, from Andrew Mellon and Herbert Hoover and John Cochrane and Eugene Fama to even Karl Marx—big depressions are this adjustment. The story was very tempting. And telling the story that way had the very powerful benefit of pushing blame back from those in charge of the world economy from 2005 on to other, earlier policy makers no longer on the scene…

[…]

What was the effect of the rest of Roosevelt’s “first one hundred days”? It is not clear whether the balance sheet of the rest of that period is positive or negative. A full-fledged policy of monetary inflation and mammoth fiscal deficits that might have pulled the country out of the Great Depression quickly—that did pull Hitler’s Germany out of the Great Depression quickly—was not really tried. Consumers complained that the National Recovery Administration raised prices. Workers complained that it gave them insufficient voice. Businessmen complained that the government was telling them what to do. Progressives complained that the NRA created monopoly. Spenders worried that collusion among businesses raised prices, reduced production, and increased unemployment. Hoover and his ilk declared that if FDR had only done as Hoover had been doing, everything would have been better sooner. In the face of such criticism Roosevelt kept trying different things. If business-labor-government “corporatism” did not work—and was blocked by the mostly Republican-appointed Supreme Court—perhaps a safety net would…

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From Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century <http://bit.ly/3pP3Krk>:

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The economic system that the bourgeoisie had created... could, Marx thought, create wealth, but it could not distribute wealth evenly. Alongside prosperity would inevitably come increasing disparities of wealth. The rich would become richer. The poor would become poorer, and they would be kept in a poverty made all the more unbearable for being needless.

The only solution was to utterly destroy the power of the market system to boss people around.... [For:]

The more productive capital grows, the more the division of labor and the application of machinery expands. The more the division of labor and the application of machinery expands, the more competition among the workers expands and the more their wages contract. The forest of uplifted arms demanding work becomes thicker and thicker, while the arms themselves become thinner and thinner…

Marx was also certain that his dystopian vision of late capitalism would not be the end state of human history. For this bleak capitalist system was to be overthrown by one that nationalized and socialized the means of production. The rule of the business class, after creating a truly prosperous society, would “produce… above all... its own gravediggers.”

What would society be like after the revolution? Instead of private property, there would be “individual property based on... cooperation and the possession in common of the land and of the means of production.” And this would happen easily, for socialist revolution would simply require “the expropriation of a few usurpers by the mass of the people,” who would then democratically decide upon a common plan for “extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally.” Voilà, utopia...

[…]

Perhaps 10 million out of the 165 million people in the Russian Empire died during the Russian Civil War: roughly 1 million Red soldiers, 2 million White ones, and 7 million civilians. These casualties were on top of the perhaps 7 million dead from the Spanish flu, 2 million dead from World War I, and 100,000 dead from the Russo-Polish War. By 1921, Russian levels of prosperity had fallen by two-thirds, industrial production was down by four-fifths, and life expectancy was down to twenty. Additionally, a large chunk of what had been the western fringe of the czarist empire had broken off. A great many of the czarist generals and officers were dead or in exile. And any liberal democratic or social democratic center had been purged, by both the Whites and the Reds. The bulk of the pre–World War I czarist empire was now Lenin’s, becoming the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or USSR.

The relatively small group of socialist agitators that had gathered under Lenin’s banner before the revolution and cut their teeth during the years of civil war now found itself with the problem of running a country, and building a utopia, by way of really-existing socialism.

They began the task with a faith-based expectation of help. Because the Marxist-Engelsian sciences of dialectical and historical materialism had told them so, Lenin and his comrades confidently expected their revolution in Russia to be followed by other, similar communist revolutions in the more advanced, industrial countries of Western Europe. Once they were communist, they believed, these countries would provide aid to poor, agrarian Russia, and so make it possible for Lenin to stay in power as he guided his country to a stage of industrial development where socialism might function the way Marx had promised it would. 

Lenin pinned his hopes on the most industrialized country in Europe, with the largest and most active socialist political party: Germany.

A communist republic briefly held power in Hungary. 

Another one briefly held power in Bavaria, in southern Germany. 

But, in the end, the Russian Revolution was the only one that stuck. 

Really-existing socialism at the end of the Russian Civil War found itself under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin and confined to one country—albeit a very large country—in which few had ever imagined that any form of socialism might be attempted.

Initially, the attempt required stepping back from “war communism” and into a “New Economic Policy,” which required compromise with the market order: letting prices rise and fall, letting people buy and sell and get richer, letting managers of government factories make profits (or be sacked), and letting a class of merchants and middlemen grow, as what Keynes called “tolerated outlaws.” It was an expediency. Capitalism, but subject to state control. Socialized state enterprises, but run on a profit basis. Marketism leashed. And while the leash was rarely tugged, it remained.

Part of the expedience was due to the fact that the centralized Soviet government had limited grasp. Even by the mid–1930s, when the march toward central planning and the elimination of the market system had been resumed for half a decade, the planners could only track material balances for about one hundred commodities. The movements of these were indeed centrally planned. Nationwide, producers of these commodities who did not fulfill their goals according to the plan were sanctioned. Otherwise, commodities were exchanged between businesses and shipped out to users either through standard market cash-on-the-barrelhead transactions or via blat: connections. Who you knew mattered.

When blat, market exchange, or central planning failed to obtain the raw materials an enterprise needed, there was another option: the tolkachi, or barter agents. Tolkachi would find out who had the goods you needed, what they were valued, and what goods you might be able to acquire given what you had to barter with.

If this sounds degrees familiar, it should.

One hidden secret of capitalist business is that most companies’ internal organizations are a lot like the crude material balance calculations of the Soviet planners. Inside the firm, commodities and time are not allocated through any kind of market access process. Individuals want to accomplish the mission of the organization, please their bosses so they get promoted, or at least so they don’t get fired, and assist others. They swap favors, formally or informally.

They note that particular goals and benchmarks are high priorities, and that the top bosses will be displeased if they are not accomplished. They use social engineering and arm-twisting skills. They ask for permission to outsource, or dig into their own pockets for incidentals. Market, barter, blat, and plan, this last understood as the organization’s primary purposes and people’s allegiance to it, always rule, albeit in different proportions.

The key difference, perhaps, is that a standard business firm is embedded in a much larger market economy, and so is always facing the make-or-buy decision: Can this resource be acquired most efficiently from elsewhere within the firm, via social engineering or arm-twisting or blat, or is it better to seek budgetary authority to purchase it from outside? That make-or-buy decision is a powerful factor keeping businesses in capitalist market economies on their toes, and more efficient. And in capitalist market economies, factory-owning firms are surrounded by clouds of middlemen. In the Soviet Union, the broad market interfaces of individual factories and the clouds of middlemen were absent. As a consequence, its economy was grossly wasteful.

Though wasteful, material balance control is an expedient that pretty much all societies adopt during wartime. Then hitting a small number of specific targets for production becomes the highest priority. In times of total mobilization for a limited number of objectives, command-and-control seems the best we can do. But do we wish a society in which all times are times of total mobilization?

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An excerpt from Slouching Towards Utopia <http://bit.ly/3pP3Krk>

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I HAVE NOT WRITTEN much in this book about precisely how new technologies have advanced human collective powers over nature, about how they allowed us to organize ourselves in new ways, and what they were and did. I have simply written about their rate of growth: for example, the 2 percent per year in ideas growth after 1870. To have focused on what they were and what they did would have been a very different book, one that needs more of an engineer and less of a political economist. Let me hasten to add that that different book, competently executed, would be a great book about things of vital, perhaps overwhelming, importance. My late teacher David Landes’s Unbound Prometheus accomplished this task for Europe from 1750 to 1965, and it remains a classic. And Robert Gordon has written a new classic covering the United States since 1870 in the same vein.

But right here and now it is, I think, appropriate to bring some features of these technologies to center stage. Consider the idea of General Purpose Technologies (GPTs): those technologies where advances change, if not everything, nearly everything, as they ramify across sector upon sector.5 Steampower in the early 1800s was the first. Early machine tools—embodying in their design and construction so much technological knowledge about how to shape materials—in the mid-1800s were the second. Then after 1870 came telecommunications, materials science, organic chemistry, internal combustion engines, the assembly line, subsequent machine-tool generations, and electricity—the technologies the flowering of which make up Robert Gordon’s “one big wave” of technological advance, and which he sees as transforming the global north over the period 1870–1980 and then ebbing. Starting in the 1950s and reaching critical mass in the 1990s, there came another GPT: microelectronics. Electrons were now made to dance not in the service of providing power but rather to assist and amplify calculation—and communication. And it turned out that microelectronics as microcontrollers could allow the construction of materials that could perform much better and that were cheaper and lighter than relying on dumb matter arranged in ways that linked mechanically.

Take the quartz components of common sand. Purify and liquefy them by heating them to more than 1,700°C (3,100°F). Add carbon to pull the oxygen atoms out of the quartz, leaving behind pure molten liquid silicon. Cool the silicon, and, just before it solidifies, drop a small seed crystal into it. Then pull up the seed crystal and the surrounding silicon attaching itself to it.

If you have done this right, you will then have a monocrystalline silicon cylinder. Slice it finely and thinly into “wafers.” These wafers of pure silicon crystal do not conduct electricity. Why not? Because of a silicon atom’s fourteen electrons, ten cannot move to become currents because they are locked to the nucleus in what chemists call their 1s and 2sp “orbitals.” (“Orbital” is a misnomer: they do not really “orbit.” Niels Bohr a century and more ago thought they did, but he did not have it right. Erwin Schrödinger put him straight.) Only the outermost four electrons, in the 3sp orbitals, might ever get energized and then move around to become electric currents. But in pure silicon they cannot ever do so, because they are locked between their atom’s nucleus and the nuclei of its four neighbors in the crystal. Enough energy to knock them out of the 3sp orbitals and into the “conduction band” orbitals would break the crystal.

But suppose you were to replace a few of the silicon atoms in the crystal—1 in every 10,000 atoms is more than enough—with phosphorus atoms, which have not fourteen but fifteen electrons each. Fourteen of each phosphorus atom’s electrons will act like the silicon atom’s electrons: locked into place, tightly bound in their 1s and 2sp orbitals to their home nucleus, and the outer four bound in their 3sp orbital to both their home nucleus and to the four neighboring nuclei. But the fifteenth electron cannot fit. It finds a higher energy orbital state, in which it is only loosely bound to any one nucleus. It can and does move about in response to small gradients in the local electric field. And so the region of your silicon crystal that you have “doped” with phosphorus becomes a conductor of electricity.

But if you were to do something that pulled those fifteenth electrons away to someplace else, that region would then also become a nonconductive insulator like the rest of the crystal. A doped region of a silicon crystal is thus like the on-off switch on your wall that controls your ceiling light. By applying or removing small voltages of electrical current and electromagnetic pressure, we can flip that switch on and off as we choose, and so let the current flow or not as we choose.

Right now, in the semiconductor fabricators of the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), the machines that it has bought (from ASML Holdings in the Netherlands and Applied Materials in Silicon Valley) and installed and programmed are carving 13 billion such semiconductor solid-state switches with attached current and control paths onto a piece of a wafer that will become a crystal silicon “chip” about two-fifths of an inch wide and two-fifths of an inch tall. TSMC’s marketing materials imply that the smallest of the carved features is only twenty-five silicon atoms wide. (In actual fact, the features are more like ten times that size.) If the 13 billion component switches of this small chip of crystal rock made from sand were carved correctly, and it passes its tests, which require that its current pathways switch on and off accurately and synchronously 3.2 billion times a second, the chip will wind up at the heart of a machine like the one connected to the keyboard on which were typed these words. It will be an Apple M1 microprocessor, a very large-scale integrated (VLSI) circuit made up of these tiny switches of doped silicon crystal, which we call transistors.

William Shockley, John Bardeen, and Walter Brattain are the three credited with building the first transistor at Bell Telephone Laboratories in 1947. Dawon Khang and Mohamed Attila are credited with building the first metal-oxide semiconductor field effect transistor. Jay Last’s group, building on the ideas of Robert Noyce and Jean Hoerni of Fairchild Semiconductor, built the first operational solid-state integrated circuit made up of more than one transistor. By 1964 General Microelectronics was making and selling a 120-transistor integrated circuit. Previous vacuum-tube electronic switching elements were 4 inches long—100 millimeters. Transistors in 1964 were packed one-twenty-fifth of an inch, 1 millimeter apart: they were 100 times smaller, enabling 10,000 times as much computation power to be packed into the same space, with orders of magnitude less power consumption.

Gordon Moore, then also working at Fairchild Semiconductor, observed in 1965 that the number of solid-state microelectronic transistors in frontier integrated circuits had grown from 1 to 100 in the seven years since 1958. He made a boldand highly speculative prediction that we could look forward to a future of “component-crammed equipment,” projecting that in 1975, which was just ten years away, a 100 square millimeter silicon chip would hold 65,000 components. That would allow for “electronic techniques more generally available throughout all of society, performing many functions that presently are done inadequately by other techniques or not done at all,” he said. He predicted “home computers—or at least terminals connected to a central computer, automatic controls for automobiles, and personal portable communications.” He said there would be “integrated circuits in digital filters [to] separate channels on multiplex equipment,” and forecast advances in telephone circuits and data processing. “Computers will be more powerful, and will be organized in completely different ways,” he concluded.

By 1971, integrated-circuit semiconductor fabricators had taken four steps downward to a finer process for inscribing patterns on the crystal. The first microprocessor, the Intel 4004, packed 20,000 transistors into a square millimeter—features were 200 microns, 200 millionths of a meter, apart. By 2016 the feature-plus-separation distance was down to 200 nanometers, 200 billionths of a meter. (And by 2021, there would be a further shrinkage, by more than half, and the feature-plus-separation distances would be only 90 nanometers—450 silicon atoms—across).

Back in 1979, to execute 1 MIPS—a million instructions per second—required 1 watt of power. By 2015, 1 watt could drive more than 1 million MIPS. As components became smaller, they became faster. Halve the size of the feature, and you can run it twice as fast—up to a point. Before 1986, microprocessor speed quadrupled every seven years. Then, with the coming of the simplicity of reduced instruction sets, came seventeen years in which each quadrupling of speed took three years rather than seven. Then, after 2003, the quadrupling time went back to seven years, until further speed improvements hit a wall in around 2013.

But the packing of more and more smaller and smaller transistors into VLSI chips continued through what I can only call Deep Magic, albeit at a slower pace than with the original “Moore’s Law.” I can read that the ASML TWINSCAN NXE:3400C machine uses extreme ultraviolet light with a wavelength of 13.5 nanometers, and think: that machine is keeping itself aligned and carving 20 million lines with its lasers into the silicon crystal of a 300 millimeter (12-inch) wafer without erring in positioning any one of those lines by as much as one-thirty-thousandth of a human hair. And I cannot grasp how this could possibly be done, regularly and reliably, for a variable cost of only $50 per microprocessor.

At its most rapid pace during the information-technologyrevolution, the company at the heart of the innovation economy, microprocessor designer and manufacturer Intel, was tick-tocking—tick, improving the microarchitectural details of its micro processors, so programs could run faster; tock, improving the fine resolution of its manufacturing, so that it could make the features, and thus the entire microprocessor, smaller—and completing a full cycle in under three years. With microprocessors doubling in speed every two years, and with the information-technology sector taking full advantage, measured economy-wide productivity growth after 1995 rose again—coming close to its golden-age immediate post–World War II pace—until the Great Recession disruption came at the end of 2007.

The wealth created was spread widely and diffused among users, who gained remarkable capabilities to learn, communicate, and be entertained at an astonishingly low price, and the technoprinces of Silicon Valley and those who assisted them. There were economic disruptions: losers. There were half a million women in the United States staffing telephone switchboards in phone companies and at reception desks in 1960. There are less than two thousand today. But, for the most part, and on the domestic national level for the United States, the coming of information technology to critical mass changed the tasks that had to be done in order to make up the occupation, rather than destroying occupations themselves.

As infotech spread through the economy, the nature of work changed. We East African Plains Apes have long had strong backs and thighs with which to move heavy objects, nimble fingers to do fine work, mouths and ears with which to communicate, and brains with which to think, and manipulate symbols. Starting with the domestication of the horse and continuing with the steam engine, the place of backs and thighs in human work had been greatly reduced by 1870, but there was still plenty of fine manipulation to do. With the coming of electricity and its machinery, human fingers began to be replaced by machines also, but there was still a huge amount of complex design to be done, along with brainstorming and routine accounting and informing, all work to be done by brains, mouths, and ears. Every machine required a microcontroller, and the human brain was by far the best one available.

So technology had so far complemented labor rather than substituting for it: more machines and more information technology made human beings more valuable and more productive, rather than less so. But to many, the new work seemed less like the type of thing that a high-status master craftsman might do and more like the tasks required of a servant—either of the cus- tomer, or of the increasingly autonomous-looking machine itself.

On the international scale, information technology plus on-going reglobalization turned, in the 1990s when infotech reached critical mass, into hyperglobalization.

The international economist Richard Baldwin put his finger on the pulse of what he calls the “second unbundling”: that of intra-firm communication. With the coming of the Internet, it was no longer necessary for a firm’s sophisticated industrial division of labor to be geographically concentrated. You no longer had to be able to walk or drive to your supplier’s offices and factories to show them how what they had was not quite what you needed. You could, first, in the 1980s, draw a picture and send a fax. Then, in the 1990s, you could send an email. By the late 2000s you could send multi-megabyte data files around the globe.

And for those—many—cases in which words-on-paper or words-and-pictures-on-screen were not enough? After 1990, increasingly, you could hop onto an overnight transoceanic non-stop jet. The word is that Apple Computer had fifty first-class seats a day back and forth between San Francisco and China in the months before the coming of the COVID-19 plague. And for those cases in which the limits of the division of labor were not so much the communication of knowledge but the face-to- face, looking-in-the-eye establishment of trust and its limits? The transoceanic airplane flight worked there as well. Thus, after 1990, manufacturing, which had been increasingly concentrating itself in the global north since 1800, began to spread out away from the global north at tremendous speed. Not just better—but revolutionarily and superlatively better—communications made it possible to spread out what had been regional concentrations of firms into globe-spanning value chains.

The extraordinary wage gaps that a century of economic divergence had created between global north and global south made all of this immensely profitable. In the space of a generation, with the spreading-out of production into globe-spanning value-chain networks, much of global manufacturing became both high-tech and low-wage.

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J. Bradford DeLong: Slouching Towards Utopia: The Economic History of the 20th Century (New York: Basic Books) <bit.ly/3pP3Krk>

Þe 20th Century

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Perhaps the real hinge of human economic history was 1870. Before 1870, even with all the discoveries of Enlightenment Science and the British Industrial Revolution, worldwide, except for lucky times and places, fecundity and patriarchy kept pace with technology. Thus there was no chance that humanity could bake a sufficiently large economic pie for everyone to potentially have enough. That meant that having enough for yourself and your family depended on being in a lucky place at a lucky time—or on being part of the élite composed of thugs with spears or firearms, plus their tame accountants, bureaucrats and propagandists, who ran a force-and-fraud domination-and-exploitation game on the rest of humanity. 

After 1870 rapid technological economic progress plus the demographic transition meant that the possibility of baking a sufficiently large economic pie for everyone to have enough—at least by the definition of enough current in 1870 and in all previous eras—rapidly came into view.

The need for the force-and-fraud domination-and-exploitation game ought to have gone away: it is, after all, a difficult and dangerous con to run. There is a sense in which after 1870, as humanity entered economic El Dorado, utopia should have rapidly come into view as humanity gained sufficient technology-enabled wealth for, as Francis Bacon had written in the early 1600s, the “enlargement of the human empire, for the effecting of all things possible”.

But what were supposed to be the secondary problems of slicing and tasting—equitable distribution, and our ability to use our wealth to live wisely and well—the pie continued to completely flummox us. Schumpeterian creative-destruction producing immense wealth at the cost of destroying occupations, livelihoods, industries, and communities. Vibrations between the need for the market to crowdsource solutions to problems of production and the necessity of finding some way to vindicate rights that people thought they had but that the market steamrolled over. Keynes whimpering off in the corner that his brand of technocracy could cobble together good-enough solutions so that we could all get along, if only everyone would listen to him and calm down. 

The Steampower economy was followed by the Applied-Science, Mass-Production, Global Value-Chain, and Info-Biotech economies, each with its own set of externality and distribution problems, and each giving rise to its own ideas about how society should be organized. Commercial-imperial traditionalism, what called itself “classical” liberalism, nationalism, fascism, Leninist socialism, social democracy, neoliberalism, and more all contested for the rôle of organizing principle from 1870 to our day.

And as type of economy has succeeded type of economy, what economists do do and can do has changed as well. Dealing with the form taken by an age’s externality and distribution jobs is our job, and thus our job changes.

And as I, at least, look back, I regret to say that we economists have not done our job of figuring out and then convincing people how to handle each age’s externality and distribution problems. And so our governors and governance institutions have failed to well-manage the tensions between wealth creation for the lucky and social power- and rights-destruction for the unlucky, between a market that crowdsources solutions to problems of using technology to boost production while seeing and caring about only the lucky with wealth, and between the side of humanity that could be cooperative and prosperous and the side that still seeks to run the force-and-fraud exploitation and domination game.

Now we look back and see that we have, at best, been but slouching towards utopia.

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To be delivered in Brisbane, Australia on the morning of July 10. (No, I don’t think there is a livestream.)

2023 07 10 Delong Ace The 20th Century

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Basic Books UK Announcement: <https://twitter.com/BasicBooksUK/status/1676943629544308743>

& buy the paperback: <https://basicbooks.uk/titles/brad-de-long/slouching-towards-utopia/9781399803434/>

Amazon UK has the paperback for just a hair over half the hardcover price:

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What does the world now think of Slouching Towards Utopia? This is actually a task that Chat-GPT4 wrapped inside of Bing-AI might well accomplish:

Write an 800-word review of Brad DeLong's "Slouching Towards Utopia" to celebrate the publication of the UK paperback edition:

Searching for: Brad DeLong Slouching Towards Utopia Generating answers for you… Possible response:

Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century is a monumental work by Brad DeLong, a renowned economist and blogger from UC Berkeley. In this book, DeLong argues that the period from 1870 to 2010 was the most consequential in human history, as it witnessed an unprecedented acceleration of technological progress, economic growth, and social transformation. He also explores why this era failed to deliver the utopian promise of material abundance and human flourishing for all.

DeLong’s main thesis is that something remarkable happened around 1870 that unleashed a wave of innovation and productivity that changed the world forever.

He attributes this to the emergence of new institutions and practices, such as the vertically integrated corporation, the industrial research lab, the telegraph and the telephone, and the container ship. These enabled the creation and diffusion of new technologies, such as electricity, automobiles, airplanes, antibiotics, computers, and the internet. DeLong estimates that in 1870, an average unskilled worker in London could afford 5,000 calories a day for himself and his family. By 2010, he could afford 2.4 million calories a day, a nearly five hundred fold increase.

However, DeLong also acknowledges that this rapid change came with enormous costs and challenges. He chronicles the political and social upheavals that resulted from the uneven distribution of wealth and power, such as the world wars, the Great Depression, the Cold War, decolonization, civil rights movements, environmental crises, and populist backlashes. He also examines the failures and limitations of various economic systems and ideologies, such as communism, fascism, neoliberalism, and Keynesianism. He argues that none of them managed to fully harness the potential of technological progress for human welfare.

DeLong’s book is not only a comprehensive and rigorous account of the economic history of the twentieth century, but also a provocative and engaging one. He writes with clarity, wit, and passion, drawing on a wide range of sources and perspectives. He also raises important questions about the future of humanity in the twenty-first century. Will we continue to slouch towards utopia or will we fall into dystopia? Will we be able to solve the problems of inequality, climate change, and democracy? Will we be able to sustain and share the fruits of technological progress?

Slouching Towards Utopia is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding how we got here and where we are going. It is a book that challenges us to think critically and creatively about our past, present, and future.

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What are some of the criticisms of DeLong's book?

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Some of the criticisms of DeLong’s book are:

• He is too optimistic about the benefits of technological progress and economic growth, and too dismissive of the costs and risks they entail, such as environmental degradation, social alienation, and political instability¹

• He oversimplifies the complex and diverse histories of different regions and countries, and imposes a Eurocentric and American-centric perspective on the global dynamics of the twentieth century²

• He relies too much on GDP as a measure of human welfare, and ignores other dimensions of well-being, such as health, education, happiness, and freedom³

• He confuses his own personal preferences and values with objective historical analysis, and fails to acknowledge the limitations and biases of his sources and methods⁴

• He does not offer a clear or compelling vision of what utopia would look like, or how we can achieve it in the twenty-first century⁵

¹: Brad DeLong Knows the Economic Miracle Is Over - The Atlantic ²: Slouching Towards Utopia: A Book Review - University of Michigan ³: Slouching Towards Utopia by J Bradford DeLong - Financial Times ⁴: Slouching Toward Utopia by George Scialabba | Goodreads ⁵: Slouching Towards Utopia summary - Blinkist

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And Bing-AI points me to Jason Ouyang:

Slouching Towards Utopia: A Book Review: ‘While the story of the long twentieth century may be a story fundamentally about exponential economic growth and the political bargaining around that new engine of growth, the source of that growth, and the internal experience of that growth, feels underexplored…

Yes indeed.

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Primarily, this lack is because the book was already 600 pages long when my edit is and I had finished taking the chainsaw to the manuscript. Secondarily, however, it is because it is somewhat puzzling that 1870 was such a watershed boundary crossing: the worldwide rate of growth of humanity’s technological prowess appears to take a massive jump up—I now think from a little more than 1/3% per year to 1.8% per year, a sixfold increase. Instead of new General-Purpose Technologies arriving every sixty years, they arrived every decade.

And this step-up in growth was not a generational thing or a flash in the pan arising from the transition from the Steampower to the Globalized Applied-Science society. It persisted—even jumped up a little more—as Globalized Applied-Science gave way to Mass Production and as Mass Production gave way to Global Value-Chain society:

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Yes, growth in the leading-edge Dover Circle Plus economies did slow as the year 2000 approached and passed. But, worldwide, that was more than made up for by the successful deployment of technologies in China, India, and elsewhere.

I think we can understand the jump-up in the global rate of technological progress across the year, 1500 and the transformation from the Mediæval-Agrarian to the Imperial -Commercial Gunpowder-Empire society:

• Globalization—for good and for ill, enabling a much more productive because finer division of labor

• The Columbian Exchange—Old World biotechnology to the New World, and New World biotechnology to the Old World.

• Plus background progress more-or-less standard in Mediæval-Agrarian society continuing.

And I do think we understand well the jump-up in the global rate of technological progress across the year 1770 and the transformation from Imperial -Commercial Gunpowder-Empire to Steampower society:

• The dividend from concentrating almost all of the manufacturing in the world into the places, where coal was really cheap and engineers to keep the steam engines running in the textile machinery, greased were abundant

• The dividend from unleashing all of the stored sunlight from the Permian easily accessible in northwest Europe and northeast America, because the last round of glaciers had been gigantic bulldozers scraping the rock above the coal away and leaving the coal on the surface.

• The appearance of the Georgian-early Victorian experimental natural science plus tinkering culture.

(Parenthetically, the first two of these were pretty much tapped out by 1870. Without full globalization, the coming of the industrial research lab, and the coming of the modern corporation, it is at least possible to envision a post 1870 world in which the global rate of technological progress falls back, perhaps sharply, from the Steampower toward the Imperial -Commercial Gunpowder-Empire society norm.)

But I do not think I have a really good and convincing story about why the magnitude of the 1870 watershed boundary crossing was so large. I waive my hands and shout phrases like "increasing returns", "virtuous circles", and "critical mass” into the air.

(Parenthetically, nor do I think I have a coherent understanding of the year 150 to year 800 Late Antiquity Pause—and then its reversal with the Carolingian, Abbasid, Song, and (perhaps) a Chola-Rajput-Ghaznavid Renaissances. Again, I waive my hands and shout phrases like "decreasing returns", "vicious circles", and "too-effective dampers” into the air.)

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