DeLong's Grasping Reality: Economy in the 2000s & Before: Enlarging the Bounds of Human Empire

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THING YOU OUGHT TO KNOW: Historian Patrick Wyman Does Podcasts

Brad DeLong — Thu, 26 Mar 2026 10:50:41 GMT

& Patrick Wyman’s relatively new “Past Lives” podcast is excellent: : <https://patrickwyman.substack.com/p/new-history-podcast-past-lives>…

Patrick Wyman: <https://bsky.app/profile/patrickwyman.bsky.social/post/3mhw6odcejs23>: ‘New season of Past Lives starts now! Introducing Bodily Experiences - every episode focuses on the life of a person we know through their remains, like skeletons and mummies. Thanks to new archaeological tools, we can understand past people in ways never before possible <https://patrickwyman.substack.com/p/new-history-podcast-past-lives>.
People I'm covering on this new season of Past Lives:
-Anzick-1, the oldest human remains found in the Americas
-The Ancient One/Kennewick Man (N. America, 6500 BC)
-The Shaman of Bad Durrenberg (Europe, 7000 BC)
-Otzi the Iceman (Europe, 3300 BC)
-The Princess of Xiaohe (Xinjiang, 1800 BC)
-Gebelein Man (Egypt, 3300 BC)
-The Amarna Laborers (Egypt, 1330 BC)
-Fu Hao (Shang Dynasty, China, 1200 BC)
-Tollund Man (Europe, bog body, 400 BC)
-Pazyryk Ice Maiden (Scythian tattooed mummy, 400 BC)
-Ephesus Gladiator (Roman, c. 200 AD)
And many, many more!…
Perspectives: Past, Present, and Future, by Patrick Wyman
New History Podcast: Past Lives
Hello friends! It’s been a while since I’ve been active on here, but there are good reasons for that, I promise. This has been an extraordinarily punishing and busy year: my father died, I finished a book (Lost Worlds - preorder now!), my longtime podcasting partner Wondery has been folded into Amazon, and I got the news that…
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5 months ago · 55 likes · 15 comments · Patrick Wyman

Patrick Wyman has the prose-, the speaking-, the patience-, and the narrative imagination-skills to make what is important about history intelligible and compelling. In a media ecosystem optimized for outrage and velocity, he has, perversely and admirably, instead optimized instead for explanation and understanding.

Wyman is a trained historian who decided that the thing he best at—reconstructing the texture of lived experience from fragmentary sources, and then embedding that texture in the big, slow-moving structures of power, production, and belief—might actually be useful for making sense of the twenty‑first century. His Substack, “Perspectives: Past, Present, & Future” at <https://braddelong.substack.com/publish/post/192189965>, undersells how ambitious the project really is. The through‑line is that you cannot understand who we are now without understanding the worlds that made us, and you cannot understand those worlds without following the flows of power and resources, and you cannot follow those flows without caring about people who never made it into the standard high‑political narrative at all.

That sensibility was already on display in his earlier work—on Rome, on late medieval war and state formation, on the strange, violent adolescence of European capitalism. But it coalesces in this podcast series. Wyman is very good at asking, in effect: what did this feel like for the people who were not in the council chamber, not on the throne, not in the ledgers as partners but in the ledgers as costs?

That was part of what made his book The Verge such a powerful piece of writing: individual lives as vehicles through which historical structure becomes visible as we watch people navigate a world in which the “big” changes—the rise of long‑distance commerce, the consolidation of states, the spread of new technologies and ideas—are not slogans but pressures and opportunities that smell of mud, gunpowder, and printer’s ink.

It helps a lot that he writes and speaks beautifully. The prose and voice are clean, vivid, and unpretentious, with an ear for the telling detail and the sharp phrase. He can toggle, in a single piece, from the granular—how a particular family’s fortunes rose and fell with the price of grain—to the synoptic—how the integration of Atlantic and Baltic trade circuits reweighted the hierarchy of European regions. Wyman is building a body of work that models how serious history can function in a democratic conversation. He is not dumbing things down; he is lifting readers up, on the assumption that they are capable of following arguments about structure and contingency, about path dependence and power. At a time when much commentary oscillates between shallow presentism and comforting myth, that is an enormous service.

That is what good historical writing (and speaking) ought to do. He does it, consistently.

References (by AI):

WYMAN, PATRICK. 2026. Post on Bluesky: “New season of Past Lives …” BlueSky. March 25. <https://bsky.app/profile/patrickwyman.bsky.social/post/3mhw6odcejs23>.
WYMAN, PATRICK. 2026. Lost Worlds: How Humans Tried, Failed, Succeeded, & Built Our World—A History of Civilization Through Trial & Error, Ice Age to Bronze Age. New York: HarperCollins. <https://books.google.com/books/about/Lost_Worlds.html?id=–Y80AEACAAJ>.
WYMAN, PATRICK. 2025. “New History Podcast: Past Lives.” Perspectives: Past, Present, & Future. November 17. <https://patrickwyman.substack.com/p/new-history-podcast-past-lives>.
WYMAN, PATRICK. 2023. “Welcome (Back) to Perspectives.” Perspectives: Past, Present, & Future, December 7. .
WYMAN, PATRICK. 2021. The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, & Forty Years that Shook the World. New York: Twelve. <https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/patrick-wyman/the-verge/9781538701171/>.
WYMAN, PATRICK. 2017–2026. Tides of History. <https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tides-of-history/id1257202425>.

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NOTE TO SELF: All of the Currently Live Theories of the Causes of the "European Miracle"

Brad DeLong — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 02:54:32 GMT

& was the “European Miracle” 800-1914, 1492-1914, 1689-1914, or 1776-1914?…

And, of course, highly overlapping:

Local geography & resources (coal, land, disease environment):
Jared Diamond, Kenneth Pomeranz, Robert Allen, Paul Bairoch, Fernand Braudel, Mark Koyama & Jared Rubin, Eric Jones, Leonid Grinin & Andrey Korotayev
Institutions, property rights & representative government:
Douglass North & Robert Thomas, Daron Acemoglu–Simon Johnson–James Robinson, Avner Greif, Joel Mokyr, Gary Cox, DeLong & Shleifer, Robert Brenner, Chris Isett, Eric Jones
Political fragmentation, competition & “market for ideas”:
Jared Diamond, Joel Mokyr, Niall Ferguson, Eric Jones, James Belich, Mark Koyama, Tuan-Hwee Sng, De la Croix–Doepke–Mokyr (guilds/journeymen)
Culture, religion & “WEIRD” psychology / Protestant ethic:
Max Weber, David Landes, Deirdre McCloskey, Joseph Henrich, Larry Siedentop, Nathan Rosenberg & L.E. Birdzell, Timur Kuran (for Islamic-world contrast), Justin Yifu Lin, Yasheng Huang, Eric Jones
High-wage economy & inducement mechanisms (wages, prices, factor prices):
Robert Allen, Gregory Clark, Jan Luiten van Zanden, Stephen Broadberry, Bishnupriya Gupta, Allen–Bassino–Ma–Moll-Murata–van Zanden
New World, coal, & “accidents” (California school/contingency):
Kenneth Pomeranz, Prasannan Parthasarathi, Jack Goldstone, Andre Gunder Frank, John Hobson, Jeffrey Williamson, Diego Comin, Acemoglu–Zilibotti (risk/diversification)
Colonialism, slavery, & deindustrialization at the periphery:
Eric Williams, Paul Bairoch, Amiya Kumar Bagchi, Prasannan Parthasarathi, Jeffrey Williamson, Tirthankar Roy (partly revisionist), Daron Acemoglu et al. (institutional twist), James Walvin
Human capital, knowledge transmission, & guilds:
De la Croix–Doepke–Mokyr (guilds/journeymanship), Bas van Bavel & coauthors (capital goods diffusion), Timur Kuran (Islamic legal forms
& firms), Mark Dincecco (state capacity & public finance)
Demography, Black Death, & Malthusian-escape dynamics:
James Belich, Oded Galor, Mark Koyama & coauthors, David Weir, Allen/Bairoch/van Zanden on wages, demography,
& living standards
Globalization, trade structure & core–periphery dynamics (19th c. “Big Bang”):
Kevin O’Rourke, Jeffrey Williamson, Guillaume Daudin, Leandro Prados de la Escosura, Paul Bairoch, Leonid Grinin & Andrey Korotayev

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"The Permanent Problem of the Human Race": Yglesias, Keynes, Lindsey; the Quest for Valued Identities & Societal Roles; & How to Move from "Abundance" to "Flourishing"

Brad DeLong — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 20:08:36 GMT

We cannot successfully outsource the solutions to the problem of how to live wisely and agreeably well to markets, bureaucracies, & parasocial algorithm-driven media feeds. We need, rather, societies of abundance in the service of human-scale connection and purpose to have what is in any sense a good society…

Matt Yglesias focuses here on a fact: People’s well‑being jumps when they change status from “unemployed to “retired”. Spinning out the implications of this for an increasingly rich society is an important task for public reasoners here in the century of the 2000s. If we don’t figure this out, we may well wind up in what Brink Lindsey calls a “middle flourishing trap” of mass abundance without mass happiness. For the modern institutions we have built that enable our prosperity and power—markets, democratic states, ideologies, and now algorithmic systems—are extraordinarily productive but structurally inhuman, dissolving the intermediate associations that people who live at human scale need to believe that they are leading lives worth living.

The important thing is not to be rich or even to be working, but rather to have a valued social identity. Smart from Matt Yglesias:

Matt Yglesias: 100 Years of Increasing Leisure <https://www.slowboring.com/p/100-years-of-increasing-leisure>: ‘What happens to unemployed people when they reach retirement age…. They experience a large upswing in well-being…. Te social identity of an unemployed person is much worse than the social identity of a retired person, and so shifting from “unemployed” to “retired” is a big win…. In American culture… even people who inherit large sums of money and don’t need to work tend to want to be seen as working hard at philanthropy or whatever else instead of just chilling.
Keynes perhaps missed this because… he would have grown up in a world where it was considered perfectly respectable for a gentleman to have no occupation and just live off of family money. But, again, I think retirement shows the limits of this American culture of hard work. If you’re affluent and in your 60s and want to stop working and just golf or whatever else all day, nobody thinks there’s a problem with that. And you can see that around 15 percent of men seem to retire early….
It’s not true that “Keynes was wrong” and human lust for material prosperity knows no limits and people will just work and work no matter how productive we become. The idea of people sitting around not working strikes most people, at least in America, as kind of depressing. But it’s clear that when you reframe it around a widely understood social identity like “retirement” that it becomes much more acceptable.
It’s at least plausible that we are on the corner of a big labor-displacing surge in productivity…. [But] I don’t want people to see it exclusively through a lens of threat. Keynes’s positive, optimistic framing of productivity growth is an important way of looking at the world…. [An]other nuance… is that a decent amount of people’s time is spent on unpaid household labor… drudgery. [But] since Keynes’s time… washing machines and dishwashers,…

I do think Matt gets two things wrong here. The first is this:

Matt Yglesias: 100 Years of Increasing Leisure <https://www.slowboring.com/p/100-years-of-increasing-leisure>: ‘In American culture… even people who inherit large sums of money and don’t need to work tend to want to be seen as working hard at philanthropy or whatever else instead of just chilling. Keynes perhaps missed this because… he would have grown up in a world where it was considered perfectly respectable for a gentleman to have no occupation and just live off of family money…

Matt claims that Keynes did not see this. But he did. Keynes does have remarks—pointed remarks—about the behavior of British upper class twit heirs and heiresses:

John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren <http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf>: ‘To judge from the behaviour and the achievements of the wealthy classes to-day in any quarter of the world, the outlook is very depressing! For these are, so to speak, our advance guard—those who are spying out the promised land for the rest of us and pitching their camp there. For they have most of them failed disastrously, so it seems to me—those who have an independent income but no associations or duties or ties—to solve the problem which has been set them…

He believed that the upper-class twits were, by and large, drunkards, gamblers, and whoremasters: that they were definitely not living “wisely and well”, but rather suffering from boredom, ennui, wasting their powers in trivial pursuits, suffering from social emptiness and restless status competition.

He believed that the upper-class twits were facing such a problem precisely because humanity had hypnotized itself into overvaluing work:

For most of human history, survival required constant labor.
Thus moral systems that survived valorized industriousness because scarcity demanded it, and successful societies find ways to boost pro-social behavior by adding inner mental to external material-organizational impulses.
A world in which scarcity would no longer be our master would, Keynes thought, administer an enormous moral-psychological shock to humanity.

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We will solve this—if we do—by creating other slices of life besides “retirement”, “schooling” (and “re-schooling”), and raising children that are sources of internal purpose and of external respect. Keynes does not see this solution as easy. It is, in fact, as he stresses, the permanent problem of the human race:

John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren <http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf>: ‘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…. To those who sweat for their daily bread leisure is a longed-for sweet—until they get it…. Man will [then] be faced with his real, his permanent problem—how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well…. There will be no harm in making mild preparations for our [future] destiny, in encouraging, and experimenting in, the arts of life as well as the activities of purpose…

And that ought to bring me to one of the now fifty-seven urgent TOP PRIORITY intellectual tasks confronting me on my IMMEDIATE TO DO NOW!!!!! list: my review of my friend Brink Lindsey’s new book The Permanent Problem <https://academic.oup.com/book/10.1093/oso/9780197803967.001.0001>.

I made a down payment on my review a month ago when I posted on it <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/assessing-brink-lindseys-the-permanent>, reacting to Brink’s anguish at two notably bad reviews—by Jonathan Rauch and Michael Strain, both falsely making Brink out to be some post-liberal weirdo.

In fact, Brink is the furthest thing from a post-liberal:

Brink Lindsey: Life Under “An Immense & Tutelary Power” <https://brinklindsey.substack.com/p/life-under-an-immense-and-tutelary>: ‘I reject this post-liberal position completely and unreservedly…. [While] there are totalitarian tendencies in modernity…. the dominant tendencies… [are the] liberating and humanitarian… dramatic uplift in material living standards… explosion in scientific knowledge and technological capabilities… mass literacy… governments subject to popular control… rule of law… the stigmatization of war… embrace of… universal human dignity… [Post-liberal] thinkers[’ ideas have]… profoundly anti-human implications…

Brink merely sees human flourishing as requiring more than Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms:

Freedom from want—material plenty.
Freedom from fear—not being subject to arbitrary oppression and domination.
Freedom of religion—or, more broadly, freedom to decide what your life is for.
Freedom of speech—not having to hold your tongue, but actually having a say.

Brink sees human flourishing—living wisely and agreeably and well, as Keynes put it—as also requiring a society of:

close relationships (family, friends, community),
meaningful projects (work or nonwork efforts that demand skill and conscientiousness),
rich experiences (the cultivated ability to attend to the world’s “miracle of consciousness”).
inclusiveness (dense webs of belonging and status),
dynamism (the capacity to explore, experiment, and innovate, and to turn new capabilities into better lives).

And Brink’s major diagnosis of the ills of modernity is that the society we have built while an absurdly rich society is also a terrifying mass society: we confront it as producer-cogs in labor markets, as consumer-cogs in product markets, and as parasocial information- and entertainment-consumers who then find themselves without agency to affect anything at all worthwhile. All human associative groups and markers of cohesion and particularity have been steamed away.

We have market economies with their price signals and their equilibria. We have states—democratic states, for now at least—setting-up rules of interaction and issuing commands via what really is a tremendously efficient bureaucratic order. We have ideologies creating and enforcing common values and orientations and operating procedures to a degree that the Prussian General Staff college dreamed of but never managed to attain. And we always have the possibility of a charismatic personalist dictatorship, law-abiding or not, giving mass society direction. on the other—whether by a market equilibrium, a bureaucratic command, an ideological conformity-enforcement, or an overmighty authoritarian personalist dictator.

All of that is necessary for us to be extraordinarily productive as we are.

Yet these societal-scale institutions squash the individual: liberate us from material scarcity and personal hierarchical domination and empower us to control nature and organize ourselves on the one hand, but subject us to the dominion of extraordinary strong powers—market systems, bureaucratic systems, ideological systems, and now algorithmic systems—that seem arbitrary and alien. They seem so because they are. They make us their playthings, controlling us by making us offers we dare not refuse, for refusing them hobbles our very valuable extraordinary material prosperity.

And so none of that is at the human scale we need for autonomy and agency, and thus for human flourishing:

Brink Lindsey: Links & Some Thoughts About Early Critics <https://brinklindsey.substack.com/p/links-and-some-thoughts-about-early>: ‘What once was a complicated, often convoluted amalgam of overlapping and competing hierarchies and authorities and loyalties resolves into an undifferentiated mass of subjects under a single rationalizing central authority…. All the intermediate institutions that lend structure and coherence and solidarity and workable consensus… are in decline.… The result is progressive atomization, as people’s connections to anything other than the market and state loosen and fray. Under these circumstances, as the bottom-up structures of mass society disintegrate, the only thing holding the social order together is top-down control…

The things our society does not produce are:

positive freedom in the sense of the ability to form groups,
groups at human scale,
so that we can do things that matter to us,
both individually and communally.

That, in a nutshell, is, I think, the point that Brink Lindsey is trying to make in his The Permanent Problem. Perhaps the best way to grok it is to see it as the Second Coming of Alexis de Toqueville <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexis_de_Tocqueville>, deploying Tocqueville’s concepts of the “tyranny of the majority” and “aristocracy of manufactures” as descriptions of our societal pathologies today—the pathologies internal to our liberal democratic capitalist order now in transition from the globalized value-chain to the attention info-bio tech economy.

What do I think of Lindsey’s diagnosis, assessment, and project?

A month ago I said I would have to leave that for another time. I do have a day job, after all.

And today I have to repeat the same thing—I still do have a day job.

DeLong, J. Bradford. 2026. “Assessing Brink Lindsey’s The Permanent Problem”. DeLong’s Grasping Reality. February 9. <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/assessing-brink-lindseys-the-permanent>.
Keynes, John Maynard. 1930. “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.” In Essays in Persuasion. London: Macmillan. <http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf>.
Knabe, Andreas, Ronnie Schöb, & Clemens Hetschko. 2012. “Identity & Wellbeing: How Retiring Makes the Unemployed Happier.” VoxEU/CEPR. May 4. <https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/identity-and-wellbeing-how-retiring-makes-unemployed-happier>.
Lindsey, Brink. 2026. “Links & Some Thoughts About Early Critics”. The Permanent Problem. February 5. <https://brinklindsey.substack.com/p/links-and-some-thoughts-about-early>:
Lindsey, Brink. 2026. The Permanent Problem: The Uncertain Transition from Mass Plenty to Mass Flourishing. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. <https://academic.oup.com/book/10.1093/oso/9780197803967.001.0001>.
indsey, Brink. 2023. The Permanent Problem. August 29. <https://brinklindsey.substack.com/p/life-under-an-immense-and-tutelary>.
Yglesias, Matthew. 2026. “100 Years of Increasing Leisure”. Slow Boring. March 7. <https://www.slowboring.com/p/100-years-of-increasing-leisure>.

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DRAFT: COURSE: The Enlargement of the Bounds of Human Empire... :: Spring 2027

Brad DeLong — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 19:28:23 GMT

On the Birth of Science as We Know It: Thinking Out Loud: Thursday Economic History

Brad DeLong — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 23:43:57 GMT

Why did science emerge—& persist—in early modern Europe? Instruments, math, & print: the bundle that built nullius in verba, the Republic of Science, and then modern science as we know it— why & how Europe’s geographic & élite fractures forged a method that made empircal curiosity about nature’s workings pay…

Science as we know it didn’t blossom in Europe by accident; it was subsidized by rivalry and craft. Add print, religion’s institutional shelters, and academies—and novelty suddenly could make a payroll. Earlier efflorescences had stalled; Europe’s persisted because it lowered the cost of verification. The bundle—artisans + math + print + institutions + more—made curiosity compounding because that specific bundle aligned incentives for empirical truth about nature rather than for the support of élite power.

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Draw a line in the sand for “science as we know it”. The convenient dates are 1543 and 1687: Andries van Wesel—Vesalius—with his De Humani Corporis Fabrica and Mikołaj Kopernik—Copernicus—with his De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium as the front door, Isaac Newton’s Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica as the oak-and-iron back gate, and in between the Royal Society’s nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for what is true. There and then a distinctive way of knowing—mathematico‑experimental, evidence‑seeking, increasingly public, and then institutionalized—was born in early modern Europe. It persisted, rather than sputtering out. Europe did not invent curiosity, or cleverness. It assembled a social machine in which curiosity could keep paying its own way. And for the first time cleverness was not tuned to elaborating the ideas in sacred texts, or to advancing ideas that were useful to the lords of the society-of-domination who ran its force-and-fraud exploitation machine. Cleverness was, rather, tuned to determining what worked out there in the world of nature.

We can see a knot of mutually reinforcing forces:

élite fragmentation and status‑competition that raised the payoff to being right;
a craft world of instruments that forced an interventionist epistemology;
a religious‑intellectual climate that, ambivalently but often positively, authorized empirical inquiry;
printing press-enabled networks that forged a public and logistics for ideas; and
institutions that lowered the cost of arriving at and maintaining stable belief.

These together made the Republic of Science more than a heroic efflorescence episode: they made it a going concern.

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Fragmented Elites & the Political Economy of Being Right

Strong bureaucratic empires and unified élite cultures are excellent at assimilating improvements into “more of the same.” Early modern Europe, by contrast, was unsuccessful at both. It was not a unified empire. It did not have a unified élite. There was a patchwork rather than a monopoly—on both force of arms, and on the ideology that granted one status as one of those who deserved to dominate. First, there were stable geography-marked kingdoms. Dukes of Burgundy may have merely ruled “our lands over here” and “our lands over there”; but kings of England, France, Aragon, Naples, Portugal and Bohemia; Princes of Wales; Dukes of Saxony, Bavaria, Milan, Lorraine, Brittany, and Austria; and a few others had a social reality and thus a durable political strength much more than a selection of lordships owing a common feudal allegiance. And kings, popes, dukes, bishops, burghers, theologians, urban merchants, craft guilds, and even universities all fought with ideas and swords to reconfigure the logic of societal order and hierarchy, seeking better position sat the trough of the 1/3 of all the farm produce and craftwork that flowed to the dominators.

Abundance, Dislocation, & the Fight to Focus Our Attention in the 21st Century

Brad DeLong — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 00:00:54 GMT

Dropping next Monday 2025-12-15, I think, is me on Sean Illing’s “Grey Area” podcast...

Growth keeps delivering but agency keeps slipping. The question is no longer how to get richer as fast as possible, but how to use our riches to live wisely and well as technological change creatively enriches and destructively dislocates. In the forthcoming Attention Info‑Bio Tech society, the fight will be for us to focus our attention so that it serves our purpose rather than the purposes of those who wish us ill, so that we can use wealth to create and enhance freedom rather than find technological power used to create techno attention-serfdom.

Sean has a preview:

Sean Illing: The world has gotten richer—so, why aren’t we happier?<https://www.vox.com/podcasts/471467/gray-area-brad-delong-progress-abundance>: ‘Technological progress and economic growth are preconditions for human happiness, not a guarantee…. We live longer, healthier, safer lives than almost any generation that came before us. And yet, the experience of modern life often feels unsettled. People are anxious, politics are brittle, and the promise of progress feels shakier than ever. Few thinkers have grappled with these contradictions more deeply than Brad DeLong. He’s an economic historian at UC Berkeley and the author of Slouching Towards Utopia, a sweeping account of the “long twentieth century” when technological progress reshaped every aspect of human life. I invited DeLong onto The Gray Area to talk about the purpose of progress, the tension between getting richer and living well, and whether our politics are capable of stewarding another era of transformation….
Key takeaways:
Growth has allowed humanity to conquer privation and disease – but discontent remains, and prosperity hasn’t solved the deeper question of what progress is for.
Abundance doesn’t necessarily lead to a sense of agency; many people still feel that impersonal systems shape their lives without their consent.
The 21st century will continue to be defined by growth and prosperity, but the center of gravity will shift to the developing world.
The defining question of our era may well be whether humans can direct their attention toward what truly matters in an era when there are increasingly competing claims to it…

Some more bite-sized pieces of the conversation:

Progress conquers scarcity but not meaning: Material abundance has largely ended the Malthusian world of pervasive hunger, disease, and early death, yet it hasn’t answered what progress is for: “Progress begins with escaping the Malthusian condition… But no longer living under the pressure of absolute scarcity, how much of our time and energy should still be devoted to producing more? And what kind of more?”
Means vs. ends confusion: Increasing GDP and consumption is not 100% aligned with living wisely and well: “The question then becomes: how do we use absolute abundance to create the conditions in which human beings can flourish?”
Agency deficit amid abundance: Wealth does not deliver meaningful freedom from impersonal systems—ideologies, bureaucracies, markets, algorithms—that control our lives without our ever remembering giving them permission to do so: “Material wealth does not automatically produce a sense of agency—indeed, it can produce a strong sense that one cannot afford to grasp one’s agency for fear of falling off a hedonic treadmill.”
Attention as the scarce resource: After the social-democratic mass-production New Deal Order society and the globalized value-chain Neoliberal Order society, there will come the Attention Info-Bio Tech Society. The key to living wisely and well may hinge on the ability to recapture attention and focus from the Zuckerbergs and the Murdochs who want to glue your eyeballs to screens they own so they can make a few more pennies by selling ads: “Directing your attention toward what matters in your becoming your best self is a defining challenge.”
Uneven technological change drives dislocation: Each generation since 1870 about 4/5 of the economy has seen a rough 1/4 increase in productivity, while about 1/5—a different albeit overlapping 1/5 each generation—has seen a doubling at the price of an utter transformation that upends life-patterns in a radical-change way: “This repeated experience of radical dislocation for some is one of the central political and economic challenges of the modern world.”
We’re handling this wave of disruption ‘moderately badly’: “Current politics and institutions manage transformation better than early 20th century, worse than postwar decades.“It’s better than the first half of the twentieth century. But, really, that is not saying much.”
Growth’s global center is shifting: The 21st century’s increasing prosperity is real, but its most powerful effects are increasingly centered in the developing world, especially China and India: “1980 is the moment when first China, then India, and later much of the rest of the poorer world managed to move onto the escalator of industrial and post-industrial growth, shifting the balance of the global story.”
Material gains enable purpose-seeking: Hundreds of millions now have reliable food, medicine, and education—freeing attention from survival to meaning: “They now have the chance to think about what it means to live well, not just how to survive. This is one of the great achievements of humanity.”
AI’s dual nature—cognitive leverage and capture risk: AI improves research and reasoning but will intensify attention-targeting and screen addiction: “Many people will gain access to tools that make complex reasoning and analysis easier. But Zuckerbergs and Murdochs and their ilk will use these same tools to target our attention even more aggressively for harvesting, in their financial interest and definitely not in our human interest.”
Speculative overinvestment with real advances: Hype drives misallocated capital (e.g., excess data centers), yet durable capability gains emerge: “We will end up with large amount of misallocated capital but also real advances that genuinely expand human capabilities—capabilities we can then use to live wisely and well, or to persuade other people not to.”
Crisis of representation in the info age: Shared reality is harder to sustain; constitutional designs assumed information environments that no longer exist: “Our information environment is now so vast and so open to manipulation that it’s harder than ever to sustain a shared sense of reality. Figuring out how to rebuild trust in both the representation of reality to us and the representation of us to the decision-making nexuses of the political system—those are both essential.”
Freedom as conditions for living well: The task is building institutions that expand real freedom—capabilities, dignity, agency—not just consumption.: A political and economic system should create the basic conditions in which people can become more free and more fulfilled. But we are not doing a great job of that.”
Two watchwords for the 21st century—growth and attention: Continued advancing prosperity, centered in the developing world, and the human struggle to control our attention to be mindful of what is good for us: “Whether we learn to navigate this environment successfully may be the most important story of the century.”

References:

DeLong, J. Bradford. 2025. Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the 20th Century. New York: Basic Books. <https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/j-bradford-delong/slouching-towards-utopia/9780465019595/?lens=basic-books>.
Illing, Sean. 2025. “The world has gotten richer—so, why aren’t we happier?” The Grey Area. Forthcoming. <https://www.vox.com/podcasts/471467/gray-area-brad-delong-progress-abundance>.

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A $140,000/Year Poverty Line? I: Stewarding & Utilizing Resources

Brad DeLong — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 00:35:14 GMT

Four factors making even rich people live poorly and hence feel poor in our immensely rich modern economy: a sense of precarity, a lack of centeredness, failures of stewardship, and an absence of mindfulness; all things that keep us from living wisely and well in our Attention Info-Bio Tech Economy. No, you are not poor if your household income is less than $140,000. But no matter how high your income is, you can make yourself live poorly. And it is surprisingly easy to do…

It continues to be the case that, every time something from the Free Press <http://thefp.com> brushes past my awareness, it almost invariably turns out to be wrong—usually deeply, often ignorantly, and also frequently making a choice to be stupidly wrong.

This time, it is Mike Green. And so we have clean-up on aisle #5 from Noah Smith:

Noah Smith: The “$140,000 poverty line” is very silly <https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-140000-poverty-line-is-very-silly>: ‘Mike Green <https://www.thefp.com/p/why-do-americans-feel-poor-because>… claimed… making less than $140,000 is poor…. There’s a much bigger market for the idea that $140,000 is poor than there is for the idea that $400,000 is middle-class. But… Green… is wrong…. He means that people can’t afford what he calls a “participation ticket”….
[But] if… even the basics of a “participation ticket” got further out of reach every year, then why are Americans flying to foreign countries, and going out to eat… working fewer hours and taking more leisure every year [with]… bigger houses, better MRIs, fancier food ingredients, and nicer cars, and also “luxuries” like foreign travel and restaurant meals. The “participation ticket”… is… to… a level of material luxury never before experienced by any middle class in any nation at any point in the history of the world…

And, related, crossing my screen the same day, we have John Scalzi:

John Scalzi: Poor Little Rich People <https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/11/28/poor-little-rich-people/>: ‘People making $500,000 a year… [yet] still frequently living paycheck to paycheck… vastly economically closer to someone in abject poverty than they are to… billionaire[s]…. If you are in the 1%… you’re comparing your lifestyle to other people in the 1%… people who have ten or a hundred times more income…. The temptation of the “lower rung rich” to financially overextend themselves to keep up appearances is real… [as] companies catering to [the] rich… know… customers don’t want to be seen counting their coins… shopping at Erewhon, not Aldi….
“Well, Scalzi, you’re bougie as f*** and yet you don’t seem to be living paycheck to paycheck,” I hear you say. And it’s true!…
The highly sporadic nature of writer income also means I am aware the income is not reliable….
Avoid… the comparison trap…. Krissy and I… experienced, shall we say, a deficit of money…. [So] we’re not going to spend money to impress….
Where we live… [an] investment strategy… predicated on… compound interest [being] our friend…. Buy[ing] a lottery ticket… has roughly the same odds as me or any other non-professional without access to advanced financial market tools successfully day trading or timing the market.
Finally… diminishing returns, and we don’t tend to spend after that bend…. My 2011 MINI Countryman lacks some modern technological amenities that I would like… [but] my own car still runs perfectly well and, frankly, sticking my phone into an eye-level holder and using an adapter to plug the thing into my car speakers will handle 90% of what I want…

From these Thanksgiving-week observations we could go in two directions:

First: We could go in the direction of the question: “Why are not people living wisely and well?” That is where Scalzi goes by giving readers a brief vade mecum to how he has (a) been lucky, while (b) using resources to conduct life wisely and well,

Second: We could go in the direction of the question: Why are there so many people who feel very small, unrespected, and dissed, for reasons? Why does even the upper-middle class of the richest civilization the world has ever seen lament so that it is put upon and oppressed by an inability to escape the grinding pressure of material necessity, when nearly everyone else always had or still has it far far worse? For, as Noah Smith admonished Mike Green thus, it is indeed the case that:

Noah Smith: The “$140,000 poverty line” is very silly <https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-140000-poverty-line-is-very-silly>: ‘The “basic needs”… are also a lot higher-quality than… back in 1963. Mike hand-waves this away: “Yes, cars today have airbags, homes have air conditioning, and phones are supercomputers. The quality of many goods has gotten markedly better. But we are not calculating the price of luxury. We are calculating the price of participation…”… But does this make any sense?… Middle-class people in 1963… aspired to buy new homes… [of] 1,450 square feet. Today… [it’s] 2,600 square feet…. Did Americans buy bigger houses because they were forced to… [as] real estate companies would only make gigantic houses… to force Americans to pay more for floor space they didn’t really care about?…

To me, Green is here exposed as simply incoherent: today’s American upper middle-class family with an income of $140,000 has, by yesterday’s standards, access to unbelievable heights of luxury. But somehow it lacks the ability to participate in middle-class American life.

Huh?

But—and I was surprised to see this—Green is backed up by Jared Bernstein here:

Jared Bernstein: That Kerfuffle Over a $140K Poverty Line <https://econjared.substack.com/p/that-kerfuffle-over-a-140k-poverty>: ‘The dude’s got a point…. What families needed to get by amounted to at least twice the poverty line…. The family budget lit[erature], which is where Greeen’s work would locate, is… not measuring poverty… [but] what it takes to get by with something closer to a middle-class lifestyle without a lot of stress around making ends meet…. How well people are doing… invokes complicated issues, particularly around absolute vs. relative well-being. Today’s poor… enjoy… plumbing, AC, antibiotics… far above the wealthy of years past. But… a lot of people, including the non-poor by any reasonable measure, are unhappy with economic conditions, their own perceived precarity, and their concerns about what the future holds…

So what is really going on here?

Let’s consider the first dimension here, and postpone consideration of the second to later.

With respect to the first, let me say this: Listen to John Scalzi. John Scalzi is right. John Scalzi has extremely good advice on using your resources to live wisely and well. (Which he puts into practice. Or, does he, really? Or is it all a fraud? I do not really know! I have only seen him once in the flesh! He is a very good writer, and so I am confident that he could pull off an impressive simulacrum on the internet, even if it is all merely his Rental Family <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rental_Family>!) Scalzi’s approach revolves, I think, around four concepts: call them precarity, centeredness, stewardship, and mindfulness. The first and third are pretty much about the acquisition of resources; the second and fourth about using them. Go read the whole thing!

Unfortunately, his very worthwhile weblog post is overcompressed. So let me lay out what he says, or at least what I take him to be saying, at more length:

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Scalzi’s advice on precarity: He writes thus:

“Well, Scalzi, you’re bougie as f*** and yet you don’t seem to be living paycheck to paycheck…”… It’s true! There are reasons…. My “paychecks”—advances, royalties, the occasional film/TV option—arrive so sporadically that if we tried to budget around their arrival we would be s***ed. Early on… we built up a “buffer account” to make sure our paying of bills was not dependent on waiting for any one particular check of mine to arrive…. The highly sporadic nature of writer income also means I am aware the income is not reliable, and watching the careers of other writers through the years means I know one can’t just assume everything will be golden forever…

A buffer account is indeed important. But more important is not assuming that you will have more income in the future than you do now. The key thing that causes life-crisis and family-wrecking shocks is optimism, which leads to borrowing from unhatched future chickens to boost the totals in your current budget. It is much easier, psychologically and practically, to spend an after-the-fact windfall well than to effectively slash to make serious economies.

To do this:

Brainwash yourself into thinking that your income is only 3/4 of what it is (much easier to do if you are on an academic-year, and your summer salaries and such do not show up in the headline number)…
Borrow only to earn net income (and reducing the rent you have to pay qualifies)…
Recognize in your bowels and your bones that, every generation since 1870, about one-fifth of the economy is overturned utterly; so much so that continuing to do the same thing in the same way is a relative and often an absolute income disaster; and that you should be ready to find yourself in this creative-destruction bullseye at any moment…

Scalzi’s advice on centeredness: He writes:

[Since] we live in rural Ohio… [we are] not exactly swimming with people whose income we directly index our own against… [lacking] shops cater to the higher end of incomes.… [My] professional community I am part of does not generally have the same incomes as, say, neurosurgeons or finance dudes…. Also… Krissy and I [have] both… experienced, shall we say, a deficit of money…. [So] we’re not going to spend money to impress other people. We’re sure as hell not going to pile up debt to do it…

William Morris wrote: “Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful…” That is a good test…
The same applies to experiences—if, after the fact, you cannot look back on it and regard it as a good use of a slice of your three-score-and-seven, then change your life…
Whenever you see someone with something or some experience that you envy, think: is that really making them happy? (If “yes”, figure out how you can go for a close equivalent you could it inside your budget.) Plus, if appropriate, tell them you envy them! It is a cheap way of making them happy, and making them think you have good taste…
Recognize that you really impress people not by having more luxuries, but by living wisely and well—which means that the bar with respect to luxury goods and services requires that you first develop the appropriate degree of connoisseurship…

Scalzi’s advice on stewardship: He writes:

We are able to acquire property at a discount to other areas…. We don’t… pay out of our income to service [debt]…. Our overall investment strategy is very much predicated on the idea that compound interest is our friend. Whenever I feel like trying to get rich quick, I buy a lottery ticket. It has roughly the same odds as me or any other non-professional without access to advanced financial market tools successfully day trading or timing the market…

This has corollaries which Scalzi does not spell out:

(i) Stuff as much of your current income as you can as early as possible into tax-favored savings vehicles, like 401(k)s and IRAs—and then draw in your stomach and stuff in some more.
(ii) Then leave it alone for decades, letting it accumulate while not watching it.
(iii) Diversify, diversity, diversity your investments across funds and asset classes—and diversify across time, which leaving it alone and not watching it will do.
(iv) In the financial world, people in aggregate are too scared of risk, so you should not be. Figure that your portfolio as a whole should be about as risky as and heavily aligned with the stock market as a whole.

This last is because are very few moments in which it has turned out to be good after the fact to have a total portfolio not aligned with and less risky on average than the stock market. 1928-1929 and 1998-2000 are pretty much the only moments when timing the stock market by pulling money out and hunkering down into other savings vehicles for five years or so would have turned out well:

<https://www.spglobal.com/spdji/en/research-insights/spiva/>

(There is one implication of what Scalzi says on stewardship that I think is wrong. A trained financial professional running a large-cap equity fund is not in the business of trying to underperform the market. But that is what, at a fifteen-year horizon, 88.3% of them do:

And only 0.8% manage to be in the top half of active funds for one year and then stay in the top half for each of the next four years. Thus when he implies that trained financial professionals with access to advanced financial-market tools have better odds of striking it rich through active trading, etc., then through buying lottery tickets, he is wrong. The overwhelming majority of such who do strike it rich do so, intentionally and unintentionally, by grifting their clients in various ways.)

Scalzi’s advice on mindfulness:

There’s a point where the use of money has diminishing returns, and we don’t tend to spend after that bend of the curve. Last year Krissy bought a Honda CR-V… [which] had everything Krissy wanted and needed in a car, and going upscale from there would have meant a lot more money for only marginal improvement in utility, was it worth it to her? No. Likewise, my 2011 MINI Countryman lacks some… amenities… but not so… that I’m going to spend for a whole new car when my own car still runs perfectly well…. (This doesn’t mean I have never done silly things with money…. But I don’t get out over my skis…

The point of having goods and services, and utilizing the service flows from the goods and the services directly from the service-providers is to make your life better, in terms of control of nature and interactions with others that serve the purposes of your best self, both in pure enjoyment and in accomplishment. But in order for that to work, you have to be mindful of what you are doing.

Yet being mindful is, in fact, in this harried world, a surprisingly difficult thing to successfully do. Our attention is constantly monetized and fragmented. For one thing, the “attention harvesting aspects of the modern Attention Info-Bio Tech Economy persistently pulls focus, training us toward distraction and micro-reward loops rather than sustained presence. For another, in our pop-psychology culture, “McMindfulness” often reframes mindfulness as a quick personal optimization tool—stripping it from ethical and communal roots, which can blunt its purpose and make practice feel shallow instead of stabilizing. The minimalist way to counter this: one-minute breath attention, notice wandering without judgment, return to breath, repeat daily. Small, consistent practice builds attentional control against the incentives to fragment your mind.

And work to be fully present to your experiences and your tool uses. Treat each moment and each instrument not as background noise but as intentional extensions of attention and judgment. In practice, this looks like noticing the texture of your day.

For Thanksgiving dinner, I went to the basement and brought up a bottle of the 2009 Château Pichon Longueville “Comtesse de Lalande” from 2009. Pauillac. Medoc. Bordeaux. Dordogne, Garonne, Gironde. $250 a bottle for what is a very good year, now approaching its likely peak. Perhaps the right thing to do would have been to see if I could get Cask on College to slip me $150 for it, and then buy 5 $30 Safeway gift certificates for a Gifting Tree somewhere. But I decided we should drink it. In small amounts.

After it had been breathing for 36 hours, we were down to one-ounce shot-glass servings, paying careful attention to how this peak of the long tradition of wine production in what had once been part of the dowry of Eleanor d’Acquitaine smelled and tasted.

But true mindfulness gets much harder than that. For, after all, a big part of the point of “making it” and one of its big benefits is that you feel you should not have to count the pennies. Your life should not be shadowed by regret as you contemplate opportunity costs. Regret from constantly contemplating opportunity costs—what the economist claims is the natural mode of human life—is a truly oppressive cognitive load. You are very happy to shed it.

The problem is that shedding that cognitive load can very quickly become very expensive indeed. You offload vigilance. Then you drift into expensive defaults. Then you discover that the money is gone, but that you do not know where it went. And you did not enjoy it as it went away. There are solutions: in the modern world figure out a micro-tracking information flow so that awareness is ambient, not oppressive; pre-commit to midrange standard defaults wherever diminishing returns in utility are steep; engage in rituals wherever luxuries are concerned in order to foreground a mindfulness in which each raise in your standard of living is story-rich.

But most of all: gamify it! Take glee in getting a bargain, or in keeping the 21-year-old Subaru on the road for an extra six months, or holding the back passenger door of the Citation closed with a rope for three.

The question is this: Have we always been lousy at figuring out how to use our resources to live wisely and well? Or is the shape of the Attention Info-Bio Tech Economy that we are moving into is taking making it much harder for us than for our ancestors?

References:

Green, Michael. 2025. “The Valley of Death: Why $100,000 Is the New Poverty”. The Free Press. November 24.
Orwell, George. 1937. The Road to Wigan Pier. London: Victor Gollancz. <https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200391.txt>.
Hikari & Stephen Blaut. 2025. Rental Family. Los Angeles: Searchlight Pictures. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rental_Family>.
Scalzi, John. 2025. “Poor Little Rich People”. Whatever. November 28. <https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/11/28/poor-little-rich-people/>.
Scalzi, John. 2000. The Rough Guide to Money Online. London: Rough Guides. <https://www.amazon.com/Rough-Guide-Online-Internet-Computing/dp/185828676X>.
Smith, Noah. 2025. “The ‘$140,000 poverty line’ is very silly”. Noahpinion. November 29. <https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-140000-poverty-line-is-very-silly>.
Weiss, Bari & al. The Free Press. <http://thefp.com>.

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Genes Tag the Journey; Culture Does the Work: The Yamnaya Shock of 5000 Years Ago

Brad DeLong — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 18:05:54 GMT

The Indo-European spread as a cultural revolution—mobility, pathogens-by-accident, and male-line dominance—rather than biological transformation. The Yamnaya-expansion story is about institutions, ecologies, and how patriarchy scaled. If you want genetic rewriting that matters a damn, go back 100 times as far into the past. And don’t overemphasize even that: my suspicion is that the late homines erecti might well have fit fine if dropped into modern society alongside we contemporary homines sapientes sapientes…

Is what I say here right?

The quirky Razib Khan reports the guesticalculation that 1/12 of humanity’s genes today are, if we trace them back 5000 years ago, derived from 10,000 Yamnaya nomads on the Pontic Steppe, scattered on the grasslands between the Urals and the Carpathians:

Razib Khan: <https://www.razibkhan.com/p/two-steppes-forward-one-step-back>: ‘Nearly half of Northern Europeans’ ancestry today, a substantial minority of Southern Europeans’ (some 20-40%), and an average approaching 15% across highly variable South Asian populations (with rates rising as high as 35% among Brahmins in certain locales), could be modeled as descended from the fourteen genomes retrieved from nine [Yamnaya burial] kurgans…. The Corded Ware [people] were [descended from] Yamnaya with cultural adaptations and local genetic accretions…. Even… Tamil Brahmins harbor some 15% Yamnaya ancestry….
Observers… likely did not see the scattered nomadic Yamnaya as ‌a particularly portentous or formidable…. Yet within less than a millennium they would… reshape the… Eurasian continent… largely replac[ing] Northern Europe’s great megalith-building civilizations, overthr[owing] Europe’s first literate society in Greece, the Minoans, and eras[ing] the memory of the people who had built the grand Indus Valley Civilization….
We find ourselves still living out the consequences of this biologically-driven mass cultural shift, the legacy of some combination of germs’ mercilessness and nomadism’s unconquerability…. I write these posts in… a descendant of the Yamnaya language…. Patriarchy… perhaps one of the most enduring results of the Yamnaya…. Those first pre-literate nomadic barbarians… poured forth out of Eurasia’s great grasslands, tall, dark and violent, plague speeding their emphatic arrival, burning down old civilizations and rewriting the continent’s genetic legacy overnight…

He is right. But this “rewriting the genetic legacy” vibe stuff he adopts seems to me to be much too strong. I don’t see it making a damned bit of difference for you today whether your Yamnaya-descent fraction if 50% or 10%. Your genes do the same thing in either case.

The story of the Yamnaya expansion to the point where 1/12 of the ancestry of humans today can be trace back to a group that was 1/1000 of the human race in the year -3000—that is a culture and a lineage story, not an evolution or a genetic change story. Razib makes rather too much of polygenic scores suggesting that the Yamnaya may have been “dark giants of the east”: “tall, dark, robust, maybe a bit plodding and prone to mentally instability…”. Yes, he is doing it in the service of declaring that the Yamnaya were:

not the ‘blond beasts’ of Nietzsche’s imaginings.. [but] dark-haired and dark-eyed.. skin… darker… than modern Southern European averages… [and] vanishingly few Yamnaya would have expressed blue eyes…

But, still, these are very small possible biology-based differences in averages: in order for such claims to be accurate even as stereotypes we would have to compare groups not within the modern human race, but rather us homines sapientes sapientes to the homines sapientes neandertales or homines heidelbergenses of not five-thousand but of three hundred-thousand years ago.

However, the Yamnaya descendants as they migrated and expanded did bring their culture, their cows, the disease burden of the steppe, their patriarchy—as it really does look like men who were not Yamnaya-descended have left very few descendents today. Of course, we do not know the degree to which the Yamnaya were conquerors rather than productive and rich hence high-status as bringers of valuable biotechnology. We do not know the mix of female choice, sexual enslavement, and rape in the human history that generated what we see as mass y-chromosome lineage extinction as the Yamnaya spread themselves, their language, and their cultural technology from the North Cape to Ceylon, from Mongolia to Cape Trafalgar.

Yes, the gene people can identify genetic similarity and descent to an amazing degree. But the background is that the genes of the Yamnaya were pretty much the genes of everyone else. As I understand it, Looking across aligned segments of the genome, as I understand it, looking for single-nucleotide variations in the genome, within today’s human population:

Two randomly-selected humans differ at 0.1% of nucleotide sites.
Two random Out-of-Africa humans—those whose ancestors all went through the population bottleneck between 50,000 and 70,000 years ago—differ at 0.07%.
Two random Sub-Saharan-Africa non-KhoeSan humans—people who did not move south to the area of the Zambezi and the Limpopo 200,000 years ago (but what then cut them off from substantial gene flow to and from the main East African Plains Ape population?) differ at 0.11%.
Two random KhoeSan humans differ at 0.12%.
A randomly-selected Out-of-Africa and a randomly-selected Sub-Saharan-Africa non-KhoeSan human differ at 0.10%.
A randomly-selected Out-of-Africa and a randomly-selected KhoeSan human differ at 0.11%.
A randomly-selected KhoeSan and a randomly-selected Sub-Saharan-Africa non-KhoeSan human differ at 0.12%.

Yes, this is getting much much too close to getting out the skull-measuring calipers. But the point is that these numbers are very, very small indeed. Look at the contrast with:

Two baboons from the same troop differ at 0.25%.
Two random baboons from the species differ at 0.4%.
A random dog and a random coyote differ at 0.4%
A random human and a random baboon differ at roughly 6% of sites.
A random human and a random chimpanzee differ at roughly 1.2% of sites.

All of us homines sapientes sapientes, are, truly very close cousins indeed.

You have to go further back, we do get the evolution and the genetic change story:

It was nine million years ago, we think, that those whose descendants were to become the gorillas split off from the Darwinian lineage that was going to become us. It was, we think, six million years ago that the pan lineage that was to ancestor our closest living relatives, the chimpanzees, split off. After that there is, from the bush of evolving lineages, of those now surviving just us. First in the main current of the us-gene flow down the ages came ardepithecus, australopithecus garhi (perhaps; perhaps some other australopithecus), homo habilis, homo erectus, then—probably—homo heidelbergensis, and then homo sapiens, all of archaic, anatomically modern, and behaviorally modern. All the while throwing off species and subspecies and reabsorbing sparks from largely separated lineages back into our gene pool.

Ardipithecus (5.0 Ma; brain-case size 350cc) sees upright posture and facultative bipedalism with sharply reduced canine sexual dimorphism; grasping big toe retained. Australopithecus garhi (2.5 Ma; 450cc) sees butchery and stone‑tool use, with limb proportions hinting at our longer stride. Homo habilis (2.0Ma; 640cc) sees a marked brain size increase and the Oldowan core‑and‑flake stone toolkit. Homo erectus (from 1.9 Ma down to their last survivals at 0.1 Ma; 1000cc) sees endurance travel; the Acheulean handaxe toolkit; clearly controlled fire, reduced sexual dimorphism, and smaller molars. Homo heidelbergensis (800–300 ka; 1200cc) conducted organized big‑game hunting with spears used complex prepared‑core toolmaking techniques.

Then came archaic homo sapiens (from 300 ka; 1350cc) with their large near‑modern brain volumes, increasing regional technological complexity, and intermittent symbolic behaviors. Anatomically-modern homo sapiens sapiens (from 250 ka onward) had the globular skull, the reduced brow, the chin, the gracile skeleton; the expanded toolkit, and long‑distance mobility. And behaviorally-modern homo sapiens sapiens (from 100 ka) adds sustained and cumulative symbolic culture—cave art and engravings, personal ornaments, ritual burials, complex language‑supported planning, long‑distance exchange networks, composite tools (e.g., bone/antler, adhesives), tailored clothing and shelters. But I suspect there is little or no bio-cognitive difference in potential between behaviorally modern and the earlier homosapsaps plus the homines sapientes neandertales and the homines sapientes longines, and probably the homo heidelbergenses. And my suspicion is that the late homines erecti with their 1000cc brain-cases could—provided they did have the morphology for speech—have functioned fine if dropped into modern human society.

Why do I think this? Because in northeastern Israel-Palestine there is a place called the Bridge of the Daughters of Jacob, Gesher Benot Yaa’qov, BGY. 750,000 years ago people we call homines erecti lived there for a while, as hand-in-hand, with wandering steps and slow, through the world took their gatherer-hunter way.

Let me return to Joseph Henrich’s description of what happened there:

Joseph Henrich: The Secret of Our Success <https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691178431/the-secret-of-our-success>: ‘Hearths and areas for both stone-tool manufacturing and food processing. The inhabitants controlled fire and made a variety of stone tools, including hand axes, cleavers, blades, knives, awls, scrapers, and choppers. Made from flint, basalt, and limestone, tool manufacture was done on-site, often from giant slabs carried in from a distant quarry by a team. Some of the basalt slabs have notches, indicating the use of levers as part of the quarrying process. The basalt is of the highest quality and well quarried, suggesting that someone had a storehouse of know-how on the topic.
The group’s diet was diverse and also would have required extensive local knowledge. The stone tools were used to process the carcasses of elephants, deer, gazelles, and rhinos as well as boars and rodents. The cut marks left on deer bones are not much different from the same marks made hundreds of thousands of years later by late Paleolithic hunters. The inhabitants of Gesher Benot Ya’aqov also, somehow, obtained freshwater crabs, turtles, reptiles, and at least nine types of fish, including carp, sardines, and catfish. Some of these fish were big, longer than a meter. On top of this, there were seeds, acorns, olives, grapes, nuts, water chestnuts, and various other fruits. This bounty included the submerged prickly water lily, which grows well away from shore. It also appears that they were cracking nuts open and roasting acorns to remove their shells and perhaps reduce the bitter tannins. They may even have made “popcorn” by roasting the seeds from the prickly water lily, as has been done for thousands of years in India and China.
Clearly, cumulative cultural evolution is up and running at this point, generating more know-how than you, me, or our lost European Explorers could have ginned up in a lifetime. If you aren’t sure, go quarry some high-quality basalt slabs (you’ll need a lever, I think), make a beautiful hand axe with full symmetry (remember to make that antler or bone hammer first), bring down an elephant (trust your Paleolithic instincts?), butcher the carcass (use the hand axe), make a fire or find naturally occurring flame, and then whip up a raft to paddle out and pick some prickly water lily (you can spot this plant, right?). Then, enjoy the elephant steaks and “popcorn.”
Of course, this is not to imply that these ancient humans were like us, but merely that they had crossed the Rubicon and embarked on a genetic evolutionary trajectory that was primarily driven by culture and its products…

Indeed, we stand on the shoulders of giants in our symbolic culture of distributed cognition, socio-cultural inheritance of our technological toolkit, and specialized division of labor that together make the collective human mind the true ASI, the true Anthology Super-Intelligence. Look to the Yamnaya explosion as a key factor shaping that ASI, if you want to truly understand history.

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Tuesday Economic Growth Blogging: The Pre‑Modern Treadmill Was Real on Necessities, Not on Technology, or Luxuries, or Culture, or Means of Domination

Brad DeLong — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 00:26:30 GMT

Greg Clark’s “Farewell to Alms” still tempts with one big, clean story: pre‑modern humanity stuck on a Malthusian treadmill until cultural-bio selection on “bourgeois” traits breaks the chains, and growth escapes. Tempting—and partly right. But, I think, substantially wrong. However, today let me talk pretty much only about the parts in which it is right…

Living standards from -3000  up to close to +1900 were indeed close to flat with respect to necessities and conveniences that map to reproductive fitness. World population crawls from ~15 million to ~500 million: an average ~0.08%/year. An unstressed pre‑industrial patriarchy does ~1.4%/year; we plainly weren’t there. Skeletons report four inches of stunting. That’s dire poverty speaking. And dire biophysical poverty without any substantial upward trend.

But biophysical reproductive fitness is not wealth. And biophysical reproductive fitness is not technology, but, rather, technology balanced against resource scarcity.

Angus Bylsma has a very nice review of Greg Clark’s now-nearly twenty-years old A Farewell to Alms. A key paragraph or so in Angus’s review:

Angus Bylsma: Downstream <https://unevenandcombinedthoughts.substack.com/p/downstream>: ‘It is… a book about… why it took so long… [for] long-run growth…. Clark’s… idiosyncratic views… [(1)] a Malthusian framing of the pre-modern world, and… [(2)] the emergence of sustained growth… [as] the culmination of a Darwinian process of selection…. In a Malthusian world… technology… lead[s] to a short-run improvement in incomes… [and then] population growth which… whittle[s] it back down…. In [Clark’s] Malthusian world poor people died young and childless while the rich went and multiplied. The traits of the successful… were passed on…. Eventually, a tipping point was reached, where technological development reached a rate sufficient to break from the Malthusian chains.… Clark argues that “the development of cultural forms—in terms of work inputs, time preference, and family formation—[is what] facilitated modern economic growth”… slow-moving social changes that predate industrialisation by centuries…

And then Angus gives a call-out to me:

Angus Bylsma: <https://substack.com/@angusbylsma/note/c-176322599>: ‘Brad DeLong on, coincidentally, similar themes to my latest review. Curious to his thoughts on Clark’s recent defence of the strict Malthusian thesis!
… <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/the-false-calm-before-steam-the-index>

So what do I think? I think that there are two big issues:

first, the claim that typical human living standards between -3000 and 1500 were more-or-less stagnant;
second, the claim that the modern post-1770 breakthrough to wealth was the result of “[in a] Malthusian world poor people die[ing] young and childless while the rich… multiplied [with] the traits of the successful… passed on… [and so] a tipping point was reached, where technological development reached a rate sufficient to break from the Malthusian chains…”

Let me reserve the second for some future date. And let me focus on the first. There I see four further subparts: (i) In terms of the production and consumption of necessities and conveniences that affect reproductive fitness, the argument that the world between -3000 and 1900 (the beginning of the population explosion) was near-subsistence—that argument is, I think, rock solid.

Almost nothing else is.

Briefly: there are three other things in play here:

(ii) The invention and production of luxuries, and their value.
(iii) The invention and production of culture and its value—the happiness, utility, and meaning that flows therefrom.
(iv) The disvalue from the development and deployment of technologies of domination that have allowed, since -3000, for an élite gang to take 1/3 of the crops and 1/3 of the crafts via an exploitation-and-domination force-and-fraud game.

Valuing, in any sense, (ii), (iii), and (iv), and balancing them—well, I quail. And I am not yet ready to put out any numbers whatsoever. So let me drop those for some future date, especially as I am not sure I can distinguish them properly yet. Luxuries-consumption shades into cultural-participation. Culture is both a source of entertainment, value, and meaning and also a brainwashing machine. Consider The Man Who Saw the Abyss…, usually called The Epic of Gilgamesh. Starting at line 45 we have:

Who can compete with him in kingship,
and claim, like Gilgamesh, “I am the king”?
From the day that Gilgamesh was born and named,
he was two-thirds god and only one-third human…

Is it a good thing to have a culture that tells you to stay in your subservient place? in The Magnificent Seven the bandit chief Calvera says of the farmers: “If God didn’t want them sheared, He would not have made them sheep.” But it was not God but men, men using bronze, writing, bureaucracy, and cultural ideology, who made them think and calculate that they had no good option other than to accept being sheared.

And are we trying to calculate the value of (ii), (iii), and (iv) in the sense of providing humanity with powers to command nature to do our bidding and to organize ourselves productively and cooperatively (were we to choose to do so)? Or are we trying to calculate the value of (ii), (iii), and (iv) in the sense of enabling humanity to live wisely and well?

So I postpone these as well to some future date.

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However (i) is, very roughly, and with heroic guesswork and assumptions, knowable. Thus we know:

From -3000 to 1500 we guess that human populations grew from 15 to 500 million—an average rate of human population growth of 0.08%/year.
A pre-industrial human population under patriarchy that is nutritionally unstressed grows at about 1.4%/year or more: infant mortality is high enough that, given the value to a middle-aged widow of having a surviving son, it is worth spending extra resources to try to have another kid; and so we expect two parents to on average have not a hair more than two but rather three (or more) reproducing descendants in the next generation.
Therefore typical populations from -3000 to 1500 were under grave nutritional stress, hence very poor; maybe they were not what the World Bank today would call “in dire poverty'“, but they were close.
We check this by looking at what skeletons tell us about heights:
If parents were not desperately poor, would they have fed their children diets to stunt them by four inches? Nope.

So that takes care of (i).

If you are willing—as I am—to guess that resource-scarcity is half as salient as technology to command nature and organize humans (at a constant capital-output ratio) in fueling productivity, you can back out a level of technology-in-necessities-production as roughly proportional to potential necessities consumption per capita times the square-root of population. That gives us a level of our index H for Human Technological Competence of 27 today, 1 in 1870, 0.3 at the peak efflorescence of the Han-Parthian-Roman ekumene around 150, and 0.08 back in the year -3000 at the start of the Bronze Age. That is a 12.5-fold multiplication of human technological capabilities from -3000 up to 1870, and a 27-fold multiplication since.

But this is measured along the necessities-and-conveniences dimension only. There are also the luxuries, cultural, and domination dimensions. Where once again I quail.

References:

Bylsma, Angus. 2025. “Downstream”. Unevenly Combined Thoughts. November 11. <https://unevenandcombinedthoughts.substack.com/p/downstream>.
Clark, Gregory. 2007. A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World. Princeton: Princeton University Press. <https://archive.org/details/farewelltoalmsbr00clar>.
DeLong. J. Bradford. 2025. “The False Calm Before Steam: The Index H, Malthus, & the Long Slog, for Growth Was Very Real Before It Became Visible in Average Living Standards”. DeLong Grasping Reality. November 11. <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/the-false-calm-before-steam-the-index>.
Sturges, John, dir. 1960. “The Magnificent Seven”. Film. Beverly Hills, CA: The Mirisch Company; distributed by United Artists. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58abXibG768>

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The False Calm Before Steam: The Index H, Malthus, & the Long Slog, for Growth Was Very Real Before It Became Visible in Average Living Standards

Brad DeLong — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 23:01:41 GMT

The cliché says nothing happened before 1800. The data say capability rose steadily—only population swallowed the dividends. Replace vibes with an index: average income × √population. Suddenly, Rome, Han, and Bronze-Age workshop floors look like real steps, not “nothing.” If you think progress began with steam, you’re reading per capita and ignoring people. My index of the value of the stock of technological capability H tells a different story: slowly rising competence, finally outrunning the Devil of Malthus…

This, eighteen years old, but in my feed via a referral to a link over on a link from one of the bad social-media websites. I remember it. It struck me back then, and it still strikes me now, as not too smart:

Steven Landsburg: <https://windowsontheory.org/2025/11/04/thoughts-by-a-non-economist-on-ai-and-economics/>: ‘Modern humans… emerged about 100,000 years ago. For the next 99,800 years or so, nothing happened. Well… wars, political intrigue, the invention of agriculture—but none of that stuff had much effect on the quality of people’s lives. Almost everyone lived… just above… subsistence level… Then—just a couple of hundred years ago, maybe 10 generations—people started getting richer. And richer and richer still… at the unprecedented rate of about three quarters of a percent per year...

I remember Landsburg. Slate gave him a column for a long time—Michael Kinsley thinking he needed to spend more of Microsoft’s money on “provocative” right-wing s***posters. See: SlatePitch. The Slatepitch was never intellectual contrarianism; it was attention arbitrage. Dress up the obvious as “forbidden truth,” or varnish the indefensible as “counterintuitive genius,” and count the clicks while readers burn minutes they’ll never get back. The trick relies on a bait-and-switch: either posit a claim that violates common sense and then filibuster through rhetorical cleverness, or launder a truism as a brave revelation (“we need to admit X”). In both cases, the scarce resource—reader time—is squandered on provocation rather than illumination.

Dan Davies (2009) had a nice take on it back in the day <https://crookedtimber.org/2009/10/22/rules-for-contrarians-1-dont-whine-that-is-all/>:

Dan Davies (2009): Rules for Contrarians: 1. Don’t whine. That is all <https://crookedtimber.org/2009/10/22/rules-for-contrarians-1-dont-whine-that-is-all/>: ‘A contrarian piece properly [written]… make[s] a defensible argument which strongly resembles a controversial one…. Having done this intentionally, you don’t get to complain that people have “misinterpreted” your piece by taking you to be saying exactly what you carefully constructed the argument to look like you were saying…. A degree of diffidence is appropriate here, because the confusion is entirely and intentionally your fault…

And that applies in spades to Landsburg’s: “modern humans first emerged about 100,000 years ago. For the next 99,800 years or so, nothing happened…”

There is, today, pushback:

Ben: <https://twitter.com/BenShindel/status/1985842682581926039>: ‘Ppl underestimate the technological and cultural progress between 100k ya and the rise of cities 5k ya, and again… to the… Bronze Age… classical era, and so forth….
People living in the classical era in the Mediterranean or China could publish books, travel thousands of miles and return to their homes, debate philosophy, trade luxury goods, construct large buildings, and examine their own history scientifically!
Three thousand years before that, on the Euphrates, you could build a house in a city, write letters to your family living in a distant state, write down your forecasts to track your understanding of astrology, and innovate by growing different crops to see what would sell better.
Three thousand years before THAT, you probably were an itinerant herder/farmer who knew a few hundred people in your tribal community and tried to make more durable pottery.
One step further and… you hunted and gathered and died in small bands of a few dozen. These are HUGE steps. Each of them far greater in scope and importance than the inevitable Industrial Revolution. Sam Altman, do not trust an academic that leads with this false epigraph!…

And:

Matthew Yglesias: <https://x.com/mattyglesias/status/1985846403218677979>: ‘Yeah “no growth in per capita income until the Industrial Revolution” reflects Malthusian population dynamics not a lack of technological progress—human capabilities grew steadily, which was reflected in population growth…

I would say that there are six things in play here:

The development and deployment of technologies of nature-manipulation…
The development and deployment of technologies of human productive coöperation…
The production of necessities and conveniences…
The invention and production of luxuries…
The invention and production of culture…
The development and deployment of technologies of domination…

If we are willing to make some truly heroic assumptions, we can deal with (3) and how it is supported by (1) and (2) in a manner that is at least somewhat believable.

I, in fact, have the beginnings of a catechism for all this. It is at <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/brad-delongs-history-of-economic>!:

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Where do you start?

I start with a very crude global index of the value of the stock of human technology—useful ideas about manipulating nature and productively organizing humans—that have been discovered, developed, and then deployed-and-diffused throughout the world economy.

How do you construct this index?

I calculate it as the average worldwide level of income per capita, times the square root of population.

Why do you set the technology level proportional to the level of average output per capita?

That is just a normalization: it makes it easy to interpret—double the technology level, and you double the average income per capita level the world’s resources can support at a fixed population.

Why the square root of population?

The square-root recognizes that there is resource scarcity—hence generating income for more people is burdensome, and so the technology level is not simply average output per capita—but also that each mouth comes with two eyes, two arms, and a brain, so that labor is productive—hence total world product is not the technology level either. “Square-root” is a balance.

Would you die on the hill that it is square-root, rather than some other power between 0 (which gives average income per capita) or 1 (which gives total world product) multiplying population?

No. But do you have a better idea?

How about things like changing capital intensity as drivers of economic growth?

Even if Solow (1956, 1957) had not scotched that as a dominant factor, I believe that the capital intensity of the average human economy—its capital stock/annual output ratio—has been pretty close to three since shortly after the invention of agriculture. Differences in capital intensity do matter in comparing the relative prosperity levels of different societies at any point in time, but I do not see them as playing any significant role over the long term.

What do your guesses—I won’t call them numbers—then show, in terms of the annual average proportional growth rates of technology deployed-and-diffused, worldwide?

Roughly:

2.1%/yr., at least, after 1870; the Modern Economic Growth era
0.33%/yr. 1770 to 1870; the Industrial Revolution era
0.17%/yr. 1500 to 1770; the Imperial-Commercial era
0.056%/yr. 800 to 1500; the High Mediæval era
0.007%/yr. 150 to 800; the Late-Antiquity Pause era
0.060%/yr. -1000 to 150; the Axial-Iron age
0.030%/yr. -3000 to -1000; the Literacy-Bronze age
0.005%/yr. -8000 to -3000; the Early Agrarian era
0.002%/yr. -8000 to -48000; the Out of Africa-Upper Paleolithic and Mesolithic eras
0.009%/yr. -73000 to -48000; the post-bottleneck African-expansion era.

Basically, growth very slow for millennia—visible only in la longue durée—then growth visible over a human lifetime, barely, after 1500; growth substantial over a human lifetime after 1770; and then growth so that humanity’s technological prowess doubles every generation after 1870.

What do your guesses show, in terms of the levels of technology deployed-and-diffused, worldwide?

Roughly:

2024: 27.1 Today
1870: 1.0, Shift to the Modern Economic Growth age
1770: 0.71 Industrial Revolution age
1500: 0.46, Imperial-Commercial age
800: 0.31, Mediæval age
150: 0.29, Classical Antiquity
-1000: 0.147, Early Iron age
-3000: 0.081, Early Literacy-Bronze age
-8000: 0.062, End of Mesolithic era
-48000: 0.028, Out-of-Africa-Paleolithic era
-73000: 0.003, Population Bottleneck

What does this measure tell us about when the big, important quantitative change in the course of human economic growth came?

It tells us that the big leap upward in economic growth—the bit watershed boundary-crossing—comes in 1870, when the global rate of technological progress jumps up more or less discontinuously from an average proportional growth rate of 0.45% per year to a rate of at least 2.1% per year.

The proportional jump from 1870 to 2020 is larger than the proportional jump from -6000 to 1870. Surely the jump from 1 to more than 20 deserves some intermediate steps?

I am playing with:

2035: Attention Info-Bio Tech Age
2000: Globalized Value Chain Neoliberal Order Age
1965: Mass Production New-Deal Order Age
1930: Morbid-Systems Interregnum
1905: Belle Époque Applied-Science Age
1870: Steampower Pseudo-Classical Semi-Liberal Order Age
1770: Imperial-Commercial Age
1500: Renaissance Global-Contact Age
800: Mediæval Age
135: High Classical Antiquity
-1000: Iron Age
-3000: Bronze-Literacy Age
-8000: Neolithic Era
-48000: Out of Africa
-73000: Population Bottleneck

with each “mode of production” marking a rough doubling of the technology level. If you believe that “the hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist”, then the list above are what you would like to mark and reference: not any of this “asian-ancient-feudal-capitalist-socialist” stuff.

Do you really think that the technological-underpinning base and the corresponding superstructures of human society really stayed the same in any meaningful sense from 200 to 1500?

No. I take the point that back in the Before Times smaller quantitative changes in the level of productivity had larger qualitative effects on how societies were run—that smaller changes in the forces- and relations-of-production carried with them bigger effects on the superstructure, at least in the long run

If, before 1500 we move to dividing history up into “modes of production” by marking an age difference as a roughly √2-ing in our valuation of the stock of deployed-and-diffused “technology”:

2035: Attention Info-Bio Tech Age
2000: Globalized Value Chain Neoliberal Order Age
1965: Mass Production New-Deal Order Age
1930: Morbid-Systems Interregnum
1905: Belle Époque Applied-Science Age
1870: Steampower Pseudo-Classical Semi-Liberal Order Age
1770: Imperial-Commercial Age
1500: Renaissance Global-Contact Age
800: Mediæval Age
135: High Classical Antiquity
-1000: Iron Age
-3000: Bronze-Literacy Age
-8000: Neolithic Era
-48000: Out of Africa
-73000: Population Bottleneck

Or, in convenient tabular form:

But that still leaves us with (4), (5), (6): luxuries—which I define as things and processes you could not have possessed, utilized or experienced beforehand; cultural goods of all kinds; and then there are the negative bidders—those who do not make you offers of good things to induce coöperation, but rather make Don Vito Corleone-like offers that you cannot refuse.

And I have not yet proven smart enough to come up with even a semi-defensible way of producing even a rough quantitative guess of the value—or disvalue—of those three. But they are key to answering the original question.

No. It is not the case that nothing interesting happened.

References:

Barak, Boaz. 2025. ‘Thoughts by a Non-Economist on AI & Economics’. Windows on Theory. November 4. <https://windowsontheory.org/2025/11/04/thoughts-by-a-non-economist-on-ai-and-economics/>.
Davies, Dan. 2009. “Rules for Contrarians: 1. Don’t whine. That is all”. Crooked Timber. October 22. <https://crookedtimber.org/2009/10/22/rules-for-contrarians-1-dont-whine-that-is-all/>.
DeLong, J. Bradford. 2022. “Brad DeLong’s History of Economic Growth Catechism, Part I”. DeLong’s Grasping Reality. July 18. <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/brad-delongs-history-of-economic>.
Landsburg, Steven. 2007. “A Brief History of Economic Time”. Wall Street Journal. June 9. <https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB118134633403829656>.
Solow, Robert M. 1957. “Technical Change & the Aggregate Production Function.” Review of Economics and Statistics. 39:3 (Aug.), pp. 312–320. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/1926047>.
Solow, Robert M. 1956. “A Contribution to the Theory of Economic Growth.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics. 70 (1): 65–94. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/1884513>.

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READING: W.E.B. DuBOIS: Of the Training of Black Men

Brad DeLong — Sun, 26 Oct 2025 00:04:26 GMT

From 1903, at the nadir of Jim Crow… <https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/408/pg408-images.html>

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Of the Training of Black Men

Why, if the Soul can fling the Dust aside,
And naked on the Air of Heaven ride,
Were’t not a Shame—were’t not a Shame for him
In this clay carcass crippled to abide?

OMAR KHAYYÁM (FITZGERALD).

From the shimmering swirl of waters where many, many thoughts ago the slave-ship first saw the square tower of Jamestown, have flowed down to our day three streams of thinking: one swollen from the larger world here and overseas, saying, the multiplying of human wants in culture-lands calls for the world-wide cooperation of men in satisfying them. Hence arises a new human unity, pulling the ends of earth nearer, and all men, black, yellow, and white. The larger humanity strives to feel in this contact of living Nations and sleeping hordes a thrill of new life in the world, crying, “If the contact of Life and Sleep be Death, shame on such Life.” To be sure, behind this thought lurks the afterthought of force and dominion,—the making of brown men to delve when the temptation of beads and red calico cloys.

The second thought streaming from the death-ship and the curving river is the thought of the older South,—the sincere and passionate belief that somewhere between men and cattle, God created a tertium quid, and called it a Negro,—a clownish, simple creature, at times even lovable within its limitations, but straitly foreordained to walk within the Veil. To be sure, behind the thought lurks the afterthought,—some of them with favoring chance might become men, but in sheer self-defence we dare not let them, and we build about them walls so high, and hang between them and the light a veil so thick, that they shall not even think of breaking through.

And last of all there trickles down that third and darker thought,—the thought of the things themselves, the confused, half-conscious mutter of men who are black and whitened, crying “Liberty, Freedom, Opportunity—vouchsafe to us, O boastful World, the chance of living men!” To be sure, behind the thought lurks the afterthought,—suppose, after all, the World is right and we are less than men? Suppose this mad impulse within is all wrong, some mock mirage from the untrue?

So here we stand among thoughts of human unity, even through conquest and slavery; the inferiority of black men, even if forced by fraud; a shriek in the night for the freedom of men who themselves are not yet sure of their right to demand it. This is the tangle of thought and afterthought wherein we are called to solve the problem of training men for life.

Behind all its curiousness, so attractive alike to sage and dilettante, lie its dim dangers, throwing across us shadows at once grotesque and awful. Plain it is to us that what the world seeks through desert and wild we have within our threshold,—a stalwart laboring force, suited to the semi-tropics; if, deaf to the voice of the Zeitgeist, we refuse to use and develop these men, we risk poverty and loss. If, on the other hand, seized by the brutal afterthought, we debauch the race thus caught in our talons, selfishly sucking their blood and brains in the future as in the past, what shall save us from national decadence? Only that saner selfishness, which Education teaches, can find the rights of all in the whirl of work.

Again, we may decry the color-prejudice of the South, yet it remains a heavy fact. Such curious kinks of the human mind exist and must be reckoned with soberly. They cannot be laughed away, nor always successfully stormed at, nor easily abolished by act of legislature. And yet they must not be encouraged by being let alone. They must be recognized as facts, but unpleasant facts; things that stand in the way of civilization and religion and common decency. They can be met in but one way,—by the breadth and broadening of human reason, by catholicity of taste and culture. And so, too, the native ambition and aspiration of men, even though they be black, backward, and ungraceful, must not lightly be dealt with. To stimulate wildly weak and untrained minds is to play with mighty fires; to flout their striving idly is to welcome a harvest of brutish crime and shameless lethargy in our very laps. The guiding of thought and the deft coordination of deed is at once the path of honor and humanity.

And so, in this great question of reconciling three vast and partially contradictory streams of thought, the one panacea of Education leaps to the lips of all:—such human training as will best use the labor of all men without enslaving or brutalizing; such training as will give us poise to encourage the prejudices that bulwark society, and to stamp out those that in sheer barbarity deafen us to the wail of prisoned souls within the Veil, and the mounting fury of shackled men.

But when we have vaguely said that Education will set this tangle straight, what have we uttered but a truism? Training for life teaches living; but what training for the profitable living together of black men and white? A hundred and fifty years ago our task would have seemed easier. Then Dr. Johnson blandly assured us that education was needful solely for the embellishments of life, and was useless for ordinary vermin. To-day we have climbed to heights where we would open at least the outer courts of knowledge to all, display its treasures to many, and select the few to whom its mystery of Truth is revealed, not wholly by birth or the accidents of the stock market, but at least in part according to deftness and aim, talent and character. This programme, however, we are sorely puzzled in carrying out through that part of the land where the blight of slavery fell hardest, and where we are dealing with two backward peoples. To make here in human education that ever necessary combination of the permanent and the contingent—of the ideal and the practical in workable equilibrium—has been there, as it ever must be in every age and place, a matter of infinite experiment and frequent mistakes.

In rough approximation we may point out four varying decades of work in Southern education since the Civil War. From the close of the war until 1876, was the period of uncertain groping and temporary relief. There were army schools, mission schools, and schools of the Freedmen’s Bureau in chaotic disarrangement seeking system and co-operation. Then followed ten years of constructive definite effort toward the building of complete school systems in the South. Normal schools and colleges were founded for the freedmen, and teachers trained there to man the public schools. There was the inevitable tendency of war to underestimate the prejudices of the master and the ignorance of the slave, and all seemed clear sailing out of the wreckage of the storm. Meantime, starting in this decade yet especially developing from 1885 to 1895, began the industrial revolution of the South. The land saw glimpses of a new destiny and the stirring of new ideals. The educational system striving to complete itself saw new obstacles and a field of work ever broader and deeper. The Negro colleges, hurriedly founded, were inadequately equipped, illogically distributed, and of varying efficiency and grade; the normal and high schools were doing little more than common-school work, and the common schools were training but a third of the children who ought to be in them, and training these too often poorly. At the same time the white South, by reason of its sudden conversion from the slavery ideal, by so much the more became set and strengthened in its racial prejudice, and crystallized it into harsh law and harsher custom; while the marvellous pushing forward of the poor white daily threatened to take even bread and butter from the mouths of the heavily handicapped sons of the freedmen. In the midst, then, of the larger problem of Negro education sprang up the more practical question of work, the inevitable economic quandary that faces a people in the transition from slavery to freedom, and especially those who make that change amid hate and prejudice, lawlessness and ruthless competition.

The industrial school springing to notice in this decade, but coming to full recognition in the decade beginning with 1895, was the proffered answer to this combined educational and economic crisis, and an answer of singular wisdom and timeliness. From the very first in nearly all the schools some attention had been given to training in handiwork, but now was this training first raised to a dignity that brought it in direct touch with the South’s magnificent industrial development, and given an emphasis which reminded black folk that before the Temple of Knowledge swing the Gates of Toil.

Yet after all they are but gates, and when turning our eyes from the temporary and the contingent in the Negro problem to the broader question of the permanent uplifting and civilization of black men in America, we have a right to inquire, as this enthusiasm for material advancement mounts to its height, if after all the industrial school is the final and sufficient answer in the training of the Negro race; and to ask gently, but in all sincerity, the ever-recurring query of the ages, Is not life more than meat, and the body more than raiment? And men ask this to-day all the more eagerly because of sinister signs in recent educational movements. The tendency is here, born of slavery and quickened to renewed life by the crazy imperialism of the day, to regard human beings as among the material resources of a land to be trained with an eye single to future dividends. Race-prejudices, which keep brown and black men in their “places,” we are coming to regard as useful allies with such a theory, no matter how much they may dull the ambition and sicken the hearts of struggling human beings. And above all, we daily hear that an education that encourages aspiration, that sets the loftiest of ideals and seeks as an end culture and character rather than bread-winning, is the privilege of white men and the danger and delusion of black.

Especially has criticism been directed against the former educational efforts to aid the Negro. In the four periods I have mentioned, we find first, boundless, planless enthusiasm and sacrifice; then the preparation of teachers for a vast public-school system; then the launching and expansion of that school system amid increasing difficulties; and finally the training of workmen for the new and growing industries. This development has been sharply ridiculed as a logical anomaly and flat reversal of nature. Soothly we have been told that first industrial and manual training should have taught the Negro to work, then simple schools should have taught him to read and write, and finally, after years, high and normal schools could have completed the system, as intelligence and wealth demanded.

That a system logically so complete was historically impossible, it needs but a little thought to prove. Progress in human affairs is more often a pull than a push, a surging forward of the exceptional man, and the lifting of his duller brethren slowly and painfully to his vantage-ground. Thus it was no accident that gave birth to universities centuries before the common schools, that made fair Harvard the first flower of our wilderness. So in the South: the mass of the freedmen at the end of the war lacked the intelligence so necessary to modern workingmen. They must first have the common school to teach them to read, write, and cipher; and they must have higher schools to teach teachers for the common schools. The white teachers who flocked South went to establish such a common-school system. Few held the idea of founding colleges; most of them at first would have laughed at the idea. But they faced, as all men since them have faced, that central paradox of the South,—the social separation of the races. At that time it was the sudden volcanic rupture of nearly all relations between black and white, in work and government and family life. Since then a new adjustment of relations in economic and political affairs has grown up,—an adjustment subtle and difficult to grasp, yet singularly ingenious, which leaves still that frightful chasm at the color-line across which men pass at their peril. Thus, then and now, there stand in the South two separate worlds; and separate not simply in the higher realms of social intercourse, but also in church and school, on railway and street-car, in hotels and theatres, in streets and city sections, in books and newspapers, in asylums and jails, in hospitals and graveyards. There is still enough of contact for large economic and group cooperation, but the separation is so thorough and deep that it absolutely precludes for the present between the races anything like that sympathetic and effective group-training and leadership of the one by the other, such as the American Negro and all backward peoples must have for effectual progress.

This the missionaries of ’68 soon saw; and if effective industrial and trade schools were impracticable before the establishment of a common-school system, just as certainly no adequate common schools could be founded until there were teachers to teach them. Southern whites would not teach them; Northern whites in sufficient numbers could not be had. If the Negro was to learn, he must teach himself, and the most effective help that could be given him was the establishment of schools to train Negro teachers. This conclusion was slowly but surely reached by every student of the situation until simultaneously, in widely separated regions, without consultation or systematic plan, there arose a series of institutions designed to furnish teachers for the untaught. Above the sneers of critics at the obvious defects of this procedure must ever stand its one crushing rejoinder: in a single generation they put thirty thousand black teachers in the South; they wiped out the illiteracy of the majority of the black people of the land, and they made Tuskegee possible.

Such higher training-schools tended naturally to deepen broader development: at first they were common and grammar schools, then some became high schools. And finally, by 1900, some thirty-four had one year or more of studies of college grade. This development was reached with different degrees of speed in different institutions: Hampton is still a high school, while Fisk University started her college in 1871, and Spelman Seminary about 1896. In all cases the aim was identical,—to maintain the standards of the lower training by giving teachers and leaders the best practicable training; and above all, to furnish the black world with adequate standards of human culture and lofty ideals of life. It was not enough that the teachers of teachers should be trained in technical normal methods; they must also, so far as possible, be broad-minded, cultured men and women, to scatter civilization among a people whose ignorance was not simply of letters, but of life itself.

It can thus be seen that the work of education in the South began with higher institutions of training, which threw off as their foliage common schools, and later industrial schools, and at the same time strove to shoot their roots ever deeper toward college and university training. That this was an inevitable and necessary development, sooner or later, goes without saying; but there has been, and still is, a question in many minds if the natural growth was not forced, and if the higher training was not either overdone or done with cheap and unsound methods. Among white Southerners this feeling is widespread and positive. A prominent Southern journal voiced this in a recent editorial.

The experiment that has been made to give the colored students classical training has not been satisfactory. Even though many were able to pursue the course, most of them did so in a parrot-like way, learning what was taught, but not seeming to appropriate the truth and import of their instruction, and graduating without sensible aim or valuable occupation for their future. The whole scheme has proved a waste of time, efforts, and the money of the state…

While most fair-minded men would recognize this as extreme and overdrawn, still without doubt many are asking, Are there a sufficient number of Negroes ready for college training to warrant the undertaking? Are not too many students prematurely forced into this work? Does it not have the effect of dissatisfying the young Negro with his environment? And do these graduates succeed in real life? Such natural questions cannot be evaded, nor on the other hand must a Nation naturally skeptical as to Negro ability assume an unfavorable answer without careful inquiry and patient openness to conviction. We must not forget that most Americans answer all queries regarding the Negro a priori, and that the least that human courtesy can do is to listen to evidence.

The advocates of the higher education of the Negro would be the last to deny the incompleteness and glaring defects of the present system: too many institutions have attempted to do college work, the work in some cases has not been thoroughly done, and quantity rather than quality has sometimes been sought. But all this can be said of higher education throughout the land; it is the almost inevitable incident of educational growth, and leaves the deeper question of the legitimate demand for the higher training of Negroes untouched. And this latter question can be settled in but one way,—by a first-hand study of the facts. If we leave out of view all institutions which have not actually graduated students from a course higher than that of a New England high school, even though they be called colleges; if then we take the thirty-four remaining institutions, we may clear up many misapprehensions by asking searchingly, What kind of institutions are they? what do they teach? and what sort of men do they graduate?

And first we may say that this type of college, including Atlanta, Fisk, and Howard, Wilberforce and Claflin, Shaw, and the rest, is peculiar, almost unique. Through the shining trees that whisper before me as I write, I catch glimpses of a boulder of New England granite, covering a grave, which graduates of Atlanta University have placed there,—

“IN GRATEFUL MEMORY OF THEIR FORMER TEACHER AND FRIEND AND OF THE UNSELFISH LIFE HE LIVED, AND THE NOBLE WORK HE WROUGHT; THAT THEY, THEIR CHILDREN, AND THEIR CHILDREN’S CHILDREN MIGHT BE BLESSED.”

This was the gift of New England to the freed Negro: not alms, but a friend; not cash, but character. It was not and is not money these seething millions want, but love and sympathy, the pulse of hearts beating with red blood;—a gift which to-day only their own kindred and race can bring to the masses, but which once saintly souls brought to their favored children in the crusade of the sixties, that finest thing in American history, and one of the few things untainted by sordid greed and cheap vainglory. The teachers in these institutions came not to keep the Negroes in their place, but to raise them out of the defilement of the places where slavery had wallowed them. The colleges they founded were social settlements; homes where the best of the sons of the freedmen came in close and sympathetic touch with the best traditions of New England. They lived and ate together, studied and worked, hoped and harkened in the dawning light. In actual formal content their curriculum was doubtless old-fashioned, but in educational power it was supreme, for it was the contact of living souls.

From such schools about two thousand Negroes have gone forth with the bachelor’s degree. The number in itself is enough to put at rest the argument that too large a proportion of Negroes are receiving higher training. If the ratio to population of all Negro students throughout the land, in both college and secondary training, be counted, Commissioner Harris assures us “it must be increased to five times its present average” to equal the average of the land.

Fifty years ago the ability of Negro students in any appreciable numbers to master a modern college course would have been difficult to prove. To-day it is proved by the fact that four hundred Negroes, many of whom have been reported as brilliant students, have received the bachelor’s degree from Harvard, Yale, Oberlin, and seventy other leading colleges. Here we have, then, nearly twenty-five hundred Negro graduates, of whom the crucial query must be made, How far did their training fit them for life? It is of course extremely difficult to collect satisfactory data on such a point,—difficult to reach the men, to get trustworthy testimony, and to gauge that testimony by any generally acceptable criterion of success. In 1900, the Conference at Atlanta University undertook to study these graduates, and published the results. First they sought to know what these graduates were doing, and succeeded in getting answers from nearly two-thirds of the living. The direct testimony was in almost all cases corroborated by the reports of the colleges where they graduated, so that in the main the reports were worthy of credence. Fifty-three per cent of these graduates were teachers,—presidents of institutions, heads of normal schools, principals of city school-systems, and the like. Seventeen per cent were clergymen; another seventeen per cent were in the professions, chiefly as physicians. Over six per cent were merchants, farmers, and artisans, and four per cent were in the government civil-service. Granting even that a considerable proportion of the third unheard from are unsuccessful, this is a record of usefulness. Personally I know many hundreds of these graduates, and have corresponded with more than a thousand; through others I have followed carefully the life-work of scores; I have taught some of them and some of the pupils whom they have taught, lived in homes which they have builded, and looked at life through their eyes. Comparing them as a class with my fellow students in New England and in Europe, I cannot hesitate in saying that nowhere have I met men and women with a broader spirit of helpfulness, with deeper devotion to their life-work, or with more consecrated determination to succeed in the face of bitter difficulties than among Negro college-bred men. They have, to be sure, their proportion of ne’er-do-wells, their pedants and lettered fools, but they have a surprisingly small proportion of them; they have not that culture of manner which we instinctively associate with university men, forgetting that in reality it is the heritage from cultured homes, and that no people a generation removed from slavery can escape a certain unpleasant rawness and gaucherie, despite the best of training.

With all their larger vision and deeper sensibility, these men have usually been conservative, careful leaders. They have seldom been agitators, have withstood the temptation to head the mob, and have worked steadily and faithfully in a thousand communities in the South. As teachers, they have given the South a commendable system of city schools and large numbers of private normal-schools and academies. Colored college-bred men have worked side by side with white college graduates at Hampton; almost from the beginning the backbone of Tuskegee’s teaching force has been formed of graduates from Fisk and Atlanta. And to-day the institute is filled with college graduates, from the energetic wife of the principal down to the teacher of agriculture, including nearly half of the executive council and a majority of the heads of departments. In the professions, college men are slowly but surely leavening the Negro church, are healing and preventing the devastations of disease, and beginning to furnish legal protection for the liberty and property of the toiling masses. All this is needful work. Who would do it if Negroes did not? How could Negroes do it if they were not trained carefully for it? If white people need colleges to furnish teachers, ministers, lawyers, and doctors, do black people need nothing of the sort?

If it is true that there are an appreciable number of Negro youth in the land capable by character and talent to receive that higher training, the end of which is culture, and if the two and a half thousand who have had something of this training in the past have in the main proved themselves useful to their race and generation, the question then comes, What place in the future development of the South ought the Negro college and college-bred man to occupy? That the present social separation and acute race-sensitiveness must eventually yield to the influences of culture, as the South grows civilized, is clear. But such transformation calls for singular wisdom and patience. If, while the healing of this vast sore is progressing, the races are to live for many years side by side, united in economic effort, obeying a common government, sensitive to mutual thought and feeling, yet subtly and silently separate in many matters of deeper human intimacy,—if this unusual and dangerous development is to progress amid peace and order, mutual respect and growing intelligence, it will call for social surgery at once the delicatest and nicest in modern history. It will demand broad-minded, upright men, both white and black, and in its final accomplishment American civilization will triumph. So far as white men are concerned, this fact is to-day being recognized in the South, and a happy renaissance of university education seems imminent. But the very voices that cry hail to this good work are, strange to relate, largely silent or antagonistic to the higher education of the Negro.

Strange to relate! for this is certain, no secure civilization can be built in the South with the Negro as an ignorant, turbulent proletariat. Suppose we seek to remedy this by making them laborers and nothing more: they are not fools, they have tasted of the Tree of Life, and they will not cease to think, will not cease attempting to read the riddle of the world. By taking away their best equipped teachers and leaders, by slamming the door of opportunity in the faces of their bolder and brighter minds, will you make them satisfied with their lot? or will you not rather transfer their leading from the hands of men taught to think to the hands of untrained demagogues? We ought not to forget that despite the pressure of poverty, and despite the active discouragement and even ridicule of friends, the demand for higher training steadily increases among Negro youth: there were, in the years from 1875 to 1880, 22 Negro graduates from Northern colleges; from 1885 to 1890 there were 43, and from 1895 to 1900, nearly 100 graduates. From Southern Negro colleges there were, in the same three periods, 143, 413, and over 500 graduates. Here, then, is the plain thirst for training; by refusing to give this Talented Tenth the key to knowledge, can any sane man imagine that they will lightly lay aside their yearning and contentedly become hewers of wood and drawers of water?

No. The dangerously clear logic of the Negro’s position will more and more loudly assert itself in that day when increasing wealth and more intricate social organization preclude the South from being, as it so largely is, simply an armed camp for intimidating black folk. Such waste of energy cannot be spared if the South is to catch up with civilization. And as the black third of the land grows in thrift and skill, unless skilfully guided in its larger philosophy, it must more and more brood over the red past and the creeping, crooked present, until it grasps a gospel of revolt and revenge and throws its new-found energies athwart the current of advance. Even to-day the masses of the Negroes see all too clearly the anomalies of their position and the moral crookedness of yours. You may marshal strong indictments against them, but their counter-cries, lacking though they be in formal logic, have burning truths within them which you may not wholly ignore, O Southern Gentlemen! If you deplore their presence here, they ask, Who brought us? When you cry, Deliver us from the vision of intermarriage, they answer that legal marriage is infinitely better than systematic concubinage and prostitution. And if in just fury you accuse their vagabonds of violating women, they also in fury quite as just may reply: The rape which your gentlemen have done against helpless black women in defiance of your own laws is written on the foreheads of two millions of mulattoes, and written in ineffaceable blood. And finally, when you fasten crime upon this race as its peculiar trait, they answer that slavery was the arch-crime, and lynching and lawlessness its twin abortions; that color and race are not crimes, and yet it is they which in this land receive most unceasing condemnation, North, East, South, and West.

I will not say such arguments are wholly justified,—I will not insist that there is no other side to the shield; but I do say that of the nine millions of Negroes in this nation, there is scarcely one out of the cradle to whom these arguments do not daily present themselves in the guise of terrible truth. I insist that the question of the future is how best to keep these millions from brooding over the wrongs of the past and the difficulties of the present, so that all their energies may be bent toward a cheerful striving and cooperation with their white neighbors toward a larger, juster, and fuller future. That one wise method of doing this lies in the closer knitting of the Negro to the great industrial possibilities of the South is a great truth. And this the common schools and the manual training and trade schools are working to accomplish. But these alone are not enough. The foundations of knowledge in this race, as in others, must be sunk deep in the college and university if we would build a solid, permanent structure. Internal problems of social advance must inevitably come, —problems of work and wages, of families and homes, of morals and the true valuing of the things of life; and all these and other inevitable problems of civilization the Negro must meet and solve largely for himself, by reason of his isolation; and can there be any possible solution other than by study and thought and an appeal to the rich experience of the past? Is there not, with such a group and in such a crisis, infinitely more danger to be apprehended from half-trained minds and shallow thinking than from over-education and over-refinement? Surely we have wit enough to found a Negro college so manned and equipped as to steer successfully between the dilettante and the fool. We shall hardly induce black men to believe that if their stomachs be full, it matters little about their brains. They already dimly perceive that the paths of peace winding between honest toil and dignified manhood call for the guidance of skilled thinkers, the loving, reverent comradeship between the black lowly and the black men emancipated by training and culture.

The function of the Negro college, then, is clear: it must maintain the standards of popular education, it must seek the social regeneration of the Negro, and it must help in the solution of problems of race contact and cooperation. And finally, beyond all this, it must develop men. Above our modern socialism, and out of the worship of the mass, must persist and evolve that higher individualism which the centres of culture protect; there must come a loftier respect for the sovereign human soul that seeks to know itself and the world about it; that seeks a freedom for expansion and self-development; that will love and hate and labor in its own way, untrammeled alike by old and new. Such souls aforetime have inspired and guided worlds, and if we be not wholly bewitched by our Rhinegold, they shall again. Herein the longing of black men must have respect: the rich and bitter depth of their experience, the unknown treasures of their inner life, the strange rendings of nature they have seen, may give the world new points of view and make their loving, living, and doing precious to all human hearts. And to themselves in these the days that try their souls, the chance to soar in the dim blue air above the smoke is to their finer spirits boon and guerdon for what they lose on earth by being black.

I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil. Is this the life you grudge us, O knightly America? Is this the life you long to change into the dull red hideousness of Georgia? Are you so afraid lest peering from this high Pisgah, between Philistine and Amalekite, we sight the Promised Land?

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HOISTED FROM THE ARCHIVES: High Patriarchy

Brad DeLong — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 15:06:53 GMT

Hoisting and breaking this out so I will be able to find this easily in the future. Originally at <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/high-patriarchy>…

Tian Chen Zeng, Alan J. Aw, & Marcus W. Feldman: Cultural Hitchhiking & Competition Between Patrilineal Kin Groups Explain the Post-Neolithic Y-Chromosome Bottleneck <https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-04375-6.pdf>;
M. Karmin & al. (2015): A Recent Bottleneck of Y Chromosome Diversity Coincides with a Global Change In Culture (Genome Res. 25, 459–466) <https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25770088/>:

All of us (men) have y-chromosomes that are those of Y-Chromosome Adam back roughly some 200,000 years ago, with whatever mutations of that have occurred since. Looking at the ensemble of y-chromosomes allows us to construct a tree by virtue of which y-chromosomes differ by one base pair, which by two, and so on. The amount of branching at each calculated date in the past tells us what the effective population size (of men) was then, for each y-sperm that fertilizes an egg is another chance for mutations to occur.

Similarly, all of us have mitochondria that are those of Mitochondrial Eve, back some back roughly some 200,000 years ago, with whatever mutations of that have occurred since. Looking at the ensemble of mitochondria allows us to construct a tree by virtue of which mitochondria differ by one base pair, which by two, and so on. The amount of branching at each calculated date in the past tells us what the effective population size (of men) was then, for each fertilized egg is another chance for mitochondrial mutations to occur.

Note that between out-of-Africa and the coming of agriculture—between 50 and 10 thousand years ago—the effective male population size was 30,000 at the start and 60,000 at the end of that late-Mesolithic Age: 30,000 and 60,000 of the men alive back then have living descendants today. By contrast, the effective female population size was more like 100,000 50 thousand years ago and more like 450,000 10 thousand years ago.

But then, with the invention of agriculture, things go bonkers. Mitochondrial lines continue to multiply at a furious pace as mutations happen. Y-chromosome lines… sharply slow down in their multiplication, as the men’s side of the effective population crashes. At the trough, 5 thousand years ago, the men who have living descendants today amount to only 1/20 as large a fraction as the fraction of women alive then who have living descendants today.

This would seem to mean that -8000 to 1 saw substantial polygyny for a few men, and non-reproduction for others. It also means the inheritance of male reproductive advantage: that if your great-grandfather had the resources to have more than one wife, the odds were higher that you were at the top of the inequality pyramid and had the resources to have more than one wife as well. Patriarchal reproductive inequality was in that age both substantial and inherited.

This is polygyny: one man, many wives—and lots of men with no wives and little sexual access to women. This is the Biblical Patriarch Jacob: 13 children with two wives and two concubines. Jacob and Leah’s children were Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Issachar, Zebulun, and Dina; Jacob and Rachel’s children were Joseph and Benjamin; Jacob and Zilpah’s children were Gad and Asher, and Jacob and Bilhah’s children were Dan and Naphtali. And somewhere in the neighborhood there were three men—unnamed, possibly dead—who were without wives, and without children.

Leah, Rachel, Zilpah, and Bilhah’s mitochondrial DNA lineages were passed down. The three nameless men’s y-chromosome lineages were not: only Jacob’s was.

Maintaining polygyny for a number of generations requires great social pressure and great societal inequality among men. It also requires a great deal of subservience among women. Back then, women were, to a substantial degree, property: the property of their fathers, and then of those in the patriarchal polygynous network who gained control over them. And back then, a great many men were without resources‚ for the overwhelming majority of men would, if they had resources to deploy to attain any form of social power, would have chosen to use those resources to marry. And yet many of them could not do so. How much social power had to be deployed against them, and in what form, to enforce their non-marrying?

This age of super-patriarchy stands out in our genetic record. The social structures and institutions to support it are not there before -8000 and do not persist since the year 1.

What was human life and human inequality like back in this patriarchal age? What brought it on? What made it come to an end?

And what was life like for women in those years—because making women share husbands is something that requires a lot of social power deployed and exerted to enforce?

References:

DeLong, J. Bradford. 2025. “HOISTED FROM THE ARCHIVES: High Patriarchy”. DeLong’s Grasping Reality. October 22. <>.
DeLong, J. Bradford. 2021. “High Patriarchy, & BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2021-12-31 Fr”. DeLong’s Grasping Reality. December 31. <https://braddelong.substack.com/p/high-patriarchy>.
Karmin. M. & al. 2015. A Recent Bottleneck of Y Chromosome Diversity Coincides with a Global Change In Culture (Genome Res. 25, 459–466) <https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25770088/>:
Zeng, Tian Chen, Alan J. Aw, & Marcus W. Feldman: Cultural Hitchhiking & Competition Between Patrilineal Kin Groups Explain the Post-Neolithic Y-Chromosome Bottleneck <https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-04375-6.pdf>;

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The Pseudo-Classical Semi-Liberal Era: The Belle Époque’s Glow, Alas!, Outran Its Reality Over 1870-1914

Brad DeLong — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 14:00:45 GMT

The Belle Époque felt so golden at the time and feels so in retrospect because expectations surged far beyond the very real progress in prosperity and inclusion. It dazzled with science, finance, and culture—but literacy, longevity, and franchise were still thin. That is precisely why 1914 was so devastating: it showed how all the optimism had rested on a narrow, brittle foundation…

Bohumilo, on the Social Media Site That Must Not Be Named, writes:

Bohumilo: ‘I consider WWI to be the most detrimental event in European history, end of the old, better civilization of high culture and hard money, high hopes for future and hard international order. That’s when everything started going downhill — and nobody really understands why. If I could erase one event from history, it would be WWI. The entire 20th century would have been much better. I still think humanity (or, lets be frank, the West) has never, before or after, combined freedom, prosperity (that’s when economic growth per capita really took off, as @delong showed), and cultural vitality on the scale seen from roughly 1870 to 1914. I always think THE author of that era is H. G. Wells — and the author of the era that followed is Orwell…

Having been name-checked, I guess I should respond. And my response is: This is not right in many ways; but, still, right in one important way.

If we look at the civilizational delta and at civilizational expectations, 1870-1914 was special in a way that those of us who live with the memories of the 1914-1918 Great War and all the shit that landed on us afterwards have never been able to recover.

Bohumilo’s take on the Gilded Age-Belle Époque as a “better civilization of high culture and hard money, high hopes for future and hard international order” is, I think, broadly right in terms of material and what we hoped was civilizational progress, and I will give cultural vitality as well. The era felt golden because expectations surged and the international order seemed stable—until it wasn’t. That mix of real gains plus overconfident optimism is precisely what made tje 1914 break so shattering.

Nevertheless, first, in terms of levels of prosperity: Material prosperity in 1914 was narrow, fragile, and uneven. Vast numbers were short‑lived, hungry, poor, and illiterate—globally and in the “west.” Around 1900, average life expectancy sat in the low 30s due to high mortality at all ages and extreme infant and child deaths; the world did not pass 40 years until well after mid‑century. Literacy was scarce. Estimates suggest global adult literacy in 1900 barely exceeded one‑fifth; mass literacy arrived mostly after 1950.

“Hungry” and “poor” were empirical facts. Even in the most industrialized nations, urban surveys found large working‑class shares below subsistence. Rowntree’s 1899 York study put about 28 percent below a nutrition‑based poverty line. Booth’s London maps showed districts marked “poor” or “very poor.” Deprivation was not just peripheral or colonial.

Health was dire. In the early twentieth century, under‑five mortality in many countries exceeded 20–30 per 100 live births and had long been higher. This drove low life expectancy at birth. Rates fell only with broad improvements in public health, nutrition, sanitation, and medicine later in the century.

Second: ⁠I object to the term “west”. Strongly. “West” is a bad label. Use “Dover Circle‑Plus.” “West” pretends there’s a continuous relay from Uruk to Silicon Valley, collapsing discontinuous histories into one tradition. “Dover Circle‑Plus” instead names the concrete locus of early‑modern change: societies within roughly a 300–400‑mile radius of Dover and the polities that received large settler inflows or deliberately emulated those institutions after 1500. That framing fits the evidence and avoids torch‑passing mythology.

Two payoffs follow. It restores analytic clarity: the post‑1870 prosperity surge ties to specific institutional packages, not a timeless “West.” And it keeps priors honest about who’s in or out at different times—why Germany and Italy mattered in 1900; why Japan, Korea, Australia, and Singapore complicate “North Atlantic.” Better label, better history, better economics.

Third, the claim that the pre-1914 Belle Époque saw the height of freedom is also not right. Two things can be true at once. Material and technological capabilities exploded after 1870, yet broad, durable political voice lagged badly. Even within the Dover Circle‑Plus, franchise expansion was grudging, exclusionary, and late: property and gender bars persisted; racialized disenfranchisement gutted formal rights; colonial subjects were ruled without consent. The polity that built mass production and public health did not, for decades, build mass inclusion.

Globally, the gap was starker. Imperial governance meant “subject” status for hundreds of millions; authoritarian restorations and single‑party states throttled pluralism; newly independent polities often inherited coercive administrative shells. If we’re serious about what prosperity should mean, the absence of voice remains the central indictment: growth without representation is brittle, easily hijacked by elites, and morally thin. Unless, of course, you were a middle-class or better western European-descended white male.

But, fourth, even that is not quite true. Anglocentric gatekeeping shrank “West” even within Dover Circle‑Plus. Quite. The British imperial sneer—“the wogs begin at Calais”—makes the point: even inside the supposed core, status hinged on language, creed, and caste. English as milk‑tongue conferred belonging; being Catholic Irish could negate it. So the imagined “West” wasn’t just historically discontinuous—it was actively policed, narrowing voice and membership. That’s why even “Dover Circle‑Plus” is useful only if we pair it with a running audit of exclusion: who was counted, who was silenced, and by which institutions.

Still, there was something special that Bohumilo did put his finger on. In its confidence, 1870-1914 was special in a way that those of us who live with the memories of the 1914-1918 Great War and all the shit that landed on us afterwards have never been able to recover.

For belief in progress and the actual delta of progress was never so solid thereafter. Even in the Trente Glorieuses after World War II, there was an iron curtain down the middle of the European continent, and tyrannies of appalling degrees of antifreedom and death between the Fulda Gap in Germany and the Imjin River in Korea.

Plus nuclear weapons.

Bu contrast, back before World War I the expectation was that even the Russian Empire would join civilized society with general civil and political rights and economic prosperity, and with faster than deliberate speed as well. Hell, its aristocracy thought of itself as at least partly French.

So the Gilded Age-Belle Époque truly was, in this narrow sense of hopes for progress and a belief that the world was going the right way, a better civilization.

A great deal of thought is required to try to figure out why this was so: Why was the era of the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, the reactionary Holy Alliance, and then the Revolutions of 1848 followed by something better? How did what I like to call the pseudo-classical semi-liberal order emerge? And how did it manage to become something which was, in historical and perhaps now in contemporary perspective, such a smashing success as far as the progress of civilization was concerned.

But, even so, do not overstate things. Let me call H.G. Wells as a witness:

H.G. Wells (1908): Becoming a Socialist: from “New Worlds for Old” (London: Macmillan), pp. 16-19: “A walk I had a little while ago with a friend along the Thames Embankment... from Blackfriars Bridge to Westminster. We had dined together and we went there because we thought that with a fitful moon and clouds adrift, on a night when the air was a crystal air that gladdened and brightened, that crescent of great buildings and steely, soft-hurrying water must needs be altogether beautiful.
And indeed it was beautiful: the mysteries and mounting masses of the buildings to the right of us, the blurs of this coloured light or that, blue-white, green-white, amber or warmer orange, the rich black archings of Waterloo Bridge, the rippled lights upon the silent flowing river, the lattice of girders, and the shifting trains of Charing Cross Bridge--their funnels pouring a sort of hot-edged moonlight by way of smoke--and then the sweeping line of lamps, the accelerated run and diminuendo of the Embankment lamps as one came into sight of Westminster.
The big hotels were very fine, huge swelling shapes of dun dark-gray and brown, huge shapes seamed and bursting and fenestrated with illumination, tattered at a thousand windows with light and the indistinct glowing suggestions of feasting and pleasure. And dim and faint above it all and very remote was the moon’s dead wan face veiled and then displayed.
But we were dashed by an unanticipated refrain to this succession of magnificent things, and we did not cry, as we had meant to cry: “How good it was to be alive!”
Along the embankment, you see, there are iron seats at regular intervals, seats you cannot lie upon because iron arm-rests prevent that, and each seat, one saw by the lamplight, was filled with crouching and drooping figures. Not a vacant place remained, not one vacant place.
These were the homeless, and they had come to sleep here. Now one noted a poor old woman with a shameful battered straw hat awry over her drowsing face, now a young clerk staring before him at despair; now a filthy tramp, and now a bearded, frock-coated, collarless respectability; I remember particularly one ghastly long white neck and white face that lopped backward, choked in some nightmare, awakened, clutched with a bony hand at the bony throat, and sat up and stared angrily as we passed. The wind had a keen edge that night, even for us who had dined and were well-clad. One crumpled figure coughed and went on coughing--damnably.
‘It’s fine,’ said I, trying to keep hold of the effects to which this line of poor wretches was but the selvage; ‘it’s fine! But I can’t stand this.’
‘It changes all that we expected,’ admitted my friend, after a silence.
‘Must we go on—past them all?’
‘Yes. I think we ought to do that. It’s a lesson perhaps—for trying to get too much beauty out of life as it is, and forgetting. Don’t shirk it!’
‘Great God!’ cried I. ‘But must life always be like this? I could die, indeed, I would willingly jump into this cold and muddy river now, if by so doing I could stick a stiff dead hand through all these things in the future,--a dead commanding hand insisting with a silent irresistible gesture that this waste and failure of life should cease, and cease forever.’
‘But it does cease! Each year in its proportions it is a little less.’
I walked in silence, and my companion talked by my side.
‘We go on. Here is a good thing done, and there is a good thing done. The Good Will in man—’
‘Not fast enough. It goes so slowly—and in a little while we too must die.’
‘It can be done,’ said my companion.
‘It could be avoided,’ say I.
‘It shall be in the days to come. There is food enough for all, shelter for all, wealth enough for all. Men need only know it and will it. And yet we have this!’
‘And so much like this!’ said I.
So we talked and were tormented.
And I remember how later we found ourselves on Westminster Bridge, looking back upon the long sweep of wrinkled black water that reflected lights and palaces and the flitting glow of steamboats, and by that time we had talked ourselves past our despair. We perceived that what was splendid remained splendid, that what was mysterious remained insoluble for all our pain and impatience. But it was clear to us: the thing for us two to go upon was not the good of the present nor the evil, but the effort and the dream of the finer order, the fuller life, the banishment of suffering, to come...

And, of course, it all went smash: At the start of 1914:

John Maynard Keynes (1919): The Economic Consequences of the Peace <https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/15776/pg15776-images.html>: ‘The inhabitant of London… regarded this [peaceful and prosperous Belle Époque] state of affairs as normal, certain, and permanent, except in the direction of further improvement, and any deviation from it as aberrant, scandalous, and avoidable. The projects and politics of militarism and imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries, of monopolies, restrictions, and exclusion, which were to play the serpent to this paradise, were little more than the amusements of his daily newspaper, and appeared to exercise almost no influence at all on the ordinary course of social and economic life…

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On the eve of the Great War, believers in prosperity had mistaken a precarious order for permanent progress. The shock of 1914-1918 lay not only in the carnage but in the revelation that the Belle Époque’s optimism rested on a brittle base—thin literacy and longevity, constrained political voice, extractive colonial structures, and overconfident elites. Grant the era its cultural vitality and genuine material improvements. But I insist we weight the baseline. Expectations had outrun reality—and that gap explains both the dazzling glow and the devastation when the lamps went out.

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"All That Is Solid Melts into Air": Since 1870, Roughly One-Fifth of the Economy Is Transformed Every Thirty Years

Brad DeLong — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 18:26:03 GMT

This time, we experts in the liberal arts—the artes liberales, the skills appropriate to enrich the lives and make productive those of us who are free and must find a way to live by our wits, as we are not bound by servile chains or possessed of some powerful form of status-group societal capital and privilege—join those in the barrel. Schumpeterian ceative destruction has massively raised living standards, but not all boats rise the same way, or at all. And it is a different set of boats that are most materially affected in each generation…

Does this have a place in my Econ 196 course for next semester? Behind the paywall for now as it is only a draft, and I should revise it heavily before I release it to run free in this wide green world:

Since 1870, worldwide, on average, according to our flawed standard measures, every thirty years about 4/5 of the economy have improved in technology and productivity by roughly 25%, at a rate of roughly 0.8% per year. And 1/5 of the economy has quintupled in technology and productivity, at a rate of about 5.4% per year. That leaves average productivity, worldwide, roughly twice what it was a generation before. And it is a different, although overlapping, share of the economy that undergoes this massive leading-sector push every generation.

And so, since 1870, we have seen successive Steampower, Applied-Science, Mass Production, Globalized Value-Chain, and now Attention Info-Bio Tech modes, with these transformations occurring faster and more completely in today’s rich countries and slower and incompletely in today’s poor countries, but with life even in poor countries being substantially transformed vis-à-vis life 150 years ago.

And for a century before 1870, roughly, the same process was going on in the then-Dover Circle Plus: the 400 miles around the port of Dover in the southeastern corner of Britain, plus its offshoot across the Atlantic in New England, the coastal Mid-Atlantic, and the American Midwest plus Ontario. But the pace was slower, taking not 30 but 100 years for the leading sectors to lift their productivity fivefold. Before Steampower there had been Commercial-Imperial society. And the three centuries or so before 1770 had seen the transformation from the second to the first, with again a roughly doubling of average productivity in the Dover Circle Plus (and perhaps a 50% gain in potential elsewhere from the Columbian Exchange and the coming of the world market, but with nearly all of that gain elsewhere eaten up by Malthusian population growth).

Benchmarks to orient ourselves:

Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels (1848): The Communist Manifesto <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/>: ‘The bourgeoisie… has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals…. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation…. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned….
National industries… are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations… [using] raw material drawn from the remotest zones… whose products are consumed… in every quarter of the globe… universal inter-dependence…. It has agglomerated population, centralised the means of production, and has concentrated property….
The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarce one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground — what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?…

Plus:

Cosma Shalizi (2010): The Singularity in Our Past Light-Cone <http://bactra.org/weblog/699.html>: ‘The Singularity has happened; we call it “the industrial revolution” or “the long nineteenth century”. It was over by the close of 1918. Exponential yet basically unpredictable growth of technology, rendering long-term extrapolation impossible (even when attempted by geniuses)? Check. Massive, profoundly dis-orienting transformation in the life of humanity, extending to our ecology, mentality and social organization? Check. Annihilation of the age-old constraints of space and time? Check. Embrace of the fusion of humanity and machines? Check. Creation of vast, inhuman distributed systems of information-processing, communication and control, “the coldest of all cold monsters”? Check; we call them “the self-regulating market system” and “modern bureaucracies” (public or private), and they treat men and women, even those whose minds and bodies instantiate them, like straw dogs. An implacable drive on the part of those networks…. Drive” is the best I can do; words like “agenda” or “purpose” are too anthropomorphic, and fail to acknowledge the radical novely and strangeness of these assemblages, which are not even intelligent, as we experience intelligence, yet ceaselessly calculating…

And, of course, from my Slouching Towards Utopia:

The technological and productivity economic underpinnings of human society in 1903 were profoundly different from those of 1870—underpinnings of industry and globalization as opposed to one that was still agrarian and landlord-dominated. The mass-production underpinnings of 1936, at least in the industrial core of the global north, were profoundly different also. But the change to the mass consumption-suburbanization underpin- nings of 1969 was as profound, and that was followed by the shift to the information-age microelectronic-based underpinnings of 2002. A revolutionized economy every generation cannot but revolutionize society and politics, and a government trying to cope with such repeated revolutions cannot help but be greatly stressed in its attempts to manage and provide for its people in the storms.
Much good, but much ill also flowed: people can and do use technologies—both the harder ones, for manipulating nature, and the softer ones, for organizing humans—for great good, but also to exploit, to dominate, and to tyrannize. And the long twentieth century saw the worst and most bloodthirsty tyrannies that we know of.
And much that was mixed, both for good and for ill, also flowed. All that was solid melted into air—or rather, all established orders and patterns were steamed away. Only a small proportion of economic life could be carried out, and was carried out, in 2010 the same way it had been in 1870. And even the portion that was the same was different: even if you were doing the same tasks that your predecessors had done back in 1870, and doing them in the same places, others would pay much less of the worth of their labor-time for what you did or made.
As nearly everything economic was transformed and transformed again—as the economy was revolutionized in every generation, at least in those places on the earth that were lucky enough to be at all near the growth poles—those changes shaped and transformed nearly everything sociological, political, and cultural as well…

Now comes the very sharp Brian Klaas, author of the subtle and amusing Fluke:

Brian Klaas: We are different from all other humans in history <https://www.forkingpaths.co/p/we-are-different-from-all-other-humans-ad0>: ‘As I wrote in Fluke: “[In] the past… local instability…. One day you could be healthy, the next day… struck down by… plague. Childbirth was a death trap. Starvation was a constant threat.… But… also… global stability… [as] society ticked along…. If your parents were agrarian peasants, you were likely to be an agrarian peasant…” We… have inverted that…. Our daily lives are highly regimented, regulated, and stable. Routine defines us…. We experience local stability. It gives us a profound illusion of control, forged through lived experience. But it is an illusion. The macro-framework… is constantly changing…. Mobile phones… artificial intelligence… pandemics, wars, climate upheaval… [as the] experience of life changes drastically from one generation to the next. Unlike the overwhelming majority of our ancestors, we experience global instability. We’ve invented an upside-down world where Starbucks never changes, while rivers dry up and democracies collapse…

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Brian is, I think, overstating it to some degree. For most people, a generation sees (i) some change in their roles as producers in the organization and productivity of their jobs and the pieces of the societal division of labor that they do, some change in their roles as consumers and utilizers of most of the products of the human division of labor, but about one-fifth or so of their life as consumers and utilizers of the products of the human division of labor completely upended, largely in a good way. And then there are the 1/5 of people whose jobs and whose roles as producers were caught up in the Schumpeterian creative-destruction leading-sector technology tsunami, for whom little is the same as it was thirty years before. That change is to their substantial detriment if they tried to do the old thing in the old way: their real incomes then would be only 1/4 or so of what they would have expected. But that change would have been to their substantial benefit had they found a way to successfully surf the wave.

To summarize: Since 1770, the modern economy changes by puncture, not glide. Every thirty years these days, a sector explodes—lifting productivity, reorganizing firms, and scrambling career ladders. Roughly four-fifths inch forward, while one-fifth quintuples and redefines the frontier. Those leading sectors—steam, mass production, information—rebuild institutions and stress politics as they march. Most people experience partial gains in consumption and workflow; the unlucky fifth face brutal displacement unless they pivot fast. Past waves forged industry, mass production, suburbia, microelectronics; each remapped the social order, often painfully. Average living standards rise, but the distribution is jagged, and the politics volatile. Today’s leading edge runs through data centers and cognitive work: prompts, context engineering, evaluation, and synthesis. The liberal arts—long buffered—now sit at ground zero. Survival means translation: turn judgment, clarity, and taste into leverage over machines and markets, while rebuilding public capacity to manage the turbulence.

And so now in this generation it is the turn of we intellectuals, the experts in the liberal arts, to be caught up in the full force of the tsunami, rather than be among the majority for whom the wave casts up substantial benefits and changes in a fraction of their lives as consumers and utilizers of the products of the human division of labor, but for whom much of the core of day-to-day life as producers, consumers, and utilizers sees (relatively) little change.

Who and what are the experts in the liberal arts, the artes liberales? “Artes” in the sense not so much of “art” as painting and sculpture, but rather the skills appropriate to be productive and enrich your life. “Liberales” in the sense of pertaining to people who are free—free in the sense of being freed from hereditary or quasi-hereditary obligation slotting them into a subservient position in the societal division of work as a slave, a serf, or a laborer; and also free in the sense of having no productive property or guild-right or fief, of having no membership in a status-group slotting you into a specific even though non-subservient position in the societal division of labor. Those who learn the artes liberales are, rather, those who have to make a living by the use of their wits.

And, right now, the ways in which we must learn to use our wits to enrich our lives and be usefully productive are changing rapidly. We are in the position of the poor stockingers of the 1770, those who became the army of General Ludd.

Right now, for example, because of the state of my lower back and right hamstring, I am not sitting at my desk looking at my “computer”, but rather semi-reclining on the couch. And I am cut off from the world by a headset that is, right now, projecting the illusion of a wrap-around computer screen ten feet high and forty feet wide fifteen feet in front of my eyes. And on this screen I have called up, in one of the “windows” through which my eyes metaphorically look out upon an information documenr in the world, Christine E. Bachman (2000): “A Liberal-Arts Education for the (Middle) Ages: Texts, Translations, & Study”, a curated online exhibit of the University of Pennsylvania library 2000 miles away, centered around a ms. called LJS 101, which is:

a remarkable example of a Carolingian monastic textbook. The main text of the manuscript is Boethius’s translation of and commentary on Aristotle’s De Interpretatione, also known as the Peri Hermenias, which was central to the study of logic, or dialectic, in the early middle ages. This text is paired with shorter texts, such as a sample letter and definitions of words, which transforms the manuscript into a useful handbook for studying the first three subjects of the medieval liberal arts – grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic. Several of the items in the exhibition demonstrate the educational context of early medieval monasteries in which LJS 101 was written and studied. Other items illustrate how the subjects of grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy were interpreted and studied throughout the middle ages. Together, the manuscripts reflect the rich medieval intellectual tradition of studying the liberal arts…

Academic reading for me is thus an experience that is indeed a very far cry from the experience of my Great-Great Uncle Abbott, with his study carrel in Harvard’s Widener Library stacks on level 4-E.

References:

Bachmand, Christine E. 2000. “A Liberal-Arts Education for the (Middle) Ages: Texts, Translations, & Study”. LJS101. University of Pennsylvania Libraries, 1 June <https://ljs101.exhibits.library.upenn.edu>.
Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus. ca. 520 [2014]. On Aristotle On Interpretation. Trans. Michael Griffin & Andrew Smith. London: Bloomsbury Academic. <https://archive.org/details/commentariiinlib00boetuoft>.
DeLong, J. Bradford. 2022. Slouching Towards Utopia: The Economic History of the 20th Century. New York: Basic Books. <https://archive.org/details/slouchingtowards0000delo>.
Klaas, Brian. 2025. “We are different from all other humans in history”. The Garden of Forking Paths, . <https://www.forkingpaths.co/p/we-are-different-from-all-other-humans-ad0>.
Klaas, Brian. 2023. Fluke: Chance, Chaos, & Why Everything We Do Matters. New York: Scribner. <https://brianpklaas.com/fluke>.
Marx, Karl & Friedrich Engels. 1848 [1888]. The Communist Manifesto. <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/>.
Shalizi, Cosma. 2010. “The Singularity in Our Past Light-Cone”. Three-Toed Sloth, November 28 <http:// .org/weblog/699.html>:
Zhuangzhi. -301. The Writings of Master Zhuang. Ed. Guo Xiang. Luoyang. <https://archive.org/details/thebookofchuangtzu_202002>.

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READING: Henry Luce (1941): The American Century

Brad DeLong — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 17:44:22 GMT

Luce’s manifesto and the world order that it… signposted…

Henry Luce’s “The American Century” is an editorial artifact. It come from a hinge moment: February 17, 1941—ten months before Pearl Harbor. Back then the United States formally neutral, materially belligerent, and psychologically divided.

It is a piece both programmatic and polemical: a manifesto by a publisher who believed the emergent American scale of industry, technology, finance, media, prosperity, good order, and above all liberty imposed obligations along with opportunities. Read it as an intervention in policy. Read it also as an aspirational framing of a century that Henry Luce thought the United States could shape, for good, via the drive of its productive capacity and the contagiousness of its culture.

I think the right way to approach Luce is to ask three questions:

What problem did he think he was solving? What tools did he believe America had at hand to solve it?
And how well did Luce’s setting forth the “American Century” as an agenda map onto what actually happened from 1941 to the present?

The problem, for Luce, was not only Hitler and totalitarianism. It was the broader sickness of interwar capitalism:

a planet with a technological capacity to produce abundance;
a social-distribution system that kept millions hungry;
a world full of states able to mobilize for war;
and institutions unable to deliver peace.

Luce diagnoses American malaise—nervousness, gloom, apathy—as a failure of intellectual and moral clarity, a refusal to name what the United States was already doing (in the war short of war) and what it ought to do (commit to an outward-facing liberal order). His rhetorical move is to declare the question of “whether” moot—America is already in the war—and to focus on “how” to win and “for what” to win.

That pivot from ontology to teleology—less “are we?” and more “what are our aims?”—is the kernel of the essay.

On tools, Luce points to concrete levers: freedom of the seas, world trade on American scale, technical assistance and human-capital exports, an explicit Samaritanism—feeding the hungry alongside arming democracies—and the projection of “Freedom under Law” as a normative brand. He does not imagine a world parliament. He does imagine a world environment hospitable to American growth, secured by American influence. In his triad—industrial capacity, moral aspiration, and cultural prestige—he anticipates the toolkit that later becomes the Bretton Woods system plus the Marshall Plan plus the Hollywood-jazz-consumer-goods soft power gradient.

If you want a single sentence from Luce that prefigures the postwar order, it is his insistence that America is “responsible… for the world-environment in which she lives.” That is the embryo of the liberal internationalist claim: your domestic prosperity depends on shaping global rules.

Now, how well did the map match the territory? The institutional sequence from 1944 onward—IMF, World Bank, GATT; NATO; the UN system; the Marshall Plan; OEEC to OECD—was a remarkably faithful implementation of Luce’s instincts, albeit designed by Roosevelt-Truman-Acheson-White rather than an editorial board. American scale and credibility financed reconstruction, underwrote convertibility, and incentivized export-led growth. The post-1947 prosperity cycle—Europe’s “economic miracle,” Japan’s high-speed growth, then the Four Tigers—leveraged American demand, technology diffusion, and rules.

The “American Century” in that sense happened.

Between 1950 and 1990 the global economic frontier was anchored on American productivity and policy. To borrow a favorite metric: by 1973, the advanced capitalist world had cut the share of its population in poverty to historical lows while tripling real output per worker relative to 1939. That is not solely an American achievement—but the order that enabled it was America-centered.

Why read Luce today? Because he ties moral aims to material instruments. Freedom and justice are not slogans but outputs of institutions, flows, and logistics—ships, planes, rules, and grain. The “Good Samaritan” line is not charity; it is also stabilization policy. And he insists that leadership is a responsibility, not a prerogative. Senior partnership is earned by underwriting common goods, accepting constraints, and listening. When America does that—at Bretton Woods, in postwar reconstruction, in the liberalization of trade conditioned by domestic cushioning—it is indeed a “powerhouse” of ideals. When it does not, prestige decays faster than hard power can compensate.

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Luce, Henry. 1941. “The American Century.” LIFE Magazine, February 17.

Luce American Century 1941

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The American Century

We Americans are unhappy. We are not happy about America. We are not happy about ourselves in relation to America. We are nervous – or gloomy – or apathetic.

As we look out at the rest of the world we are confused; we don’t know what to do. “Aid to Britain short of war” is typical of halfway hopes and halfway measures.

As we look toward the future – our own future and the future of other nations – we are filled with foreboding. The future doesn’t seem to hold anything for us except conflict, disruption, war.

There is a striking contrast between our state of mind and that of the British people. On Sept. 3, 1939, the first day of the war in England, Winston Churchill had this to say: “Outside the storms of war may blow and the land may be lashed with the fury of its gales, but in our hearts this Sunday morning there is Peace.”

Since Mr. Churchill spoke those words the German Luftwaﬀe has made havoc of British cities, driven the population underground, frightened children from their sleep, and imposed upon everyone a nervous strain as great as any that people have ever endured. Readers of LIFE have seen this havoc unfolded week by week.

Yet close observers agree that when Mr. Churchill spoke of peace in the hearts of the British people he was not indulging in idle oratory. The British people are profoundly calm. There seems to be a complete absence of nervousness. It seems as if all the neuroses of modern life had vanished from England.

In the beginning the British Government made elaborate preparations for an increase in mental breakdowns. But these have actually declined. There have been fewer than a dozen breakdowns reported in London since the air raids began.

The British are calm in their spirit not because they have nothing to worry about but because they are fighting for their lives. They have made that decision. And they have no further choice. All their mistakes of the past 20 years, all the stupidities and failures that they have shared with the rest of the democratic world, are now of the past. They can forget them because they are faced with a supreme task – defending, yard by yard, their island home.

With us it is diﬀerent. We do not have to face any attack tomorrow or the next day. Yet we are faced with something almost as diﬃcult. We are faced with great decisions.

We know how lucky we are compared to all the rest of mankind. At least two-thirds of us are just plain rich compared to all the rest of the human family – rich in food, rich in clothes, rich in entertainment and amusement, rich in leisure, rich.

And yet we also know that the sickness of the world is also our sickness. We, too, have miserably failed to solve the problems of our epoch. And nowhere in the world have man’s failures been so little excusable as in the United States of America. Nowhere has the contrast been so great between the reasonable hopes of our age and the actual facts of failure and frustration. And so now all our failures and mistakes hover like birds of ill omen over the White House, over the Capitol dome and over this printed page. Naturally, we have no peace.

But, even beyond this necessity for living with our own misdeeds, there is another reason why there is no peace in our hearts. It is that we have not been honest with ourselves.

In this whole matter of War and Peace especially, we have been at various times and in various ways false to ourselves, false to each other, false to the facts of history and false to the future.

In this self-deceit our political leaders of all shades of opinion are deeply implicated. Yet we cannot shove the blame oﬀ on them. If our leaders have deceived us it is mainly because we ourselves have insisted on being deceived. Their deceitfulness has resulted from our own moral and intellectual confusion. In this confusion, our educators and churchmen and scientists are deeply implicated.

Journalists, too, of course, are implicated. But if Americans are confused it is not for lack of accurate and pertinent information. The American people are by far the best informed people in the history of the world.

The trouble is not with the facts. The trouble is that clear and honest inferences have not been drawn from the facts. The day-to-day present is clear. The issues of tomorrow are befogged.

There is one fundamental issue which faces America as it faces no other nation. It is an issue peculiar to America and peculiar to America in the 20th Century – now. It is deeper even than the immediate issue of War. If America meets it correctly, then, despite hosts of dangers and diﬃculties, we can look forward and move forward to a future worthy of men, with peace in our hearts.

If we dodge the issue, we shall flounder for ten or 20 or 30 bitter years in a chartless and meaningless series of disasters.

The purpose of this article is to state that issue, and its solution, as candidly and as completely as possible. But first of all let us be completely candid about where we are and how we got there.

America Is in the War

…But are we in it?

Where are we? We are in the war. All this talk about whether this or that might or might not get us into the war is wasted eﬀort. We are, for a fact, in the war.

If there’s one place we Americans did not want to be, it was in the war. We didn’t want much to be in any kind of war but, if there was one kind of war we most of all didn’t want to be in, it was a European war. Yet, we’re in a war, as vicious and bad a war as ever struck this planet, and, along with being worldwide, a European war. Of course, we are not technically at war, we are not painfully at war, and we may never have to experience the full hell that war can be. Nevertheless the simple statement stands: we are in the war. The irony is that Hitler knows it – and most Americans don’t. It may or may not be an advantage to continue diplomatic relations with Germany. But the fact that a German embassy still flourishes in Washington beautifully illustrates the whole mass of deceits and self-deceits in which we have been living.

Perhaps the best way to show ourselves that we are in the war is to consider how we can get out of it. Practically, there’s only one way to get out of it and that is by a German victory over England. If England should surrender soon, Germany and America would not start fighting the next day. So we would be out of the war. For a while. Except that Japan might then attack the South Seas and the Philippines. We could abandon the Philippines, abandon Australia and New Zealand, withdraw to Hawaii. And wait. We would be out of the war. We say we don’t want to be in the war. We also say we want England to win. We want Hitler stopped – more than we want to stay out of the war. So, at the moment, we’re in.

We Got in Via Defense

…But what are we defending?

Now that we are in this war, how did we get in? We got in on the basis of defense. Even that very word, defense, has been full of deceit and self-deceit. To the average American the plain meaning of the word defense is defense of the American territory. Is our national policy today limited to the defense of the American homeland by whatever means may seem wise? It is not. We are not in a war to defend American territory. We are in a war to defend and even to promote, encourage and incite so-called democratic principles throughout the world. The average American begins to realize now that that’s the kind of war he’s in. And he’s halfway for it. But he wonders how he ever got there, since a year ago he had not the slightest intention of getting into any such thing. Well, he can see now how he got there. He got there via “defense.”

Behind the doubts in the American mind there were and are two diﬀerent picture-patterns. One of them stressing the appalling consequences of the fall of England leads us to a war of intervention. As a plain matter of the defense of American territory is that picture necessarily true? It is not necessarily true. For the other picture is roughly this: while it would be much better for us if Hitler were severely checked, nevertheless regardless of what happens in Europe it would be entirely possible for us to organize a defense of the northern part of the Western Hemisphere so that this country could not be successfully attacked. You are familiar with that picture. Is it true or false? No man is qualified to state categorically that it is false. If the entire rest of the world came under the organized domination of evil tyrants, it is quite possible to imagine that this country could make itself such a tough nut to crack that not all the tyrants in the world would care to come against us. And of course there would always be a better than even chance that, like the great Queen Elizabeth, we could play one tyrant oﬀ against another. Or, like an infinitely mightier Switzerland, we could live discreetly and dangerously in the midst of enemies. No man can say that that picture of America as an impregnable armed camp is false. No man can honestly say that as a pure matter of defense – defense of our homeland – it is necessary to get into or be in this war.

The question before us then is not primarily one of necessity and survival. It is a question of choice and calculation. The true questions are: Do we want to be in this war? Do we prefer to be in it? And, if so, for what?

We Object to Being in It

…Our fears have a special cause

We are in this war. We can see how we got into it in terms of defense. Now why do we object so strongly to being in it?

There are lots of reasons. First, there is the profound and almost universal aversion to all war – to killing and being killed. But the reason which needs closest inspection, since it is one peculiar to this war and never felt about any previous war, is the fear that if we get into this war, it will be the end of our constitutional democracy. We are all acquainted with the fearful forecast – that some form of dictatorship is required to fight a modern war, that we will certainly go bankrupt, that in the process of war and its aftermath our economy will be largely socialized, that the politicians now in oﬃce will seize complete power and never yield it up, and that what with the whole trend toward collectivism, we shall end up in such a total national socialism that any faint semblances of our constitutional American democracy will be totally unrecognizable.

We start into this war with huge Government debt, a vast bureaucracy and a whole generation of young people trained to look to the Government as the source of all life. The Party in power is the one which for long years has been most sympathetic to all manner of socialist doctrines and collectivist trends. The President of the United States has continually reached for more and more power, and he owes his continuation in oﬃce today largely to the coming of the war. Thus, the fear that the United States will be driven to a national socialism, as a result of cataclysmic circumstances and contrary to the free will of the American people, is an entirely justifiable fear.

But We Will Win It

…The big question is how

So there’s the mess – to date. Much more could be said in amplification, in qualification, and in argument. But, however elaborately they might be stated, the sum of the facts about our present position brings us to this point – that the paramount question of this immediate moment is not whether we get into war but how do we win it?

If we are in a war, then it is no little advantage to be aware of the fact. And once we admit to ourselves we are in a war, there is no shadow of doubt that we Americans will be determined to win it – cost what it may in life or treasure. Whether or not we declare war, whether or not we send expeditionary forces abroad, whether or not we go bankrupt in the process – all these tremendous considerations are matters of strategy and management and are secondary to the overwhelming importance of winning the war.

What Are We Fighting for?

…And why we need to know

Having now, with candor, examined our position, it is time to consider, to better purpose than would have been possible before, the larger issue which confronts us. Stated most simply, and in general terms, that issue is: What are we fighting for?

Each of us stands ready to give our life, our wealth, and all our hope of personal happiness, to make sure that America shall not lose any war she is engaged in. But we would like to know what war we are trying to win – and what we are supposed to win when we win it.

This questioning reflects our truest instincts as Americans. But more than that. Our urgent desire to give this war its proper name has a desperate practical importance. If we know what we are fighting for, then we can drive confidently toward a victorious conclusion and, what’s more, have at least an even chance of establishing a workable Peace.

Furthermore – and this is an extraordinary and profoundly historical fact which deserves to be examined in detail – America and only America can eﬀectively state the war aims of this war.

Almost every expert will agree that Britain cannot win complete victory – cannot even, in the common saying, “stop Hitler” – without American help. Therefore, even if Britain should from time to time announce war aims, the American people are continually in the position of eﬀectively approving or not approving those aims. On the contrary, if America were to announce war aims, Great Britain would almost certainly accept them. And the entire world including Adolf Hitler would accept them as the gauge of this battle.

Americans have a feeling that in any collaboration with Great Britain we are somehow playing Britain’s game and not our own. Whatever sense there may have been in this notion in the past, today it is an ignorant and foolish conception of the situation. In any sort of partnership with the British Empire, Great Britain is perfectly willing that the United States of America should assume the role of senior partner. This has been true for a long time. Among serious Englishmen, the chief complaint against America (and incidentally their best alibi for themselves) has really amounted to this – that America has refused to rise to the opportunities of leadership in the world.

Consider this recent statement of the London Economist:

If any permanent closer association of Britain and the United States is achieved, an island people of less than 50 millions cannot expect to be the senior partner. . . . The center of gravity and the ultimate decision must increasingly lie in America. We cannot resent this historical development. We may rather feel proud that the cycle of dependence, enmity and independence is coming full circle into a new interdependence.

We Americans no longer have the alibi that we cannot have things the way we want them so far as Great Britain is concerned. With due regard for the varying problems of the members of the British Commonwealth, what we want will be okay with them.

This holds true even for that inspiring proposal called Union Now – a proposal, made by an American, that Britain and the United States should create a new and larger federal union of peoples. That may not be the right approach to our problem. But no thoughtful American has done his duty by the United States of America until he has read and pondered Clarence Streit’s book presenting that proposal.

The big, important point to be made here is simply that the complete opportunity of leadership is ours. Like most great creative opportunities, it is an opportunity enveloped in stupendous diﬃculties and dangers. If we don’t want it, if we refuse to take it, the responsibility of refusal is also ours, and ours alone.

Admittedly, the future of the world cannot be settled all in one piece. It is stupid to try to blueprint the future as you blueprint an engine or as you draw up a constitution for a sorority. But if our trouble is that we don’t know what we are fighting for, then it’s up to us to figure it out. Don’t expect some other country to tell us. Stop this Nazi propaganda about fighting somebody else’s war. We fight no wars except our wars. “Arsenal of Democracy?” We may prove to be that. But today we must be the arsenal of America and of the friends and allies of America.

Friends and allies of America? Who are they, and for what? This is for us to tell them.

Don Dang or Democracy

…But whose Dong Dang, whose Democracy?

But how can we tell them? And how can we tell ourselves for what purposes we seek allies and for what purposes we fight? Are we going to fight for dear old Danzig or dear old Dong Dang? Are we going to decide the boundaries of Uritania? Or, if we cannot state war aims in terms of vastly distant geography, shall we use some big words like Democracy and Freedom and Justice? Yes, we can use the big words. The President has already used them. And perhaps we had better get used to using them again. Maybe they do mean something – about the future as well as the past.

Some amongst us are likely to be dying for them – on the fields and in the skies of battle. Either that, or the words themselves and what they mean die with us – in our beds.

But is there nothing between the absurd sound of distant cities and the brassy trumpeting of majestic words? And if so, whose Dong Dang and whose Democracy? Is there not something a little more practically satisfying that we can get our teeth into? Is there no sort of understandable program? A program which would be clearly good for America, which would make sense for America – and which at the same time might have the blessing of the Goddess of Democracy and even help somehow to fix up this bothersome matter of Dong Dang? Is there none such? There is. And so we now come squarely and closely face to face with the issue which Americans hate most to face. It is that old, old issue with those old, old battered labels –the issue of Isolationism versus Internationalism.

We detest both words. We spit them at each other with the fury of hissing geese. We duck and dodge them.

Let us face that issue squarely now. If we face it squarely now – and if in facing it we take full and fearless account of the realities of our age – then we shall open the way, not necessarily to peace in our daily lives but to peace in our hearts.

Life is made up of joy and sorrow, of satisfactions and diﬃculties. In this time of trouble, we speak of troubles. There are many troubles. There are troubles in the field of philosophy, in faith and morals. There are troubles of home and family, of personal life. All are interrelated but we speak here especially of the troubles of national policy. In the field of national policy, the fundamental trouble with America has been, and is, that whereas their nation became in the th Century the most powerful and the most vital nation in the world, nevertheless Americans were unable to accommodate themselves spiritually and practically to that fact. Hence they have failed to play their part as a world power – a failure which has had disastrous consequences for themselves and for all mankind. And the cure is this: to accept wholeheartedly our duty and our opportunity as the most powerful and vital nation in the world and in consequence to exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit.

“For such purposes as we see fit” leaves entirely open the question of what our purposes may be or how we may appropriately achieve them. Emphatically our only alternative to isolationism is not to undertake to police the whole world nor to impose democratic institutions on all mankind including the Dalai Lama and the good shepherds of Tibet.

America cannot be responsible for the good behavior of the entire world. But America is responsible, to herself as well as to history, for the world-environment in which she lives. Nothing can so vitally aﬀect America’s environment as America’s own influence upon it, and therefore if America’s envi-ronment is unfavorable to the growth of American life, then America has nobody to blame so deeply as she must blame herself. In its failure to grasp this relationship between America and America’s environment lies the moral and practical bankruptcy of any and all forms of isolationism. It is most unfortunate that this virus of isolationist sterility has so deeply infected an influential section of the Republican Party. For until the Republican Party can develop a vital philosophy and program for America’s initiative and activity as a world power, it will continue to cut itself oﬀ from any useful participation in this hour of history. And its participation is deeply needed for the shaping of the future of America and of the world.

But politically speaking, it is an equally serious fact that for seven years Franklin Roosevelt was, for all practical purposes, a complete isolationist. He was more of an isolationist than Herbert Hoover or Calvin Coolidge. The fact that Franklin Roosevelt has recently emerged as an emergency world leader should not obscure the fact that for seven years his policies ran absolutely counter to any possibility of eﬀective American leadership in international co-operation. There is of course a justification which can be made for the President’s first two terms. It can be said, with reason, that great social reforms were necessary in order to bring democracy up-to-date in the greatest of democracies. But the fact is that Franklin Roosevelt failed to make American democracy work successfully on a narrow, materialistic and nationalistic basis. And under Franklin Roosevelt we ourselves have failed to make democracy work successfully. Our only chance now to make it work is in terms of a vital international economy and in terms of an international moral order.

This objective is Franklin Roosevelt’s great opportunity to justify his first two terms and to go down in history as the greatest rather than the last of American Presidents. Our job is to help in every way we can, for our sakes and our children’s sakes, to ensure that Franklin Roosevelt shall be justly hailed as America’s greatest President. Without our help he cannot be our greatest President. With our help he can and will be. Under him and with his leadership we can make isolationism as dead an issue as slavery, and we can make a truly American internationalism something as natural to us in our time as the airplane or the radio.

In 1919 we had a golden opportunity, an opportunity unprecedented in all history, to assume the leadership of the world – a golden opportunity handed to us on the proverbial silver platter. We did not understand that opportunity. Wilson mishandled it. We rejected it. The opportunity persisted. We bungled it in the 1920’s and in the confusions of the 1930’s we killed it. To lead the world would never have been an easy task. To revive the hope of that lost opportunity makes the task now infinitely harder than it would have been before. Nevertheless, with the help of all of us, Roosevelt must succeed where Wilson failed.

The 20^th Century Is the American Century

…Some facts about our time

Consider the 20th Century. It is not only in the sense that we happen to live in it but ours also because it is America’s first century as a dominant power in the world. So far, this century of ours has been a profound and tragic disap- pointment. No other century has been so big with promise for human progress and happiness. And in no one century have so many men and women and children suﬀered such pain and anguish and bitter death.

It is a baﬄing and diﬃcult and paradoxical century. No doubt all centuries were paradoxical to those who had to cope with them. But, like everything else, our paradoxes today are bigger and better than ever. Yes, better as well as bigger – inherently better. We have poverty and starvation – but only in the midst of plenty. We have the biggest wars in the midst of the most widespread, the deepest and the most articulate hatred of war in all history. We have tyrannies and dictatorships – but only when democratic idealism, once regarded as the dubious eccentricity of a colonial nation, is the faith of a huge majority of the people of the world.

And ours is also a revolutionary century. The paradoxes make it inevitably revolutionary. Revolutionary, of course, in science and in industry. And also revolutionary, as a corollary in politics and the structure of society. But to say that a revolution is in progress is not to say that the men with either the craziest ideas or the angriest ideas or the most plausible ideas are going to come out on top. The Revolution of 1776 was won and established by men most of whom appear to have been both gentlemen and men of common sense.

Clearly a revolutionary epoch signifies great changes, great adjustments. And this is only one reason why it is really so foolish for people to worry about our “constitutional democracy” without worrying or, better, thinking hard about the world revolution. For only as we go out to meet and solve for our time the problems of the world revolution, can we know how to re-establish our constitutional democracy for another 50 or 100 years.

This 20th Century is baﬄing, diﬃcult, paradoxical, revolutionary. But by now, at the cost of much pain and many hopes deferred, we know a good deal about it. And we ought to accommodate our outlook to this knowledge so dearly bought. For example, any true conception of our world of the 20th Century must surely include a vivid awareness of at least these four propositions.

First: our world of 2,000,000,000 human beings is for the first time in history one world, fundamentally indivisible. Second: modern man hates war and feels intuitively that, in its present scale and frequency, it may even be fatal to his species. Third: our world, again for the first time in human history, is capable of producing all the material needs of the entire human family. Fourth: the world of the 20th Century, if it is to come to life in any nobility of health and vigor, must be to a significant degree an American Century.

As to the first and second: in postulating the indivisibility of the contemporary world, one does not necessarily imagine that anything like a world state – a parliament of men – must be brought about in this century. Nor need we assume that war can be abolished. All that it is necessary to feel – and to feel deeply – is that terrific forces of magnetic attraction and repulsion will operate as between every large group of human beings on this planet. Large sections of the human family may be eﬀectively organized into opposition to each other. Tyrannies may require a large amount of living space. But Freedom requires and will require far greater living space than Tyranny. Peace cannot endure unless it prevails over a very large part of the world. Justice will come near to losing all meaning in the minds of men unless Justice can have approximately the same fundamental meanings in many lands and among many peoples.

As to the third point – the promise of adequate production for all mankind, the “more abundant life” – be it noted that this is characteristically an American promise. It is a promise easily made, here and elsewhere, by demagogues and proponents of all manner of slick schemes and “planned economies.” What we must insist on is that the abundant life is predicated on Freedom – on the Freedom which has created its possibility – on a vision of Freedom under Law. Without Freedom, there will be no abundant life. With Freedom, there can be.

And finally there is the belief – shared let us remember by most men living – that the 20th Century must be to a significant degree an American Century. This knowledge calls us to action now.

America’s Vision of Our World

…How it shall be created

What can we say and foresee about an American Century? It is meaningless merely to say that we reject isolationism and accept the logic of internationalism. What internationalism? Rome had a great internationalism. So had the Vatican and Genghis Khan and the Ottoman Turks and the Chinese Emperors and 19th Century England. After the first World War, Lenin had one in mind. Today Hitler seems to have one in mind – one which appeals strongly to some American isolationists whose opinion of Europe is so low that they would gladly hand it over to anyone who would guarantee to destroy it forever. But what internationalism have we Americans to oﬀer?

Ours cannot come out of the vision of any one man. It must be the product of the imaginations of many men. It must be a sharing with all peoples of our Bill of Rights, our Declaration of Independence, our Constitution, our magnificent industrial products, our technical skills. It must be an internationalism of the people, by the people and for the people.

In general, the issues which the American people champion revolve around their determination to make the society of men safe for the freedom, growth and increasing satisfaction of all individual men. Beside that resolve, the sneers, groans, catcalls, teeth-grinding, hisses and roars of the Nazi Propaganda Ministry are of small moment.

Once we cease to distract ourselves with lifeless arguments about isolationism, we shall be amazed to discover that there is already an immense American internationalism. American jazz, Hollywood movies, American slang, American machines and patented products, are in fact the only things that every community in the world, from Zanzibar to Hamburg, recognizes in common. Blindly, unintentionally, accidentally and really in spite of ourselves, we are already a world power in all the trivial ways – in very human ways. But there is a great deal more than that. America is already the intellectual, scientific and artistic capital of the world. Americans –Midwestern Americans – are today the least provincial people in the world. They have traveled the most and they know more about the world than the people of any other country. America’s worldwide experience in commerce is also far greater than most of us realize.

Most important of all, we have that indefinable, unmistakable sign of leadership: prestige. And unlike the prestige of Rome or Genghis Khan or 19th Century England, American prestige throughout the world is faith in the good intentions as well as in the ultimate intelligence and ultimate strength of the whole American people. We have lost some of that prestige in the last few years. But most of it is still there.

No narrow definition can be given to the American internationalism of the 20th Century. It will take shape, as all civilizations take shape, by the living of it, by work and eﬀort, by trial and error, by enterprise and adventure and experience.

And by imagination!

As America enters dynamically upon the world scene, we need most of all to seek and to bring forth a vision of America as a world power which is authentically American and which can inspire us to live and work and fight with vigor and enthusiasm. And as we come now to the great test, it may yet turn out that in all our trials and tribulations of spirit during the first part of this century we as a people have been painfully apprehending the meaning of our time and now in this moment of testing there may come clear at last the vision which will guide us to the authentic creation of the 20th Century – our Century.

Consider four areas of life and thought in which we may seek to realize such a vision:

First, the economic. It is for America and for America alone to determine whether a system of free economic enterprise – an economic order compatible with freedom and progress – shall or shall not prevail in this century. We know perfectly well that there is not the slightest chance of anything faintly resembling a free economic system prevailing in this country if it prevails nowhere else. What then does America have to decide? Some few decisions are quite simple. For example: we have to decide whether or not we shall have for ourselves and our friends freedom of the seas – the right to go with our ships and our ocean-going airplanes where we wish, when we wish and as we wish. The vision of America as the principal guarantor of the freedom of the seas, the vision of Americas [sic] as the dynamic leader of world trade, has within it the possibilities of such enormous human progress as to stagger the imagination. Let us not be staggered by it. Let us rise to its tremendous possibilities. Our thinking of world trade today is on ridiculously small terms. For example, we think of Asia as being worth only a few hundred millions a year to us. Actually, in the decades to come Asia will be worth to us exactly zero – or else it will be worth to us four, five, ten billions of dollars a year. And the latter are the terms we must think in, or else confess a pitiful impotence.

Closely akin to the purely economic area and yet quite diﬀerent from it, there is the picture of an America which will send out through the world its technical and artistic skills. Engineers, scientists, doctors, movie men, makers of entertainment, developers of airlines, builders of roads, teachers, educators. Throughout the world, these skills, this training, this leadership is needed and will be eagerly welcomed, if only we have the imagination to see it and the sincerity and good will to create the world of the 20th Century.

But now there is a third thing which our vision must immediately be concerned with. We must undertake now to be the Good Samaritan of the entire world. It is the manifest duty of this country to undertake to feed all the people of the world who as a result of this worldwide collapse of civilization are hungry and destitute – all of them, that is, whom we can from time to time reach consistently with a very tough attitude toward all hostile governments. For every dollar we spend on armaments, we should spend at least a dime in a gigantic eﬀort to feed the world – and all the world should know that we have dedicated ourselves to this task. Every farmer in America should be encouraged to produce all the crops he can, and all that we cannot eat – and perhaps some of us could eat less – should forthwith be dispatched to the four quarters of the globe as a free gift, administered by a humanitarian army of Americans, to every man, woman and child on this earth who is really hungry.

But all this is not enough. All this will fail and none of it will happen unless our vision of America as a world power includes a passionate devotion to great American ideals. We have some things in this country which are infinitely precious and especially American – a love of freedom, a feeling for the equality of opportunity, a tradition of self-reliance and independence and also of co-operation. In addition to ideals and notions which are especially American, we are the inheritors of all the great principles of Western civilization – above all Justice, the love of Truth, the ideal of Charity. The other day Herbert Hoover said that America was fast becoming the sanctuary of the ideals of civilization. For the moment it may be enough to be the sanctuary of these ideals. But not for long. It now becomes our time to be the powerhouse from which the ideals spread throughout the world and do their mysterious work of lifting the life of mankind from the level of the beasts to what the Psalmist called a little lower than the angels.

America as the dynamic center of ever-widening spheres of enterprise, America as the training center of the skillful servants of mankind, America as the Good Samaritan, really believing again that it is more blessed to give than to receive, and America as the powerhouse of the ideals of Freedom and Justice – out of these elements surely can be fashioned a vision of the 20th Century to which we can and will devote ourselves in joy and gladness and vigor and enthusiasm.

Other nations can survive simply because they have endured so long – sometimes with more and sometimes with less significance. But this nation, conceived in adventure and dedicated to the progress of man – this nation cannot truly endure unless there courses strongly through its veins from Maine to California the blood of purposes and enterprise and high resolve.

Throughout the 17th Century and the 18th Century and the 19th Century, this continent teemed with manifold projects and magnificent purposes. Above them all and weaving them all together into the most exciting flag of all the world and of all history was the triumphal purpose of freedom. It is in this spirit that all of us are called, each to his own measure of capacity, and each in the widest horizon of his vision, to create the first great American Century.

If reading this gets you Value Above Replacement, then become a free subscriber to this newsletter. And forward it! And if your VAR from this newsletter is in the three digits or more each year, please become a paid subscriber! I am trying to make you readers—and myself—smarter. Please tell me if I succeed, or how I fail…

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Does Each of Us Have a Big Enough Brain to Compensate for Our Lack of Fangs, Claws, Sprinting Speed, & Dodging Quickness?

Brad DeLong — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 14:06:41 GMT

I say: “No”. Not individually we don’t. The Scarecrow in “The Wizard of Oz” had a greatly exaggerated view of what he would have been able to do if he only had a brain…

There is a shlock TV show, on the Discovery Channel, called “Naked & Afraid”.

In it, two humans are dropped into a wilderness somewhere, naked, with one and only one piece of technology each (usually something like a knife, a fire starter, or a fishing line). All around them are other mammals doing their mammal thing: living their lives, reproducing their populations, evolving to fit whatever niche they have found where they are. But the two humans dropped by themselves (well, they are surrounded by cameramen, sound technician, drivers, logistical support, and such who do not help and who stay out of the field of view) do not. Instead, the humans proceed, not too slowly, to start starving to death.

I am not being figurative or metaphorical here. Look:

This is outdoorswoman Melissa Miller of Fenton, Michigan—Pure Michigan Melissa, Melissa Backwoods <https://melissabackwoods.com/>, across a time span of 21 days.

Melissa Miller is an expert on wilderness education and survival skills. She was dropped into the Ecuadorian Amazon with a fishing line and a partner, Chance Davis, with a knife. Over her 21 days in the jungle she lost 17 pounds: a daily metabolic deficit of about 2800 calories.

Given her likely BMR of 1500 calories, that is quite a feat.

Had she simply hunkered down and fasted, burning little energy other than her BMR, we would have expected to see a nine‑pound weight loss from burning fat. Trying to find food and avoid becoming food cost her an extra eight pounds, roughly, plus or minus.

As she described the physical stress:

Melissa Miller (2018): Naked & Afraid Weight Loss & Health Effects <https://melissabackwoods.com/naked-afraid-effects/>: ‘My hands were riddled with thorns and burn marks. We kept the fire steady the entire trip, building a mo[a]t… around it to elevate it from heavy rainfall. We also utilized a technique in which we created an oven to continually burn wet dead logs as there was no dry wood available. In order to create fire I had to construct a platform to dry out palm fibers and palm grasses for two days before I could get a tinder bundle to ignite successfully. Before that we had to ward off mosquitoes at night by covering ourselves [with] clay and mud. We prevented ants from entering our shelter area by covering the ground with thick ash from the fire…

Back in civilization, Ms. Miller needed significant medical attention, as she rapidly regained her weight, to deal with the:

fungus growing underneath fingernails and toenails.
under weight BMI.
severely infected bug bites, 4 that resulted in abscess growth, surgically extracted.
hundreds of thorns in feet and hands (result of the spiny palm trees that littered the ground in the amazon)…

Moreover, the constestants are naked, and may well be afraid, but they are not alone. In post-show interviews, they report:

On‑site medics and IVs, with medics rehydrating contestants with IV saline for severe dehydration and food poisoning.⁠
Field safety rangers and plant ID checks, with a ~20‑person crew plus rangers on location to confirm plant identifications to prevent poisoning.⁠
Medical tent and controlled supplies, on site, with accounts of contestants obtaining (or stealing) food/electrolytes from crew/medic areas during extreme calorie deficits. ⁠ ⁠⁠
Rapid medevac, when injuries or infections surpass on‑site care.

And Melissa Miller’s partner, Chance Davis? He lost nearly twice as much weight as she did: 32 pounds over 21 days.

A former U.S. Army Ranger, he did not have the 17 pounds of fat to lose.

And as a bigger human he had a higher BMR.

You need to burn 3 lbs. of muscle to get the caloric energy you can get from burning 1 lb. of fat. The experience of caloric deprivation without sufficient fat resources seriously messed with his head. And not just in a “in life, we have support—friends, family, podcasts, coffee, sugar—without those, you’re outside yourself; when I get hungry, I get angry” way. Instead, in this way:

The worst part was being hungry. Long-term hunger plays with your psyche. After the show, hunger made me physically reactive and angry. I carried food stashes in my pockets and car. I gained 70 pounds in a month because I couldn’t stop eating—I didn’t want to be hungry. A big scoop of peanut butter sticks in your throat; you feel full—the taste, texture, sweetness. That’s what I wanted. Creamy or crunchy? Doesn’t matter—they’re all heaven…

As I said: the experience seriously messed with his head, and made his body and brain desperate to build up fat reserves just in case something like that were going to happen again. The body and the brain had learned: even with the knife and fishing line that kept them from being completely naked, individual brains, even knowledgeable ones, are not going to be enough against the daily caloric math of the wilderness.

Meanwhile, back in the Ecuadorian Amazon, the other mammals were doing fine.

It was homo sapiens that floundered.

Recognize this: Melissa Miller is not some nature-shy city mouse. She started out as a outdoors educator and a nature-preserve naturalist, as a university-level wilderness teacher with a magna cum laude B.A. from the University of Michigan: primitive trapping, fire-making, native fishing methods, plant identification, tracking, wild foods, nature appreciation, and survival, with blades and their uses as her principal focus. The type of person who would put up YouTube videos demonstrating how to start a fire with a bow-drill, and how to catch turtles (for eating) in Michigan lakes:

Before her Amazon expedition, she would:

Melissa Miller (2018): The Prepping Guide <https://melissabackwoods.com/how-to-prepare-and-survive-naked-and-afraid-qa-with-melissa-miller/>: ‘[Be] outside all the time… reading foraging books, practicing primitive trapping, and perfecting my friction fires… trail running and road running without shoes. I would also go into the swampland and build a shelter while in a pair of shorts and a sports bra. I would sit there and let mosquitoes bite at me to understand what it might feel like living in the jungle. I had to get myself mentally prepared to feel that miserable for 21 days. I also did a lot of work outside when it would be really humid because I knew this was the type of environment I had to prepare for. I was practicing designing raised beds, and studying indigenous Amazonian tribes…. Teaching wilderness survival classes [had] also helped me prepare…. I was living and breathing “survival” as much as I could….
Letting mosquitos bite me as I trained in the woods prepared me for the mental fortitude it would take to get through (the insects play serious mind games with you out there). I also entered Ecuador with the thought that there was a possibility we m[ight] never get fire due to the humid jungle conditions. I would fast some days and shelter-build to familiarize myself with exertion through hunger…

But the principal thing Melissa Miller wished she had done differently before entering the Amazon?

Have gotten fatter.

Before she would next venture in front of the “Naked & Afraid” cameras, this time for South Africa, she put on an additional 16 fat pounds above her normal weight. She thus carried into the wilderness extra survival rations to cover her BMR energy requirements for 37 days, or to carry her for 19 days at a marathon-training pace. In her, I think accurate, judgment, there was no way for her to prepare so that she and her partners could deal with the jungle environment to be in energy balance for three weeks But she could prepare to carry three weeks’ extra energy into the wilderness so that she would be able to work hard and long while she was there.

Perhaps you just shrug your shoulders and say: “humans are relatively inept”. Even when she is at home in Fenton, Michigan, odds are she can barely remember where she left her keys last night. The other mammals out in the Amazon have been equipped by Darwin’s Daemon with teeth, claws, instincts, and brains that allow them to get into daily caloric balance. We don’t have much in the way of teeth and claws. We do have opposable thumbs. We do have big brains. They are supposed to compensate. But perhaps you shrug your shoulders and say: “they do not compensate very well”. For, out in the wilderness, Melissa Miller’s brain and thumbs failed at the one job for which Darwin’s Daemon gave them to us, for which other mammals’ teeth, claws, instincts, sprinting speed, dodging quickness, and much smaller and thus less energetically expensive brains largely suffice.

The rule: a smart, knowledgeable human (or two) in the wilderness naked should be afraid: they are highly likely to start starving to death.

And yet: Somehow we are here. We have not all yet been eaten. We have been evolved evolved. Our ancestors survived, and reproduced.

Our ancestors started to come down from the trees about seven million years ago. That was when we left the ancestors of our chimpanzee cousins still up in the forest canopy.

By five million years ago, the ardipitheci were walking upright when they had to, with much smaller and less sexually-dimorphic canines, but as of them with no signs of fire or stone‑tool use or indeed of semi-systematic butchery. Their brain cases were only 350cc, only 350 cubic centimeters. By 3.5 million years ago, the autralopitheci afarenses were habitually walking on two legs with their 450cc brain-cases. By 2.5 million years ago, the homines habiles with their Oldowan stone toolkit and 650cc brain-cases were around. And paleontologists judge they deserve our genus name: homo. By 1.8 million years ago, there were the homines erecti spreading out across the world, with their Acheulean handaxes, their endurance walking/running, and their 950cc brain-cases. When we look back 600,000 years ago, the world was then populated by the likes of the homines heidelbergenses: widely-controlled fire; complex hunting with tools like spears.

These people were not yet us: Their brain-cases were only 3/4 of the size of our brain-cases of 1350cc. They did not have organized big‑game hunting with spears, complex prepared‑core toolmaking techniques, long‑distance mobility, or evidence of our sustained and cumulative symbolic culture—cave art and engravings, personal ornaments, ritual burials, complex language‑supported planning, long‑distance exchange networks, composite tools made with adhesives, tailored clothing, or shelters. They did not have the final brain expansion, the globular skull, the reduced brow, or the chin.

And between 300,000 and 200,000 years ago there emerged people we definitely call us: homines sapientes, albeit “archaic”, with our brain-case size of 1350cc, but without the fully globular skull, the reduced brow, or the chin.

From a chimpanzee-sized brain one-quarter the size of ours five million years ago to our current state, our ancestors and then we have been evolved. And now we are here. So how can there have been so much selection pressure for larger brains when, even today, out in the wilderness they are insufficient to keep us, when naked individuals, from being hungry and afraid?

You know where I am going here. The answer of course, is simple: What is smart—what the brain is good for—is not each of our brains, but all of our brains thinking together. And the tools that we, and those who came before us, have made—tools that no one individual could make in a lifetime, and that embody all of that thinking-together one. Melissa Miller is an expert on knives, how to use them, and what to use them for. She could not make one from scratch.

From long-ago Acheulean handaxes to contemporary hunger in the Amazon, the throughline is simple: selection favored group knowledge and group production by a pecialized division of labor, not solo genius. Our edge not only was and is not claws or speed, it was and is not the ability to think up clever solutions to problems on the fly. Instead, it was pooled memory and anthology thinking-power, plus the division of labor that allows us to carve tools that contain the results of that collective thinking-power.

If reading this gets you Value Above Replacement, then become a free subscriber to this newsletter. And forward it! And if your VAR from this newsletter is in the three digits or more each year, please become a paid subscriber! I am trying to make you readers—and myself—smarter. Please tell me if I succeed, or how I fail…

#does-each-of-us-have-a-big-enough-brain-to-compensate-for-our-lack-of-fangs-claws-sprinting-speed-dodging-quickness
#naked-afraid
#melissa-miller
#chance-davis
#anthology-super-intelligence
#asi
#human-collective-mind-anthology-super-intelligence
##quantitative-long-run-global-economic-history

DRAFT: A Small, Intensive, Data-Sciencey Seminar in Long-Run Economic History

Brad DeLong — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 23:11:39 GMT

I have decided on my teaching next semester: two things that are half-courses (half of grad student intro to economic history, and the economic-history outside-speakers seminar), and this 25-student seminar to quantify the grand arc of economic history—and to make tools that will be usable by everyone, STEM majors or not. We’ll estimate, simulate, and argue about the quantitative shape of human economic history all the way from evolving foragers to the attention economy…

Well, I have decided what the rest of my teaching load is going to be this forthcoming spring…

For quite some time now, I have been worried as I see CP Snow’s "Two Cultures” problem—the division between those for whom math is a way of thinking, and those for whom it is an obstacle to thought—growing bigger and bigger, as it steadily has since he laid it out nearly a century ago. And for some time now, I have been thinking that getting people comfortable with what are now called the “Data Science” tools—statistics, quantitative optimization, decision-making under uncertainty, basic operations research, and so on—are going to be for our students the equivalent of learning for their day what learning to write a fine chancery hand was for students at the mediæval university. And for some time now, I have been thinking we commit educational malpractice every time we allow a student to leave Berkeley without acquiring basic competence and comfort with numeroliteracy.

Back when I was in the rotation teaching the "applied math" version of undergraduate, macro economics, I had what I at least regarded as considerable success in moving my problem sets off of paper and into Python Jupyter Notebooks, and in the process and the process making them superior educational materials as engines of estimation and counterfactual simulation. But whenever I tried to move these things to my economic history courses, I found that the exercises I produced were (a) so simple as to be terminally boring for 1/3 of the students while also being (b) so complex that they were completely impenetrable to 2/3 of the students. I could not find the sweet spot. For 2/3 of the students who show up in my economic history courses, numbers, algebra, calculus, statistics, and so on are not tools for thought but rather arcane ritual stumbling blocks, where sometimes they can learn to mouth the proper responses, but still find them large obstacles to understanding.

So I am going to make one more attempt to shift this—this time by hand-picking twenty-five students for a seminar, meeting four hours a week, and watching them very closely to see what they find straightforward and what they find impenetrable:

DRAFT: ECON 196: SEMINAR: Quantitative Long-Run Global Economic History

Mostly behind the paywall as it is only an early draft…

TITLE: Seminar: Quantitative Long-Run Global Economic History

DESCRIPTION: What, quantitatively, do we actually know about the long-run shape of global economic history? And what can we say about how reasonable counterfactual simulations of alternatives can add to our knowledge?

In our modern information-technology age, we can do many more kinds of analysis much more quickly and deeply and broadly than we ever could before. We ought to be able to use these tools beyond simple counting—the tools of sampling, estimation, forecasting, simulation, classification, and so on that make up what is now "Data Science" as the coming-together and then expansion of statistics with operations research and economics—to know more and to know in new ways.

This course will cover the standard long-run picture, as set out by Melissa Dell in her "History of Economic Growth" Harvard Econ 1342 and Robert Allen in his "Global Economic, Political & Social Development" NYU- Abu Dhabi SOCSC-UH 1011.

It will cover:

our ancestors' separation from chimpanzee ancestors six-million years ago,
the evolution of behavioral modern humans (perhaps) a hundred-thousand years ago,
the coming of agriculture ten-thousand years ago,
the agrarian age and its societies of domination up to 1500,
the first globalization and the societies of the imperial-commercial age up to 1770,
then the coming of industrialization and full globalization in the following century;
followed by, successively, the economies of the:
- steampower mode,
- applied-science mode,
- mass-production mode,
- globalized value-chain mode,
- and now the attention info-bio tech mode of human economic life.

It will cover: the sources of and blockages to industrialization and economic growth across time and space, the origins and maintenance of large-scale inequality within and across societies, the social and political impacts of economic growth, the role of economic incentives and political institutions in underpinning and retarding economic progress, and other similar questions.

But it will cover it from a pedagogical-experimental angle that attempts to use "Data Science" tools to the max. And the hope is that in the process the course will generate teaching materials that will allow the course's subsequent scaling-up to 150 people many of whom will have had no previous data science chops.

MEETING: TuTh 1-3 :: CAPACITY: 25 :: UNITS: 4

WEEK 1: Jan 20: Overview: Trying to measure human productivity (at making useful stuff) & the value of the stock of human technological knowledge (at manipulating nature & coöperatively organizing ourselves).

WEEK 2: Jan 27: Backing Up: Human evolution, effective population size, & high patriarchy.

WEEK 3: Feb 3: Agrarian-Age Malthusianism: Typical Living Standards, the rise of “classical” Mediterranean civilization, & the fall of the Roman Empire in the west.

WEEK 4: Feb 10: My wife will be having rotator-cuff surgery

WEEK 5: Feb 17: Societies of Domination: Land & Seaborne agrarian-age empires.

WEEK 6: Feb 24: The Post-1500 Imperial-Commercial Age: The beneficiaries from commerce, the Columbian exchange, & the Atlantic slave trade.

WEEK 7: Mar 3: 1770-1870 in the Dover Circle: The British industrial revolution: size, nature, & causes of economic growth

WEEK 8: Mar 10: The Post-1870 Growth Explosion: Quantifying the prosperity hockey stock.

WEEK 9: Mar 17: Reversals of Fortune: Colonial origins & cross-nation inequality.

WEEK 10: Mar 31: The Development of Underdevelopment: Globalization & racist migration barrier, & the development of underdevelopment

WEEK 11: Apr 7: The current spread of wealth across nations.

WEEK 12: Apr 14: Prospects for further growth acceleration (or deceleration).

WEEK 13: Apr 21: The Fermi Paradox and the future of humanity.

WEEK 14: Apr 28: Hicks Lecture…

WEEK 15: May 5: The Fermi Paradox: & the future of humanity

Humanity as an ASI—an Anthology Super-Intelligence—& the pace of technological change.

Yes, consider this as lab for teaching, or trying to teach, economic history with code instead of chalk dust. For only 25 students (not our standard 150, so that I can watch each of them learn and practice), four hours a week (not our standard three; ditto), to try to build the bridge between narrative and numbers and simulations (anecdotes to tell us what the numbers really mean; numbers to tell us which anecdotes are representative and of what; simulations as counterfactuals are the only way to get a good handle on cause-and-effect and what-if). We’ll measure productivity, model diffusion, and simulate counterfactuals from agriculture to AI, from human evolution to globalization’s bottlenecks, tackling inequality, institutions, and growth regimes. We’ll use data science tools to estimate, forecast, classify, and simulate across epochs: Malthusian constraints, empire, industrialization, global value chains, and today’s attention/info/bio-technology frontier. Weekly topics pair big ideas with reproducible notebooks and counterfactual experiments.

The pedagogical bet: Python Jupyter notebooks can be written that are substantive enough for data-savvy students yet accessible to those wary of math. Success means materials we can scale to 150 students with diverse backgrounds. Failure still yields knowledge about what confuses, what clicks, and possibly that it is time to despair of ever fixing C.P. Snow’s “Two Cultures” divide.

This course asks a blunt question: what do we actually know—quantitatively—about the long-run path of the world economy? The goal is dual: push STEM students beyond toy models while making numeroliteracy feel like thinking, not ritual, for non-STEM students. If the pilot works, we’ll have a scalable, inclusive toolkit for teaching economic history by doing it.
. We’ll interrogate canonical narratives—Roman collapse, Atlantic slavery’s beneficiaries, British industrialization, reversals of fortune, migration barriers—using estimation and simulation that students can replicate and extend. The structure: 13 weeks, Tu/Th 1–3, capacity 25, units 4. The ambition is equal parts substantive and pedagogical: produce materials that are interesting, subtle, and doable. I’m not certain it will succeed. I am certain it is worth attempting—and I have the chair’s green light to see how far we can move the frontier.

I must say I think my chances of coming up with good-enough materials are not high. They must be ones that: (a) make enough interesting substantive points to hold students’ attention, (b) are difficult & subtle enough not to be boringly trivial to STEM students with data-science chops, & (c) are doable by non-STEM Berkeley students for whom math has been a stumbling block rather than a way to think.

But it is worth doing, or so I believe. And now I have my chair’s endorsement!

If reading this gets you Value Above Replacement, then become a free subscriber to this newsletter. And forward it! And if your VAR from this newsletter is in the three digits or more each year, please become a paid subscriber! I am trying to make you readers—and myself—smarter. Please tell me if I succeed, or how I fail…

#draft-a-small-intensive-data-sciencey-seminar-in-long-run-economic-history
##quantitative-long-run-global-economic-history
##quantitative-long-run-global-history

DRAFT: Notes on Human Division-of-Labor Globalization from Stone Tools to the Assembly Line: -750000 to 1945

Brad DeLong — Mon, 01 Sep 2025 19:28:36 GMT

I’m going to be giving a guest lecture in Harvard’s GenEd 1120 “The Political Economy of Globalization”, taught by Robert Lawrence and Lawrence Summers. The topic they gave me was “Globalization from Adam to the Great Depression”, which is not small. Here is one first cut at what I might say. Behind he paywall as it is, after all, only an early draft…

Humanity’s unique superpower is its twin abilities to collaborate in the creation and development of knowledge on the one hand and of the division of labor on the other. And this has then led rapidly to globalization—vast networks of trade and cooperation that transcend any single political authority’s span of control or legal system’s span of jurisdiction. The benefits of global integration are and have always been distributed profoundly unequally. And since 1848 the rapid innovation and industrialization that have driven unprecedented wealth and social change have also greatly widened global inequality and risks from globalization gone wrong, or gone smash.

I’m happy to be here. I’m happy to accept the invitation. I am not sure it is kind to have the topic be “Globalization from Adam to the Great Depression”, but while we are not such as move heaven and earth, what we are, we are; and we will do what we can.

I want to run through a dozen or so slides. And then we—or rather you—will try to decide whether I have in fact made an argument, and, if I have, whether you believe it.

Animal Behavior & the Human Superpower:

Why Cash Isn’t Truly King: Cash Transfers, Opportunity, & Real Engines of Transformation

Brad DeLong — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 22:59:54 GMT

To win the war on poverty, look beyond cash & toward the levers that truly unlock human potential...

I was lucky enough to have a personal cash transfer program. It’s called an “inheritance”. And here I find Kelsey Piper saying that I, probably, largely wasted it—did not use it wisely and well—in a not-using-it-for-investment sense:

Kelsey Piper: Giving people money helped less than I thought it would <https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/giving-people-money-helped-less-than>: ‘Ending the war on poverty will take more than cash transfers…. What… the basic income studies… show… [is that] poor Americans do not fritter away the cash on [extra spending on] "vice goods."… In qualitative interviews… recipients give very moving accounts [on how] the money brought comfort, security, hope and steps toward a better future…. But… the results are fairly clear at this point: Cash isn't king….
Cash transfers did not improve maternal… or child health outcomes… had no effect on stress, depression, body mass index, how often children got sick or the children’s overall health… did not improve mothers’ self-reported relationship quality or measures of psychological distress… [or] child development….
[Researchers] found “no significant effects of the transfers on labor supply; assets; psychological well-being; financial security; or food insecurity.”… The groups receiving transfers worked fewer hours or got paid less…. [And when] participants were asked to rate their own psychological well-being… nothing changed….
[Other researchers] found that participants worked less — but nothing else improved. Not their health, not their sleep, not their jobs, not their education, and not even time spent with their children….
Most studies on the relationship between income and well-being in the U.S. find that increases in income predict increases in well-being. Research from the earned income tax expansion in 1993 found that the extra cash improved stress and maternal health. [That] direct cash payments not making people better off is a surprising finding…

What is my guess as to what is going on?

First, this finding is, on one level truly bizarre. We know as solidly as we know anything in social science here on God’s Green Earth that our social safety net of progressive programs show powerful effects on opportunity in America today:

The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) improves children’s test scores; a $1,000 income boost raises math/reading by roughly 6% of a standard deviation (with subsequent replication-adjusted estimates still sizable). ⁠
EITC-driven income increases reduce low birth weight and raise mean birth weight, improving early-life health that underpins later educational and labor outcomes. ⁠
Childhood EITC exposure raises high school and college completion, employment, and earnings in adulthood, indicating transfers translate into measurable opportunity escalators. ⁠
Medicaid coverage expansions in childhood produce long-run gains in employment, reduced disability, and lower mortality—evidence that in-kind progressive transfers build human capital and economic opportunity. ⁠
Early-life Medicaid exposure improves adult health and reduces chronic conditions; mechanisms include increased preventive care and reduced family medical debt, freeing resources for child investment. ⁠
In general, SNAP access reduces food insecurity and poverty, which lowers toxic stress and supports better child development—preconditions for later opportunity. ⁠
The 2021 Child Tax Credit (CTC) expansion sharply lowered child poverty, demonstrating that well-designed cash-like transfers reach the children most constrained by resources. ⁠
Monthly CTC payments reduced food insecurity for recipients without statistically significant employment reductions relative to nonrecipients, supporting opportunity via stability rather than work disincentives. ⁠
High-frequency poverty tracking showed each monthly CTC payment lifted millions of children out of poverty, illustrating how predictable cash flow can secure the basics that enable learning and growth. ⁠
Moving-to-Opportunity vouchers (a targeted, progressive in-kind transfer) boosted college attendance and earnings for children who moved young, showing that resources that unlock better environments raise life chances. ⁠
Exposure to food stamps before age five increases adult educational attainment, economic self-sufficiency, neighborhood quality, and even longevity—consistent with durable opportunity gains. ⁠
In particular, SNAP expansions during the Great Recession functioned countercyclically and reduced very low food security—stabilizing households so children could maintain schooling and health routines. ⁠
National Academies synthesis concludes that expanding child-focused income supports (EITC/CTC/SNAP/housing) would cut child poverty and improve health and development—i.e., opportunity—at scale. ⁠
The same report emphasizes packages of progressive transfers as the most reliable lever to halve child poverty in a decade, with downstream gains in schooling and work.
The weight of causal evidence—EITC, SNAP/Food Stamps, Medicaid, housing vouchers, and CTC—shows transfers don’t just raise consumption; they change life-course trajectories in education, health, and earnings. ⁠

In summary, by raising family resources during childhood, transfers improve long-run human capital and earnings for kids, especially when benefits arrive early in life. Opportunity gains from transfers are largest when delivered earlier in childhood, aligning with dynamic complementarity: early resources make later investments more productive. ⁠Progressive tax credits raise pretax earnings (via labor-supply and job-match channels) while also raising children’s future earnings, indicating multipliers through both current and next-generation opportunity. Health-mediated channels matter: income supports (EITC/Medicaid) increase prenatal care, reduce smoking, and improve birth outcomes, which are strongly predictive of later cognitive and earnings trajectories. ⁠Transfers often operate via stress reduction: by easing material hardship and volatility, they improve parental mental health and bandwidth, which supports children’s learning and socioemotional development. ⁠

Thus this null finding may well not be real—be one of those outlier throws of the statistical dice.

As I said above, I was lucky enough to have a personal UBI.

My maternal grandfather went bankrupt three times, I think, on his way to becoming the richest man between Tampa and Orlando. Along the way, he got his name attached to the Wellman-Lord process for cleaning-up the environment and acid rain. That process is an efficient alternative where wet scrubbing is not cost-effective, either where water is expensive, scale is small, sludge is not allowed, or recovery of pure SO2 is needed for plant operation.

Some of his money came to me and to my benefit: about $20,000 a year from birth up to roughly age 50. Of this personal UBI:

Some (probably not enough) I or other saved and did invest in financial assets. And, adjusted for inflation, $1 extra saved from my first assistant-professor paycheck in 1987 is now a $14 lump-sum invested that is throwing off about $0.70 in boosting each-year’s income today.
Some was spent on more frequent and lavish and lengthy travel vacations.
Some, after we moved out of the ground-floor two-room studio across the street from the scrapyard in Somerville, was spent on having a larger house
Some gave us the ability to make impulse purchases without feeling constrained by financial necessity,
Some was spent higher-quality food (especially in California) cooked by others (the restaurant chefs here in California are a true gift).
Plus it gave me, always, a great feeling of security; I always knew that the family had immense financial reserves; thus any setbacks and problems in my life that could be solved by the application of money, in amounts up to seven figures, would be so solved.

Did this personal UBI make he happier? Hell yes! Am I very grateful to my maternal grandfather for not losing more than half his money in wildcat oil speculation in the 1980s and 1990s, and passing down to us his descendants what he did not lose? Hell yes! Did I spend the extra money wisely and well? Kinda-sorta.

But did this personal UBI transform my life? No. Did this personal UBI boost economic growth? No. The investments in my education that determine my skills and in human-connection network-construction that determine what opportunities I have to productively apply my skills were investments that would have been made anyway.

Looking at my own experience with my private personal UBI, seeing it in context with the RCT UBI studies, and generalizing radically and well beyond the limits, I see life in America today as a situation in which resources can be placed into three buckets: (1) the current-cash bucket, (2) the grasping-the-opportunity bucket, and (3) the savings-investment bucket:

The cash bucket: produces comfort now, by enabling the purchase of necessities, conveniences, and sometimes luxuries, in a context in which want is never going to be satisfied.
The opportunity bucket: by which you build skills and acquire connections
The savings bucket: which through the magic of compound interest can, if you invest in a well-diversified equity portfolio, keep up the habit of saving, and are not unlucky, will produce massive amounts of extra opportunity thirty years down the road.

Committing resources to this third bucket is very difficult in America today. Puritan family norms, automatic payroll savings, harnessing the gambling instinct—but that often turns out badly. Those are the only way to really get it going. And those do not come attached to a UBI.

The second bucket as well is much more of a culture-network psychological-sociological orientation thing than a constrained-by-cash thing. And with the increasing transformation of our society into one with a similar system to te Sui-dynasty keju (科举) set of barriers to opportunity, being unlucky enough to fail to pay attention in Math and English in fifth grade creates deficits that are then very hard to surpass.

So UBI goes into the first bucket, and is used for necessities, conveniences, and some luxuries. This is fine. This is a good thing. Let me stress that: This is very much worth doing.

But my experience suggests that life-transformation comes through opportunity—either now, or via savings-generated opportunities that are unlocked thirty years from now. Success at those would win the war on poverty as we know it.

You can tell stories and make arguments that my élite rarified-air experience gives clues to what is going on with the UBI-like experiments for the poor Piper covers, and other similar programs.

The first is that programs directed at the poor that expand demand without expanding supply of human-capital investments they might make are likely to have low returns. They provide liquidity without complements. They do not bundle the childcare slots, school quality improvements, or neonatal health clinics that would be neeed to convert resources into human-capital formation. Thus scale and saturation of opportunity may matter: Big effects may arise when programs buy admission into higher-opportunity environments (vouchers) or health systems (Medicaid). Cash cannot on its own expand the supply of quality schools, clinics, or housing. And so unconditional cash for the poor who do not have robust access to supply networks winds up boosting consumption and leisure, but not investment in any sense.⁠

The second is that the EITC is special because of its work-tied salience. EITC is paid through the tax system and tied to work, making it more salient as an “earnings booster” that families channel into child investments. Plus the EITC’s work-contingent phase-in/plateau embeds a nudge toward labor supply, raising earned income and complementary human-capital investments for children. Cash stipends lack this framing, and with no contingencies plausibly reduce labor supply.

Plus there is, more generally, a powerful element of in-kind targeting of binding constraints: SNAP directly relaxes nutrition constraints that impede school attention and attendance, and thus learning.

Mental bandwidth is an important consideration in itself. In-kind supports reduce toxic stress from food and medical insecurity, freeing parental bandwidth for thinking about child investment. Generic cash fails to durably remove these specific stressors. ⁠Vouchers and Medicaid embed case management and provider networks that translate benefits into services, thus providng information and take-up externalities. Cash provides no navigational help through complex opportunity markets. ⁠

Then there are programs that are tied to and aimed at critical developmental windows: Medicaid, SNAP, and early-life credits hit during pregnancy and early childhood, when returns to investment are highest; adult-targeted cash misses that window. Early-life nutrition returns are especially powerful: Food Stamps/SNAP expansions before age five yield adult gains in education, earnings, neighborhood quality, and longevity—mechanisms cash did not replicate in recent U.S. experiments. Targeting toward children really does matter: EITC/CTC expansions disproportionately reach households with children at moments of high marginal returns; adult-focused UBI spreads money thinly across recipients with heterogeneous goals. Maternal and infant health mechanisms appear very often to be key: EITC improves infant health via more prenatal care and reduced smoking, seeding later cognitive and educational gains; unconditional cash hasn’t shown comparable maternal/infant health improvements

And health-mediated gains are very important: Medicaid improves prenatal care and reduces later disability, raising employability and earnings decades later—a pathway cash stipends don’t consistently activate. ⁠

Improving predictability and providing stability may matter: entitlement-linked in-kind benefits reduce income volatility, which is strongly related to lower food hardship and better child routines; one-off or short-lived cash programs don’t.

Duration and dose of exposure may matter: Voucher and Medicaid effects scale with years of exposure; many UBI-like pilots are short duration and too small to change long-run trajectories.⁠

Networks certainly do matter, hence the success of things that utilize neighborhood channels: Housing vouchers directly move children to lower-poverty neighborhoods with better schools and peers, raising college attendance and adult earnings. Peer and school effects are powerful: Housing vouchers relocate children into peer groups and schools with higher expectations and resources; cash rarely changes peer/school context, a major driver of human-capital accumulation. Cash rarely produces a move to high-opportunity places.

Looking at my own experience with my private personal UBI, seeing it in context with the RCT cash-gift studies, and considering it in the context of the broader human-capital formation and poverty-reduction literatures, should I think raise your Bayesian credence in my seeing life in America today as a situation in which resources can be placed into three buckets: (1) the current-cash bucket, (2) the grasping-the-opportunity bucket, and (3) the savings-investment bucket—and buckets (3) and (2) are, for the poor especially, not that easy to access.

It was probably a black day for human knowledge when Gary Becker coined the term “human capital”. Building human capital is not taking a sum of money down to the bank and frictionlessly depositing it in some place where it becomes an income-producing financial asset, as the transformation of the societal power to act and do into real machines and production networks is then handed off to others. You have to handle the transformation of societal power in the form of money to skills and network connections that are the opportunity to use them yourself. And so accessing the second bucket as well is mostly not a constrained-by-cash thing, and is becoming less so with increasing sclerosis.

So a cash transfer goes into the first bucket, and is used for necessities, conveniences, and some luxuries. This is not bad.

Let me, again, stress that: this is worth doing.

But all I see suggests that it is indeed the case life-transformation comes through opportunity, both now via acquisition of skills or through the development of networks to open up opportunities to use them, or via savings-generated opportunities that are unlocked thirty years from now.

Success at those would win the war on poverty as we know it.

And all these problems are likely to become much more fraught in the coming decade.

Building skills today is, increasingly, less about grabbin and then oneself hoarding knowledge and more about joining the HCMASI—Humanity’s Collective Mind Anthology Super-Intelligence. Modern prosperity comes from weaving ourselves into dense networks of information, expertise, and institutional memory. The successful individual is not the one with the biggest fact bank, but the one who functions as a strong node—acting, processing information, and enabling communication within this human web that is supersmart that is the HCMASI: not some Artificial Super-Intelligence some maddened Silicon Valley billionaire TechBro will demand be constructed, but that we have all together built over the past 5000 years since the invention of writing made us a global, rather than a local village, and a time-binding past present and future, rather than just a here and now, superscale rather than auditory-distance anthology intelligencce. Mass education, research institutes, and digital platforms have all further multiplied our ability to connect, learn, and act together(see:

YouTube tutorials and AI assistants are the latest expressions of this long arc that have hit me. Once, mastering tools or machines required long training or thick manuals. Now a ten-minute YouTube video can make me a competent dishwasher repairman. This democratization of skill-building extends the reach of mass education, well, massively. For society, YouTube-style tools are positive-sum, making problem-solving cheaper and more widespread.

MAMLMs—Modern Advanced Machine-Learning Models—may bring a new leap. They could act as “information butlers,” filtering noise and aligning knowledge with my aims. society as a whole, MAMLMs may be closer to zero-sum than YouTube videos are: MAMLMs may well matter less for collective productivity, as better ways of filtering collide with the production of AI-slop at megascale. But they may well be decisive edges for those attempting careers like like mine.

The fact is: practical and informational skill-building is always very social social. Progress comes fastest when access to the HCMASI—the human collective mind—is broad, not confined to elites. The HCMASI is a wise super-intelligence, storing and organizing more than any individual brain. Open-source software and Wikipedia show what collective problem-solving can do. Alone, you are weak. And stupid. You forget your keys, step into the shower and slip on the soap, and give passwords to phishing emails. Human frailty makes collective systems essential. The future depends on keeping strong connection to the HCMASI open to all, not restricted to a privileged few.

Yet how we make such connections really is rapidly changing.

Hence how we plug ourselves into the HCMASI—Humanity’s Collective Mind Anthology Super-Intelligence—so that we can grasp opportunity is changing in ways we do not yet see clearly. The twentieth century gave us institutions like the research university, the corporate laboratory, and the professional association, each a structure for channeling human intelligence into collective problem-solving. Today, the internet, online forums, Wikipedia, YouTube tutorials, and GitHub repositories are the latest platforms through which we tap into the HCMASI. The next stage will look different still. Large-scale machine-learning models and AI assistants are beginning to act not just as repositories but as intermediaries, filtering, contextualizing, and personalizing access to the collective mind. We do not yet know how this new layer will reshape opportunity: whether it will amplify democratization, as the spread of mass education once did, or whether it will entrench advantage by giving the already-privileged even more powerful tools. As with the spread of literacy or electrification—technologies whose consequences were not foreseen at their birth—the shape of this new connection remains unclear

Similarly, how, in the context of the changing HCMASI, we build and maintain and utilize the networks that offer us opportunities that we can grasp are changing, also in ways we do not yet see clearly. In the twentieth century, such networks took the form of industrial research laboratories, trade unions, and government agencies, all of which structured collaboration and coordinated knowledge and opportunity at scale. Think of Bell Labs, which not only produced the transistor but also laid the foundations for information theory, or the New Deal’s Tennessee Valley Authority, which combined engineering, policy, and community-building to electrify a vast swath of America. Just as mass electrification or universal secondary education reshaped opportunities and networks in ways unforeseen at their inception, the emerging Order, whatever it turns out to be, layered on top of the coming Attention Info-Bio Tech mode of production will reorder who gets to participate and how. Their contours will define the next stage of prosperity—or its absence—just as earlier institutional networks shaped the long twentieth century⁠

Thus much thought and action are needed right now. Much thought and action as to how to roll with things and generate ways to better connect more people in changing ways to the HCMASI—the Humanity’s Collective Mind Anthology Super-Intelligence—so that they can be more useful and effective action-taking and information processing-communicating nodes for it. And this is changing right now.

Are these problems we face right now especially special in degree? Is the pace of change speeding up? Perhaps. But I would say no. I would say it sped-up starting in 1770, and then really sped-up again starting in 1870, but since 1870 the pace of change has been roughly the same: transformative over each generation, but not more rapid than that. What we are seeing now is change at the normal post-1870 pace that has shifted us from SteamPower Capital; to Applied-Science Belle Époque, to Mass-Production New Deal, to Globalized Value-Chain Neoliberal, and now to the Attention Info-Bio Tech Order Age that we are now moving into. Perhaps our problems are different in kind, as our industrial revolutions are about information and communication rather than matter and energy manipulation. Perhaps that makes a real difference.

But still, this—“all that is solid melts into air” under pressure of human technological revolution—has been the human condition since 1770, at least, with only one solid increase in its pace with the 1870 Second Industrial Revolution’s coming.

By now we should be more used to dealing with this than we are.

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