A Thoughtful & Critical Review of “Slouching” by Kevin Drum!, &
BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2022-09-25 Su
A Thoughtful & Critical Review of “Slouching” by Kevin Drum!
I am engaged and happy this morning because of a smart review of my Slouching Towards Utopia <bit.ly/3pP3Krk> book!
The very thoughtful and intelligent Kevin Drum has written a review of itin which he says that he thinks one of my principal themes is totally wrong!
Briefly, I say: Starting in 1870 it became clear—with human technological competence deployed-and-diffused worldwide (not just in the southern part of one small island) doubling every generation—that humanity was on the way to solving the problem of baking, a sufficiently large economic pie for everyone to potentially have enough. But finding the solution to that problem did not get us very far, because the problems of slicing and tasting the pie—of equitably distributing it, and of utilizing our wealth so humans could live, lives in which they were safe and secure, and healthy and happy—continue to completely flummox us. And I offer explanations and stories about that flummoxing.
Kevin, however, says of course the problems of slicing and tasting continue to flummox us. That is simply the human condition:
We have… a thin layer of cognition that allows us to gossip… and solve differential equations… [that] lives on top of millions of years of primate evolution….
We are territorial.
We are patriarchal.
We are hierarchical.
We are addicted to dominance displays.
We are tribal.
So just as always, after 1870 we continued to have stupid wars… base our social structures on racism and tribalism…. be seduced by charismatic (male) leaders… do stupid things….
Brad… thinks something should have changed in 1870 and he's disappointed that it didn't happen…. I, on the other hand, think that nothing special should have happened just because we got better at inventing things. And it didn't. We just continued on our sloppy way…. Still, we've made progress on all these things. Not a lot, but what do you expect in only a few hundred years? This is why, for example, I think that our current MAGA-inflected politics is a pothole, not a roadmap for the future. We'll get over it.
As for economics in general, you all know what I think: in another 20 or 30 years we will have cheap, genuine artificial intelligence. That will be a breakpoint in human history and will make all our current arguments moot. Practically any economic disagreement you can think of simply makes no sense in a world dominated by robots and AI. But we should keep arguing anyway. After all, I might be wrong about AI.
I think that Kevin has accurately put his thumb on our disagreement: I see the Singularity in our past (cf. Shalizi <http://bactra.org/weblog/699.html>). Kevin sees the Singularity in our future.
I say: Up until 1870 there was no possibility of humanity baking a sufficiently large economic pie. Hence the foundation of politics and governments had to be an élite elbowing competitors out of the way and running a force-and-fraud exploitation game on the rest of humanity so that the élite of thugs-with-spears and their tame accountants, bureaucrats, and propagandists could have enough. After 1870 it was clear that things could be very different. And yet, while they were different, they were not different enough—so we are at best slouching towards utopia.
Kevin says: The sufficiently arge economic pie will not be here until 2050. And then we will see. What comes after will be marvelous and strange, but not the same-old same-old of history.
He might be right. But I think that the past gap is, psychologically, greater than the future one. I see the bit dealhumanity’s passage to a state in which for many of us we no longer spend much of our day thinking how hungry we are and plotting how the get more calories, and no longer see half our babies die before five. I see that as bigger than the leap to the Robotoverse.
Consider: we upper-middle-class Californians—Kevin Drum and I—are already largely in the Robotoverse: we are unconstrained by material necessity in finding enough food that we are not hungry, enough shelter that we are not wet (or sunburned), enough clothing that we are not cold. Lacking access to information and entertainment is just not a thing for us.
It is true that our personal Robotoverse is not made (entirely) out of robots: large pieces of it are made up of poorer people than us, both nearby and elsewhere, coordinated by the global market economy.
Yet how is our personal experience different from what Kevin envisions will be here after 2050?
Must Listen:
The best thing I have found to catch up on Muscovy’s attempt to dismantle Ukraine:
Ezra Klein & Andrea Kendall-Taylor: Why Russia Is Losing Steam and Ukraine Is Gaining Ground: ‘When Russia invaded Ukraine in February, the question most analysts were asking was not whether Russia would win. It was how fast…. swift victory didn’t happen. And in recent weeks, the direction of the war has begun to tilt in Ukraine’s direction…. Andrea Kendall-Taylor is the director of the trans-Atlantic security program at the Center for a New American Security. She’s a former intelligence officer who, from 2015 to 2018, led strategic analysis on Russia at the National Intelligence Council. When we spoke, she was recently back from a trip to Ukraine. And she believes that the war’s long-term trends favor a Ukrainian victory…
Other Things I Note:
Very Briefly Noted:
Duncan Black: Our Donald Problem, and Yours: ‘I get the impediments to publicly betraying The Donald, but that elite conservatives generally—including judges—don't obviously want to quietly push him off stage is a bit of a mystery. Sure they love Trumpism too, but not the guy!
Sam Seder: ‘We have been speculating why Sean Hannity has repeatedly pressed guests to concede that it’s criminal to transport asylum seekers around the country under knowingly false pretenses… now its clear… the team trump/desantis war is becoming more public..
Dan Wang: ‘Brad @DeLong makes FDR sound like Deng Xiaoping, whose spirit was: “Whatever grows the economy we shall declare to be socialism, and what does not we shall declare to be capitalism”…
John Burn-Murdoch: Economics May Take Us to Net Zero: ‘The plummeting cost of low-carbon energy has already allowed many countries to decouple economic growth from emissions…
Max Chafkin: The Sneaky Genius of Apple’s AirPods Empire: ‘AR/VR headsets are a small market by Apple standards, but Tim Cook’s massive headphones division shows just how big the company can make a niche product…
Erik Loomis: The Long Arms of Trumpism: ‘“This week, Mr. Malpass’s refusal to acknowledge that the burning of fossil fuels is rapidly warming the planet exposed a debate inside and outside of the [World Bank] institution”… Who could have guessed that putting a climate denier at the head of the World Bank would be less than optimalWonder why people are so upset by it…
Mrs. Dalloway’s: Author Drop-in: ‘Brad DeLong… the provocative and timely Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century, a book Paul Krugman described as “A magisterial history… asks the right questions and teaches us a lot of crucial history along the way”…
Ryan Avent: Sleepwalkers: ‘Are we about to make some very costly, potentially avoidable errors? Or have I simply failed to learn from recent experience? You be the judge…. it still needs to be said: maybe the Fed really ought to consider taking a break here…
Rafael Guthmann: Ancient scientists and the economic performance of antiquity: 'Ancient economic history can be summarized by: Fast growth from 800 BC to 300 BC, slow growth from 300 BC to around 1 AD, negative growth from 1 AD to the 7-8th centuries AD...
¶s:
Felicia Wong: Why Is This Happening? Discussing Joe Biden and the end of Reagonomics: ‘Market fundamentalism, “the market giveth, the market taketh away, blessed be the market,” that's what Brad DeLong calls it… I think of the political birth of that movement in the 1970s as being a reaction to chaos… growth in people's wages… outpaced by inflation… stagflation…. Chaos on the political and cultural side… post-Vietnam… the sexual revolution… women… demanding… black Americans were demanding…. The fear for many middle class white Americans that lots of things were changing…
Tim Miller: The Republicans Selling Their Souls to Trump: ‘There is a nihilism in this that connects to narcissism in an especially dangerous manner, but at this point I’d say that this is something that really only manifests itself within the GOP. I don’t believe it was always that way. About half the book is on how people working in the GOP became like this, but a short version goes like this: There was a big disconnect between what GOP party elites wanted and what their voters wanted. So, to do well in GOP politics, you had to do a certain amount of pretending when it came to cultural issues. That kind of pretending becomes muscle memory. Then a buffoon like Trump takes over the party, and rather than fall back on whatever principles once got them into politics, people just keep on pretending—and then they become resentful not at Trump, but at the people who call them out on it…
I read Kevin Drum’s review, and one quibble I have with it is that, in support of his argument that 1870 was particularly special, he lists a number of significant inventions of earlier date that figured prominently in later prosperity. This seems sideways to your thesis. You aren’t positing that nothing important was invented before 1870. As I understand it, you are asserting that three circumstances that first coexisted around then fed unprecedented pie-growing thenceforward.
As for technology, Drum’s focus, the new era created an environment in which existing technology could be fully exploited to an unprecedented extent and new and follow-on technology could be discovered and commercially developed with much greater intensity than had previously been possible.
So, Drum’s point can be accepted without undermining your larger thesis. Similarly, as to his point that “people being people” is a sufficient explanation for inequitable wealth sharing, we have over the centuries nonetheless gotten inarguably “better” in various respects, notwithstanding our plains-ape inheritance. I believe your question is, why have we not gotten better, faster in this respect.
As far as I can see, Kevin and Brad are easy to reconcile. Kevin is objective: it's been relatively smooth (if you squint) exponential growth, with no obvious inflection point. Brad is subjective: smart people in 1870 started to believe that this exponential growth could beat Malthus. Both statements can be true at the same time.
It might be worth saying that most of the smart people who so realized this called themselves socialists. The Communist Manifesto was quite clear about this in 1848, and Bellamy published in 1888.