& þe Paperback of "Slouching Towards Utopia" Is Out in the UK!

US paperback coming later in the fall...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Buy Slouching Towards Utopia on Amazon

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

Searching for: criticisms of Slouching Towards Utopia Generating answers for you… Possible response:

Some of the criticisms of DeLong’s book are:

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

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

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

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

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

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

And Bing-AI points me to Jason Ouyang:

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

Yes indeed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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