& "Slouching Towards Utopia" Is a Go...
Forthcoming September 6, 2022, from Basic Books:
SO PLEASE PREORDER IT!!!!
Here are early blurbs:
Robert Waldmann: “Brad: I remember reading an earlier draft 30 years ago. You haven't wasted the 30 years. This book is vastly improved. It is, in my view, an amazing accomplishment…”
Fred Block: “Brad: You have a distinct angle of vision, encyclopedic knowledge, and wonderful facility with the language. You are uniquely situated to synthesize…. Appreciate [the book’s] audacity and reach. …Let it go [to the publisher] with confidence and joy…”
Larry Summers: “History provides the only data we have for charting a course forward in these turbulent times. I have not seen a more revealing and illuminating book about economics and what it means in a very long time. It should be required reading for anybody who cares about the future of the global system, and that should be everyone…”
Thomas Piketty: “Brad DeLong learnedly and grippingly tells the story of how all the economic growth since 1870 has created a global economy that today satisfies no one's ideas of fairness. The long journey toward economic justice and more equal rights and opportunities for all shall and will continue…”
Christie Romer: “What a joy to finally have Brad DeLong's masterful interpretation of twentieth-century economic history down on paper. Slouching Towards Utopia is engaging, important, and awe-inspiring in its breadth and creativity…”
Larry Summers: “A book that will come out in the next several months, Brad DeLong’s Slouching Towards Utopia is, I think, a really remarkable and powerful placing of all of economic history in perspective, that gives a sense that at some level I had known but never appreciated of how profoundly different the 20th century was than all other centuries and points towards the combined power of science and markets to change the world profoundly, and sometimes, in some ways, for good, and sometimes, in some ways, for ill. I think anybody who wants to propound about economic policy should read that book…”
Ezra Klein: “I feel like I’ve been waiting for Brad’s big economic history opus for a long time now. So I will agree that I’m very excited for that one to hit my desk…”
Christie Romer: “Brad: Reading Slouching Towards Utopia, I am struck again at what a lovely writer you are. I find myself just marveling at how well you express things and how alive your prose feels. I am having trouble putting it down (even though I need to be preparing for Econ 2!)…”
Tim O’Reilly: “Brad: I love it. The grand story you are looking to tell makes a lot of sense to me, and it is very engagingly told…”
My Tweetstorm:
Elevator Pitches:
One Floor: Only when Keynes blessed the shotgun marriage of von Hayek’s market and Polanyi’s society did 20th-century humanity even slouch towards utopia. Remember that, and material El Dorado, at least, is at hand.
Ten Floors: Before 1870, humanity lived in dire poverty, with a slow crawl of invention offset by a growing population. Then came a great shift: invention sprinted forward, doubling our technological capabilities each generation and utterly transforming the economy again and again. Our ancestors would have presumed we would have used such powers to build utopia. But it was not so. When 1870÷2010 ended, the world instead saw global warming; economic depression, uncertainty, and inequality; and broad rejection of the status quo. Economist Brad DeLong’s Slouching Towards Utopia tells the story of how this unprecedented explosion of material wealth occurred, how it transformed the globe—and why it failed to deliver us to utopia. Of remarkable breadth and ambition, it uncovers the last century to have been less a march of progress than a slouch in the right direction.
Fifty Floors: The theme of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, & Steel—a brilliant book, if not without its major flaws (and what things in this fallen sublunary sphere do not have their major flaws?)—is: Civilizations in different places had access to different plant and animal resources, and for developing bio and other technologies two heads are better than one. Within Eurasia at the last the Atlantic Seaboard led in agricultural wealth and hence first developed the steel and the guns. Plus Eurasians gained immunity to all the germs that jumped from Eurasian animals into humans. And everything else follows from those Atlantic-Seaboard differential advantages with respect to guns, germs, and steel.
The theme of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century—a brilliant book, if not without its major flaws (and what things in this fallen sublunary sphere do not have their major flaws?)—is: Capitalists control enough political levers to keep the profit rate around 5%, faster than economies grow. Only in exceptional eras of wars, revolutions, deep depressions, and the short post-WWII social-democractic age of very rapid growth will wealth at the top fail to outpace wealth in general. Hence in normal times income and wealth inequality is either already very high already or is rising fast. And everything else follows from that tendency toward high inequality.
The theme of Brad DeLong’s Slouching Towards Utopia—a brilliant book, if not without its major flaws (and what things in this fallen sublunary sphere do not have their major flaws?)—is:
The long 20th century—the first whose history was primarily economic, with the economy not painted scene-backdrop but rather revolutionizing humanity's life every single generation— taught humanity expensive lessons. In 1870 industrial research labs, modern corporations, globalization, and the market economy—which, as that genius Friedrich von Hayek most keen-sightedly observed, is tremendously effective at crowdsourcing solutions—proved keys to the lock that had kept humanity in its desperately poor iron cage, with the only comfortable ones being the thugs with spears who took from the near-subsistence farmers, and those with whom they shared their extractions. And previously unimaginable economic growth revolutionized human life over and over, generation by generation.
We should, thereafter, have straightforwardly turned our technological power and wealth to building something very close to a utopia: a truly human world. From 1870-2016 was 146 years. Few in 1870 would have doubted that humanity more than ten times richer in material terms would build ourselves a utopia.
So what has gone wrong? Well, that idiot Friedrich von Hayek thought the unleashed market would do the whole job: “the market giveth, the market taketh away: blessed be the name of the market”. But, as that genius Karl Polanyi put it: people will not stand for being told that there are no rights but property rights. They instead insist that “the market was made for man, not man for the market”. The market’s treating those whom society saw as equals unequally, or unequals equally, brought social explosion after explosion, blocking the road to utopia. They deserved communities, incomes, and stability. They needed their Polanyian rights to those things vindicated too.
Since 1870 humans—Theodore Roosevelt, John Maynard Keynes, Benito Mussolini, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Vladimir Lenin, Margaret Thatcher, Deng Xiaoping, and others— tried to think up solutions. They dissented from “the market giveth…” constructively and destructively. The demanded that the market do less, or different, and other institutions do more.
Only with a shotgun marriage of von Hayek’s market to Polanyi’ society, a marriage blessed by Keynes—a marriage that itself has so far failed its own sustainability tests—have we been able to even slouch towards utopia, and bring the El Dorado of a truly human world into view. Whether we ever justify the full bill run up over the 140 years from 1870 to 2010 will likely depend on whether we remember that lesson.
Sold!
Done.
And congratulations! I'm pleased that you haven't wasted the last 30 years!