Another Excellent & Thoughtful Review of Slouching: Adam Gurri, & BRIEFLY NOTED

For 2022-11-21 Su

CONDITION: Muskker Has Lost All Control of Its ‘Bot Infection:

Conspirador Norteño: ‘It's a Sunday, and some chucklehead has decided to bestow ~24,000 newly-created fake followers on my account. All are accounts created in November 2022 with 0 tweets, a default profile image, or both…

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FOCUS: Another Excellent & Thoughtful Review of Slouching: Adam Gurri:

Another excellent and very thoughtful review of Slouching <bit.ly/3pP3Krk>, this one from the extremely wise and accomplished Adam Gurri:

Adam Gurri: Inventing Invention: Brad DeLong’s Slouching Towards Utopia: ‘In the 19th century… as scientific, technical, and productive capabilities expanded beyond anyone’s wildest imaginings, some contemporaries did begin to imagine… at the end of the tunnel of material progress… a true utopia…. A century and a half later, we have failed to reach the leisure society of Keynes, much less the classless society of Marx, or any of the other visions of heaven on Earth…. DeLong’s book is self-styled as a “grand narrative” rather than a dry academic analysis. He offers a strong perspective, in contrast to a book like Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin’s How the World Became Rich… performing a long survey of the many competing perspectives…. Slouching Towards Utopia is in this way much more like Robert Gordon’s The Rise and Fall of American Growth; each book allows both the lay reader and the specialist to walk away with a greater grasp of the general economic history of the time period covered, and both offer a strong thesis that remains controversial among specialists….

The rationalization of invention and the routinization of diffusing innovations at scale; that is the basic logic behind the role of the research lab and the corporation in DeLong’s grand narrative. But the manner in which it was rationalized and routinized is explored in far less depth…. How exactly did the research lab and the corporation empower these men to accomplish these tremendous feats? And why did no one think to gather “communities of engineering practice to supercharge economic growth” before 1870? It seems answers to these questions were left on the cutting room floor.

What DeLong does do, however, is no less valuable…. He moves on to what exactly happened, and how the world was transformed by this unexpected pivot from millennia of stagnation to a “long century” of slouching onward and upward…. He encourages his readers to constantly consider the conflicting moral perspectives of Friedrich Hayek on the marvels of the market and Karl Polanyi on its dangers in order to evaluate the flow of events he narrates from a broader perspective than either. It is difficult to conceive of a reader who will fail to come away from Slouching Towards Utopia with their knowledge and their perspective enlarged; the breadth of what is covered is staggering….

We ought… to take a page from DeLong’s “grand narrative” and get to thinking about the steps we might take to press ahead—even if we must do so at a slouch, and even if we never quite arrive at utopia in the end.

As I said at the SSHA Slouching panel on Saturday:

In Which I Quibble wiþ Paul Krugman, &

Once I had decided to stake my claim on the hill that 1870 is the hinge of history—the moment at which humanity’s ensorcellment by the Devil of Malthus was broken—there were then three natural directions:

1. Look back from 1870 at how we got to that point—how it was that the Devil of Malthus’s spell had been so powerful from -6000 to 1870, and how we then wrought the miracle of breaking it.

2. Look forward from 1870 at the working-out of the logic of unprecedented, revolutionary, economic growth generation after generation—what I call the David Landes-Joseph Schumpeter-Vaclav Smill book.

3. Look forward from 1870 at the political-economy consequences of the magnificent explosion in the rate of human technological progress, the sudden jump up in the proportional rate of growth h of the value of the stock of human ideas H about manipulating nature and cooperativelhy organizing humans deployed-and-diffused in the human world economy:

   

I had hoped, back when I started, to go in all three directions: backwards into origins; forwards into technology, industry, and society; and forwards into economy, sociology, and polity. And I thought I could accomplish it. As Michael Walzer once told me, when one starts a book project one is confident that at the end, when one holds the finished copy in one’s hands and opens it, one will see letters of fire that will by the logic of iron necessity inscribe their truth directly on the minds and souls of readers, and that the book will be κτῆμά τε ἐς αἰεὶ, a treasure for all time. But when the actual book appeared—no letters of fire, no direct truth, just chicken-scratchings that were not even the shadows on the wall of the cave, but rather vague gestures in the direction of shadows from which a good-hearted and hard-working reader might learn something.

Basic is not in the business of publishing thousand-page books.

And I very much doubt that I could have successfully executed a thousand-page book: the difficulty of the dive goes with the square of the number of pages. I wound up writing a book looking forward from 1870 that is overwhelmingly about the political-economy consequences of the magnificent explosion in the rate of technology-driven growth, with occasional side-glances at the parts of the original project that I was unable to execute.

I wish I had answers to give Adam to the questions he asks: How exactly did the research lab and the corporation empower these men to accomplish these tremendous feats? And why did no one think to gather “communities of engineering practice to supercharge economic growth” before 1870? But, alas, they are not even on the cutting-room floor. They are very hard and deep questions indeed. Was the explosion of wealth and productivity of 1870 causally-thin, in the sense that institutions had to evolve then in a way that was unlikely to get the explosion? Or was the growth acceleration of the Second industrial Revolution, the one big wave of Robert Gordon, causally-thick—largely baked in the cake, while the causally-thin nexus or nexuses came earlier?:

• Earlier this fall at Berkeley the extremely learned Robert Brenner lectured me for 45 minutes about how the true causally-thin nexus came much earlier: with the emergence, in the two centuries after the Black Death, in the 300 mile-radius circle around Dover, of market-bourgeois class relations, and thus the transformation of (a) a society of peasants, knights, lords, and the occasional merchant into (b) a society of laborers, craftsman, merchants, farmers, landlords, mercenaries, and plutocrat-politicians.

• Had we managed to get Joel Mokyr as a discussant at the SSHA, he would surely have said that the causally-thin counterfactual nexus word was the founding of the Royal Society and nullius in verba, “nothing by word”. This shift from (a) ideas spreading primarily because they are useful to an upper class élite running a force-and-fraud domination-and-exploitation scheme on the rest of society, to (b) ideas spreading because they are true of empirical reality.

• Nate Rosenberg and David Mowery would say that it was the diffusion of the steam engine that created a critical mass of engineers in the first two-thirds of the 1800s that was the key, and that once you had that critical mass the development f the industrial research lab was inevitable. Alfred DuPont Chandler would say similar things about the railroad: you had to build a corporation as we know it to run a railroad, and, once done, the advantages of diffusing that organizational form to other technology-frontier industries would become obvious.

• Others would find different causally-thin critical nexuses:

  • The consequences of the British-Dutch naval victories in the Wars of the League of Augsburg and of the Spanish Succession.

  • The Glorious Revolution of 1688.

  • Emperor Heinrich IV Salier, reportedly standing in the snow outside of the castle at Canossa in 1077, and the establishment there and then of the principle that the law is not just a tool for but binds even the most powerful.

  • Or you might even go back to the emergence of a strict monotheism—a God focused not on this world but on heaven and hell—in which case in this world one should praise the Lord, yes, but what is important here and now is to pass the ammunition.

I wish I had a good answer. But already this year both Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin and Oded Galor have put in their own bids on these issues, set forth their own excellent analyses:

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One More Video:

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One Image:

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MUST READ: David Bell on “Presentism”:

David Bell: Opinion | Two Cheers for Presentism: ‘The fraught question of how present-day concerns should guide historical research…. Historians… inescapably… write from a present-day perspective…. “Presentism” is not something that can simply be “corrected for,” like measurement error in a scientific experiment. Beyond this, history written with an eye to the present serves the common good. It illuminates how elements of our own world came into being, exposing the development of key political, social, and economic structures, tracing the effects of past choices, and offering insight into how change can take place…. What Sweet called “presentism” is to be accepted and even applauded, not denounced—at least to a certain extent. But at the same we need to be aware of the ways that it can also impoverish our understanding and appreciation of history.

The past… is a foreign country: weird, wonderful, and strange. Great historians give a visceral sense of this foreignness…. It took a very long time for historians to develop this sense of the strangeness of the past. Very few of the great historians of Western antiquity and the Middle Ages considered the societies they were writing about to be qualitatively different from their own…. This does not mean embracing moral relativism…. Understanding why slave owners or Nazis behaved as they did does not mean excusing them. But we do have to understand why… if we hope to understand why events played out as they did… a delicate balance between, on the one hand, trying to convey the sheer strangeness of the past, and, on the other, revealing its connections to the present and to our own concerns….

There is nothing more potentially liberatory than the sense of endless possibility that great history can open up — the sense that categories of thought and practice are not fixed, that the world can be made to change in all sorts of strange and unexpected ways. We may be driven, inescapably, by present-day concerns, but if we make the past look too much like the present, how can we envision a future that looks different from where we are now?…

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Oþer Things þt Went Whizzing by…

Very Briefly Noted:

• Alan Blinder: A Monetary and Fiscal History of the United States, 1961-2021…

• Adam Ozimek: ‘My dissertation has now been discussed in Slate, WaPo, Calculated Risk, but has only 7 academic citations…

• Matthew Zeitlin: ‘Salame also supported Tom Emmer, newly elected GOP whip and a longtime crypto booster. While Emmer has attacked Gary Gensler for being too close to FTX, in happier times he was pointing to FTX as a reason the SEC was too harsh…

• Todd Tucker: ‘It takes much stronger labor movements than the ones we see around the world to get to sustained wage-price spirals…

• Adam Roberts: Pindar’s 3rd Pythian: Horses, Horses, Horses, Horses…

• Christina Warren: ‘I think using analogies like nativism and gentrification for open source and open protocols is pretty gross tbh. Look, I feel for anyone who sees their communities change, but a platform or instance is either open or it isn’t…

• David Pierce: ‘Disney’s new-old CEO Bob Iger had some big ideas… at the Code conference… betting on distribution vs. content, not giving a crap about the metaverse, and “a world where technology was going to expand the purview of the storyteller.” He also said he was happy being retired...

• Shane Goldmacher: ‘The NRSC sent a fundraising email today signed by Herschel Walker in which it is actually keeping 99% of what’s raised, per fine print. Walker gets a dime for every ten dollar donation...

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¶s:

Aziz Sunderji: Fed’s Aggressive Rate Hikes Are a Game Changer: ‘“Monetary actions affect economic conditions only after a lag that is both long and variable.”… It can take years before the full effects of tightening become apparent, [and so] the Fed tends to move incrementally…. In the current state of the economy, the Fed has decided it doesn’t have the luxury to act slowly. Inflation has risen rapidly to a level not seen in decades. The central bank has chosen to slam on the brakes. This less-incremental approach raises the risk that Fed officials overdo rate increases, plunging the economy into a deeper recession than is needed to tame inflation…

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Michael Tomasky: The Vindication of Joe Biden: ‘There’s no indication that the midterms have given the GOP’s leadership the nerve to finally cast out the extremists who populate their base. “MAGA has repeatedly shown it cannot win national elections,” said Simon Rosenberg, president of the liberal think tank NDN, who was one of the few voices in Washington to predict non-disaster for Democrats ahead of November. “Unless Republicans can somehow walk away from MAGA, Democrats have to be considered favorites”…. A guy who passed several pieces of major legislation, held his factionalized party together, and defied history in the midterms. The subset of Democratic presidents in the past century who can make all three of those boasts is exactly two: Biden—and Franklin Roosevelt…

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Ed Zitron: The Fraudulent King: ‘As an expert on the subject, I believe that Elon Musk is currently in the process of ruining his life…. A few days later, Musk entered into a public spat with Twitter engineer Eric Frohnhoefer over the speed of the Twitter Android app, responding to Frohnhoefer’s patient technical explanations by firing him. He then proceeded to fire several more people for being rude about him publicly on Twitter.com and privately on their internal Slack…. Musk has paid $44 billion to purchase a website that has all told him to go f—- himself. The userbase, the staff, the advertisers, and even the website’s code have united around a bipartisan agenda—that Elon Musk is a big, stupid dumbass, a terrible manager, a terrible coder, and someone who lacks the basic empathy and emotional intelligence to run a company…. He is not done ruining things yet…. Fundamentally, this situation has also proven Elon Musk to be deeply, painfully uncool…