Davis Kedrosky Has Smart Things to Say About “Slouching", &

BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2022-10-01 Sa

FIRST: Davis Kedrosky Has Smart Things to Say About “Slouching”:

Young whippersnapper Davis Kedrosky has a sharp review of Adam Tooze’s review of my Slouching Towards Utopia <bit.ly/3pP3Krk>:

Davis Kedrosky: ‘Tooze's FT take on Slouching Towards Utopia is a fun read, but it's less of a book review than a prospectus for the book that Tooze thinks Brad should've written. In particular, [Tooze] thinks that there's too much America and too little China and climate…. That's ironic, though, because STU is the most Toozian history of the 20th ccentury.! Brad notes the centrality of American finance, manufacturing heft, and political economy to a global economic order in transition. That's the underlying theme across [Tooze’s] Wages, Deluge, and Crashed:

[Tooze: “America’s sway was often exercised] indirectly and in the form of a latent, potential force rather than an immediate, evident presence. But it was nonetheless real. Tracing the ways in which the world came to terms with America's new centrality, through the struggle to shape a new order, will be the central preoccupation of this book [Deluge]. It was a struggle that was always multidimensional—economic, military and political. It was one that began during… [WWI] itself and stretched beyond it into the 1920s. Getting this history right matters because we need to understand the origins of the Pax Americana that still defines our world today. It is crucial too, however, to understanding the huge second spasm…. It was precisely the looming potential, the future dominance of capitalist democracy, that was the common factor impelling Hitler, Stalin, the Italian Fascists and their Japanese counterparts to such radical action…”

I [Davis Kedrosky] think the climate crisis is a big part of the American Century's story. But the idea that it's the only way to frame the narrative is wrong. I wouldn't have written a book about North Atlantic political economy—but that's not a very useful critique of a book that is.Brad could have emphasized the climatological consequences of modern economic growth, sure. But the political economy story helps to explain the trajectories and distribution of economic power that structure the world today in a way that climate does not. Maybe in 20 or 50 years, immersed in a catastrophe of our own making, we'll think about Hayek, Keynes, and Polanyi in the same way we do the bullionists and mercantilists of yesteryear. That's not true now. Brad's KP-FH formula was worth more than a sentence of engagement….

Using the rising exigency of the climate crisis as a demarcation line between the 20th and 21st centuries is a perfectly valid way to deal with the issue and Brad does this…

Davis Kedrosky @dkedrosky

Tooze's FT take on *Slouching Towards Utopia* is a fun read, but it's less of a book review than a prospectus for the book that Tooze thinks Brad should've written. In particular, AT thinks that there's too much America and too little China + climate.

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My Responses:

(1) I agree that Davis has the goods on the centrality of America here: it was, starting in 1870, what Trotsky called it: “The furnace where the future is being forged.” And so I believe that a viewpoint centered in America is appropriate, just as a viewpoint centered in Britain would be appropriate from 1690 to 1870.

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(2) As to energy, global warming, and fighting global warming—as I really do not want to knuckle under to the bad right-wingers who insist on “climate change” and “climate policy”; and perhaps it is Tooze’s failure to search for “global warming” in my text that leads him to say that “of all of this there is no mention in DeLong’s history”?—that is a more complex issue. Sometimes I think yes; sometimes I think no.

To the question of whether I should have focused on the coming of resource extraction—driving mines deep with steam shovels, shipping commodities, like guano across half the world, and taking advantage of the fact that the last generation of glaciers served as bulldozers to scrape all the post-Permian rock away and leave the store to sunlight energy of half 1 billion years ago on the surface in the form of really cheap coal—I simply say no: that is the story of the British Industrial Revolution Century 1770-1870. 1870 to 2010 does see an expansion of energe scale—but the energy sector is far from unique, in that such an expansion of scale is economy-wide over 1870 to 2010. 1870 to 2010 does see a shift from coal to oil. 1870 to 2010 does see an important story in the repeated interactions of global energy economics and global energy politics. But the Storm God of the Semites knows that the last thing the book needed was yet another digression from its Polanyiesque Grand Narrative.

There are manuscript pieces on the cutting-room floor for roughly 60 more print pages on the cutting-room floor that might anwer Adam Tooze’s complaints about neglect ofoil, and globall warming—10 pages on Colonel Drake, John D. Rockefeller, and company; 10 pages on how an oil-driven economy is different from a coal-driven one, 10 pages on the centrality of the Middle East in the post-World War II economy, and some 30 pages on the the three civilization-shaking threats—global warming, nuclear weapons, and reviving fascism—that the Neoliberal Order made precisely zero attempt at handling at the end of the Long 20th Century.

But the book weighs in at 605 pages. And the book is, as my friends politely say, “sprawling” as it is: it could have used more authorial discipline in making sure that everything circles back to my Polanyiesque Grand Narrative than I was able to mobilize.

To the question of whether I should have made fighting global warming a major thread, I say no: We have not yet begun to do so.

To the question of whether I should have made the coming of global warming a major narrative thread, I oscillate. Maybe. But I came down on the side of seeing global warming as part of the story of the 21st century—a story we do not yet know—not of my 20th century. An effective book has to tell a narrative, and a narrative needs a beginning, a middle, and AN END.

Sue me.

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(3) As for neglect of China, it would simply have been silly for me to have tried to write a world history focused on China’s rise. For one thing, China has not yet risen. It does not yet have superpower, let along hyperpower, status. We can see it coming—maybe. But it is not yet here.

Moreover, I simply do not know enough about China to say more than I have. It is indeed true that, as my friend Yingyi Qian says, come 2100 the story that everyone will see as central starts in 1976 with the accession of Deng Xiaoping and is the story of the Chinese 21st century. But that, again, is a different story.

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So what is my advice to Adam Tooze, given that his reaction to my Sluching Towards Utopia is the same as my reaction was to Hobsbawm’s The Age of Extremes—that it is not the book he wanted to read?

My advice is: WRITE IT! WRITE THE BOOK YOU WANT TO READ!

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Other Things That Went Whizzing By…

Very Briefly Noted:

• Dani Rodrik: An Industrial Policy for Good Jobs: ‘A modern approach to industrial policy must respond to new circumstances. It must target “good-jobs externalities,” in addition to the traditional learning, technological, and national security considerations…. Focus on manufacturing and globally competitive industries has to be broadened to service sectors and smaller and medium-sized firms. And the practice of industrial policy will need to rely… more on collaborative, iterative interaction whereby public agencies supply a portfolio of customized public services in exchange for firms undertaking soft commitments on the quantity and quality of employment…

• Sara Trimble & Hannah Eliiot: Stunt Driver Sera Trimble on How She Got Her Start (and Her Porsche 911): ‘In the latest “How’d You Get That Car?” column, Trimble talks with Hannah Elliott about getting into car collecting—and showbiz…

• John Authers: The UK Cannot Afford to Look This Ridiculous: ‘The Bank of England may have saved gilts, but scorn and political danger for Truss and Kwarteng still have a long way to run—and could cut their careers short. Ridicule is something politicians need to be very, very scared of...

• Radley Balko: Welcome to The Watch: ‘“A masterpiece of reporting . . . If the goal of great journalism is to speak truth to power, Balko’s contribution does just that.”—Judges’ statement, 2022 Deadline Club Awards…

• The Economist: What to read to understand central banking: ‘Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market. By Walter Bagehot. White Crane Publishing; 232 pages; $8.99. John Wiley & Sons; £15.99…. A book that analyses in simple language the Bank of England’s role in the British monetary system…. Bernanke refers to Bagehot in at least eight chapters of his memoir and kept the book in his office at the Fed...

• The Economist: What to read to understand Donald Trump: ‘Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America. John Sides, Michael Tesler and Lynn Vavreck. Princeton University Press; 352 pages; $29.95…. Trump…. Were non-college-educated whites—key to his victory in the battleground states—swayed by economic anxieties or by his racism, Islamophobia and anti-immigrant scapegoating? This book, by three political scientists, argues it was the latter…. Racial attitudes shaped their perception of who deserved what from the economy…. Grievance politics prevailed…