Slouching Towards Utopia—Reviews & Interviews

Grey Area Podcast wiþ Host Sean Illing, & BRIEFLY NOTED

For 2022-11-22 Tu

Nov 22, 2022

The free-market century is over NOV 21 ⋅ 53:19

Sean Illing talks with economic historian Brad DeLong about his new book Slouching Towards Utopia. In it, DeLong claims that the "long twentieth century" was the most consequential period in human history, during which the institutions of rapid technological growth and globalization were created, setting humanity on a path towards improving life, defeating scarcity, and enabling real freedom. But... this ran into some problems. Sean and Brad talk about the power of markets, how the New Deal led to something approaching real social democracy, and why the Great Recession of 2008 and its aftermath signified the end of this momentous era.

References:

Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century by J. Bradford DeLong (Basic; 2022)
The Road to Serfdom by Friedrich von Hayek (1944)
The Great Transformation by Karl Polanyi (1944)
Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy by Joseph Schumpeter (1942)
"A Short History of Enclosure in Britain" by Simon Fairlie (This Land Magazine; 2009)
"China's Great Leap Forward" by Clayton D. Brown (Association for Asian Studies; 2012)
What Is Property? by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1840)
The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order by Gary Gerstle (Oxford University Press; 2022)
Apple's "1984" ad (YouTube)
The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by John Maynard Keynes (1936)
"The spectacular ongoing implosion of crypto's biggest star, explained" by Emily Stewart (Vox; Nov. 18)
"Did Greenspan Add to Subprime Woes? Gramlich Says Ex-Colleague Blocked Crackdown" by Greg Ip (Wall Street Journal; June 9, 2007)
"Families across the country are tightening their belts and making tough decisions. The federal government should do the same," from President Obama's 2010 State of the Union Address (Jan. 27, 2010)
"The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte" by Karl Marx (1852)
Why We're Polarized by Ezra Klein (Simon & Schuster; 2020)
The Paradox of Democracy: Free Speech, Open Media, and Perilous Persuasion by Zac Gershberg and Sean Illing (U. Chicago; 2022)

<https://overcast.fm/+QLhUY_ods>

Excerpts:

Friedrich von Hayek… [the] genius… saw more clearly than anybody else that… if you can get a decentralized system up and running in which you solve the problems of information and incentivization… then you can turn humanity into an incredibly effective anthology intelligence… provided that market prices are in accord with social values… provided that the income distribution accords with, you know, utility and desert…

Friedrich von Hayek… technology is doing wonderful things… [but] that is all we can ask for…. the market… [to] make us rich…. Accept that the market giveth, the market taketh away, and say, blessed be the name of the market. To which Karl Polanyi responds… try to impose a system in which the market rules everything, in which the only form of social power comes from your wealth, in which the only rights that are recognized are property rights, and people will explode in revolution and resistance…. People… think they have other rights and demand that those be recognized…

Schumpeterian creative destruction [means] the forces-of-production… technological hardware underneath human society… [is] radically transformed every generation…. We have to… rewrite the sociological, political, economic, organizational software… run[ning] on top of this new forces-of-production hardware…. Frantically rewrit[ing] it… caught between the Hayekian imperative that we need the market economy… [and] the Polanyian… [imperative] that people will react…. They may react well – FDR and the New Deal. They may react very badly – Benito Mussolini and fascism. But they will react…. That interplay is most of the political economy story of humanity since 1870…

Right wing classical liberalism in exile… get back to the pre-Great Depression System…. People who [see the New Deal Order as]… much too bureaucratic… prone to rent-seeking…. Much of the 1960s counterculture…. The assembly-line office culture that was necessary for the prosperity of social democracy [seen as] positively inhuman…. Steve Jobs's 1984 Super Bowl Macintosh launch commercial…. How good the market can be… at crowdsourcing… summon[ing] the ingenuity of everyone who wants to be prosperous and get rich…. Plus the idea that taxes had been too high on the rich, so they spent their time buying political influence and figuring out how to evade taxes rather than being good entrepreneurial job creators. And [the idea] that subsidies had been too great for the non-rich… people feather-bedding their way through society and not contributing…. The New Deal order was distributing a lot of good things to people as entitlements simply because they were citizens…. Social democracy produces… people who are very fearful and angry about how others are being the moochers and the takers. And… neoliberals want… to say that success in the market is a sign of your moral virtue…

We've already had several revolutions in forms of effective communication, both for scientific and other forms of knowledge, and for political organization – in our lifetimes…. And that has powerful, powerful, powerful implications for how we organize ourselves, and the economy is very much a part of organizing ourselves…. The experience of all past generations weighs like an Alp upon the brains of the living as Karl Marx wrote in his 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, trying to understand how the hell it could be that someone who he regarded as as much of a clown as we regard Donald Trump wound up as Emperor of France in 1851 simply because he had a famous uncle, in large part…

Our modern media shifts us from a public sphere of compromise — one in which everyone agrees we have a pretty comfortable common home here, but the Left says we need to build an addition, and the Right says we have to fix the holes in the roof — to one in which people trolling each other on Twitter forever. Who are your enemies? Who do you identify your enemies as the first step everyone takes in gaining an audience, so that you cannot even be heard without starting out, as we cannot compromise with these people, whoever the 'these people’ are…

You have managed to get magnificent things out of all of your guests so far in all of this new series that you've started…. If we do get down to a world in which podcast hosts are no longer a mass, but instead a very small elite group, you are certain to be among them…

Share Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality

Oþer Things Þt Went Whizzing by…

Very Briefly Noted:

David Frum: ‘I wrote today about the GOP plan to make the next Congress all Hunter Biden, all the time... and why the plan is doomed to flop…
Ian Millhiser: ‘My concern is that the Hunter Biden investigations uncover some stupid-but-exceedingly-minor mistake by Joe Biden — perhaps he used a personal email account to conduct work business — that gets turned into a giant scandal by irresponsible and incompetent journalists...
Sean Illing ‘The delusion here is still thinking the other side is playing the 20th century liberal democratic game in which bad faith actors "flop" if they fail to make a convincing case. Flooding the zone with shit succeeds merely by creating spectacle and dictating coverage…
Jeremy Wallace: The end of GDPism in China as we know it (?): ‘Untangl[ing]… from the land, finance, and real estate triangle… the over-investment, over-indebtedness, overly-speculative nature…. Increasingly, the questions of China’s climate politics and policy are intimately connected to these questions about growth and ending the construction-based political economy of local governments. More on this in the weeks, months, and years to come…
Kay Halloran: How To Summon The Devil, And What To Do When He Shows Up: ‘The sorcerer’s summoning ceremony first debuted on the early modern stage as the morbid set piece at the center of Christopher Marlowe’s Tragical History of the Life and Death of Dr. Faustus…
Daniel Seligson & Anne E. C. McCants: Polygamy, the Commodification of Women, & Underdevelopment: ‘A suite of social conventions…age gaps at marriage, bride price, sequestration, and discrimination and violence… are overrepresented in polygamous societies…. Polygamy produces a chronic scarcity of marriageable females… [with] demonstrably significant consequences for social, institutional, and economic development…
Corey Robin: Empathy & the Economy : ‘The left is still preoccupied with the decades-old debate over which is more important: recognition of our identities or material redistribution. Adam Smith ended that argument before it began…
Leave a comment

¶s:

Jonathan Bernstein: Joe Manchin Charted a Better Course for House GOP: ‘The party would benefit more from seeking bipartisan agreements than from allowing extremists like Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene to wield influence…. Two dozen House Republicans… likely to face difficult re-election battles in 2024… reaching across the aisle to work with Democrats. Extremists, for all their bluster, have no such option…

Dan Pfeiffer: Stuff You Should Consume - Nov 22, 2022: ‘“Democrats on Offense: Messages That Win”by Data For Progress: “The most effective Democratic messages featured lowering costs; creating new jobs; spurring domestic manufacturing; taking on Big Pharma; protecting Social Security; highlighting the economic benefits of clean energy production; and defending abortion rights by emphasizing bodily autonomy, personal privacy, and government interference. The most effective Democratic policies featured protecting and expanding Social Security; reforming prescription drug pricing; increasing the minimum wage to $15 an hour; improving infrastructure; raising taxes on individuals making more than $1 million a year; and requiring a background check for every gun purchase…

Alan Crawford: Brexit Is Back to Haunt the UK’s Conservatives: ‘For years now, discussion of the negative impact of the UK’s decision to leave the European Union has been taboo. Governing Conservatives, most notably Brexit booster-in-chief Boris Johnson, insisted it was time to move on, and that the benefits of “taking back control” were only just around the corner waiting to be plucked and savored. That kind of wishful thinking has evaporated along with the UK’s economic fortunes…. A weekend report that senior figures in Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s government are seeking a closer trade relationship with the EU sparked an angry reaction from Brexit hardliners who oppose any dilution of the UK’s regulatory freedoms. That prompted Sunak to deny any such plans…