London Economist Review of “Slouching Towards Utopia”, &
BRIEFY NOTED: For2022-09-09 Fr
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FIRST: Economist Review of “Slouching Towards Utopia”
Ryan Avent’s Economist review of Slouching Towards Utopia <bit.ly/3pP3Krk> is very very kind, and very blurbable indeed, for which I thank the reviewer profoundly:
‘Slouching Towards Utopia is an impressive achievement, written with wit and style and a formidable command of detail…
And so I do blush, and I do hope that people who are impelled to pick it up are not disappointed wirh what they find they have bought. People who are not just my friends and relatives are willing to say that they really like the book!
Moreover, the Economist review provides a very nice precis:
Economist: Bradford DeLong Reconsiders the 20th Century’s Economic History: ‘DeLong seeks to redraw the temporal map…. 1870 to 2010… a coherent whole: the first era… in which historical developments were overwhelmingly driven by economic ones... hurtled towards “economic El Dorado”.... Had the denizens of the 19th century known how fantastically wealthy their descendants would become, many would have supposed those heirs lived amid peace and contentment. Yet building harmonious societies out of material abundance has proved maddeningly difficult...
Thus today, flying back from Boston at the end of the workweek, I feel profoundly blessed by Tykhe. I could have fantasized about a better launch three days for Slouching Towards Utopia, but I really could not have rationally expected a better one.
On Amazon, at least, the hardcover peaked at sales rank 121 on September 3. I confess I am very interested in seeing what people do in response to this review, and to all the other reviews when they hit. And then I am also eager to learn what people who are neither my friends or relatives want to say about the book after they read it. And then there is the question of what people who do not read the book think about what, and whether they will actually worry over and change their minds for the better as a result of their thinking and talking about what the book says. That is: I am worried abou the question of the reception of the book. Which reminds me I should write my review of my sometime student Glory Liu’s forthcoming Adam Smith’s America: How a Scottish Philosopher Became an Icon of American Capitalism <https://www.amazon.com/dp/0691203814> on the reception of Adam Smith in America.
I would like to take exception to the reviewer’s belief that I portray post-WWII social democracy—the New Deal Order, as Gary Gerstle calls it <https://www.amazon.com/dp/0691006075> <https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09SGHRK4H>—as a “happy marriage” between Friedrich von Hayek and Karl Polanyi. I wanted the dominant metaphor to be one of a shotgun marriage, in which John Maynard Keynes was the guy with the shotgun who gave the “blessing”. And is the reviewer just telling the reader that I know whereof I speak because I was there in the 1990s when politicians and policymakers who wished the return of the New Deal Order found themselves trying to maneuver within the Neoliberal one?:
Building harmonious societies out of material abundance has proved maddeningly difficult… a duel between the insights of Friedrich von Hayek… and Karl Polanyi…. [After] the second world war… a happy marriage of Hayek and Polanyi—“blessed by Keynes” (as Mr DeLong puts it),… bore fruit, in the form of a three-decade post-war run of torrid growth…. [Yet] when growth sagged and inflation rose in the 1970s, market-friendly, or “neoliberal”, reforms… of which Mr DeLong was himself a steward… failed to keep growth high and led to worse inequality—yet rich countries pressed on [with them]…. [His] analysis underestimates how deeply neoliberal ideas took root across both the left and the right…
I think not. Often people from the other side of the Atlantic are too polite. But here I think that readers are definitely being warned that I cease to be a reliable narrator when my own career begins to entangle itself with history, as we come to the fall of the New Deal Order in the late 1970s, and the subsequent Neoliberal Turn. In response, I would ask the reviewer: Who does a better job of describing the fall of the New Deal and the subsequent rise and strange (to my eyes) stubborn persistence of the Neoliberal Order? I am arrogant enough to say that I do as good a job as Gary Gerstle does in his excellent The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order <https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09SGHRK4H> (albeit in a much-shorter and hence much-overcompressed form, so my book is not a substitute for Gary’s: readers of my book really need to go read his too).
The piece of the review I took to heart was the reviewer’s belief that I have failed to thread the Strait of Messina between the Skylla of overstressing social being—forces of production and patterns of life—and the Kharybdis of overstressing social consciousness—what ideas people have and spread about how the world does and should work—and so have had six of my crew devoured by the monstrous heads of Skylla:
If this book has a weakness, it is its occasional reluctance to give credit to people’s beliefs, rather than narrow economic concerns, as a driving force of history…. Slouching Towards Utopia shows how economic growth can transform the world. It also demonstrates that material prosperity alone cannot transport people to the promised land. The future may well be shaped by fights about what can.
That is a disappointment. That was not my intention. I will have to go back and see if I can fix the balance.
But for that it needs to do well enough for Basic to be willing to publish a revised edition!
Very Briefly Noted:
Garfield Clinton Reynolds: Jumbo Jumbo Jumbo: ‘Central bankers are mostly busy delivering the rapid policy tightening they gave fulsome notice was on the way when they met at Jackson Hole…
Gillian Tett: Philosopher William MacAskill: ‘The world is a darker place than it was just five years ago’. The prophet of ‘Effective Altruism’ on giving away his earnings—and how we can save the world, one small act at a time…. 7,400 (mostly youngish) community members who have signed up to embrace his “Effective Altruism” pledge to donate time and money to pursue a moral path…
J. Bradford DeLong: resenting Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century <bit.ly/3pP3Krk>, in conversation with LAWRENCE H. SUMMERS…. Thursday September 8, 2022 7:00 PM ET…
Nick Troiano: Why Some Trump Critics Survived This Primary Season and Some Didn’t: ‘Ranked choice voting and other electoral reforms are showing the way to depolarize American politics…
Noah Smith The War Economy: Batteries & Drones: ‘Another major cluster of high-technology industries that the U.S. should target with industrial policy…. Currently, China dominates both of these industries…
Andrew Keen: KEEN ON the End of the Future: ‘DeLong explained on Keen On this week that this economic juggernaut originated in 1870 with the globalizing German industrial revolution and came to a shuddering halt with the Great Global Recession of 2008…
Jon Brodkin: Judge Slams Musk: ‘For withholding text messages, cites “glaring” omissions… also chides Musk for wasting time, says there's no time for “just kiddings”…
John Gruber: The Steve Jobs Archive
Anna Mindess: Café Ohlone's Triumphant Return: ‘The Berkeley “love song to Ohlone culture” isn’t a historic recreation: it’s a reflection of a living and resilient culture…
¶s
Yuri Slezkine: ‘He Loved Handing Out Decorations’: ‘The admiring biographer of Leonid Brezhnev… finds him an affable heartthrob who longed for peace “with every fibre of his body”…. Neither capable nor ambitious, he would likely have become a low-level administrator had the Great Terror of 1937–1938 not eliminated most party and government officeholders…. During the postwar “restoration period,” when stolidity was in greater demand than ruthlessness or daring, they were lined up and told to lead by example. They symbolized survival and embodied a new bureaucratic standard. They wore suits, knew how to listen, and sat behind long desks. They would offer you a soft handshake, invite you to sit down, ask about your children, nod thoughtfully as you spoke, make a good-natured joke, and promise to look into the matter further. In their free time, they liked steam baths and hunting…
Matthew Yglesias: Janet Yellen Explains Bidenomics: ‘The case for modern supply-side economics…. Biden has mostly delivered on his pro-worker growth agenda, with its emphasis on tax fairness and geographically broader economic opportunity…. Michigan is the center of U.S. car manufacturing, an industry that’s been impacted by all the major legislation during the Biden years. That starts with the simple fact that demand for new cars has remained robust throughout the entire period with no collapse of demand. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act invests in creating charging stations for EVs, the Inflation Reduction Act invests in American EV manufacturing, and the Chips Act tries to address a key supply-chain bottleneck that’s held back production. There’s more to Bidenomics than cars, but the auto industry is emblematic of the approach Yellen calls “modern supply-side economics” that aims to harness *all* the major factors of production and not just shower private financial capital with tax incentives…. The Biden administration will probably be haunted for years by the charge that the American Rescue Plan was too large…. What the administration says now, to quote Yellen’s speech, is that “the tail risk of the pandemic’s impact on our economy was a downturn that could match the Great Depression” and a super-sized ARP eliminated that tail risk. I don’t think that fully answers the smarter criticisms of ARP by any means, but it does set up one of the larger themes of Bidenomics, which is prioritizing certain forms of resilience over a narrow sense of efficiency…. America has had the best economic performance in the world over the past few years…
Matt Levine: Crypto Securities: ‘“A basic premise of Web3… “is that every product is simultaneously an investment opportunity”…. The good thing is that Web3 and crypto have solved the cold-start problem for network-effects businesses. It is hard to build a social network or a marketplace or a ride-sharing app or lots of other businesses, because those businesses are useful mainly if they have a lot of users, so they are not very useful for their first users. But if you add a crypto token, the first users get the most tokens…. The bad thing is that every project is simultaneously a Ponzi scheme, and it is hard to know if people are using the project because they get utility out of it or because they hope to dump their tokens on future suckers…
There's a post on your book at LGM. As usual, the discussion ranges rather further than the limits of what you wrote. :) https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2022/09/what-is-the-most-important-thing-in-the-world
I think the Clinton years had just about the perfect Neo-Liberal recipe, lacking only higher immigration of high skilled people. and perhaps more infrastructure and R&D investment. Regan and Bush deficits are not orthodox "Neo-Liberalism."