Mindscape Podcast wiþ Sean Carroll, &

BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2022-09-05

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FIRST: Mindscape Podcast with Sean Carroll

209 | Brad DeLong on Why the 20th Century Fell Short of Utopia

“Back in the 1990s, I decided that someone really ought to write an economic history of the world, but one that started not with… pushing pieces of flint against each other to get sharp edges, or with the Industrial Revolution…. Up until 1870… technology was advancing slowly… [but] in nearly all human societies if you’re a woman… the only way you have any social power in your old age is if you have surviving sons…. Irresistible Malthusian pressures to keep trying to have kids in the hope that one of the sons will survive…. Technology advances, but population advances as well…. People with better technology across the centuries farming smaller and smaller plots… the worldwide standard of living in 1870 was not that different from what it was in -6000. Much, much better technologies on the one hand, but much, much smaller average farm sizes on the other…. 1870 stands out like a sore thumb… [as] the point where things change, and where, whatever history was beforehand, it looks very different afterwards…”

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1870 as the hinge of history, and thus 1870 as the moment at which to start a history book—in Slouching Towards Utopia <bit.ly/3pP3Krk> I make maximalist claims to that effect.

But I could have written the book without making those claims: I could have just said that the processes of 1900 to 1914 were continuous with those of 1872 1900, and thus that it was convenient to take the period as a whole and include it in the long 20th century.

But making the maximalist claim is (a) true, and (b) helps people see both why the history of the long 20th century is important, and why the history of the long 20th century is so different from the history of earlier epochs.

At my third pre-launch dry-run academic book talk, my discussant the brilliant Robert Brenner—I remember being 20, and my teacher David Landes saying “you have to read Brenner”—strongly disputed this maximalist claim of mine. It was a talk for the N2PE—the Network for a New Political Economy <https://n2pe.berkeley.edu/>—and the Berkeley Social Science Matrix <https://matrix.berkeley.edu/> on the very top floor of the U.C.Berkeley Social Sciences Building on SouthSide. The N2PE will get the video up on its website soon <https://n2pe.berkeley.edu/events/slouching-towards-utopia-an-economic-history-of-the-twentieth-century/>.

Robert Brenner is Director of the Center for Comparative History and Social Theory at UCLA. Most people would be happy being director of either a Center for Comparative History or a Center for Social Theory. Bob, however, wants both.

The overwhelming thrust of Brenner’s discussion was that, in my book, I am mischaracterizing the economies that lay within the Dover Circle—the 300 mile-radius circle centered on the port of Dover at the southeast corner of England. I see them as much closer to the other economies of 1500-1870—gunpowder-empire social formations that are still largely “Malthusian” in character—than to the economies of modern economic growth that emerge after 1870. Brenner thinks that that is very wrong: the replacement of peasants by laborers and farmers in the countryside, the extraordinary growth of rural and urban industry, and the coming of merchant and non-agricultural producer classes to challenge landlords for political power and cultural hegemony make him see the classic industrial revolution period, and even the early modern period, to be closer to what came after 1870 than to what had come before 1500, or what existed outside the Dover Circle over 1500-1870.

At least, he thinks, that was true for the Netherlandish and English sub-components of the Dover Circle.

I will have to think more about how to figure out which one of us is right. In my book I rely on the authority of John Stuart Mill, publishing in the 1870s:

That is not sufficient.

Slouching: Responding to Critics I:

The substantive critics of the book are beginning to show up. Critical comment A:

Relatively marginal to the argument…. you are right to emphasize the world-changing importance of the corporate research laboratory.  However, I think there is a lot of evidence that the corporate research labs have declined dramatically in significance over the last half century.  Some of this is short-termism where corporations don’t want to spend on anything that will not improve the bottom line in the next two or three quarters.  But far more significant is the greater technological complexity of current innovation…

No, that is not a quibble, and that is not marginal—that is, I think, a very important point and a key part of how the neoliberal era has been such a disappointment to all in the Global North, save the plutocrats. The Fordist-R&D structures of Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, and such were of immense value for human society, and you are right to note their sharp decline over the past half century.

And I do think you are right in extending Gerschenkron’s “Economic Backwardness” argument from finance and investment to research and development. Gerschenkron claimed that while the individual entrepreneur could do the job of finance and investment in the first generation of industrializers, you needed the support of universal banks for the second and of the state for the third. But the scale-of-R&D dimension may well be more important. And just how have Apple and TSMC managed it—financing the hardware node construction, gaining the engineering knowledge, and also writing the software to take advantage of what they make? I thought I understood Intel-Microsoft back in The Day. But I do not understand TSMC-Apple today.

And of course you are right that we are failing to distribute or to make proper use of our wealth—and that is potentially truly catastrophic. Marx and Lenin and so many others way back when—now more than a century ago—could say that while the problem of production was hard, the problems of distribution and utilization would be easy. It would be easy and natural—requiring merely a rotation of administrative tasks among those who could add, subtract, multiply, divide, and issue receipts—once we were out the kingdom of necessity, in which the principal focus of those who controlled the levers of power in human society faced was how to exploit so that they, at least, could get enough.

But they were wrong. We here and now cannot say that.

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Very Briefly Noted:

• Noah Smith: American Workers Need Lots and Lots of Robots: ‘With the power of automation, our workers can win. Without it, they're in trouble…

• Michael Slaby: Augmentation over Replacement: ‘If we continue to talk about the future only in the darkest, most post-apocalyptic terms, no one is going to want to go there. And we may miss an opportunity to make it amazing…

• Joseph Politano: Understanding Inflation Expectations: ‘Households’ inflation expectations were not that well-anchored even during the Great Moderation, people are not as rational as much of the theory suggests, and the causal mechanisms that transmit higher household inflation expectations to higher inflation can be messy…

• Annie Lowrey: American Motherhood: ‘My pregnancies could have killed me, but at least I chose them…

• Annie Lowrey: A Crisis Historian Has Some Bad News for Us: ‘Adam Tooze, a historian of economic disaster, sees a combination of worrisome signs…

• Andrew Collier: China’s Technology War: Why Beijing Took Down Its Tech Giants

• Michael Tomasky: The Middle Out: The Rise of Progressive Economics and a Return to Shared Prosperity: ‘Politics and Prose; Saturday, September 17  5 p.m. E.T…

• Tracy Alloway & Joe Weisenthal: Soft Landing in Practice. But What About in Theory?: ‘This is not to say that a soft landing has been achieved…. [But] if we were coasting to a soft landing (by which I mean inflation is defeated without a major recession), it would probably look like what we’ve seen over the last few months…

• Brad DeLong: 'Ross Douthat says: “I’ll vote for Trump unless you give me policy wins X, Y, Z, & W! What, you won’t? Then it is **your** fault I am voting for Trump!"

  Ross Douthat @DouthatNYT

  ... namely the sense that voters to the right of center are being asked to sacrifice various commitments or interests to defeat Trumpism, even as their would-be leaders or partners to the left give up none of their partisanship and indeed become ever-more ideologically purist.

  Right...

• Neal Katyal: ‘This special master opinion is so bad it’s hard to know where to begin:1. She says Biden hasn’t weighed in on whether docs protected by Exec Privilege. Nonsense. The archives letter (which DOJ submitted to the Judge) makes it clear current President thinks none of this is...

• Stephan Rahmsdorf: ‘So why do we see such crazy heat extremes after “only” 1.3 degrees C of Global Warming?… Land areas have warmed much more than ocean, and the global average temperature consists of 70% ocean surface… <https://t.co/FZVlkQmuJ0 https://t.co/MQx0itmA9s>…

• Michael Pettis: ‘The longer it takes for global creditors to recognize that much developing-country debt can never be serviced, the longer will it take for them to restructure debt with meaningful forbearance, and the worse off both they and the borrowers will be <https://t.co/uWS2wot6by>…

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