Mu-Jeung Yang: REVIEW of “Slouching Towards Utopia” at Amazon

2022-09-23 Fr

This book provides you with the tools to call out BS on economic policy and political ideology!

I am a recovering libertarian, thanks in part to Brad De Long.I have been waiting for this book for 20 years, ever since I read some draft chapters that Brad De Long posted in the late 90s on his blog. It has been worth the wait.

One of the basic truths of our time is the BS asymmetry principle: “It is much easier to make up lies and BS, than it is to debunk them”. Brad Delong’s world economic history of the long 20th Century gives you the tools to debunk fake news and call out BS. For example, many other grand stories (or “narratives”) about the 20th Century (“Age of Extremes” by Hobspawn and “Commanding Heights” by Yergin and Stanislaw) focus excessively on the rivalry of ideas between Marxism and “neoliberalism”, as represented by Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. Yet, in the political discourse of the last 30 years, Marxism has mostly been a foil for the right and was supported by only a small minority on the left.

The viewpoint that today’s left is nothing else than your Grandpa’s Marxism is an example of fake news.

Instead, the counterpoint in the battle of ideas to neoliberalism is identified by Brad DeLong as Karl Polanyi and related ideas of European-style social democracy. Polanyi’s key insight was that markets did not just bring explosive economic growth since 1870, but also started to decouple themselves from social relations that used to embed them. For example, it used to be much more natural for CEOs to feel social responsibility, instead of focusing on shareholder value only. The vanguard of this decoupling process was Friedrich Hayek, who argued that unless we let unconstrained markets reign, the state will enslave us all.

In contrast Polanyi argued that if nobody deliberately regulates the market, the backlash against untamed markets will enslave us all. Or in the words of John Kennedy: “If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.“ (Inauguration Speech). It is hard to see Republicans' turn towards MAGA not as basically confirming Polanyi's argument.

Hayek vs Polanyi is the central tension that makes you understand the long 20th Century and it continues to shape our lives today. And I applaud Brad DeLong for writing about Hayek and especially Polanyi in such a clear and accessible way.

A second strength of this book is that I think it is actually ideologically balanced (instead of being fake balanced like Fox News). Much of the tale of economic growth in the 20th Century is about the pendulum swings in globalization and about technological progress and Brad DeLong discusses these trends without falling into the trap of only seeing the positive side of less hunger and less poverty for many. Instead, he emphasizes throughout the long shadow of slavery, privilege and exclusion. Similarly, “government failure” isn’t just the story of corruption and incompetence but also of insufficient intervention and failure to keep markets open for everyone.

Finally, the book is full of little historical gems, that are thought-provoking and insightful. For example:

• (1) Why did neoliberalism persist as convincing story of the how the world works, both on the left and on the right, when the track record of its policies is quite poor? Brad DeLong: Reagan got credit for the fall of the USSR (with lots of hindsight bias about the “inevitable collapse of the Soviet command economy”!) (p.453)

• (2) How does pre-1914 globalization differ from post-1989 globalization? Brad De Long: transnational corporate control was infeasible then but is the norm now (p.483) – this reinforces the notion that anonymous global forces shape local daily life and explains why MAGA's rallies against “Globalism” are effective.

• (3) How was fascism and Nazism possible in the heart of civilized Western Europe and Germany, the country of Immanuel Kant, a key philosopher of the Enlightenment?  Brad De Long: People failed to respond to market forces destroying the social foundations they are based on.

And neoliberals have a pretty sad history of standing up for democracy and constitutional human rights. For example, it is well-known that Milton Friedman supported Pinochet’s fascist regime in Chile in the 1970s. But Brad De Long also shows that even the libertarians Ludwig Van Mises and Friedrich Hayek supported the idea that fascism should be used to halt political movements towards social democracy. (p280). Remember that the next time Rand Paul wants to tell you something about civil liberties!