¶ 1: Introduction: My Grand Narrative: Slouching Towards Utopia: Notes & Long Notes

.I am starting to go through the manuscript of my forthcoming book, paragraph-by-paragraph, adding in the full notes that could not make it into the print version...

The printed endnotes in my Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the 20th Century <https://bit.ly/3pP3Krk>, forthcoming September 6, 2022, from Basic, are minimal, minimal. They are (1) direct quotes plus (2) places where I am following one particular source plus (3) places where there is an obvious next thing to read.

The problem is that the subject deserves much more in the way of notes. Here they are, paragraph-by-paragraph

Introduction: My Grand Narrative[a]

What I call the “long twentieth century” started with the watershed-crossing events of around 1870—the triple emergence of globalization, the industrial research lab[1][b], and the modern corporation[2]—which ushered in changes that began to pull the world out of the dire poverty that had been humanity’s lot for the previous ten thousand years, since the discovery of agriculture. And what I call the “long twentieth century” ended in 2010,[c] with the world’s leading economic edge, the countries of the North Atlantic, still reeling from the Great Recession that had begun in 2008, and thereafter unable to resume economic growth at anything near the average pace that had been the rule since 1870. The years following 2010 were to bring large system-destabilizing waves of political and cultural anger from masses of citizens, all upset in different ways and for different reasons at the failure of the system of the twentieth century to work for them as they thought that it should.

---

Printed Endnotes:

[1] Steven Usselman, “Research and Development in the United States since 1900: An Interpretive History”, Economic History Workshop, Yale University, November 11, 2013 https://economics.yale.edu/sites/default/files/usselman_paper.pdf; Thomas P. Hughes, American Genesis; A Century of Invention and Technological Enthusiasm, 1870-1970, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.

[2] Alfred Chandler, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977.

---

Longer Notes:

Most of the extra notes I could add to this first paragraph have a better place further down the pages, sometimes much further down the pages. But I do want to add four things:

[a] I think I stole the title from Simon Auerbach from an article he wrote back in 1993: “Mrs. Thatcher’s Labor Laws: Slouching Towards Utopia?” <https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-923X.1993.tb00312.x>. And the extremely insightful George Scialabba grabbed it for a talk title <http://georgescialabba.net/mtgs/2018/03/slouching-toward-utopia.html> four years ago. And, of course, Joan Didion <https://archive.org/details/isbn_0679640866>. And, of course, the most plundered poem of the entire twentieth century William Butler Yeats’s The Second Coming <https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-coming>:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst   
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.   
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out   
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   
The darkness drops again; but now I know   
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

---

[b] Bill Janeway sends me a quote from late-1800s Scottish-American steelmaster Andrew Carnegie on the birth of the IRL, and the application of science to technology and engineering:

Bill Janeway: Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018) <https://www.amazon.com/dp/1108471277>, p. 253: By World War I, a new institution was emerging to serve as the nexus of technological innovation: the industrial research laboratory. The relevance of science to industry had been discovered by that most entrepreneurial of capitalists, Andrew Carnegie, who reflected on the economic benefits of systematic assays of iron ore by a trained chemist: “What fools we had been! But then there was this consolation: we were not as great fools as our competitors….. Years after we had taken chemistry to guide us, [they] said they could not afford to employ a chemist. Had they known the truth then, they would have known they could not afford to be without one…[37] Quoted in David Mowery & Nathan Rosenberg: Technology and the Pursuit of Economic Growth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) <https://www.amazon.com/dp/0521380332>, p. 30.

Janeway is worth quoting, both in his own voice and quoting Alfred Chandler, on this at greater length:

The more general recognition, a generation later, of science-based research and development as a source of competitive advantage may be read as an indirect impact of the railroads in the context of the American version of laissez-faire…. A national market… the radical decline in manufacturing costs as companies exploited the “economies of scale and scope” analyzed by Alfred Chandler….

Companies ha[d] a need and an opportunity to rationalize “the facilities and skills of the constituent companies by making concentrated investments in manufacturing, marketing and management, the mergers and corporate reorganizations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries hastened the growth of industrial research… In firms such as American Telephone and Telegraph, General Electric, U.S. Steel or Du Pont, the development of a strong central office was closely associated with the establishment or significant expansion of a central research facility…”

Thus the great corporations moved into a space that previously had been haphazardly funded, principally by wealthy individuals guided by motives that combined curiosity and philanthropy… [with] utter lack of interest in economic or financial return…

And Fred Block writes from U.C. Davis that the decline of Industrial Research Laboratories in American oligopolistic corporations in the age of neoliberalism bears some responsibility for the slowdown in growth that is one of the signposts of the end of the long twentieth century:

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.  Developing new products or new processes now requires five, six, seven, or more different scientific specialties.  Not even the big monopolies can afford to create career lines for technologists in more than three or four fields. 

 So the current pattern is that they have experts in two or three fields and they link up with outside experts either at federal laboratories or universities or the new larger research institutes that the government is busy creating—such as the advanced manufacturing institutes.  Moreover, the public sites are the place where the actual innovating occurs rather than back home at the corporate lab that probably lacks all the high tech equipment that the public sector provides.  Nobody talks about this because it undermines the case for privatizing the profits rather than gainsharing that acknowledges the federal contribution. 

As you imagined, I am skeptical of your reliance on the Gordon/TFP numbers, but it does not make too much difference in terms of your argument whether or not there was some economic improvement in the 90’s and early 2000’s. The basic point is that the neoliberals did not solve the problems that they claimed to solve and with rising inequality and the failure to deal with climate change, the economy became more fragile. 

(personal communication)

---

[c] 1870 as the starting date is, to my mind, incontestable. The pace of technological progress deployed and diffused worldwide jumps up discontinuously by a factor of more than four around 1870. That transforms humanity from a civilization still under the dire poverty-generating harrow of Malthus to one that is on the way of solving the problem of producing enough—of producing a big enough economic pie that there is a real sense that the economic problem is no longer among the most serious problems of the human race, and that what comes to the forefront are the problems of distribution and utilization—slicing the pie semi-equitably, and tasting—enjoying—the pie so that we can make ourselves healthy, safe, secure, and happy.

While 1870 is the starting point, there is lots of room for debate and argument about the ending point of the long 20th century. Did it end at the turn of 2000-2001, when George W, Bush got himself elected to the presidency by a 5-4 Supreme Court vote, and the possibility of renewing American economic exceptionalism as an exemplar of rapid and equitable growth melted away? Did it end in September, 2001, with the boiling over of a new round of catastrophes that threatened to become wars of religion? Did it end in the spring of 2003, when George W. Bush and Richard Cheney broke the western alliance and abandoned the U.S.’s mammoth soft-power advantage of being able to portray itself as a benevolent hegemon? Did it end in 2007-2008, when it became very clear that the neoliberal order had no clue how to regulate financial markets for stable prosperity? Did it end in 2009-2011, when it was only by the skin of our teeth that we avoided a second Great Depression, and it became clear that restoring high employment was not a high priority among the ruling élite? Was it 2016, and the rise of Donald Trump—and the failure of America’s Republican Party to stand up for itself? Was it in the 2010s in general, with a worldwide rise of movements that Madeleine Albright called “fascist” (and who am I to argue with her?)? Was it 2020, and the failure to competently manage the coronavirus plague as a public health challenge?

I very much hope that people will argue about this. But for now let me bracket it, and delay discussion until we approach the end of the book.