Slouching Towards Utopia: Elevator Pitches & Potential Op-Eds
Slouching Towards Utopia: Elevator Pitches & Potential Op-Eds
A folder of attempts to make what I have to say easy to access...
FIRST: My Basic 675-Word Elevator Pitch for “Slouching Towards Utopia”:
J. Bradford DeLong (Sep. 6, 2022): Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Long 20th Century, 1870-2010 (New York: Basic Books, ) <https://www.amazon.com/Economic-History-Twentieth-Century/dp/0465019595/>:
Slouching Towards Utopia is a book in the same class as Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, & Steel or Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century.
The theme of Diamond’s Guns—a brilliant book, if not without its major flaws (and what things in this fallen sublunary sphere do not have their major flaws?)—is: Civilizations in different places had access to different plant and animal resources, and for developing bio and other technologies two heads are better than one. Within Eurasia at the last the Atlantic Seaboard led in agricultural wealth and hence first developed the steel and the guns. Plus Eurasians gained immunity to all the germs that jumped from Eurasian animals into humans. And everything else follows from those Atlantic-Seaboard differential advantages with respect to guns, germs, and steel.
The theme of Piketty’s Capital—a brilliant book, if not without its major flaws (and what things in this fallen sublunary sphere do not have their major flaws?)—is: Capitalists control enough political levers to keep the profit rate around 5%, faster than economies grow. Only in exceptional eras of wars, revolutions, deep depressions, and the short post-WWII social-democractic age of very rapid growth will wealth at the top fail to outpace wealth in general. Hence in normal times income and wealth inequality is either already very high already or is rising fast. And everything else follows from that tendency toward high inequality.
The theme of Slouching Towards Utopia—a brilliant book, if not without its major flaws (and what things in this fallen sublunary sphere do not have their major flaws?)—is this:
The long 20th century—the first whose history was primarily economic, with the economy not painted scene-backdrop but rather revolutionizing humanity's life every single generation— taught humanity expensive lessons. In 1870 industrial research labs, modern corporations, globalization, and the market economy—which, as that genius Friedrich von Hayek most keen-sightedly observed, is tremendously effective at crowdsourcing solutions—proved keys to the lock that had kept humanity in its desperately poor iron cage, with the only comfortable ones being the thugs with spears who took from the near-subsistence farmers, and those with whom they shared their extractions. And previously unimaginable economic growth revolutionized human life over and over, generation by generation.
We should, thereafter, have straightforwardly turned our technological power and wealth to building something very close to a utopia: a truly human world. From 1870-2010 was 140 years. Few in 1870 would have doubted that humanity more than ten times richer in material terms would build ourselves a utopia.
So what has gone wrong? Well, that idiot Friedrich von Hayek thought the unleashed market would do the whole job: “the market giveth, the market taketh away: blessed be the name of the market”. But, as that genius Karl Polanyi put it: people will not stand for being told that there are no rights but property rights. They instead insist that “the market was made for man, not man for the market”. The market’s treating those whom society saw as equals unequally, or unequals equally, brought social explosion after explosion, blocking the road to utopia. They deserved communities, incomes, and stability. They needed their Polanyian rights to those things vindicated too.
Since 1870 humans—Theodore Roosevelt, John Maynard Keynes, Benito Mussolini, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Vladimir Lenin, Margaret Thatcher, Deng Xiaoping, and others— tried to think up solutions. They dissented from “the market giveth…” constructively and destructively. The demanded that the market do less, or different, and other institutions do more.
Only with a shotgun marriage of von Hayek’s market to Polanyi’ society, a marriage blessed by Keynes—a marriage that itself has so far failed its own sustainability tests—have we been able to even slouch towards utopia, and bring the El Dorado of a truly human world into view.
Whether we ever justify the full bill run up over the 140 years from 1870 to 2010 will likely depend on whether we remember and act upon that lesson.
Polanyi, Keynes, von Hayek:
The book wound up with a Polanyi-Left Neoliberal grand narrative:
The frozen glacial creep of economic history came to an end in 1870. The ice had been cracking beforehand, but as of 1870 it all melted, and the torrent began. Every single generation after 1870 technological change was so fast that the economy revolutionized itself in a generation, and then did so again, every single generation, at least until 2010. (After which, a new story **may** have begun.) And the repeated, sequential, Schumpeterian creative-destruction economic revolutions meant that all was solid melted into air—all established patterns and orders were steamed away—and while men (and women) were not compelled to face with sober senses their real conditions of life and relations with one another, they did have to try to build new institutions to manage the problems and opportunities of production, distribution, and utilization that the onrushing technological cornucopia brought.
Von Hayek said that the market economy could produce unequal prosperity, but nothing more: trying to shape and manage it to produce social justice as well would fail, destroy prosperity, and put us on the road to, well, serfdom; and so the watchword had to be "the market giveth, the market taketh away, blessed be the name of the market".
Keynes whimpered that if only governments allowed his technocratic students to conduct a sensible monetary policy along with a "somewhat comprehensive" socialization of investment, that everyone would have a job and technology plus compound interest would wreak marvels and rock-bottom interest rates would "euthanize" the rentiers—so that they could use their money social power only at the cost of spending down their capital, and so relinquishing it. Thus in the not-very-long-run, Keynesian technocrats could solve the problems of production and distribution, leaving humanity to grapple with its real problem: that of utilization of our wealth to create a truly human world.
Polanyi said that the "stark utopia" of von Hayek's market was unsustainable: the only rights it recognized were property rights and your own source of social power was your wealth, but people thought that they had other, more important, rights that society needed to vindicate—to economic security, to an income level proportional to what they deserved, that other people should have income levels proportional to what they deserved too, in a connected society that gave them respect and place—plus that you should have some power in society even if you had no wealth. Political economists who did not recognize this and tried to bring the stark utopia of market society would thus face explosions, and be overwhelmed by social-political movements that sought social justice—which might be a very inegalitarian kind of social justice, because it would give people not equal shares but rather what those making the rules deserved.
The closest the whole thing came to holding together was the post-WWII era of social democracy, in which Keynesian focus on full employment (and low interest rates to make amortizing the WWII-era debt easy), Beveridgian equality-through-redistribution (and public provision), plus a little Pigovian externality-compensation produced the Thirty Glorious Years. But somehow social democracy failed its sustainability test, and was replaced by neoliberalism, which stubbornly persists in spite of its failure to fulfill any of its promises except that it would make the rich much richer with much more social power.
Alternative Grand Narratives:
In the beginning, the book was going to have a number of important threads. It was to be a science-and-technology book—a Michael Polanyi book. It was going to be an engineers-and-entrepreneurs book. It was going to be a Schumpeterian creative-destruction-and-finance book. It was going to be a Keynesian macro-and-moral-philosophy book. And it was going to be a reacting-to-“Red-Vienna” book—a Karl Polanyi-and-friends book.
Of all of these Grand Narratives that I had originally hoped to thread throughout the book, only the last of these—the Karl Polanyi Grand Narrative—survived the writing and editing process.
That means that my aspirations for the book have shrunk: my hope now is that my book will do for Karl Polanyi something like what Charlie Kindleberger’s Manias, Panics, and Crashes did for Hyman Minsky—that is, make him comprehensible, arresting, immediate, and important, by providing lots of narrative examples for which the underlying theory can serve as a thematic lens.
Why are not the good people of the global north happier and more satisfied with the techno-utopian marvels that have been delivered to them? Why has great wealth in historical perspective produced not reduced but increased economic anxiety? And how does that economic anxiety get transformed into ethno-nationalist fear and rage? And how is it that the neoliberal ordering of society still survives, given that it has fulfilled exactly none of the promises made by its original salesmen, save for making the rich richer and society more economically unequal?
30 Words:
Only when Keynes blessed the shotgun marriage of von Hayek’s market and Polanyi’s society did 20th-century humanity even slouch towards utopia. Remember that, and material El Dorado, at least, is at hand.
100 Words:
The long 20th century—the first whose history was primarily economic, with the economy not painted scene-backdrop but rather revolutionizing humanity's life every single generation—taught humanity expensive lessons. The most important of them is this: Only a shotgun marriage of Friedrich von Hayek to Karl Polanyi, a marriage blessed by John Maynard Keynes—a marriage that itself has failed its own sustainability tests—have we been able to even slouch towards utopia. Whether we ever justify the full bill run up over the 140 years from 1870 to 20160will likely depend on whether we remember that lesson.
300 Words:
The long 20th century—the first whose history was primarily economic, with the economy not painted scene-backdrop but rather revolutionizing humanity's life every single generation— taught humanity expensive lessons. The most important of them is this: Only a shotgun marriage of Friedrich von Hayek to Karl Polanyi, a marriage blessed by John Maynard Keynes—a marriage that itself has failed its own sustainability tests—has humanity been able to even slouch towards the utopia that the explosion of our science and technological competence ought to have made our birthright. Whether we ever justify the full bill run up over the 146 years from 1870 to 2016 will likely depend on whether we remember that lesson.
Friedrich von Hayek—a genius—was the one who most keen-sightedly observed that the market economy is tremendously effective at crowdsourcing solutions. The market economy, plus industrial research labs, modern corporations, and globalization, were keys to the cage keeping humanity desperately poor. Hayek drew from this the conclusion: “the market giveth, the market taketh away: blessed be the name of the market.” Humans disagreed. As genius Karl Polanyi saw, humans needed more rights than just property rights. The market’s treating those whom society saw as equals unequally, or unequals equally, brought social explosion after explosion, blocking the road to utopia.
Not “blessed be the name of the market” but “the market was made for man, not man for the market” was required if humanity was to even slouch towards utopia that technology and potential material abundance ought to have made straightforward to reach. But how? Since 1870 humans—John Maynard Keynes, Benito Mussolini, Vladimir Lenin, and others—have tried solutions, demanding that the market do less, or different, and other institutions do more. Only government, tamed government, focusing and rebalancing things to secure more and different rights for more citizens have brought the El Dorado of a truly human world into view.
2022-05-16:
Start with the metaphor of the economic pie, and with the society-scale problems of baking, slicing and tasting. First you have a bake a large-enough pie—a pie so that there is potentially enough for all. Then you have to slice the pie—so everyone gets their share. Then people have to taste the pie—use their material resources to live a good life—be healthy, safe, secure, and happy.
Before 1870 the human technological level and ability to harvest natural resources was low relative to our population. Humanity could not even bake a large-enough pie. After 1870 things changed. Advancing science, turned into technology by industrial research labs, deployed at scale by modern corporations, and then diffused throughout the world by that magnificent crowdsourcing mechanism that is the market economy solved the problem of baking what every previous era would have seen as enough. And—since they saw the baking as the hard problem—they would be very surprised to see that the problems of slicing and tasting have flummoxed us. They would expect us to live in utopia, as we manifestly do not.
My Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the 20th Century is about how we solved the problem of baking the pie—and how we fumbled the solution to the problems of slicing and tasting. That is its big narrative sweep, with lots of subthreads, digressions, and anecdotes along the way.
What happened? This, I think, my book has nailed. Letting the market economy rip to solve the problem of making enough had consequences. You see, the only rights the market economy recognizes are property rights; and the only gospel it preaches is "the market giveth; the market taketh away: blessed be the name of the market".
People will not, and did not, stand for that. They demand, instead: “the market was made for man; not man for the market”.
Perhaps humanity, came close to an institutional-societal setup to tackle the problems of slicing and tasting. Post-WWII "social democracy" in the rich countries was a good try. But social democracy failed its sustainability test: society may not know what "social justice" is, but it knows that it manifestly does not consist of giving benefits to and making life easy for those it calls "undeserving".
And so the wheel turned. Here we are. Our current situation: in the rich countries there is enough by any reasonable standard, and yet we are all unhappy, all earnestly seeking to discover who the enemies are who have somehow stolen our rich birthright and fed us unappetizing lentil stew instead.
What do we do next? This my book punts. That is for a younger generation than my failed one to decide. Global warming, ethno-national terrorism on all scales from the individual AR-15 to the Combined Arms Army, revived fascism, technokleptocracy—I quail.
As John Maynard Keynes wrote back in 1924: “[That] assumes... a plan exists.... [But] we lack more than usual a coherent scheme of progress, a tangible ideal. All the political parties alike have their origins in past ideas and not in new ideas.... No one has a gospel. The next move is with the head...”
The Blurbs:
“History provides the only data we have for charting a course forward in these turbulent times. I have not seen a more revealing and illuminating book about economics and what it means in a very long time. It should be required reading for anybody who cares about the future of the global system, and that should be everyone…”—Larry Summers, Harvard University, Secretary of the Treasury under President Clinton
“Brad DeLong learnedly and grippingly tells the story of how all the economic growth since 1870 has created a global economy that today satisfies no one's ideas of fairness. The long journey toward economic justice and more equal rights and opportunities for all shall and will continue…”—Thomas Piketty, EHESS & l’Ecole d’économie de Paris, author of Le Capital au 21e Siècle.
“What a joy to finally have Brad DeLong's masterful interpretation of twentieth-century economic history down on paper. Slouching Towards Utopia is engaging, important, and awe-inspiring in its breadth and creativity.”—Christina Romer, U.C. Berkeley, Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Obama
“An intellectually exciting and entertaining gallop along the arc of twentieth-century economic history. DeLong puts together the puzzle of the past to tell a story of remarkable achievements as well as setbacks. A great way to understand the forces that have shaped the world today…”—MINOUCHE SHAFIK, Director, LSE
“The period 1870-2010—what DeLong calls the "long twentieth century”—saw the world break decisively free of its Malthusian chains, with levels of per capita economic growth without any parallel in human history. This wonderfully researched and written book explains the roots of this vertiginous ascent towards utopia, while also exposing the causes of the subsequent flat-lining in our economic fortunes and what action is now needed to ensure the long century is viewed by future historians as the historical rule, not the exception”—ANDREW G. HALDANE, CEO, RSA, & fmr. Chief Economist at the Bank of England
“Brad DeLong manages brilliantly to combine detailed analysis of a huge sweep of global history with an accessible and engaging narrative. The result is a book full of well founded and penetrating insights that will appeal to anyone interested in the causes and consequences of modern economic growth”—ROBERT C ALLEN, NYU & Oxford
“A magisterial history of… “the Long 20th Century”…. The progress that brought us on-demand streaming music hasn’t made us satisfied or optimistic. DeLong offers some explanations for this disconnect, which I find interesting but not wholly persuasive. But his book definitely asks the right questions and teaches us a lot of crucial history along the way”—PAUL KRUGMAN, Nobel Laureate‘
“Brilliant, important. A tour de force, DeLong grabs political-economic history and wrestles it to the ground. You may disagree (I don’t buy all of it) but you won’t be able to let go.”—Bob Reich, Clinton Administration Labor Secretary
“Brad: You have a distinct angle of vision, encyclopedic knowledge, and wonderful facility with the language…. Appreciate [the book’s] audacity and reach.… Let it go [to the publisher] with confidence and joy…”—Fred Block, U.C. Davis
“Brad: I remember reading an earlier draft 30 years ago. You haven't wasted the 30 years. This book is vastly improved. It is, in my view, an amazing accomplishment…”—Robert Waldmann, U. of Rome “Tor Vergata
“Brad: Reading Slouching Towards Utopia, I am struck again at what a lovely writer you are. I find myself just marveling at how well you express things and how alive your prose feels. I am having trouble putting it down (even though I need to be preparing for Econ 2!)…”—Christina D. Romer, U.C. Berkeley, Chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Obama
“Brad: I love it. The grand story you are looking to tell makes a lot of sense to me, and it is very engagingly told…”—Tim O’Reilly
2022-05-21:
Before 1870 humanity had thought the big problem was that limited technology and natural resources relative to population kept there from being enough. We simply could not bake a large-enough pie. Half of the big story of the twentieth century is of overcoming that constraint—the pie can now be baked—but, somehow, that did not bring us to utopia. Slicing and tasting the pie proved much harder problems than earlier ages had thought: today, having enough remains out-of-reach for most of humanity; and those of us with enough have a hard time properly tasting it. Look around: many (most?) of us do not look healthy, safe, secure, or happy.
Friedrich von Hayek saw clearly that the market economy, when coupled with industrial research labs, modern corporations, and globalization, was the key to unlocking the cage keeping humanity desperately poor. He thus preached the gospel: “the market giveth, the market taketh away: blessed be the name of the market.” But, as Karl Polanyi saw, humans needed more rights than just property rights. The market’s treating those whom society saw as equals unequally, or those whom it saw as unequals equally, brought social explosion after explosion, blocking the road to utopia.
Not “blessed be the name of the market” but “the market was made for man, not man for the market” was required But how? During the post-WWII North-Atlantic shotgun marriage of Friedrich von Hayek to Karl Polanyi blessed by John Maynard Keynes—what we called “social democracy”—was humanity able to even slouch towards utopia. But that marriage failed its own sustainability test: it ran into the buzzsaw of the neoliberal challenge in the 1980s. And the neoliberal order has been stubbornly and persistently resistant to erosion in spite of its own many, many failed promises.
Slicing and tasting the pie ought to be problems as solvable as baking the pie turned out to be. But not so. The second half of the big story of the twentieth century is that very painful one. And is slicing and tasting even possible?
As Richard Easterlin wrote a generation ago, humanity’s is a “hollow victory”: “In the end, the triumph of economic growth is not a triumph of humanity over material wants; rather, it is a triumph of material wants over humanity…”
And as John Maynard Keynes wrote a century ago: “We lack, more than usual, a coherent scheme of progress, a tangible ideal. All the political parties alike have their origins in past ideas and not in new ideas.... It is not necessary to debate the subtleties of what justifies a man in promoting his gospel by force; for no one has a gospel. The next move is with the head, and fists must wait...”
2022-06-04:
Before our modern age, human technological knowledge crept forward at only the pace of a glacier. A typical century would see technology advance by little. Perhaps the the population at the end of the century could have lived 5% better than those at the start—if the population had stayed the same. But Malthusian forces were dominant. The only way for women to have durable social power was to be the mothers of surviving sons, and even with high fertility more than a quarter saw all their sons die, so better nutrition would lead them to try harder. Thus the population grew by 10% in an average century, and so smaller farm sizes offset better technology and kept the real income of the typical human much the same. And so human psychology, human sociology, and human polities stayed much the same, with substantial changes visible only if one took the long-duration viewpoint of millennia.
This frozen glacial creep of economic history came to an end in 1870. The ice had been cracking beforehand, over 1500 to 1870. But after 1870 saw the roaring of the cataract. In every single generation after 1870 technological change was so fast and the seizing of opportunities by the market economy so rapid that the economy revolutionized itself in a generation, and then did so again, every single generation. This was the story at least until 2010. (After which, a new story may have begun.)
Te repeated, sequential, Schumpeterian creative-destruction economic revolutions meant that all was solid melted into air—all established patterns and orders were steamed away—and while men (and women) were not compelled to face with sober senses their real conditions of life and relations with one another, they did have to try to build new institutions to manage the problems and opportunities of production, distribution, and utilization that the onrushing technological cornucopia brought.
Friedrich von Hayek said that the market economy could produce unequal prosperity, but nothing more: trying to shape and manage it to produce social justice as well would fail, destroy prosperity, and put us on the road to, well, serfdom; and so the watchword had to be "the market giveth, the market taketh away, blessed be the name of the market".
John Maynard Keynes whimpered that if only governments allowed his technocratic students to conduct a sensible monetary policy along with a "somewhat comprehensive" socialization of investment, that everyone would have a job and technology plus compound interest would wreak marvels and rock-bottom interest rates would "euthanize" the rentiers—so that they could use their money social power only at the cost of spending down their capital, and so relinquishing it. Thus in the not-very-long-run, Keynesian technocrats could solve the problems of production and distribution, leaving humanity to grapple with its real problem: that of utilization of our wealth to create a truly human world.
Karl Polanyi said that the "stark utopia" of von Hayek's market was unsustainable: the only rights it recognized were property rights and your own source of social power was your wealth, but people thought that they had other, more important, rights that society needed to vindicate—to economic security, to an income level proportional to what they deserved, and that other people should have income levels proportional to what they deserved too, in a connected society that gave them respect and place—plus that you should have some power in society even if you had no wealth. Political economists who did not recognize this and tried to bring the stark utopia of market society would thus face explosions, and be overwhelmed by social-political movements that sought social justice—which might be a very inegalitarian kind of social justice indeed, because it would give people not equal shares but rather what those making the rules deserved.
The closest the whole thing came to holding together was the post-WWII era of social democracy, in which Keynesian focus on full employment (and low interest rates to make amortizing the WWII-era debt easy), Beveridgian equality-through-redistribution (and public provision), plus a little Pigovian externality-compensation produced the Thirty Glorious Years. But somehow social democracy failed its sustainability test, and was replaced by neoliberalism, which stubbornly persists in spite of its failure to fulfill any of its promises except that it would make the rich much richer with much more social power.
2022-06-11:
The long 20th century was the first whose history was primarily economic, with the economy not painted scene-backdrop but rather revolutionizing humanity's life every single generation with massive, creative and destructive, utopian and immiserating upward leaps in technology-driven productivity. Before 1870 humanity had thought that the big problem was that it could not bake a big enough pie: given limited technology and natural resources relative to population, human production could not be large enough for everyone to have enough. In the long twentieth century that constraint fell away. The pie could be baked. But better technology did not help solve the problems of slicing and tasting the pie: as of today, having enough remains out-of-reach for most of humanity. And those with enough have a hard time properly tasting it: many (most?) of them do not look healthy, safe, secure, and happy.
Only when the political-economic order was the post-WWII North-Atlantic social-democratic shotgun marriage of Friedrich von Hayek to Karl Polanyi, a marriage blessed by John Maynard Keynes—a marriage that itself has failed its own sustainability tests when it ran into the buzzsaw of the neoliberal challenge in the 1980s—has humanity been able to even slouch towards utopia. The explosion of our science and technological competence ought to have made our birthright. Yet we have, in many aspects, sold it for thin red-lentil stew.
Friedrich von Hayek—a genius, in some ways—was the one who most keen-sightedly observed that the market economy is tremendously effective at crowdsourcing solutions. The market economy, plus industrial research labs, modern corporations, and globalization, were keys to the cage keeping humanity desperately poor. Hayek drew from this the conclusion: “the market giveth, the market taketh away: blessed be the name of the market.” And he said that attitude was necessary to grasp as much of utopia as humanity could grasp. But humans disagreed. As genius Karl Polanyi saw, humans needed more rights than just property rights. The market’s treating those whom society saw as equals unequally, or unequals equally, brought social explosion after explosion, blocking the road to utopia.
Not “blessed be the name of the market” but “the market was made for man, not man for the market” was required if humanity was to even slouch towards the utopia that we ought to grasp with our technology. But how? Since 1870 humans—John Maynard Keynes, Benito Mussolini, Vladimir Lenin, and many others—have tried solutions, demanding that the market do less, or different, and other institutions do more, or other. Only government, tamed government, focusing and rebalancing things to secure more and different rights for more citizens, have brought the El Dorado of a truly human world into view. If electorates could choose such governments, slicing and tasting the pie ought to be problems as solvable as baking the pie turned out to be. But the twentieth century taught us—painfully—that that is not easy. And is it even possible?
As John Maynard Keynes wrote way back in 1924:
We lack, more than usual a coherent scheme of progress, a tangible ideal.... It is not necessary to debate the subtleties of what justifies a man in promoting his gospel by force; for no one has a gospel. The next move is with the head, and fists must wait...
Self-Struggle Session:
The book is only possible because it has a straightforward Grand Narrative at its heart. But that means that the book is also inadequate because it has an overly-simplistic Grtand Narrative at its heart. The Grand Narrative is a stripped-down pseudo-Polanyiesque obe. That may have been adequate for a 1940s understanding of the dynamic of fascism, really-existing socialism, and classical (or, rather, pseudo-classical semi-) liberalism then. But it is wholly inadequate for grasping the political-economy dilemmas of the world today!
At the very least, a satisfactory book would deal:
with the role played by the fiduciary institution of modern science (a la Michael Polanyi) and the failed attempts to extend that into technocracy;
with the fine-grained advance of technology, an engineers-and-entrepreneurs book (a la David Landes and his The Unbound Prometheus);
with the interaction of technology and the creation of businesses and industries (and destruction of same) (a la Joseph Schumpeter);
with the construction of institutions that were truly liberal and democratic as attempts to approximate what an open society (a la Karl Popper's hopes) might turn out to be; Michael Polanyi book;
with macroeconomics and moral philosophy in the mode of John Maynard Keynes;
with managerialism (a la Peter Drucker but also Alasdair MacIntyre) as an attempt to reconcile individual freedom with community purpose;
with taming the market via wealth equalization and public provision (a la William Beveridge);
with Coasian hopes to make the market sovereign by carving property rights properly at the joints;
with Pigovian realities that prohibit such carving;
with a much deeper dive at the failure of social democracy (under the trinity of Keynesian full employment and rentier-euthanasia, Pigovian externality correction, and Beveridgean redistribution) to pass its own sustainability test under pressure from the neoliberal challenge;
with a much deeper dive into the extraordinary persistence of neoliberalism in spite of its failure to keep any of its promises about how it was going to promote the public good';
and, last, with “Red Vienna” and the reactions to it—as monarchy met aristocracy, cosmopolitanism met nationalism, reason met irrationality, the avant garde met classicism, socialism met the bourgeoisie, all in one industrial-financial-cultural-bureaucratic eastern-European capital city—a “Karl Polanyi, Sigmund Freud, and friends” book.
That is twelve different grand narrative frames, each of which could underpin an economic history of the long 20th century. Plus there are all of the frames that can underpin the history of the short 20th century—and have, in books by thinkers from Eric Hobsbawm to John Lukacs.
The "what is to be done?" message of my book is, to the extent that there is one, "double-down on social democracy". But that did not work in the 1970s, is unlikely to work now, and yet the book cannot suggest a better path because of its inadequate pseudo-Polanyiesque Grand Narrative frame.