Slouching Towards Utopia—MOAR Interviews

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Michael Hiltzik: Column: How did America get addicted to a policy that fails everyone but the rich?

The neoliberalism of Ronald Reagan has served only the rich, yet it still governs American economic policy. UC Berkeley’s Brad DeLong examines why in his new book: Social Democratic policies crafted in the 1930s succeeded in creating a long era of widespread prosperity, then suddenly lost their credibility in the mid-1970s. They were replaced by the neoliberalism of Ronald Reagan, which failed to help anyone but the rich, yet still governs American economic policy. The ascent of neoliberalism and its staying power “is a puzzle,” J. Bradford DeLong writes in his magisterial new economic history of the 20th century, “Slouching Towards Utopia.” It’s the central puzzle that DeLong, a professor of economics at UC Berkeley, a widely followed economics blogger and one of our leading critics of economic inequality, aims to examine. DeLong takes as the canvas what he calls the “long twentieth century,” which he defines as the period from 1870 to 2010 and argues was “the most consequential years of all humanity’s centuries”…

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J. Bradford DeLong Says More…

Project Syndicate: In March, you wrote that higher inflation was “inevitable and therefore not regrettable,” because it was “a side effect and a consequence of the robust recovery,” which amounts to a “massive policy victory.” You also predicted that price stability would return in the medium term, though you also noted in June that the US Federal Reserve’s ability to raise interest rates sufficiently was constrained by forward guidance. Are you still relatively sanguine about US inflation, and was the Fed’s latest interest-rate hike the right call? How effective will the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) be in supporting the Fed’s efforts to ease inflation?

This week in Say More, PS talks with J. Bradford DeLong, Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century <bit.ly/3pP3Krk>.

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Annie Lowrey: The Economist Who Knows the Miracle Is Over: An era of remarkable prosperity has ended… <https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/09/brad-delong-economist-slouching-towards-utopia-book/671337/>

James Ledbetter: “Technology Is the Only Thing That Can Potentially Save Us”: A Conversation with Brad DeLong :: The economist and historian J. Bradford DeLong discusses the development of technology, globalization, and climate change… <https://observer.com/2022/09/technology-is-the-only-thing-that-can-potentially-save-us-a-conversation-with-brad-delong/>

Dylan Matthews: Humanity was stagnant for millennia — then something big changed 150 years ago: Why the years from 1870 to 2010 were humanity’s most important… <https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2022/9/7/23332699/economic-growth-brad-delong-slouching-utopia>