Teaser for ACE Conference Keynote: Title: "Þe 20th Century"
What is special about þe history of þ 20th century? & what does þt specialness mean for þe role of an economist in þe past, present, & future?
Still, alas! missing a smart "marching orders" what-should-we-do-next chapter? Þe only semi-thing smart to say about life here in our era of zombie neoliberalism is þt, once again: þe old is dying, but þe new cannot be born, so it is a time of monsters…
J. Bradford DeLong: Slouching Towards Utopia: The Economic History of the 20th Century (New York: Basic Books) <bit.ly/3pP3Krk>
Þe 20th Century
Perhaps the real hinge of human economic history was 1870. Before 1870, even with all the discoveries of Enlightenment Science and the British Industrial Revolution, worldwide, except for lucky times and places, fecundity and patriarchy kept pace with technology. Thus there was no chance that humanity could bake a sufficiently large economic pie for everyone to potentially have enough. That meant that having enough for yourself and your family depended on being in a lucky place at a lucky time—or on being part of the élite composed of thugs with spears or firearms, plus their tame accountants, bureaucrats and propagandists, who ran a force-and-fraud domination-and-exploitation game on the rest of humanity.
After 1870 rapid technological economic progress plus the demographic transition meant that the possibility of baking a sufficiently large economic pie for everyone to have enough—at least by the definition of enough current in 1870 and in all previous eras—rapidly came into view.
The need for the force-and-fraud domination-and-exploitation game ought to have gone away: it is, after all, a difficult and dangerous con to run. There is a sense in which after 1870, as humanity entered economic El Dorado, utopia should have rapidly come into view as humanity gained sufficient technology-enabled wealth for, as Francis Bacon had written in the early 1600s, the “enlargement of the human empire, for the effecting of all things possible”.
But what were supposed to be the secondary problems of slicing and tasting—equitable distribution, and our ability to use our wealth to live wisely and well—the pie continued to completely flummox us. Schumpeterian creative-destruction producing immense wealth at the cost of destroying occupations, livelihoods, industries, and communities. Vibrations between the need for the market to crowdsource solutions to problems of production and the necessity of finding some way to vindicate rights that people thought they had but that the market steamrolled over. Keynes whimpering off in the corner that his brand of technocracy could cobble together good-enough solutions so that we could all get along, if only everyone would listen to him and calm down.
The Steampower economy was followed by the Applied-Science, Mass-Production, Global Value-Chain, and Info-Biotech economies, each with its own set of externality and distribution problems, and each giving rise to its own ideas about how society should be organized. Commercial-imperial traditionalism, what called itself “classical” liberalism, nationalism, fascism, Leninist socialism, social democracy, neoliberalism, and more all contested for the rôle of organizing principle from 1870 to our day.
And as type of economy has succeeded type of economy, what economists do do and can do has changed as well. Dealing with the form taken by an age’s externality and distribution jobs is our job, and thus our job changes.
And as I, at least, look back, I regret to say that we economists have not done our job of figuring out and then convincing people how to handle each age’s externality and distribution problems. And so our governors and governance institutions have failed to well-manage the tensions between wealth creation for the lucky and social power- and rights-destruction for the unlucky, between a market that crowdsources solutions to problems of using technology to boost production while seeing and caring about only the lucky with wealth, and between the side of humanity that could be cooperative and prosperous and the side that still seeks to run the force-and-fraud exploitation and domination game.
Now we look back and see that we have, at best, been but slouching towards utopia.
To be delivered in Brisbane, Australia on the morning of July 10. (No, I don’t think there is a livestream.)
It is a good narrative, but incomplete. Does the Hayek-Polanyi axis really explain WWI? and decolonization? Isn't it more the force and fraud institutions and mentality persisted sort of like our hunter-gatherer preference for sugar and fat cause problems for our different lifestyle? And should anyone who believes in the Fall have ever expected utopia?
It's probably not the centerpiece of the talk (for which your narrative is good and useful; I don't meant the first paragraph to be a criticism of the presentation per se) but looking at our role as economists in the post 1870 world (I think we actually really had it nailed pre 1870) would be an interesting next project. And not just an explanation of what happened, but taking an out on the limb position on what is should have been. [The similarity of my earlier suggesting about analysis of economic policy in Antiquity should be obvious. :)]