The Best “Slouching Towards Utopia” Event I Have Done Is Now Lost to History… Tears in the Rain...

It was my USC discussion with Jake Soll on 2022-10-20 Th

FIRST: Slouching Towards a Free Market:

It is truly a shame that my USC Slouching Towards Utopia <bit.ly/3pP3Krk> event was not videotaped: it went the best of all my events so far, in large part because I was talking to the excellent Jake Soll—and we were also talking about his excellent new book: Jake Soll: Free Market: The History of an Idea <https://www.amazon.com/Free-Market-History-Jacob-Soll/dp/0465049702>.

Jake’s and my books are just close enough that the overlap of our concerns is near-total but sufficiently far apart that virtually nothing is repetitive.

But the event is now lost… tears in the rain…

All I have is my memory, and my notes.

So let me try to reconstruct at least some of the highlights of what was heard and said. It is in all cases difficult to reproduce passages word-for-word, so my method will be to make the speakers say what is in my opinion demanded of them at each occasion, of course adhering as closely as possible to the general sense of what they really said:

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Selected Reconstructed Highlights:

Brad DeLong: The market economy, as that genius Friedrich von Hayek said, is one of the best possible mechanisms for crowdsourcing, for harnessing humans’ collective potential as an anthology intelligence. A bureaucracy turns almost all of us into mindless software bots following rules set down by some small committee of bureaucrats who understand only about a third of what is going on, and are completely ignorant of the knotty edge cases. A central-planning system turns us all into mindless robots going through motions decreed by some central planner who has no clue about what is actually going on given his direct reports’ powerful interest in telling him convenient lies. The best thumbnail description of how chains-of-command actually work comes from SF&F author Lois McMaster Bujold’s novel “Brothers in Arms”, in which we read: “No, no, never send interim reports," said Miles. "Only final ones. Interim reports tend to elicit orders. Which you must then either obey, or spend valuable time and energy evading, which you could be using to solve the problem”…

Brad DeLong: But the market economy with property rights and contract obligations—as long as those are established, and as long as market prices are consonant with social values, all of the decision-making is pushed out to the periphery where the information is, all of the human race is incentivized to take actions to increase human wealth, and so all of the brain- and muscle-power of humanity is turned into an anthology intelligence focused like a laser beam on the problem of applying technology to produce necessities, conveniences, and luxuries. Friedrich von Hayek the idiot thought the unleashed market would do the whole job—or at least all the job that could be done.

Hayek’s argument was that the market would then put technology to work. True, the market would not produce “social justice”. But Hayek’s argument was to ask for social justice was to be disappointed: It would undermine prosperity and put us on The Road to Serfdom. The social-justice bureaucracy would turn into kleptocracy. And the administration of things would turn back into not the government but the domination of men, for power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Lenin had thought that once society could produce enough for all—once you had Soviet power plus electrification—there would no longer be any point to engaging in domination. People would rotate through administrative jobs, much as professors undertake to be department chair only reluctantly and under some duress, and those administrative jobs would be within the competence of everyone, for all that would be required would be the ability to add, subtract, multiply, divide, and “issue appropriate receipts”.

Von Hayek thought Lenin was naïve. Von Hayek was not wrong. And accountant Jake Soll to my left will tell you that “issuing appropriate receipts” is a remarkably subtle and complex task.

Milton Friedman might add that if you tried to achieve social justice, you might probably achieve something else, and that it was better to trust to the rough productivity-rewarding justice of the market than to “social justice”: Milton Friedman lived in a world in which he had been fired from his job at the University of Wisconsin, because a member of the Wisconsin legislators said the Wisconsin-Madison economics department already had too many Jews.

Yes, von Hayek and Friedman agreed: “the market giveth, the market taketh away: blessed be the name of the market” was the only sensible gospel that should ever be preached…

Brad DeLong: Each generation after 1870 humans had to try to figure out how to write new economic-sociological-political software to run on top of the changing forces-of-production of hardware so that society did not crash in a context in which Schumpeterian creative-destruction was destroying occupations, livelihoods, and communities as it created immense wealth…

Jake Soll: What DeLong is doing with great expertise for the twentieth century… I was trying to do for an earlier period…. The dichotomy, between von Hayek’s just completely free libertarian market, and Karl Polanyi’s idea that you would need a society, a democratic, decent society with human rights for things to function. I feel like Brad is more polite than I am about von Hayek. Reading von Hayek upsets me because I find him to be paranoid. His statements about the state are just not helpful…. If you know anything about history, you know that no one comes starts complaining about states until they start becoming powerful at the end of the 17th century. States are so delicate and hard to build. The anti-statist mind only emerges once the state is there and stable. This seems a remarkable lack of sophistication on Hayek’s part—though I understand where Hayek is coming from, coming from World Wars coming from totalitarianisms…

Jake Soll: John Maynard Keynes believed in the free market here—was very much scared of totalitarian communism and believed that in order to save capitalism, at a time when it was under great stress, one had to help it to full employment, because mass unemployment would pose such an incredible danger to democracy and to civil society and to freedom. Therefore, the state would have to help with employment by in times of great dearth of spending…

Jake Soll: Adam Smith… was seen as a kind of proto-libertarian…. But that is not the Smith that I know from living a lot of my life in the 17th and 18th centuries…. Everyone I live with has been dead a really long time. So I stay up all night speaking to the dead and trying to dig in and find out what they thought, and it can make you a little bit crazy.

Brad DeLong: It also can make you sane. There is a letter of Niccolo Machiavelli’s saying that the only times he feels happy are after dinner when he puts on his fancy clothes and goes into his library—to talk to the dead, and listen to them answer him. But that was because he was at the time terrified they were going to drag him back to Florence and torture him again, and reading in his library distracted him from that. And he was a little nuts.

Jake Soll: You have to be a little nuts to kind of do what we do, and spend all this time with books.

Brad DeLong: I spent more time arguing with my dissertation advisors by myself in my shower than I ever spent talking to him in person.

Jake Soll: Many of our conversations are hypothetical, yes. And the more you do those hypothetical conversations out loud, the more your family thinks that you're insane. But that's another story…

Jake Soll: I took Adam Smith… and I went back…. If you read enough, and if you know enough references, you can hear the references in Smith's book…. Everything he and his mentor and very close friend David Hume did was done through the lens of a Roman moralist named Marcus Tullius. Cicero, probably the most important pagan author. In the European tradition, until 1954, every heavily educated person would have read quite a bit of Cicero…. He wrote about exchange, and Smith wrote about exchange…. But he's not the first person to look for… an economics working in a self-perpetuating way…. Cicero says if exchange is done by like-minded people of the same class—he means senators, which he was the first in his family to become—and if they only exchanged from love, that means “friendship in a disinterested way”, then wealth will just be created. It's quite a remarkable statement…. You go back through economic thinkers, you will constantly find references back to this…

Jake Soll: There is a key moment at the end of the 17th century. Louis XIV had a famous finance minister, Colbert, and I happen to have spent 15 years of my life in his archives listening and looking for things. Colbert also pops up in Adam Smith's writings. Smith hates Louis XIV. But his Minister, Colbert—Smith has strong mixed feelings about. Smith said that Colbert brought in too many regulations, and favored merchants and what we would call today industrialists when Smith he should have supported farmers. But Smith also said that this guy Colbert was a good manager of government…. And I thought: That’s really interesting. I hear echoes of Colbert in Smith. They're supposed to be antithetical—Colbert the father of this mercantilism, of the state-run monopolistic war-making economy, while Smith was supposed to be the father of liberal free markets. In the Colbert archives, I found this not to be necessarily true…

Jake Soll: Colbert over and over again stated that free markets were preferable if you can trade in a symmetrical way. He said: France today has been destroyed by religious and civil war, its industrial base is broken, it is thus unable to make good trade deals—if it trades with Holland today, it will be destroyed. He said: I don't think we can actually beat the Dutch in terms of individual productivity. But if we can build a market that can trade with the Dutch and the English freely, if we get trust and competence, if we get a certain level of industry, and if we can then write acceptable trade treaties, we can d o so successfully. This was visionary market-building. Free-market thinkers, until a certain point in the 18th century, believed that the state had to build markets for them to be free…. Free markets would be made by a state that would help the  market and what that meant could be very different things. So my book became this back and forth of free market-thinkers demanding market freedoms but also demanding state support for creating the conditions in which a market is going to work…. It can even counteract sin. Everything humans did was sinful. But if people traded together, they would kind of sin at each other, and that would counter the sinful desire. And that moves into this idea that vices can become virtues—that greed can produce things. And that gets to this kind of crowdsourcing idea…

Jake Soll: I made the decision not to discuss Polanyi in my book. I now regret it. It was dishonest—I didn't want to come off as the leftist guy who thinks Polanyi is right. But I guess that is who I am. See: I am admitting it here. He was a brilliant guy. Lke Brad, I believe that the market is a key engine, is absolutely essential and important, does amazing things. But in structuring the market the state has an enormously important role—to say that the state can only do bad is misleading and very dangerous. You can't have a good market without a state…

Jake Soll: What I wanted to do is wind the clock back to the old way, and say: Look, if we're going to argue about free markets, about how markets work best, if we look at any situation we will see the state. So let's drop this pretense that we can get rid of the state and start talking about the state in a more sophisticated way. And lots of people don't like this….

Jake Soll: Why didn’t I talk more about the 20th century? I don't have the expertise. Brad does. And so, for me, it was incredibly gratifying to read Brad's book…

Brad DeLong: In response, let me throw out four things and you can decide which one we want to talk about.

(1) Quousue tandem abutere, Catalina, patentia nostra? That is the opening line of Marcus Tullius Cicero's most famous speech, his First Oration Against Lucius Sergius Catalina: O , Cataline! For how long are you going to take advantage of our patience? Cicero was not just a thinker and a writer, but also a rubber-meets-the-road politician, and an extraordinarily effective one. He was, I think, the only person in two generations to be elected one of the two consuls of the Roman Republic without having had a consul as a father or grandfather.

(2) I seem to have more tolerance for von Hayek—see him as more balanced between Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde than Jake does. Some of what von Hayek does not see comes from the fact that his Vienna is not one of the world’s economic-growth polls. In the Vienna of Hayek’s youth governance was still, in large part, what it had been back in the Agrarian Age: the major business of what state there was was to ensure that some have enough by taking from others. The state is then a group of thugs-with-spheres assisted by their tame accountants, bureaucrats and propagandists.

After 1870, and in the growth hot spots before, once you get the potential for real prosperity, once you get post-1870 the technological competence of the human race doubling every generation, you start thinking: of course we can get rid of the state; it’s primarily this apparatus of exploitation-and-domination, of force and fraud. You get things like Lenin saying that under Full Communism, coming real soon now, there won't be any government of men but merely the administration of things. We will all rotate through the ministerial administrative jobs—someone having to take the boring job of chair of the academic department for a year or so. After all, all the administrative jobs require is that you are able to add, subtract, multiply, and divide and issue receipts. Now at this point Jake will say that the accountants’ job of issuing receipts is actually a really complex and subtle one.

(3) Moving to the meat of Jake’s book: Cicero was living through the transformation of Rome. It had been the center of a small society of largely self-sufficient aristocrats bossing the slaves and commoners tilling the large individual farms that they had grabbed via conquest. It was become the capital of a large empire ruling over a commercial economy with a sophisticated and complex division of labor that required a dense network of exchange. How were things going to work. Cicero’s answer was that trade was mutually beneficial and wealth-creating when it was between people of equal social power and status.

Cicero was not wrong. go back to Econ 1. One thing you may have missed is that the games from exchange Dash in the area above the supply and below the demand curve to the left of the market equilibrium point—is distributed depending on how desperate suppliers and demanders are for the deal. If people have other options and things to do—if you have to cut the price a lot to get demanders to buy a little more, or if even a large increase in price only gets suppliers to provide a little more—then they will get the lion’s share of the surplus, and their counterparties will benefit very little from exchange. Those who do not want the deal very much have an enormous bargaining advantage, and hence much more social power. And Colbert saw that—he was in a position somewhat analogous to Cicero, with Europe moving out of its society of serfs, knights, and lords into the gunpowder-empire world of the early modern years.

The Jean-Baptiste Colberts, the Alexander Hamiltons, the Adam Smiths, the David Humes—all are all trying to figure out how you have to tweak things so that it can be made to work. If you look at Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, you see that it has five parts, only the first two of which are of great interest to economists proper. The third is economic history. The fourth is a critique, sympathetic and unsympathetic by turns, of Colbert’s mercantilism and of Turgot’s physiocracy. And the fifth, by far the largest book, is about all the things government needs to do for the free market to actually work—one of the most important of which is public education precisely, because someone who is caught up in this division of labor and has little property of their own is desperately going to need to be educated or else they will wind up stultified and living an unhappy life.

(4) Remember that von Hayek lives in the 20th century world, in which the market economy is the water in which we swim: what is needed to make the market work is already there, and largely beneath his notice. But von Hayek also comes from Eastern Europe, where governance is still primarily domination-and-exploitation. Hence he reaches his answer, but his answer is unhelpful in many ways.

We face a much sharper problem than did Cicero or did Colbert and Smith. Colbert and Smith live around 1700, in the gunpowder-empire age between the feudal society of 1000 and the steampower society of 1870, in a time of great growth and development. There was a lot of technological change and associated econo-social-political change from 1000 to 1870.

Since 1870, howver we've had that much technological change  as was seen over 1000-1870 in every single generation: from the steam power economy, to the second industrial revolution economy, to the mass production economy, to the distributed mass consumption economy, to the global value chain economy. And now we're well on our way to the info biotech economy. The problems of actually figuring out how you organize things so that the market society does not crash are coming at us much faster and are more urgent. Before 1870it  was very likely that your life was a lot like that of at least one of your grandparents. Well, since 1870, it has been unlikely that's the case.

There are four things to talk about…

Jake Soll: Brad's book is the story of the force of this new technologically-driven market and its constant stumbles and slouches: its capacity to create create great wealth, but this constant need to go back to the state. I do think there's an intellectual history tension. Brad is very Hegelian: each time a free market, neoliberal, libertarian, economic ideal arrives, he shows that actually it has been semi-disastrous, and cannot and will not continue. He shows very clearly how a fully state-run economy just doesn't work—it didn't work in Russia, or in China, until China starts really opening up. Isabella Weber is going to be speaking in November—we’re going to be doing an event together—about how China avoided shock therapy, the history of free market thinkers going into China, and China's interest in certain aspects of free-market thought and how to put that under an authoritarian state. The remarkably realistic vision of history that the Chinese have may come from many of the Chinese elite,having more perhasps of a French than an Anglo-Saxon education. It’s a remarkable story…

Jake Soll: Looking for a perfect system—that is extremely dangerous. Slouching, tripping, negotiating, there's always going to be a give and take, there's always going to be this kind of fall or tripping. I get where Hayek is coming from—there is that discussion of the Prussian state. I tried to be fair, but it's it's very hard. It's very hard…

Jake Soll: Usually free-market means—and this is meant in the 18th century—getting rid of taxes and any other impediments affecting the richest. In the 18th century, that meant enlightened aristocratic farmers and landowners. Early free-market French thinkers and Adam Smith believed that these farmers could unlock lock the wealth of nature, if they were just allowed to so—this is an old Roman nature cult that expands with Newtonianism and the discovery of the New World. I try and tell the story. It's an ancient crazy cult—which might be one reason we're still stuck with it now—this idea that just letting the richest people produce and commune with some natural force. It doesn’t seem to work. Yet it still seems to be in people's consciousness, to the point that the British economy was just crashed by one of these concepts. It seems crazy.

Brad DeLong: It is the very distant descendant of Cato the Elder: take care of your farm and your slaves and then all will be well. This descends down to Margaret Thatcher's, we need to lower the taxes on the job creators, and all will be well. In my book I quote Eric Hobsbawm—the greatest communist historian, maybe the greatest historians of the 20th century. He was also someone who in the early 1930s was a teenage Jew living in Berlin with Nazis marching outside calling for the immediate murder of himself and his family. And so he made certain political commitments he never would revisit—to the end of his days you could get him talking about how Stalin was underappreciated. Yet even Hobsbawm would say of Britain in the 1970s that he unions were too powerful—exerted their social power to raise their wealth not by increasing production, but instead by inconveniencing the public—and so the good ship “Social Democracy” needed a thorough neoliberal scrub by Margaret Thatcher.

However, it is now a generation and a half later. Liz Truss shows up with the Margaret Thatcher playbook. Truss says: Let's do this again. But, lo and behold, the economy underlying economy is different. We haven't had 30 years of Labor Party intellectual dominance, building up the infrastructure of the British economy.Her chancellor put forward the plan—and financial markets want no part of it, crash, judge that these policies simply do not fit the requirements imposed by the level of the current technological forces of production.

Jake Soll: Even back in the day—it was a little difficult for me to watch some interviews with Thatcher, wtaching free-market leaders explaining why the free market didn't work. That goes all the way back to the 18th century: if we had just been allowed more power, if we hadn't been thwarted by people who didn't believe in the free market, our free-market reforms would have worked.

Brad DeLong:  Oh, it goes back much, much earlier than that. Consider Jeremiah and company. The kings of Judah are desperately trying to make alliances with Egypt to the south to protect themselves from the Assyrians coming down from the north like the wolf on the fold. The kingdom of Israel—the northern kingdom—has already been conquered, and its people, or at least its élite, had been deported to Nineveh. Now the Assyrians are coming back. Pharaoh says, quite reasonably, that Egyptian forces need the protection of the gods of Egypt, and so there need to be shrines in Jerusalem. Jeremiah says: No! You must not tolerate the Egyptian gods! You must cleave to YHWH and YHWH alone! Jeremiah is listened to. In the end, it is Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon who conquers Jerusalem and deports the élite of Jerusalem to Babylon. And the response of Jeremiah’s successors is that even though we spurned the Egyptian Alliance, in the end, we did not worship YHWH hard enough. Our policies did not fail the people. The people failed the policies.

Jake Soll: This pattern of thought went into Christianity: Give your wealth and all of your pleasure away to either the poor or to god of free will, and you will get the treasure of the Kingdom. If you do that, it will work out even here on earth. The narrative is deeply embedded in the western tradition. You can show its long genealogy. It is why, in these European and post-European countries, there is this clinging to this dream. I wanted to call my book: “history of a dream”. Laura called it: “the history of an idea”. I can't argue with Laura. But it was a dream. People are actually telling me no one believes this anymore. But it was my classmate from Cambridge, Kwasi Kwarteng, who stood up and threw out the whole thing as policy in what was almost an evangelical moment…

Brad DeLong: John Maynard Keynes and his successors and disciples did think that they had unraveled the Gordian Knot in the post-WWII generation: progressive taxes on the rich, a large social safety net to provide for the poor and the unemployed, Pigovian taxes and subsidies to deal with externalities, and the commitment to full employment. In a market economy the only rights that are respected are property rights. If you don't own valuable property, you don't have a social voice or social power. But under full employment even raw individual labor is a valuable commodity, and so everyone as some social power. Plus Keynes thought that the policy of full employment would require one of low interest rates. And if interest rates are very low, then either plutocrats reinvest their earnings to maintain their wealth share or they spend down their capital, and so lose their social power. Thus the low interest-rate and high public-investment policies to maintain full employment solve the twin problems of giving social power to the not-rich and curbing the excessive social-power of the rich. Thus very judicious and very light-handed central planning and government interference, regulation, structuring of the market could actually get us to where we wanted to go. But this fell apart in the late 1970s, with the coming of Reagan and Thatcher, and its inability to maintain durable political majorities in elections. And so we are now still searching for something else…

Brad DeLong: My book doesn't have a “what we do next to make the 21st century great” chapter. It does not have such a chapter because my coäuthor Steve Cohen convinced me that any history book that ends with such a chapter undermines its authority because the what-we-should-do-next chapter looks ridiculous six months after the book's publication. So I'm looking forward to writing the what-should-we-do-next? chapter in the next few months, and then rewriting or replacing it with a new version every two years, and I should be able to make this one of my successful business lines for a generation.

The first thing to grasp is that reaching back into the past for models is almost certainly doomed. Any institutional configuration that even semi-worked in the past is unlikely to work today, because things are different. We don't have the 35% of the labor force in manufacturing, with 20% of the labor force in essentially semi-robotic mass-production assembly-line jobs that we had back in 1948, that supported the strong union movement and the egalitarian push for social democracy that worked then—that forced even Dwight Eisenhower, a very, very conservative person by nature, to govern by saying: I am going to be a much better prudent, more efficient, and more effective manager of the New Deal than the Democrats will be, in large part because I'm not in bed with their particular interest groups, and I can focus government spending on things we need—interstate highways, a space program, a strong military to fight the Cold War, rather than on things that democratic interest groups kind of happened to want.

How does that apply to us right now? It's probably no surprise, but I think that Biden is moving in the right direction—massively investing more in the communities of America that are currently not attractive places for people to have jobs. We need to do this because attractive places like LA are doing all they can to prevent the building of large amounts of extra housing. So for the first time in American history, people have not been moving from places where wages are low to places where wages are high, because they can't afford to buy houses here. And it is not as bad here as in San Francisco.

The supply-side progressive agenda is the perhaps the best one for America going forward right now. But that also needs to be paired with some attempt to get the world as a whole back into the framework where we agree we are all headed for a future of greater peace, greater prosperity, and also greater public voice and discussion. That last seems to be the very hardest. We have the Grand Prince of Muscovy thinking that the way to persuade Ukrainians that they are a Russian ethnicity not by sending the Bolshoi Ballet to perform, not by sending orchestras to play the works of Mussorgsky, not I would be sending out poets to read the works of Pushkin in Ukrainian cities out loud, but by sending killer robots to blast people from the skies. This is the world we have…

Jake Soll: I’m gonna be the voice of early modern history—perhaps of reaction. One playbook from the past works: education, and public education, and public higher education. We’ve had deindustrialization in the Midwest. I spent some of my life there. You see not just a disinvestment in manufacturing but a disinvestment from what were grand public universities. That old playbook of grand ambitious education at all levels does create wealth and a quality of life and a desire to invest. That could turn things around.

Brad DeLong: The Republican Party platform! The Republican Party platform of 1863: free labor, settling the frontier—the technological frontier—and land-grant colleges.

Jake Soll: The land-grant colleges were incredibly successful, created vast amounts of American wealth. And the Americans of the Midwest took no interest in them, and are now throwing them away. It is startling to me, seeing the wealth of these institutions and seeing Americans literally discount them in every sense of the term. So I think there's a, there's an older playbook, which has to be renewed now. We are not going to be able to find prosperity without global cooperation. And I believe education is absolutely essential to this at all levels. One last point, within all this technology is culture—ballet and poets and all these things, they really do still play a huge role.  Think about Japan, and the strange way Japan produces massive global culture that we're not even always aware of. These things work and make places attractive, and make us able to cooperate and work together. Cultural interaction between humans around the world is so important: key to avoiding war and creating this understanding that we're going to have to have…

Jake Soll: We did have these small pockets of remarkable wealth creation—Tuscany in the late Middle Ages, the Dutch Republic in in the early Renaissance, places with remarkable levels of literacy, perhaps 75% of Tuscans in 1375. Remarkable levels of Holland literacy mixed with a very specific form of tolerance. Literacy and tolerance will give you a capacity to manage the changes that come at you with much more ease. That might sound naïve and super old-fashioned…

Brad DeLong: I think Keynes would say, and I know I would agree, that there's a difference between very low interest rates that are produced by a shortage of safe assets in an economy and very low interest rates that are produced by an expansionary full-employment monetary policy, which carries with it a high level of investment and hence a relatively low rate of profit. With a low rate of profit you have higher wages. The trap you're worrying about is one that the world economy has been in for most of the past 20 years, but the cause is a significant shortage of safe assets and hence a wide gap between the rate of interest that you earn on safe bonds like those issued by the US Treasury on the one hand, and the rate of profit and thus return on a diversified unit-beta equity portfolio yield on the other. Most of the problems are a result of that wide gap, and not because of the low interest rates themselves…

Brad DeLong: There’s lots of stuff that might have been in my book on the cutting room floor. I am not yet organized to be able to claim to have a director's cut. But in the published version, immigration shows up in a major way only twice. First, it shows up as the thing that makes the United States “the furnace where the future is being forged” in the 20th century, as the United States brings in huge numbers of people from around the world and makes them Americans. Second is the role played by migration in the development of underdevelopment. If you come from Asia, you're not allowed into places like Canada, like Australia, like Argentina, like the United States—unless you're willing to go to Angel Island, spend a year there in quarantine, and maybe be sent back to China afterwards. Thus the enormous migration flow from Asia is directed into various tropical countries. Consider Malaysia: Chinese workers brought in from the Pearl River Delta, British capital, and Brazilian biotechnology because the British have grabbed rubber plants from the Brazilian Amazon, shipped them to Kew Gardens, and then shipped them to Malaysia and found that in Malaysia rubber grows like a weed because its pests and parasites are an ocean away. Hence the Brazilian rubber industry is decimated by Malaysian competition. That story, over and over again, structures the world into a developed global north and an underdeveloped and poor global south—one which is too poor to have a large enough middle class to support the development of its own indigenous manufacturing and engineering to any great degree…

Brad DeLong: A number of things make the world since since 2010 different from the world before. From 1870 to 2010 humanity’s technological competence doubles every generation with Schumpeterian, creative destruction creating immense wealth while destroying entire occupations and industries and livelihoods and communities. The task is to manage this process—to keep solving the problem of baking a sufficiently-large economic pie from disrupting our ability to slice and taste, to distribute and utilize our wealth, so that people feel safe and secure and are healthy and happy. Over 1870-2010 we make great strides at solving the problem of baking, but the problems of slicing and tasting flummox us.

Since 2010 we have had a marked slowing of the rate of technological progress. I blame this on Reagan and Thatcher, on the coming of neoliberalism, both in terms of government’s much lower willingness to invest in the future, the increasing shift towards corporate short-termism with the destruction of industrial research labs, and the U.S. has abandoned its role as semi-benevolent hegemon. Plus there is the emergence of new civilization-shaking problems: nuclear proliferation reaches critical mass, neofascism has surged, and not even oil companies can pay enough to keep an active stable of global-warming deniers in their employ any more. This year the monsoon was 300 miles south of where it is supposed to be—a lot more rain flooding Pakistan and a drying-up Yangtze River. 3.5 billion people live in the six great river valleys plus the monsoon regions of Asia.They are not rich enough to simply pack up and move to Vancouver and get jobs there.

Dealing with global warming and dealing with killer robots armed with nuclear weapons—those are big problems the world is going to face starting now that it did not before 2010…

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Brad DeLong: I am not going to lecture you. People who want me to lecture them should read the book, or maybe listen to the audiobook as recorded by the amazing Alan Aquino—who is much more convincing at presenting my arguments than I am. Remember Mel Brooks. The now very old TV show “The Dick Van Dyke Show” was a thinly fictionalized account of Mel Brooks's experiences, for Sid Caesar. They made a pilot starring Mel Brooks. It was absolutely awful. They concluded that Dick Van Dyke could be a convincing and good Mel Brooks on TV, but Mel Brooks could not…

Brad DeLong: There is far more about wines than anyone with only one liver can learn—even about French wines, even about that subset of French wines that come from lands that were once part of the dowry of Eleanor of Aquitaine…