Time to Post My 675-Word Elevator Pitch for “Slouching Towards Utopia”, &
BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2022-04-09 Sa
FIRST: Time to Post My 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.
CONDITION: John Cassidy Has a Short Piece About Larry Summers’s Inflation Fears:
Tom Levenson has a question:
And I have a comment:
One Video:
I confess I do not understand the phrase “fabless manufacturer”. Shouldn’t it be “fabless designer” instead?
Asianometry: How AMD Left GlobalFoundries for TSMC <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAlU6vQ1Pn8>:
One Picture:
Asia in exaggerated relief:
Very Briefly Noted:
Dan Wang: Chinese Manufacturing <https://stratechery.com/2022/an-interview-with-dan-wang-about-covid-chinese-manufacturing-and-chinas-response-to-ukraine/>
Edward Luce: The World-Changing Meaning of Putin: ‘Milestones are… the point at which history says it can no longer be ignored…. A new era is undoubtedly upon us. But the west’s resolve is not yet a given… <https://www.ft.com/content/186659fa-9408-4868-b00c-a7bb5d1704a0>
Robert Armstrong & Ethan Wu: The Fed Gets Scary: ‘Lael Brainard… dovish… in the past… said “rapid” reduction of the Fed balance sheet could start in May…. You should be worrying more about recession this morning than you were yesterday morning… <https://www.ft.com/content/13d74b15-e4ba-408e-a912-0ccddd76e4a1>
Maya Averbuch: Supply Chain Latest: Mexico Gains as Companies Near-Shore From China: ‘Factory-filled states along the U.S. border are thriving, with the country’s exports surpassing $80 billion in the first two months of the year…. Mattel… announced in mid-March plans to make Mexico the site of its biggest plant in the world, a $47 million consolidation and expansion project that includes a 200,000-square-foot facility with some 3,500 workers… <https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-04-05/supply-chain-latest-mexico-gains-as-companies-near-shore-from-china>
Zsuzsanna Szelényi: How Viktor Orbán Built His Illiberal State: ‘Fidesz’s victory Sunday was the culmination of many events that, once upon a time, we thought couldn’t happen here… <https://mailchi.mp/tnr/how-viktor-orbn-built-his-illiberal-state?e=a9e3ae3dd2>
William Burr: A Cold War Mystery: ‘Did Truman Meet with NATO Foreign Ministers on 3 April 1949?…. If the document is the genuine record of an important meeting, it has exceptional significance… <https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/nsa/DOCUMENT/200008/>
Benjamin Mazer: COVID Is More Like Smoking Than the Flu: ‘Choosing not to get vaccinated against COVID is, right now, a modifiable health risk on par with smoking, which kills more than 400,000 people each year in the United States… <https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/02/covid-anti-vaccine-smoking/622819/>
Anatol Lieven: Inside Putin’s Circle: The Real Russian Elite <https://www.ft.com/content/503fb110-f91e-4bed-b6dc-0d09582dd007>
Robert Service: Lenin: A Biography: ’So why has Lenin been charged with monumental insincerity in relation to the book [State and Revolution]?… <https://archive.org/details/leninbiography0000serv_i1z1>
Andrew Gelman: One-Sided Journalism & the Fundamental Attribution Error: ‘The commonplace journalistic assumption that ‘Republican bad faith… is just a feature of the landscape’, whereas a given Democrat is ’an actor with agency, and subject to scrutiny.’… [But] people always have a choice <https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2022/03/30/one-sided-journalism-and-the-fundamental-attribution-error/>
Twitter & Stack:
Joshua Gans: Managing Endemic Covid: ‘How your attitude and behaviour should adjust…
Anand Giridharadas & Masha Gessen: Is This How Russia Ends?: ‘An interview… why Putin might dare a nuclear strike on Poland, what democratic leaders don’t grasp that authoritarians do, and what Russia might look like after Putin… <
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