What Is Right & What Is Wrong in "Slouching Towards Utopia": Venkatesh Rao's View
About once a month þese days I find another really good review of my "Slouching Towards Utopia". Þis month þe great review comes from Venkatesh Rao
One of the nicest things about writing my big book Slouching Towards Utopia <http://bit.ly/3pP3Krk> is that one gets very insightful reviews from serious, smart, hard-working people who think differently than I do. Not only is it a huge ego boost—someone smart is paying attention to me!—but I get to learn stuff as well:
Venkatesh Rao: Book Review: Slouching Towards Utopia: ’A brave attempt at a grand narrative… a weak economic determinism story [that] is worth telling, despite its significant genre-level shortcomings. It is the story of the gradual taming… of a weakly domesticable beast, the market, that some viewed as a God it was sacrilegious to even attempt to tame, and others viewed as a Devil to be exorcised… [but that] is merely a kind of vast distributed computer… difficult… to program… opaque and complex… call[ing] for pragmatic engineering… rather than ideological grand-standing…. The story of the long twentieth century told with the presumption that economics was (and remains) “in charge” of history is… useful… vastly improves on motivated ideological mythologies…
And:
DeLong’s brave attempt at a new grand narrative… does not entirely succeed, but…. It’s heartening to see someone take on a grand narrative challenge…. The twentieth-century tale… in the… “short” telling… colliding charismatic ideologies that engaged in great wars over conflicting visions of equally false utopias… [that] elides the economic and technological strands… [and] reinforces deep confusions about the nature of our world and its pattern of progress…. DeLong scopes out a much truer periodization that he then proceeds to narrativize as a long period of “slouching” economic progress… towards utopia… the right way, the only morally defensible way… the pragmatic humane way…. The slouching story… encourag[es] you to draw certain conclusions. Especially conclusions about what does not work. It does not offer anything like a… distillation of a “correct” philosophy of economic governance…
But the book is far from perfect—blinkered by its genre, and hence not properly “Grand” at all:
A weakness of economic history as a genre…. You narrate what you measure…. It can at best tell the tale between significant surprise entrances of unmodeled forces…. DeLong is aware of… genre-level weakness of his approach to grand-narrativizing. He attempts to accommodate all this historical phenomenology that eludes an economic lens by corraling them within a notion of “Polanyian rights,” the idea that humans demand various extra-economic things such as work commensurate with their sense of their worth and skill, stable community life, and a sense of status… a kind of catch-all philosophical boundary condition and forcing function (“the market was made for man, not man for the market”) that can guide regulation of a wisely managed economy, and through which all extra-economic forces operate. Left unmanaged, Polanyian rights tend to generate nasty surprises that derail economic stories. Properly managed, they tame the market…. To some extent, this unceremonious bundling of all non-economic strands of history into the rubric of “Polanyian rights” works… [but] feels reductive, and like it is missing the point and the inner logic of those stories…
And, in addition, Venkatesh says:
[The book] is weakest where DeLong dives into the inside baseball of arguments over… the theological machinery that keeps EconTwitter busily arguing…
His account of the still-mysterious inflection of 1973–74… felt unsatisfying…
The weakest parts of the book are … the stories of a) the development of the Global South, b) growing inclusion and c) the role of technology qua technology…. DeLong cops to the inadequacy of his telling of all three tales, and gamely does his best…
The story of the Global South is largely that of large populations doing, economically speaking, nothing of consequence…
The story of minorities is… the arc of the moral universe doing various interesting things from Lincoln to Gandhi to MLK, but nothing particularly interesting economically (the exception here is the story of women, treated as an honorary minority, even though they constitute a majority—and to his credit, DeLong unpacks that thread a little)…
All of this is a wind-up to a main-event critique that Venkatesh makes, about my handling of technology:
The story of technology reduces to a gee-whiz parade of amazing science-fictional spectacles that mostly don’t matter economically—until they do. In the few instances where DeLong does tell hurriedly the story of a technology that mattered economically, he sometimes gets it mostly right (containerization) and at other times gets it kinda wrong (semiconductors and computing)…
[What] does not work well is in DeLong’s treatment of technology. The question of how technology shapes economics does not fit into the sociological rubric of Polanyian social rights…
For DeLong, technology is bundled into a sort of blackbox idealization of the industrial research lab. A magic box within which fascinating spectacles unfold, but from which they only occasionally manage to break out and “arrive” economically as discontinuous “surprises” in the Polanyi-Hayek dialectic…
[The] patching-over of a technological break boundary within an economic narrative is a kind of forced fiction of apparent economic continuity that weakens it. Major technologies, arguably, alter the fundamental logic of economics…. If you tried to navigate the present armed only with economic histories, you would be doomed to ignore most technological breakthroughs until it was too late…
DeLong’s treatment of technology is that of an unabashed fanboy who nevertheless insists on viewing it as a kind of separable species of blackbox that only impacts history through economic mechanisms in ways that are relatively predictable in aggregate…
To me, the story of the long twentieth century is primarily… technological…. Technology reshapes and alters reality much more directly than economists seem to think. It is not a matter of point-like “irruptions” emerging from “labs” and influencing reality indirectly through the midwifery of economic mechanisms. Technology is an input to all reality, not just to economic machinery. The vast proportion of the entangled dynamics of technology and history is economic “dark matter”…
DeLong candidly admits that his treatment of technology is inadequate, and that perhaps an equivalent grand narrative could be written with technology, rather than economics, as the main thread, implying that the two might be roughly equivalent…
What do I think of all of this?
First, and most important, I am tremendously flattered by and grateful for Venkatesh’s attention: that he read the book and thought about it—that he seriously engaged with it—that he took black marks on pages and from them spun-up a SubTuring instantiation of my mind and arguments which he then ran in a separate partition in his own WetWare and argued with—makes my day.
Second, I am incredibly pleased that—in Venkatesh’s reading—the book works: it does what I intended it to do. And I am even more pleased in his judgment that “this unceremonious bundling of all non-economic strands of history into the rubric of ‘Polanyian rights’ works…” Yes, it not only “feels reductive”, it is reductive. Yes, it not only feels “ like it is missing the point and the inner logic of those stories” of resistance to the market economy’s ruthless assertion of the dogma that the only rights that matter and are to be vindicated are property rights, it does miss the point and the inner logic of the stories of resistance. It could not do otherwise: all Grand Narratives are false. But, as he says, my Grand Narrative framework “works”.
Third, Venkatesh is right: the inside baseball of semi-technical economics is weak (but I had to include it because it did matter), the account of the still-mysterious inflection of 1973–74 and the Fall of Post-WWII Global-North Social Democracy is unsatisfying (but I had to include it because it did matter), the coverage of the development of the Global South is inadequate, and I believe that if I started over from scratch I could do a much better job at laying out the minorities (and female majority) -inclusion chapter (as one of the modes of the very partial dismantling of the pre–1870 élite domination-and-exploitation by force-and-fraud machine).
Fourth, what do I think about the main-event critique that Venkatesh launches, the critique of my handling of the category “technology”? I think he is right. I think the problem is half space—the book is 600 pages, and to keep it that short lots of things had to wind up on the cutting-room floor—and half that my Visualization of the Cosmic All does not have an adequate grasp of the relationship between technology and economy, of the workings of what somebody-or-other once called “modes of production”. But on all that more anon…
I agree with Venkatesh’s issue over technology, but from the POV that your view of research labs is overimportant. Yes, they have been important, although lesser-sized corporate R&D is very important. Indeed, the creativity of small startup R&D is one reason why larger corporations keep acquiring them. In the computer world, let us not forget that the home computer was an invention of guys in garages, even if IBM muscled in when it became apparent that there was a potential business to be had. [Also let's not forget that the Innovator's Dilemma" was very much a problem for IBM. Not long after it offered its open designs, it tried to lock out competitors with its microchannel architecture - which fortunately failed.] If software in "eating the world", GitHub is a massive inventory of individuals and small groups creating useful software libraries across a wide range of computer languages. The pharma industry is well known for its diminishing new chemical entities and merging corporations. Startups spun out of university research are often the source of novel drug ideas, which Big Pharma acquires to provide funding.