Yet Anoþer Attempt at a Better “Slouching Towards Utopia” Elevator Pitch…, &

BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2022-06-13 Mo

Jun 13, 2022

∙ Paid

Before our modern age, human technological knowledge crept forward at only the pace of a glacier. A typical century would see technology advance by little. Perhaps the population at the end of the century could have lived 5% better than those at the start—if the population had stayed the same.

Preorder "Slouching Towards Utopia"

In this environment, Malthusian forces were dominant. The only way for women to have durable social power was to be the mothers of surviving sons, and even with high fertility more than a quarter saw all their sons die, so better nutrition would lead them to try harder. Thus the population grew by 10% in an average century, and so smaller farm sizes offset better technology and kept the real income of the typical human much the same.

And so human psychology, human sociology, and human polities stayed much the same, with substantial changes visible only if one took the long-duration viewpoint of millennia.

This frozen glacial creep of economic history came to an end in 1870. The ice had been cracking beforehand, over 1500 to 1870. But after 1870 saw the roaring of the cataract. In every single generation after 1870 technological change was so fast and the seizing of opportunities by the market economy so rapid that the economy revolutionized itself in a generation, and then did so again, every single generation. This was the story at least until 2010. (After which, a new story may have begun.)

The repeated, sequential, Schumpeterian creative-destruction economic revolutions meant that all was solid melted into air—all established patterns and orders were steamed away—and while men (and women) were not compelled to face with sober senses their real conditions of life and relations with one another, they did have to try to build new institutions to manage the problems and opportunities of production, distribution, and utilization that the onrushing technological cornucopia brought.

Friedrich von Hayek said that the market economy could produce unequal prosperity, but nothing more: trying to shape and manage it to produce social justice as well would fail, destroy prosperity, and put us on the road to, well, serfdom; and so the watchword had to be “the market giveth, the market taketh away, blessed be the name of the market”.

John Maynard Keynes whimpered that—if only governments allowed his technocratic students to conduct a sensible monetary policy along with a "somewhat comprehensive" socialization of investment—it was within our grasp for everyone to have a job, and technology plus compound interest would wreak marvels and rock-bottom interest rates would “euthanize” the rentiers—so that they could use their money social power only at the cost of spending down their capital, and so relinquishing it. Thus in the not-very-long-run, Keynesian technocrats could solve the problems of production and distribution, leaving humanity to grapple with its real problem: that of utilization of our wealth to create a truly human world.

Karl Polanyi said that the "stark utopia" of von Hayek's market was unsustainable: the only rights it recognized were property rights and your own source of social power was your wealth, but people thought that they had other, more important, rights that society needed to vindicate—to economic security, to an income level proportional to what they deserved, that other people should have income levels proportional to what they deserved too, in a connected society that gave them respect and place. Plus that you should have some power in society even if you had no wealth. The watchword had to be: “the market was made for man, not man for the market”.

Political economists who did not recognize this and tried to bring the stark utopia of market society would thus face explosions, and be overwhelmed by social-political movements that sought social justice—which might be a very inegalitarian kind of social justice, because it would give people not equal shares but rather what those making the rules deserved.

The closest the whole thing came to holding together was the post-WWII era of social democracy, in which Keynesian focus on full employment (and low interest rates to make amortizing the WWII-era debt easy), Beveridgian equality-through-redistribution (and public provision), plus a little Pigovian externality-compensation produced the Thirty Glorious Years. But somehow social democracy failed its sustainability test, and was replaced by neoliberalism, which stubbornly persists in spite of its failure to fulfill any of its promises except that it would make the rich much richer with much more social power.

Now I am well aware that you will find that inadequate as a Grand Narrative.

But it is the one that I have.

Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Long 20th Century, 1870-2010, forthcoming September 6 <https://bit.ly/3pP3Krk>

One Video:

Omar Moav: How Farming Shaped the World <https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=3DVCsbDHdus>:

Share Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality

One Image:

Very Briefly Noted:

Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels (1848): Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei <https://oll.libertyfund.org/page/marx-manifest#bourgeois>
Mindy Carlson: Her Dying Day <https://mindycarlson.com/her-dying-day/>
Vanessa Lobue: Why Can’t We Remember Being Born or Our First Words?: ‘First memories… are all autobiographical… and they typically didn’t happen before the age of 2 or 3… infantile amnesia. But why can’t we remember the things that happened to us when we were infants?… <https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/06/why-cant-we-remember-being-born-or-our-first-words/>
Sylvia Varnham O’Regan: Meta Scales Back AR Glasses Plan Amid Reality Labs Shakeup <https://www.theinformation.com/articles/meta-scales-back-ar-glasses-plan-amid-reality-labs-shakeup?rc=b4kz7m>
Robby Porter: : We Need PEPS More than STEM: ‘Forget about STEM for a minute, what we need is PEPS—philosophy, economics, and political science—humanity is desperate for new inventions from these fields… <https://vtdigger.org/2018/05/06/robby-porter-need-peps-stem/>
John Quiggin: The Three-Party System in France & Australia: ‘The breakdown of a two (dominant) party system in which power alternated between hard (Thatcher) and soft (Clinton) versions of neoliberalism…. There’s no longer enough support to maintain two neoliberal parties, so the natural outcome is a three-party system, with Trumpists, neoliberals and a left coalition…. In political systems set up for two parties, this creates a lot of instability… <https://crookedtimber.org/2022/06/06/the-three-party-system-in-france-and-australia/>
Martin Sandbu: Economic Thinking Is at a Crucial Inflection Point: ‘The market-friendly governing philosophy that triumphed in the 1980s is on the defensive…. When things feel intolerable, people blame the status quo and demand change. In the 1970s that meant deregulating a rigid economy. Today it may mean re-regulating an unchained one…. The current inflationary surge overshadows the triumph of a labour market that makes it easy to find better jobs… <https://www.ft.com/content/4575b986-ef11-478d-a7e2-0451ae71b0e1>
Paul Krugman: Elon Musk, Mars & the Modern Economy <https://messaging-custom-newsletters.nytimes.com/template/oakv2?CCPAOptOut=true&emc=edit_pk_20220607&instance_id=63417&nl=paul-krugman&productCode=PK&regi_id=64675225&segment_id=94458&te=1&uri=nyt%3A%2F%2Fnewsletter%2F04008f43-2873-528d-8b0e-1af0e6a1d404&user_id=8a3fce2ae25b5435f449ab64b4e3e880>
David Singh Grewal: The Breakdown of Neoliberalism as Foreign Policy Agenda <https://email.hewlett.org/t/ViewEmail/t/707246A252454B182540EF23F30FEDED/3C79567D312FB707D08BC3D516CA522B?alternativeLink=False>
Chad Orzel: Many Worlds, but too Much Metaphor <https://www.forbes.com/sites/chadorzel/2019/09/17/many-worlds-but-too-much-metaphor/?sh=7e428b4e625d>
Ross Douthat: We Can’t Be Ukraine Hawks Forever <https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/04/opinion/ukraine-russia-putin-war.html?referringSource=articleShare>
Dominic Lieven: The End of Tsarist Russia: The March to World War I & Revolution: ‘One goal of my book is to resurrect the term “Second World” and to apply it to Europe’s periphery before 1914… <https://archive.org/details/endoftsaristruss0000liev>
Isaac Chotiner & John Mearsheimer: Why John Mearsheimer Blames the U.S. for the Crisis in Ukraine <https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/why-john-mearsheimer-blames-the-us-for-the-crisis-in-ukraine>

Twitter & ‘Stack:

Laurie Penny: Ship of Fools: ‘What follows is one of the strangest pieces of journalism I have ever done… a four-day Mediterranean cruise with hundreds of crypto-crazed investors and evangelists…