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Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century by [Bradford DeLong]

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J. Bradford De Long

Bradford DeLong

Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century Kindle Edition

by Bradford DeLong (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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An instant New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller from one of the world’s leading economists, offering a grand narrative of the century that made us richer than ever, but left us unsatisfied

“A magisterial history.”—Paul Krugman

Named a Best Book of 2022 by Financial Times * Economist * Fast Company

Before 1870, humanity lived in dire poverty, with a slow crawl of invention offset by a growing population. Then came a great shift: invention sprinted forward, doubling our technological capabilities each generation and utterly transforming the economy again and again. Our ancestors would have presumed we would have used such powers to build utopia. But it was not so. When 1870–2010 ended, the world instead saw global warming; economic depression, uncertainty, and inequality; and broad rejection of the status quo.

Economist Brad DeLong’s Slouching Towards Utopia tells the story of how this unprecedented explosion of material wealth occurred, how it transformed the globe, and why it failed to deliver us to utopia. Of remarkable breadth and ambition, it reveals the last century to have been less a march of progress than a slouch in the right direction.

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546 pages
Language

English
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On Kindle Scribe
Publisher

Basic Books
Publication date

September 6, 2022
Grade level

8 and up
File size

2213 KB
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

J. Bradford DeLong, an economic historian, is a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley. He was a deputy assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury during the Clinton administration. He writes a widely read economics blog, now at braddelong.substack.com. He lives in Berkeley, California. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

Review

“Brad DeLong learnedly and grippingly tells the story of how all the economic growth since 1870 has created a global economy that today satisfies no one’s ideas of fairness. The long journey toward economic justice and more equal rights and opportunities for all shall and will continue.”

―Thomas Piketty, #1 New York Times–bestselling author of Capital in the Twenty-First Century

“What a joy to finally have Brad DeLong’s masterful interpretation of twentieth-century economic history down on paper. Slouching Towards Utopia is engaging, important, and awe-inspiring in its breadth and creativity.”
―Christina Romer, University of California, Berkeley

“History provides the only data we have for charting a course forward in these turbulent times. I have not seen a more revealing and illuminating book about economics and what it means in a very long time. Slouching Towards Utopia should be required reading for anybody who cares about the future of the global system, and that should be everyone.”
―Lawrence H. Summers, Harvard University --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B09PL63L1V
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Basic Books; 1st edition (September 6, 2022)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ September 6, 2022
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 2213 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 546 pages
Page numbers source ISBN ‏ : ‎ 0465019595

Best Sellers Rank: #96,286 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #6 in Macroeconomics (Kindle Store)
- #19 in Economic History (Kindle Store)
- #57 in 20th Century World History

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4.3 551 ratings

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M. Yang

This book provides you with the tools to call out fake news on economic policy!

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 22, 2022

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Note: I usually do not review books, but there are just too many fake 1-star reviews, of people who obviously did not read the book but instead complain about a scam seller of a copy of the book.

Additional full disclosure: I am a recovering libertarian, thanks in part to Brad De Long.

I have been waiting for this book for 20 years, ever since I read some draft chapters that Brad De Long posted in the late 90s on his blog. It has been worth the wait. One of the basic truths of our time is the fake news asymmetry principle: “It is much easier to make up lies and fake news, than it is to debunk them.”. Brad Delong’s world economic history of the long 20th Century gives you the tools to debunk and call out fake news.

For example, many other grand stories (or “narratives”) about the 20th Century (“Age of Extremes” by Hobspawn and “Commanding Heights” by Yergin and Stanislaw) focus excessively on the rivalry of ideas between Marxism and “neoliberalism”, as represented by Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. Yet, in the political discourse of the last 30 years, Marxism has mostly been a foil for the right and was supported by only a small minority on the left. The viewpoint that today’s left is nothing else than your Grandpa’s Marxism is an example of fake news. Instead, the counterpoint in the battle of ideas to neoliberalism is identified by Brad De Long as Karl Polanyi and related ideas of European-style social democracy. Polanyi’s key insight was that markets did not just bring explosive economic growth since 1870, but also started to decouple themselves from social relations that used to embed them. For example, it used to be much more natural for CEOs to feel social responsibility, instead of focusing on shareholder value only. The vanguard of this decoupling process was Friedrich Hayek, who argued that unless we let unconstrained markets reign, the state will enslave us all. In contrast Polanyi argued that if nobody deliberately regulates the market, the backlash against untamed markets will enslave us all. Or in the words of John Kennedy: “If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.“ (Inauguration Speech). It is hard to see Republicans' turn towards MAGA not as basically confirming Polanyi's argument. Hayek vs Polanyi is the central tension that makes you understand the long 20th Century and it continues to shape our lives today. And I applaud Brad De Long for writing about Hayek and especially Polanyi in such a clear and accessible way.

A second strength of this book is that I think it is actually ideologically balanced (instead of being fake balanced like Fox News). Much of the tale of economic growth in the 20th Century is about the pendulum swings in globalization and about technological progress and Brad De Long discusses these trends without falling into the trap of only seeing the positive side of less hunger and less poverty for many. Instead, he emphasizes throughout the long shadow of slavery, privilege and exclusion. Similarly, “government failure” isn’t just the story of corruption and incompetence but also of insufficient intervention and failure to keep markets open for everyone.

Finally, the book is full of little historical gems, that are thought-provoking and insightful. For example:

(1) Why did neoliberalism persist as convincing story of the how the world works, both on the left and on the right, when the track record of its policies is quite poor? Brad De Long: Reagan got credit for the fall of the USSR (with lots of hindsight bias about the “inevitable collapse of the Soviet command economy”!) (p.453)

(2) How does pre-1914 globalization differ from post-1989 globalization? Brad De Long: transnational corporate control was infeasible then but is the norm now (p.483) – this reinforces the notion that anonymous global forces shape local daily life and explains why MAGA's rallies against “Globalism” are effective.

(3) How was fascism and Nazism possible in the heart of civilized Western Europe and Germany, the country of Immanuel Kant, a key philosopher of the Enlightenment? Brad De Long: People failed to respond to market forces destroying the social foundations they are based on. And neoliberals have a pretty sad history of standing up for democracy and constitutional human rights. For example, it is well-known that Milton Friedman supported Pinochet’s fascist regime in Chile in the 1970s. But Brad De Long also shows that even the libertarians Ludwig Van Mises and Friedrich Hayek supported the idea that fascism should be used to halt political movements towards social democracy. (p280) Remember that the next time Rand Paul wants to tell you something about civil liberties!

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Isolatrix

The best economic history you will read.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 25, 2022

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This erudite and masterful economic history uses a framework to document and explain what the author calls the long 20th C, a period from 1870 to 2010 which experienced extraordinary economic and material wealth for everyone (at least in the Northern Hemisphere), yet only partially delivered what should by now have been a utopia by any prior standards.

The period is chosen at its start the rate of economic growth rapidly increases, and for the first time, allows the population to escape from the Malthusian trap that was the lot of humans from prehistory, and certainly since the start of civilization. While before then the upsetting of our ape-evolved social hierarchies was the only way for individuals and groups to improve their lot by getting a larger share of resources, but by and large, elites controlled the social system in a variety of ways ensuring that most of the population remained poor and at the mercy of those elites. After 1870, the wealth rapidly improved for most of the population, although the inequality seemed to increase, except for 2 periods, most recently for the 30 years after WWII. However, since 2010, after the financial collapse of 2007, growth has returned to a slow, pre-1870 rate, and inequality has increased with a vengeance. The author uses the framework of Hayek (the market is all) and Polyani (other rights to wealth and status) is important to show how different political systems have managed their economies, with some moderate, but variable success. [ I well recall a British tv political show that at the beginning of the Thatcher era suggested that the government should stop trying to make teh population happier and focus on wealthier - a Hayekian ideal that was the start of the neoliberal in the US and Britain.] 2010 saw the end of any success of the neoliberal experiment, and populations have been turning back to authoritarian/fascist approaches, last seen between WWI and WWII, and what the socialist systems of the USSR and China evolved into.

DeLong has no answer for the why's of this history, nor any prescription to get societies moving forward toward a utopia again. [This is unlike Piketty's "Capital in the Twenty-First Century". DeLong wisely just provides a rich, beautifully written, economic history that could easily become a required reading, and rather than like many historians make historical events seem inevitable with hindsight, he acknowledges that how the twists and turns of history have resulted are not clear and that he may even be an imperfect historian as events overlap with his experiences.

For myself, I think that the struggle of individuals and groups to ascend our evolutionary-determined social pyramid explains some of why various systems resulted in wealth inequality, either stably or by revolution. Whatever the system, some will always do anything to ascend to teh top of the pyramid by whatever means they have - by force of arms, by a revolt of the masses, by wealth accumulation through commerce, and so forth.

My only niggle is that the editors missed some errors - most notable that it was Edward VIII, not VII who abdicated the British throne, and it seems that autocorrect has changed some words that I do not think teh author intended. Hopefully, a 2nd edition will fix any errors and language. But these are niggles in what is a superb book and highly recommended.

23 people found this helpful

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Len

Excellent for understanding our prosperity as compared with that of our ancestors and progeny.

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on December 5, 2022

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Mr. DeLong marks our slouch towards utopia as beginning in the year 1870 and ending in 2010. Now, what does he mean by the term “slouching towards utopia.” Well, before the year, 1870, mankind was basically, just surviving. Whatever energy that was gained through increased agricultural production was put toward the production of more babies. Beyond that point, malnutrition would set in. Babies died and women could no longer ovulate. It was a one-to-one ratio so to speak and this had been going on since the beginning of time. It was the world written about by Thomas Malthus back in 1798.
So, essentially, man’s existence had been rather miserable. And then, suddenly, in the year, 1870, production began to exceed consumption. Technology had created a situation such that humans in countries like the U.S. produced more food than needed so they could, well, just relax. They could have more babies and feed them or not.
What made this possible? Well, according to Mr. DeLong, it was the corporation, global transportation, global communications, and falling trade barriers. With the corporations came the industrial research lab. Guys and gals could devote all their time inventing. Bradford calls it the invention of invention. If you look around your room, pretty much everything you see would be the result of these research labs. Its filled with stuff our ancestors wouldn’t dream of possessing and we accumulated with a fraction of the effort required by them simply to survive, utopia if you want to think about it that way.
Of course, the corporation reproduces these inventions in mass numbers and can send them all over the world using steel shipping containers such that the movement of these products accounts for about one percent of a good’s retail value.
The slouch towards utopia since 1870 has moved in fits and starts. Utopian began with a start that introduced trade on a global scale as never seen before and instant communication through the telegraph cable. Then came World War I followed by a spurt of growth and productivity followed by the depression and then World War II.
Post-war economic growth has been tremendous bringing increased prosperity to most of the world. And then, 2010 when Barrack Obama had a choice to invest in America and bring it out of a financial crises caused by the very institutions responsible for its stability followed by the election of Donald Trump and a move backward away from increased prosperity to the opposite.
This a book to read if you want to understand our prosperity as compared with our ancestors and possibly, our progeny.

Caro

Worth reading

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on June 2, 2023

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My slight disappointment with this book is that I had expected that such a vast amount of work studying the economic history of the long 20th century would result in at least a few clues as to where we go from here. I would have welcomed more analysis of the impact of population increase and decline and also of the devastating growth of welfare dependency. Globalisation has enabled western governments to disguise increasing inequality by allowing the market to provide cheap material goods/luxuries as well as welfare to the wider populace which has fostered a something-for-nothing culture. What we used to value as a benefit (eg free health care, education) is now seen as a right. With prices rising as globalisation goes into reverse, welfare systems threatening to bankrupt many countries and demographics reducing the tax paying versus dependent population, not to mention the cost of dealing with global warming, how will governments square the circle? No idea but at least after reading this book I realise I am not alone. No-one has any idea.

Vlad Thelad

Political economy lens for a grand narrative of a long century

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on February 23, 2023

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Even though recent history has been, written, interpreted, debated and poured over in so many ways, there is always room to approach things with a twist, and in this case one with very sound underpinnings. Bradford DeLong brings forth his grand narrative of what he terms the long twentieth century. The cornerstone, the fundamental explanatory root of his overarching telling is the examination of the causes and consequences of the extraordinary economic growth, which began in 1870. The political economy lens allows the author to explore how and why, with all this wealth, humankind has not even come close to making this an utopian world. John Maynard Keynes wondered, back in 1930, if once freedom from pressing economic cares was achieved, we could live wisely, and agreeable, and well. The question remains open, and sometimes, it is hard to be optimistic.

2 people found this helpful

MR V BEEVER

How would I know?

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on December 28, 2022

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It was a Christmas present for someone. I hope he likes it as I read all the reviews etc.

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