Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century

"The two last books are not dissimilar, in a way, but also very different because the people writing them are so different. So Brad is American, he teaches at Berkeley, I’ve known him for decades. He’s incredibly knowledgeable. It’s well known that he’s been working on this book for 15-20 years. It’s a history of the last 150 years. There is lots in it that I absolutely love. It’s very American. It’s not American-focused, but it’s a book an American would write. That’s really important because America has made the world we live in. People in Europe and Britain don’t want to accept that, but that’s the reality. I mean that in every respect: culturally, economically, technologically, and so forth. The Industrial Revolution in Britain was incredibly important but since the late 19th century, everything has been dominated by America. What Brad argues is that between 1870 and 2010 we had an extraordinary period in human history in which, particularly in the Western world—but now spread globally—there were sustained high rates of growth of productivity and real incomes. There’s no doubt that these were quite broadly shared, very profound and they were cumulative. They can be seen in pretty well every aspect of our lives: life expectancies which almost tripled over this period of time, in urbanization, in universal education (which was completely unthinkable before that), in entertainment, in transport—in every way we live our daily lives. He makes the provocative remark—which I think is actually true—that if we told our great great grandparents, in 1850, that by 2010 this is how many of us would live, they would have thought, ‘This is utopia!’ Think of all the gadgets we have in our homes that we take for granted—like washing machines. Just think what that would have meant for my great-grandmother! So much leisure and such superb medical care. For example, in 1800, around 300 infants per 1000 might die before they were five. That would now be considered unthinkable, but parents lived with it. The rate now is two or three. It’s still horrific, but just think of what that change means in terms of human welfare. “If we’re in a post-growth world…a lot of things we’ve taken for granted…may no longer be relevant” So we’re Slouching Towards Utopia . Brad discusses why this happened and how it worked, as well as the huge political failures of the 20th century and the horrors of totalitarianism. We slouched towards utopia, because we made so many mistakes in so many ways. Nonetheless, life really did, in profound ways, get better. But he argues that in the last 13 years, the great productivity growth machine has stopped. It’s a very controversial view, but it seems we’re going back to the stagnant economies our great-great-grandparents—and everyone else going back for thousands of years—took for granted. That leads to two things at the end of the book. Do we recognize that we’re in utopia? No, of course we don’t. We take everything that happened for granted and we’re just miserable about what we don’t have. Secondly, do we know how to deal with our society if we don’t continue towards it, if things don’t continue to go better? How much of our society is built around the idea that we’re all going to get better off? This history raises those questions. It’s very long, but it’s beautiful stories, beautifully told, on a really important theme."

"There are two in-jokes among economic historians—one of which is, ‘when is Brad going to finish that book of his?’ But now, three decades after he first promised it, he’s actually done! Slouching Towards Utopia is a history of what DeLong calls the ‘long 20th century,’ the period from approximately 1870 to 2010. You might be able to detect a not-so-subtle reference to Eric Hobsbawm’s book, The Age of Extremes , which is subtitled ‘the short 20th century’ and covers 1914-1991. Delong decides to extend it, for the reason that instead of focusing on the cataclysm of the two world wars and the fall of the Soviet Union, he is looking at the great enrichment that occurs over this period. It’s about the transformation of first the North Sea region, then the North Atlantic, and finally parts of the rest of the world into an economic and industrial powerhouse. He points to three main factors that drive this transformation: the first wave of globalization during the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, the industrial research lab, and the modern corporation. These were the prime instigators of a new wave of innovation that economic historians call the second industrial revolution—when applied science began to accelerate technological progress and economic growth through new, innovative sectors like steel, chemicals, and electricity. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter For DeLong, this surge forward in living standards and technology was what allowed humanity to finally escape the Malthusian trap and achieve sustained economic growth. Had these factors not come into play, DeLong hypothesizes that we would today inhabit a significantly less populous world—with perhaps around 5 billion people—and have steampunk technologies, maybe 1895 vintage. It’s a book of titanic scope, covering not just the economic axis, which he emphasizes, but also the effects of the wrenching social changes of the period on North Atlantic political economy and the rise of neoliberalism. He’s tying together this great economic transformation with the dynamics of this period’s most important political movements, including the rise and fall of fascism and socialism. Particularly important to Brad is the three-sided intellectual debate between the two Austrians, Friedrich von Hayek and Karl Polanyi , and the British economist John Maynard Keynes . Hayek emphasized the importance of the market as a mechanism for coordinating economic activity; Polanyi, that markets create and sell “fictitious commodities”—land, labor, and money—that should actually be protected as rights. Keynes, who advocated state intervention in defense of the market mechanism, oversaw a “shotgun marriage” between the two that resulted in the “developmental social democracy” that prevailed in the Trente Glorieuses after World War II. Yes, absolutely. DeLong readily acknowledges the enormous forward surge in living standards that transpired over the course of his ‘long 20th century’—from a society threatened by Malthusian catastrophe to (at least in the Global North) one of affluence and abundance. “Slouching is better than standing still, let alone going backward,” after all. But escaping “the realm of necessity” isn’t the only component of the utopian vision, and many other parts have not been fulfilled. DeLong cites the collapse of the Hayek-Polanyi alliance—postwar Keynesian social democracy—and the withdrawal of the United States as guardian of representative government in the 21st century as critical ways in which the utopian project has been derailed. Economic outcomes are still mediated by the market, which is a superb coordinating device, but does little to protect property rights other than those strictly defined by the government. And large inequalities of income and wealth persist within and between countries. Our mistake was abandoning the postwar compromise of allying markets with tactical state guidance under the crises of the 1970s."

"A book that’s received a lot of coverage—including from Paul Krugman in the New York Times , who called it “magisterial”—is Slouching Towards Utopia by Brad DeLong . ‘Slouching’ is one of my favourite words, so I was happy to see it in a book title, though I don’t think it does justice to what’s been achieved in economic terms over the long 20th century he covers. It’s been more of an exciting hurdle race with frequent and sometimes catastrophic crashes. DeLong is a macroeconomist at UC Berkeley who is also very interested in history (he first came to my attention for his ‘Liveblogging’ of World War II), and this book is valuable because it’s a global history of the 20th century told by someone who understands economics. Over more than 500 pages, you’ll get historical details (eg why the Nazis were called the Nazis) but also his analysis of why, for example, China was economically behind Japan in the early 20th century or Argentina has not been able to join the ranks of the wealthiest nations. After reading this book, you’ll want to read some Hayek and Polanyi , if you haven’t already. Also in economic history highly relevant to the present is a book called Free Market: The History of an Idea by Jacob Soll , a professor of history and accounting at the University of Southern California. Here in the UK, we’ve just had a new prime minister chosen for us who believes that free markets—meaning, in the case of British Conservatives , lower taxes and less regulation—can solve everything. Unfortunately, the evidence suggests otherwise, as the sewage currently flowing into the river outside my office due to poor regulation attests. As an ideology, however, it’s an enticing one and this is a historic account that traces its allure, starting with Cicero."

"Slouching Towards Utopia is a rich, nuanced story of the interplay of politics, economics , and ideas and how they shaped progress. It is a great book to read right after The Journey of Humanity because Brad DeLong focuses on the 140 years when most of humanity’s economic growth has taken place. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Brad DeLong does not try to develop a single simple, unified theory. Instead, his account emphasizes contingency, periods of progress, periods of regress, and ways in which ideas mattered. He focuses on the battle between Friedrich Hayek’s idea of free markets and Karl Polanyi’s ideas about the need for regulation. Brad believes political leaders do matter. All these factors are important if you want to understand why some economies grew in certain decades, but not others, or why, for instance, the United States became richer than Argentina, and why inequality fell for a while and then rose for a while. It portrays progress as halting, non-linear and not necessarily destined to continue. Growth picked up after the Industrial Revolution but slowly at first—with virtually no progress in per capita incomes for most workers and losses for some. Growth and innovation picked up dramatically later in the century with larger increases in per capita income and a much wider spread of that growth. So something really has been special about the last 150 years."