Brad DeLong on Slouching Toward Utopia

Brad DeLong on Slouching Toward Utopia

Matthew Yglesias — Read time: 16 minutes

Brad DeLong on Slouching Toward Utopia

Back on October 13 we hosted Berkeley University economist (and veteran blogger) Brad DeLong for a Slow Boring Book Club event about his magisterial new book Slouching Toward Utopia: An Economic History of the 20th Century.

The audio of the first half of that event — my conversation with Brad — is available here for your listening pleasure. The audio and transcript for the audience Q&A will be available next week.

We’re sharing the audio, but the transcript below is reserved for subscribers, as is participation in future book club events. So if you’re interested, I would urge you to subscribe — our price of $8/month or $80/year is unchanged since we launched nearly two years ago, which means that in inflation-adjusted terms it’s become quite a bit cheaper!

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On to the transcript!

Matthew Yglesias Thanks, everybody, for coming. I apologize for a little bit of trouble getting started, but we are really excited to be here with the second Slow Boring Book Club with Professor BDL, talking about his fantastic book, Slouching Toward Utopia: An Economic History of the 20th Century. We're going to chat amongst ourselves for a little bit and then go to questions from the audience. If you want to use the Q&A function here in the chat, that will be great, and I will read some questions for everyone. So first step, Brad, thanks for being here with us. 

BDL No, it's my great pleasure to be here. I'm enthusiastic and I'm wonderfully pleased that you invited me because after all, my job this month is to try to sell books. 

MY  So a key idea of this book is the long 20th century, and that involves kind of an unusual periodization. I think I'm sort of used to political histories in which people treat World War I, you know, in 1914 as a breakpoint, either as the end of something or the beginning of something, but you put that at 1870. So why 1870?

BDL Well, first because of the numbers, and second, because of the attitudes. I've just put that behind me — and it may well be too small for people who haven't put me big on their screens — Jon Stuart Mill's quote from 1871 about “how it is questionable of all the mechanical inventions yet made”  — and he's talking about the early 1870s now —  “have yet lighten the day's toll of any human being.”

You know, “they have just enabled a greater population to live the same life of drudgery and imprisonment”. You know that back before 1870, there was simply no prospect that humanity could bake a sufficiently large economic pie so that there was the potential for everybody to have enough. And so as a result, you know, if some people had enough, it was only because they were part of a group of thugs with spears, with surrounding elite enablers who grabbed from everybody else. After 1870, humanity's productivity doubled every generation, and the possibility of making enough for everyone comes into view. 

MY So I think this “thugs with spears” point is really interesting because so much of history as it's conventionally written, essentially is the history of the thugs with spears. 

BDL Well, their tame accountants, bureaucrats, and propagandists. 

MY Right. Well, exactly. So from their point of view, it feels like there is this tremendous progress over the years. Right. That if you are at the top of the social pyramid, if you are confiscating the surplus, then, you know, by 1600, there's a lot more technology than the Roman emperors had. You are a much grander emperor than your predecessors in the empire-building process. And so why is it that that doesn't trickle down to the common person? 

BDL I mean, maybe the very short answer is patriarchy. That, you know, if you're female before 1900 and if you're lucky enough to survive until the age of 50, if you don't have a surviving son to advocate for you, you're close to being socially powerless, close to being socially dead by then. And given that about one-third of women would not have surviving sons back before 1870, what that means is that if you had extra resources, you know, you'd be pretty, pretty focused on saying, “how can I raise the chances of having a surviving son?” And you know, in a world in which the average woman has two children survive to reproduce, you may be three reaching the cusp of adulthood, which kind of means four or four and a half reaching the age of five, which means seven, seven and a half live births, which means nine pregnancies, which means once you're talking about feeding the growing baby and then breastfeeding, you're talking about 20 years eating for two. Under that environment, practically any increases in technology — and there'll be a bunch — are pretty soon going to lead to significant increases in population in big increases in population as well. And so technology advances, but average farm size diminishes. And there's this dynamic that keeps the average real wage of non-upper class people in Britain pretty constant from the year 1000 all the way up to 1850, as best we can tell. And there's no reason to think that Britain is at all exceptional here. 

MY And so we see that, you know, sort of where land is more productive. Instead of people being wealthier, they just end up with smaller farms. Right. So you have more people, for example, in the rice paddy sort of areas that then offer them a steppe. 

BDL And the rice paddy areas are dynamic, right? They have a little teeny thing on this slide, which is actually a picture of the Philippines where they've taken a very steep hill and they've turned every single inch of it into a flat terraced rice paddy. They're only about eight feet wide, the individual pieces of paddy, but it's there everywhere. 

MY And the original sort of set of economists, the classical economists this is what they sort of all thought, right? That you were in this world of diminishing returns and you would bring into cultivation worse and worse land, the population would grow. And you. I mean, it's interesting compared to what we think of sort of market economics today, there was this incredible pessimism among the kind of founders of the discipline. 

BDL Which lasts remarkably long, right? Even in 1919, John Maynard Keynes is writing about how even though humanity had changed the Malthusian devil in 1870, perhaps World War One, and a failure to successfully manage the postwar right, the postwar rebuilding would loose the Malthusian devil yet again. 

MY And so but what is it that that changes in 1870 that sort of causes this upward inflection point? 

BDL Well, you know, there have been lots of institutions dropping into place, you know, to encourage societies that spent more time focusing on building and developing technology and also then on deploying that technology into the economy. But around 1870, the last three institutions we seem to need, they all drop into place more or less all at once. I mean, we get the build-out of the railroad and the telegraph, including the undersea telegraph, which is really important. We get the coming of full globalization with the iron-holed, oceangoing steamship that all of a sudden makes Hamburg much, much closer to Chicago in terms of getting food there. Then Hamburg is close to the Prussian farms of the East German military aristocrats of the Prussian state.

We also get the coming of the industrial research lab, which rationalized and routinized the discovery and development of modern technologies, and means that someone like Nikola Tesla can be an enormous genius who moves a 10th of the economy forward by a decade, by knowing how to make electrons get up and dance in the way nobody else does. And then his crazy ideas can be handed off to others who can say which ones make sense and which ones don't. That rationalizing and routinizing, discovery and development. And then the corporations, the Westinghouse Corporation that rationalizes and routinized development and deployment, you know, all of a sudden the pace at which human technology grows more than quadruples across a small span of years, around 1870, and more than quadruples from a level that was already three times as high in the years before 1870 as it had been in the years since 1500. And post 1500 it’s three times as high as it was back in the Middle Ages. So there's no comparison between how fast technology is developing after 1870 and before. 

MY But I mean, I guess, you know, not to spoil the premise of the book, but part of what you're saying there is that there is this kind of longer back story of acceleration. It's just that it's only in the late 19th century that it reaches a pace that's high enough to produce this rapid per capita growth.  

BDL Only after 1870 that technology can outrun fertility and before 1870, it's very easy for fertility to keep up with technology. You know that population growth rates of maybe 10% percent per century on average before 1500. You know, maybe you have a near doubling of the world population in the century before 1870. But those are things that the Malthusian world produces. You know, population growth is a lot faster just before 1870 than it was before 1500. But in either case, it's enough to keep humanity in the same life of drudgery and imprisonment. 

After 1870, you know, technology leaps ahead. People grow richer. Infant mortality falls. Patriarchy begins to drop away. And all of a sudden, women start saying, “I really don't want to spend 20 years pregnant.” And then, yes, we have a population explosion, but you can see the curve of the demographic transition coming. And so the possibility of having enough for everyone comes into view because population growth isn't going to eat up all the possibilities. 

MY But so, that's what I was going to ask — does the rising per capita living standards precede the demographic transition, or is it caused by the demographic transition? 

BDL I would say it's both. I would say you have to have a big leap ahead in technology to get you rich enough, you know, so that your children's immune systems aren't compromised, so that they aren’t regularly taken down by the common cold, and so that women are sufficiently well nourished that ovulation is no longer a hit or miss matter. And once you do that, once you get some assurance that the children you have are probably going to live, that you won't watch half your babies die between zero and five, you know, once you're rich enough that you'll get well enough nourished and get good enough public health, if that's the case, then the fertility transition begins, the big drop in fertility begins. And once that happens, that then reinforces how much of technology can then be used to boost living standards, as opposed to going to simply figuring out how to feed more mouths. 

MY So then the other thing that that happens during this era is this kind of modern economic growth process starts out really in Great Britain, but then it spreads to progressively wider and wider circles of humanity.. 

BDL Yes. And it remarkably leaves Great Britain remarkably soon. You know, the fact that Great Britain passes the baton more or less immediately after 1807. That the largest electrical equipment manufacturing firm in Britain in 1913 is the British subsidiary of the German Siemens, that it's the United States and Germany. And then after the United States and Germany, the next one to come up with is really Japan, you know, start surpassing Britain remarkably quickly in the half-century after 1870. So it's not so much that…Britain leads up and needs through the classic industrial revolution to the formation of steam power societies. But then after that, things are passed quickly off to otherwise to the North Atlantic in general. 

MY And it's a sort of tremendous expansion. But then that leads to some of the big picture ideological and geopolitical conflicts that the 20th century is famous for stem in part, right, from the fact that the powers can harness all of this technology to fight each other. And also more than one country has it. 

BDL Yes. And they also feel, you know, a need to fight each other, right? You know, before 1870, your life was probably very much like your grandparents. Now, you know, I mean, you come from a rather literary family, and yet your workday doesn't bear any resemblance to what your more literary grandparents did. 

Scratching with pens and typing on typewriters and messing with carbon paper and going to libraries and begging publishers for hardcover copies of things, mailing things.

MY Well, you know, I mean, it was a better world. I was looking through some of my grandfather's old papers, and I saw the per-word rate that magazines paid in the 1970s. There was an incredible scarcity of like, could you get published? But if you could clear that bar, you were on easy street and now we're in hyper-competition. But no, I mean, yes, I mean, that's right. I mean, not unlike an old guild, the Yglesiases are all working in the same field, but our tools are completely different. I mean, nothing that I use or do — you would need weeks to explain to my grandparents what's a Substack, what's a podcast? It doesn't mean anything. 

BDL And yet after 1870, every 30 years, humanity's technological competence doubles, which produces enormous wealth. But, you know, it's Schumpeterian. It's Schumpeterian creative destruction. You produce enormous wealth, but you also obsolete and destroy entire sectors, industries, occupations, livelihoods, communities. You know, and as a result, people are greatly pissed and the greatly pissed people seek something to deal with the problems they see. While meantime, those at the top of society are frantically trying to figure out how to rewrite, how to frantically rewrite the sociological, economic, political software code of society running on top of the rapidly changing forces of production hardware so that the thing does not crash catastrophically.

And, you know, sometimes it does crash catastrophically, that Andrew Carnegie's belief that he should push for social Darwinism to get people to accept that even though the law of market competition was cruel, it was nevertheless progressive for the race then gets tied up with the idea of Prussian aristocrats that they need to demonstrate that they do have a social role by leading Germany to acquire more resources via war. And so the poisonous cocktail of an aristocracy that needs a place plus a social Darwinist view that if we're going to fight in the marketplace for money, well, then we might as well have nations fight with real weapons for power and possessions. You know, the economic Eldorado that Keynes saw as having begun in 1870 all comes crashing down in 1914 simply because humanity cannot rewrite its socioeconomic software code fast enough and well enough to avoid catastrophic crashes. And we get these not like clockwork, but there's always the possibility of these things after 1870 if only because whatever rough equilibrium balance of forces you had reached a generation ago, it won't work now. And you need to find a new one. 

MY And there's a rising expectation. I mean, once you're several generations into a growth period, I mean, people now experience a slowdown or recession as a catastrophe. I mean, everyone was very upset in 2011 that we were going backward rather than forwards.

BDL Yes, yes, yes. We're only as rich as we were in 2005 now in 2011, how absolutely truly horrible. 

MY But I mean, it was right. I mean, it's a political upheaval. And once you have a world in which most people are above subsistence level, you get these distributional questions that were sort of moot in a world where most people are at the bare margin of survival. Now, you know, you've got more than enough to stay alive. I've got more than enough to stay alive, but different people still have very different amounts of resources. and we can argue about it. 

BDL You do have distributional questions, but they're on the line of how “do me and my family run away fast enough so that my daughter doesn't get made a sex slave by Achilles and I get killed,” you know. And there's not much that can help this. Right. But even if you are a priest of Apollo and even if Apollo answers your prayers and is willing to send the arrows of plague down on the entire Greek army, all that can do is rescue one young girl from a life of sexual slavery to Agamemnon, who promptly wants to replace his sex slave with someone else. And so you got the plot of the Iliad. And, you know, the thugs with spears and their tame accountants, propagandists, and bureaucrats, you know, the tone of the Iliad is not the tone we modern woke people would say of “isn't this an absolutely horrible thing happening, that women are this complete chattel and that the only people who have serious agency here are the most skilled of those who are good at gutting someone else with a spear?” And yet lots of people who did not spend all their time on that battlefield would drink from and have on their table, you know, pots and vessels like the one from which this picture is taken. The one of the armies of Achilles. 

MY And so, you know, even well into the period that you're talking about, I mean, we say 1870, but even a hundred years later, by 1970, really large swaths of the world have still not seen living standards increase, right? I mean, you talk about that spread of modernity to Germany, to the United States. But to China, to India, where, you know, billions of people live, that's even more recent. 

BDL We don't really know very much about what living standards really were like in China at the end of the Cultural Revolution. But they were really, really not high at all. At the moment, we can say that there are only 500 million of our 8 billion who still the same pre-industrial ancestors’ standard of living. And they have major advantages. They have access to the village smartphone in some way or another. And they also have, you know, they also have modern public health so that their life expectancy at birth is 60 or more and not 30.

And those are enormous benefits. But, you know, there still are 500 million people who are likely to spend several hours a day thinking about how hungry they are and how nice it would be to have more calories. That's not just something that happens to them when they're on a Global North, largely unsuccessful diet binge. And they really are genuinely uncertain about where their 2,000 calories a day are going to come from next year or maybe next month. And, you know, right now we are facing the prospect of famine in Nigeria, in Egypt, with some probability in the forthcoming year. Our failure to distribute internationally and globally has been an enormous scandal and a tragedy and an atrocity and continues to be so. 

MY  And lies behind — you know, I mean, we've seen, I think, so many developed countries really unsettled by immigration-type questions in their domestic politics in recent years. But so much of this I mean, seems to me to just flow pretty straightforwardly from the, you know, incredible inequality in life prospects facing you based on where it is you live in the world. I mean, this story of technological transformation is so profound. But the fact that, you know, a person living in Nigeria has probably not benefited, or at least could benefit so much more.

BDL So much more could benefit so much more. Right now, I would say we are only we are down to only one in 16 having not significantly benefited except that their life expectancy has doubled and they have potential, sadly, some access to the village smartphone. 

MY Not nothing. 

BDL Although, you know, if one were to be a sociologist, one would say that there's a difference between a peasant knowing that almost everyone else is a peasant, and being one of the people who really does seem to be, compared to how most other people in the world are living, you really do seem to be the child chained to the dungeon in Omelas, right? 

MY I mean, I guess there's all these, you know, legitimating myths around, you know, traditional kings and things like that. And, you know, everyone is a peasant. And it's our lot in the world. Whereas today we have this very different global economy and we have these different ideologies, right? And people are left out.

I'm going to start turning to some questions.