Short Twentieth, Long Caveats

The subtitle of DeLong’s book is An Economic History of the Twentieth Century. In his 1995 review, one of DeLong’s major gripes with The Age of Extremes was the book’s focus on political and ideological issues over strict economic history. But Hobsbawm had prepared readers for his non-economic preoccupations in his book’s introduction:

Compared to [the economic transformation of the world], the history of the confrontation between “capitalism” and “socialism” . . . will probably seem of more limited historical interest [to future historians] — comparable, in the long run, to the sixteenth and seventeenth-century wars of religion or the Crusades. For those who lived through any part of the Short Twentieth Century [1914 to 1991] they naturally bulked large, and so they do in this book, since it is written by a twentieth-century writer for late twentieth-century readers.

To DeLong, this is a nostalgic man — “a once believing acolyte in the world religion of Communism” as he caricatured Hobsbawm — delusionally or petulantly refusing to give capitalism its due. The twentieth century, DeLong tells us in Slouching Towards Utopia, “is fundamentally economic in its significance” and elucidating this requires reframing the era as the “Long Twentieth Century,” which he periodizes as 1870 to 2010.

DeLong’s grand narrative of modern global economic history consists of three great watersheds: the Imperial-Commercial Revolution (circa 1500), the Industrial Revolution (circa 1770), and the “post-1870 innovation growth acceleration.” It is estimated that the population of the world increased over fivefold between 1870 and 2010, from 1.3 billion to 6.8 billion, while global GDP increased by a factor of forty-five. This works out to an 8.5-fold increase in global GDP per capita.

A crude inference from this exercise is that humanity was living 8.5 times better at the end of the Long Twentieth Century than at the beginning — but this conclusion requires many caveats. GDP does not count labor performed in the household or community when the end products are not sold on the market. As a result, the substitution of market goods and services for nonmarket activities — a fundamental part of economic development —registers as a pure, rather than net, increase in GDP. Furthermore, the practices and institutions for recording market activities and producing complete GDP estimates have improved over time (but are still far from perfect).

On the other hand, GDP growth can understate welfare improvement when the quality of particular types of goods and services has increased without a corresponding increase in real price. What’s more, new types of products have emerged to fulfill historically novel wants and needs. Finally, GDP per capita is an average and does not account for distributional inequalities. The gains of the Long Twentieth Century were unevenly distributed both within and between countries. DeLong implores his readers to “never forget that the riches were vastly more unequally distributed around the globe in 2010 than they were in 1870.”

“Inventing Invention”

Questions about how to define and estimate economic well-being, both today and over the longue durée, are fundamental to DeLong’s argument about the historical exceptionality of the Long Twentieth Century. He claims this era “unlocked the gate that had previously kept humanity in dire poverty.” While these questions are understandably not a major focus in a book of such broad scope aimed at a general audience, a nod to the long-standing debates about poverty measurement would have been fitting. Regardless, something clearly started or escalated in the late 1800s to produce this explosion in economic productivity. But what? DeLong provides a three-part answer: “full globalization, the industrial research laboratory, and the modern corporation.”

DeLong compellingly describes the massive migrations of people in the period from 1870 to 1914, interweaving individual stories with broad trends. He traces the deglobalization of the period Hobsbawm termed the Age of Catastrophe (1914 to 1945), the postwar reglobalization, and the hyperglobalization of the late 1900s, facilitated by the rise of the shipping container and the revolution in information technology.

While globalization remains a fairly consistent focus throughout the book, the industrial research laboratory and the modern corporation — the two institutions that DeLong credits with “inventing invention” in the North Atlantic during the early Long Twentieth Century — receive less sustained attention. Yet these two organizational forms produced the “wonders of convenience and consumption” (telephones, cameras, automobiles, etc.) that have been described by others, misleadingly in DeLong’s view, as the fruits of a second industrial revolution.

Slouching Towards Utopia has an extensive cast of characters, and DeLong gives special place to philosophically and historically minded economists. Friedrich Hayek and Karl Polanyi repeatedly appear to tell the reader “blessed be the market” and “the market is made for man,” respectively, in response to political-economic conundrums. John Maynard Keynes, however, is clearly DeLong’s model economist. But it is Deng Xiaoping whom DeLong suggests is the Long Twentieth Century’s “most consequential single figure.” Deng is certainly a reasonable selection, but a somewhat curious one given the book’s limited discussion of post-revolution China. DeLong spends a few pages on China under Mao Zedong but leaves the reader wondering what exactly happened after Deng rose to power in 1978. He offers only brief hints: Deng took China down “the capitalist road,” with critical support from Hong Kongese and Taiwanese “entrepreneurs and . . . mobilizers of finance.”

DeLong’s explicit embrace of “American exceptionalism” as a defining feature of the Long Twentieth Century may explain the lack of substantive engagement with the greatest reduction in extreme poverty in human history. However, this omission undercuts his stated aim of explaining how humanity finally overcame “Malthus’s devil” — the specter of population growth devouring any gains in resource production, trapping humanity in poverty despite technological and agricultural advances.

Slouching Toward Utopia, but Stumbling Over History

DeLong has attempted a more general history than one might expect given his book’s subtitle and thesis. Zachary Carter criticized the book’s “excessive detours into dorky cul-de-sacs,” but I find these detours endearing. Slouching Towards Utopia reads like the passion project of an autodidact who has spent their professional life trapped inside the hyperspecialized academy. Adam Tooze noted that DeLong “writes knowledgably about the second world war” — and Tooze would know. But the treatment of certain noneconomic subjects makes one wish DeLong’s editor had given him the advice Weidenfeld gave Hobsbawm’s agent in 1988. The discussion of the Korean War is a case in point.

Although Hobsbawm devoted only a sentence or two to the conflict in The Age of Extremes, DeLong felt moved to critique Hobsbawm’s take in his 1995 review. Yet in Slouching Towards Utopia, DeLong dedicates three pages to the Korean War, citing only one secondary source — Max Hastings’s 1987 book. This reliance skews his account to a particular narrative.

Historian Paul Thomas Chamberlin has written that there are “two basic historical interpretations of the war . . . both [of which] have some validity.” One frames the war as an international conflict that began when North Korean forces crossed the 38th parallel into South Korea in June 1950 and ended with an armistice in July 1953. It was a war between two states started by the North’s aggression; the United Nations, led by the United States, intervened accordingly.

The other interpretation views the period from 1950 to 1953 as the most intense phase of what was fundamentally a civil war that began in the 1930s with Korean resistance to Japanese colonialism in Manchuria and Korea. By June 1950, this civil war between Korean Communists (who had dominated the guerrilla resistance to Japan) and anti-communist Korean nationalists (many of whom had collaborated with Japan) had already claimed one hundred thousand Korean lives south of the 38th parallel, a demarcation neither side recognized as a legitimate.

DeLong entirely omits any mention of pre-1950 conflict, a glaring oversight given the space he allocates to the war. He also suggests that between 1950 and 1953 “perhaps 400,000 South Koreans were abducted from their homes and taken to North Korea,” but provides no specific citation for this figure (a 2011 article in the New York Times puts the number of alleged abductees in the tens, not hundreds, of thousands).

Brad DeLong vs. Himself

Few, if any, readers are likely turning to DeLong specifically for his commentary on the Korean War, but his treatment of the subject reveals an uncritical analysis of US hegemony, at least prior to the George W. Bush administration. That said, when it comes to economics, DeLong is laudably candid about how his own thinking evolved over the course of writing Slouching Towards Utopia: “When I first started writing this book, I felt . . . that 1929–1933 was a uniquely vulnerable time. . . . But in 2008, we skated to the edge of another Great Depression.” Was the Financial Crisis an intellectual turning point for DeLong? Here, in the chapter on the Great Depression, he suggests it revealed to him the inherent instability of capitalism.

Later on, however, DeLong contrasts himself with his fellow economic historian Adam Tooze: “[T]he calamity of post-2008 was [for Tooze] a result of deep structural currents . . . where Tooze sees tides and structures, I see contingency and bad luck.” By “contingency,” DeLong means the failures of politicians and technocrats in the lead-up to and aftermath of the Financial Crisis (not Bill Clinton and company, though). But, in a surprising twist, DeLong ultimately bets against his own emphasis on contingency.

In the book’s penultimate chapter, he concludes that future historians will likely attribute the end of the Long (American) Twentieth Century to structural factors, despite his own emphasis on what he sees as the avoidable blunders of American leadership. Finally, he concludes the book identifying Donald Trump’s 2016 victory and the administration’s handling of the pandemic as the final nails in the Century’s coffin. It is all rather confusing.

The project that would become Slouching Towards Utopia was apparently in the works for at least fifteen years. In a 2002 essay, Perry Anderson analogized The Age of Extremes to “a palace whose architect altered his plans while building it, leaving structural inconsistencies that make it stranger . . . than it appears at first sight.” Perhaps the same can be said of DeLong’s book.

Hobsbawm was writing The Age of Extremes during and in the immediate aftermath of the unraveling of the Soviet Union, and his analysis was indeed a little gloomy at the “End of History.” Francis Fukuyama’s famous 1989 essay shares some of Hobsbawm’s somber tone — to an extent often not remembered — whereas DeLong was unabashedly triumphalist in his 1995 review:

Good news on the environment, on the danger of nuclear war, on Asian and Latin American (albeit not African) development, on the spread of democracy, and on the end of tyrannies have been the major developments of the past decade. If you were optimist about the human future before the mid-1980s, you should be ecstatic today.

By the end of his book, however, DeLong is uncertain of whether or not humanity is still slouching towards utopia. But it is unclear if he is able to countenance a path not blazed by a globally hegemonic US, and his theory of the latter’s decline is rather muddled.

DeLong is nonetheless correct that grand narratives help us think, and his is no exception. Those of us inclined to roll our eyes at the Whiggish narratives favored by most economists must reckon with the real abundance produced by capitalism’s rapacious expansion. Having followed his Grasping Reality newsletter for a few years, I suspect present-day DeLong has a deeper appreciation of competing narratives than the DeLong of 1995 who dismissed The Age of Extremes as “an index of the impact decades of doublethink can leave on a good mind.”

Hobsbawm concluded his history of the twentieth century by identifying the two fundamental problems of development as demographic and ecological crises. Neither feature in DeLong’s grand narrative. In 2024, Hobsbawm’s gloominess feels less like “planet Hobsbawm” than 1995 DeLong’s optimism feels like “planet DeLong.”