Aaron Arnold's Reviews > Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century

I’m sure you’ve seen those charts of historical world GDP per capita: almost perfectly flat for 99% of human history since the dawn of time, rising gradually only in the 19th century, and finally turning nearly vertical by the present day. That line represents humanity’s gradual escape from the grinding poverty of our prehistoric past into a world of, if not plenty, at least some, and if not for everyone, at least more and more, and explaining its shape - not just how but why it went from flat to exponential, changing the story of our species from questions of bare subsistence and survival to wealth and abundance - is one of the central questions of both economic history as well as any progressive politics of the future. Now, to fully describe the economic history of the entire planet over even a single year is an impossible task, let alone the “long 20th century” of 1870 to 2010, but if any mortal could even dream of such an Olympian feat, it’s DeLong. This stretch of time, from 1870 - when globalization, the industrial research lab, and the modern corporation appeared - to 2010 - the trough of the Great Recession - is populated with many disputatious characters and diverging trends, but DeLong sees the overarching narrative as a conflict between Friedrich Hayek’s market capitalism and Karl Polanyi’s social justice, refereed by John Maynard Keynes’s mixed economy, reaching an apex in the postwar mixed economies and shambling to a nadir after the Great Financial Crisis. And yet even that nadir represents a fantastic triumph of human achievement, vast numbers of people lifted out of poverty and even into luxury, and we can be confident that the story’s not over yet, even if we never reach the promised land. I’ve been reading DeLong’s econ blog for nearly 20 years, enjoying all the preview snippets of this magnum opus he would from time to time, and it was well worth the wait.