Middle-aged men buy two-seaters or perhaps a boat. Middle-aged economic historians write sweeping historical narratives. Avner Greif wrote Institutions and the Path to the Modern Economy at 51; Greg Clark wrote A Farewell to Alms at 52; and Deirdre McCloskey wrote The Bourgeois Virtues at 63 to name just a few. Now we have J. Bradford DeLong, at age 62, with his entry into this illustrious series, offering a dazzling global history of the “long” twentieth century, starting in 1870 and ending in 2010.
Now, in broad outline, what has happened economically speaking since roughly the start of the Second Industrial Revolution should be well known to every card-carrying economic historian. What distinguishes this book from other more run-of-the-mill histories of this period is its glistening prose. I never thought you could write such a ravishing description of the technical process of turning sand into silicon chips (pp. 470–71). Honestly, I never would have thought to write such a description in a book like this. In any case, I am thankful those pages were not cut by an overly aggressive editor. Besides these lovely vignettes, the cadence and rhythm of the prose make nearly 600 pages fly by and make it easy to understand how the book has already found a wide audience.
The book also distinguishes itself with its sheer number of idiosyncratic insights and novel claims, some of which are absolutely spot on. For example, my undergrads never seem persuaded when I tell them not to worry about steady 2 or 3 percent inflation. DeLong explains why my explanation always fails (beyond my meager teaching abilities) by observing how “inflation—even moderate inflation strips the mask [that there is some rational basis for a person’s prosperity].” Rather, as Keynes said, inflation causes “the process of wealth-getting to [degenerate] into a gamble and a lottery.” I also agree with DeLong’s complaint that economic historians have not cared enough about India’s failure to develop economically under the British Raj, even though it had all the Smithian conditions for “opulence” of “peace, easy taxes, and tolerable administration of justice” in place. Finally, DeLong’s taxonomy of recessions into monetarist, Keynesian, and Minskyite episodes clarified for me what differentiated the elevated levels of unemployment in the Great Depression from the 1980s and from the Great Recession.
Now I did not find all of these novel claims compelling. For example, DeLong stresses (repeatedly) the importance of the creation of the corporate research lab for the Second Industrial Revolution. As evidence, DeLong offers the example of Nikola Tesla. Yes, Tesla did work in a number of corporate labs designing the induction motor and arc lighting among other things. But if the value of the corporate research lab was to organize, direct, and rationalize R&D, Tesla seems like a less than ideal illustration. He quit after only six months of working for Edison’s lab. He and Edison famously argued over the practicality of alternating versus direct current. In the long run, the inventions Tesla came up with while working in corporate labs did triumph, but it is hard to see how the existence of that institution was necessary or sufficient for the (eventual) success of Tesla the inventor and entrepreneur.
Probably the best insight is DeLong’s apt description of the mixed economy that prevailed during the “30 Glorious Years” of postwar Western economic history as a “shotgun marriage between Friedrich Hayek and Karl Polyani, blessed by John Maynard Keynes.” Keynes and Hayek and what each stood for will be familiar to economists and economic historians, Polyani less so. For DeLong, this is unfortunate since Polyani was the original theorist of “political backlash.” In his book The Great Transformation, Polyani identified the ways in which people from the Luddites of the nineteenth century to the coal miners for Trump of today have pushed back against the all-powerful market and asserted their rights beyond a threadbare right to property.
Just before starting this book, I read Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson’s forthcoming book Power and Progress and some of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. These two books and DeLongs’s—all written within the last five years by liberal economists—form something of a triptych. Each in their own way echoes Polyani and all express a profound disillusionment with where twenty-first century Western economies and societies have ended up. The irony that this disillusionment comes from a deputy assistant Treasury secretary in the Clinton Administration, during which the “neoliberal turn” reached its apotheosis, is not lost on DeLong. But this disenchantment with the market on the part of today’s economic winners and elites, including professors at elite universities who write big books about economic history, would have shocked Polyani.
The most interesting commonality between the three books is a certain amount of intellectual exhaustion. All Acemoglu and Johnson can offer as a response to rising inequality is a call to rebuild the “little platoons” of civil society and some half-baked policy ideas such as “government leadership to redirect technological change.” Piketty, at least, understands that we need something big to address historically high levels of inequality. I am just not sure anyone would be too keen on his “solution” of a major world war. DeLong offers only an acknowledgment of the fact that, in the words of my college roommate, “Those days are gone. They are not coming back.” This is a hard truth, but one we have to accept because, in the words of DeLong’s elegant coda, “a new story, which needs a new grand narrative that we do not yet know, has begun.”
