The Shape of Twentieth Century History

1
The Shape of Twentieth Century History

• Bradford DeLong
• U.C. Berkeley

2
Time for a Grand Narrative

• Not for a story with a guaranteed ending
• But for a narrative thread of a process
• What are our choices for the shape of
  twentieth-century history?
• The triumph of democracy?
• The progress of science?

3
Why Not the Alternatives?

• The triumph of democracy
• A near-run victory over great tyrannies
• But where did these tyrannies come from?
• Have to go into the economics to see their
  sources
• The progress of science
• But how does science affect how people live?

4
My Preference Slouching Towards Utopia

• William Butler Yeats
• Slouching
• Tyrannies
• Maldistribution and misgovernance
• Towards Utopia
• Cornucopia
• The possibility of a human world
• But will we get where we want to go?

5
Cornucopia

• Measuring economic development
• Standards of living or technological
  capabilities?
• The glacial pace of pre-industrial development
• The slow pace of development during the
  industrial revolution
• Since 1900--or maybe 1870--things are different
• The pace and extent of economic growth

6
How to Measure Modern Economic Growth?

• Kuznetss project
• Kuznetss answer a factor of ten in the
  twentieth century
• But is this sufficient?
• New goods and new kinds of goods
• New capabilities and new needs
• Does this generate Utopia?
• Seeing em jump (Krugman) needs triumph
  (Easterlin)
• Trustees of the possibility of civilization
  (Keynes)

7
Tyrannies

• Joining the thirty-million club
• Where did Stalin and Mao come from?
• Marx and the hungry fourties (Boyer)
• Relative and absolute immiserization
• The revolution, the market, and the command
  society
• Where did Hitler come from?
• Malthus and Darwin

8
Uneven Development

• Growing international inequality
• Before 1950 (Lewis, Easterlin, Clark)
• Since 1950, however, the trends continue
• Understanding international inequality
• Communism
• Vicious circles
• Mixed economies and developmental states
• Third-world social democracy and the neoliberal
  bet

9
Economic Policies and Policymaking

• The domestic side
• High and persistent unemployment
• Central bank independence and the conquest? of
  inflation
• The commanding heights
• The international side
• Managing international capital flows
• Dealing with financial crises

10
Conclusion Slouching Towards Utopia

• Twentieth-century processes continue
• The escalator to modernity, or continued
  divergence?
• The cretinism of parliaments, or the neoliberal
  order?
• Remembering history, or repeating it?
• But underneath, the dynamic growth of wealth
• The possibility of--for the first time--a truly
  human world