Slouching Towards Utopia is the new book from Brad DeLong, Professor of Economics at University of California, Berkeley. Professor DeLong joins show host Gene Tunny to discuss the long twentieth century from 1870 to 2010. The conversation considers the three factors which came together to massively raise living standards post-1870, and how nonetheless we’ve struggled to achieve the Utopia that once appeared possible. The “neoliberal turn” beginning in the 1970s and 1980s is considered, and DeLong explains why he writes that “Hayek and his followers were not only Dr. Jekyll–side geniuses but also Mr. Hyde–side idiots.”
You can buy Slouching Towards Utopia via this link and help support the show:
Please get in touch with any questions, comments and suggestions by emailing us at contact@economicsexplored.com or sending a voice message via https://www.speakpipe.com/economicsexplored.
Highlights
- The big story after 1870: technological progress becomes rapid, the technological competence of the human race globally doubles every generation. [6:50]
- The importance of industrial research labs in the big story since 1870 [16:35]
- The role of the modern corporation [18:23]
- Globalization in the late nineteenth century and pre WWI [23:25]
- How bad governance can make a country very poor very quickly [29:09]
- The neoliberal turn [35:56]
- Prof. DeLong thinks the big lesson of history is that trying to maintain social and economic systems past their sell-by date doesn’t work [58:28]
You can listen to the episode via the embedded player below or via podcasting apps including Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher.
About this episode’s guest: Brad DeLong
Brad DeLong is a professor of economics at U.C. Berkeley, a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a weblogger at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth, and a fellow of the Institute for New Economic Thinking. He received his B.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1982 and 1987. He joined UC Berkeley as an associate professor in 1993 and became a full professor in 1997.
Professor DeLong also served in the U.S. government as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy from 1993 to 1995. He worked on the Clinton Administration’s 1993 budget, on the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, on the North American Free Trade Agreement, on macroeconomic policy, and on the unsuccessful health care reform effort.
Before joining the Treasury Department, Professor DeLong was Danziger Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at Harvard University. He has also been a John M. Olin Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, an Assistant Professor of Economics at Boston University, and a Lecturer in the Department of Economics at M.I.T.
Links relevant to the conversation
Brad DeLong’s substack:
https://braddelong.substack.com/
DeLong on Hobsbawm’s short 20th century (1914 to 1989) compared with his long 20th century:
https://www.bradford-delong.com/2016/12/the-short-vs-the-long-twentieth-century.html
Re. Yegor Gaidar’s analysis of the collapse of the Soviet Union:
https://sites.dartmouth.edu/asamwick/2007/06/08/the-soviet-collapse-grain-and-oil/
Lant Pritchett’s book Let Their People Come: Breaking the Gridlock on Global Labor Mobility:
https://www.cgdev.org/sites/default/files/9781933286105-Pritchett-let-their-people-come.pdf
Transcript: Slouching Towards Utopia w/ Brad DeLong – EP163
N.B. This is a lightly edited version of a transcript originally created using the AI application otter.ai. It may not be 100 percent accurate, but should be pretty close. If you’d like to quote from it, please check the quoted segment in the recording.
Gene Tunny 00:00
Coming up on Economics Explored.
Brad DeLong 00:02
2008 you seemed to see the engine of technological progress itself drop into a lower gear slow down by half or more. Starting in 2012-2013, we see the rise of anti democratic movements all over the world.
Gene Tunny 00:23
Welcome to the Economics Explored podcast, a frank and fearless exploration of important economic issues. I’m your host Gene Tunny. I’m a professional economist based in Brisbane, Australia, and I’m a former Australian Treasury official. This is Episode 163, on Slouching Towards Utopia, the new book from the renowned US economist, Brad DeLong. He joins me this episode. Brad DeLong, is professor of economics at the University of California Berkeley. From 1993 to 95. He was deputy assistant secretary of the US Treasury for economic policy, and slashing towards utopia. Professor DeLonge explores why, despite the incredible increase in our productivity since 1870, we have failed to achieve a utopia. DeLong argues that what he calls the long 20th century began in 1870 mended by 2010, after which a productivity slowdown and stagnant wages have contributed to political discontent around the world. Please check out the show notes, relevant links and details of how you can get in touch with any comments or suggestions. I’d love to hear from you. If you’d like to buy Professor Long’s book, very grateful if you could do so via the Amazon page link in the show notes. By doing so you’ll help support the show. Right oh, now it’s my conversation with Professor Brad DeLong on Slouching Towards Utopia. Thanks to Nicholas Gruen for connecting us and to my audio engineer Josh Crotts for his assistance in producing this episode. I hope you enjoy it. Professor Brad DeLong thanks for appearing on the programme.
Brad DeLong 02:02
It’s wonderful for me to be here. Right. Might help me sell some books. Excellent. Something I’m very, very interested in right now.
Gene Tunny 02:09
Excellent. Yes, yes. I hope to help you do that. And hopefully if people in the audience if they enjoy the conversation, and I’m sure they will, I’ll put a link in the show notes for sure for to your book. So I’ve been I’ve been reading your book and enjoying it.
Brad DeLong 02:20
Thank you very much.
Gene Tunny 02:23
Yes, I’m the Kindle. Nicholas Gruen put me on to it. So Nick’s a big fan, too.
Brad DeLong 02:33
Yes. Yeah. So I’m very grateful to him for spreading the word.
Gene Tunny 02:37
Yes, yes. And it’s Slouching Towards Utopia in economic history of the 20th century. Brad, I’d like to kick off by asking, What motivated you to write the book? And what message are you trying to convey with the title, please?
Brad DeLong 02:53
Well, I suppose I started. I guess it really was reading Eric Hobsbawm’s, Age of Extremes, you know, back in 1994. And thinking that the story he was telling wasn’t the big story, that what he was telling was only a relatively small part of the big story. And that someone should write a book that told the other big story of history after 1870. And so I grossed about that for a couple of years. And in 1998, I thought, since no one else was writing it, maybe I should write the big story. And so I wrote a chapter to kind of put a stake in the ground and started showing it around, but you didn’t do anything else. And then maybe a decade, a decade and a half later, an editor from basic Tim Sullivan came around and said, You know, someone should write this, that someone should be you, you’re clearly not, why don’t we put you under contract. So I can call you once a year and yell at you about where the manuscript is. Um, and, you know, he did that. And to get into that once a year, that was a call and so forth. And then eventually, I just kind of buckled down and wrote the thing. Then, after writing the first draft, I had to take the chainsaw to it, because it was twice as big as the book that was published. And then after that, we had to polish it, and was out there in the world, you know, spiffy and polished and shrunken down considerably from the project I originally attempted. But it’s out there in the world. And I’m, I actually like it a lot, which I didn’t expect to at this point. At this point. I expected to be sick of it and thinking there was a lot wrong with it, then I find but I’m not thinking that way.
Gene Tunny 04:45
Okay. Yes. Well, that’s good. I mean, I think it’s, I think it’s terrific. And, I mean, it’s still a big book, it’s still 600 pages or so. So it’s still very, very meaty. I was impressed by all of the examples. In history, I didn’t know things that I found fascinating. So thank you. Yes. One thing I didn’t appreciate until I read your book. And maybe I’ve just missed this in other places, but the role of the Saudis in ending the Soviet Union, I didn’t appreciate how much when they increased oil output in the 80s. I think that’s the story, isn’t it? That meant the Russians or the Soviets weren’t earning as much income from their own production and that effect. Yeah. Yeah. I thought that was.
Brad DeLong 05:32
This was this was what the late Yegor Gaidar always insisted on, you know, that as long as the Soviet Union could trade oil for grain, the fact that the system was so sclerotic, they were unable to figure out a way to grow more grain at all was, you know, a problem, but not a crisis. But then the price of oil falls by two thirds and 1986, you know, as the Saudis react to with current, what’s currently going on in the Iran, Iraq War, and other things, and all of a sudden, the Soviet Union has to start borrowing if it wants to import its grain, and it starts borrowing from banks. And then the banks begin to say no. And then it goes and starts borrowing, starts asking for loan guarantees from Western governments. And then the demands come for well, we’ll guarantee these loans, but we want you to kind of be cooperative and open with respect to politics and democracy and things. And then the whole system simply collapses. It’s really quite an interesting story. Yegor Gaidar, Gaidar has a short speech he gave, I think, at the American Enterprise Institute called something like grain and oil. It’s very much worth reading,
Gene Tunny 06:50
RIght. Okay. Well, that’s good. I’ll see if I can track it down and put a link in the show notes. I mean, that’s one of many examples of, of good stories in the book, I look, I’d like to go back to what you mentioned about Eric Hobsbawm, who’s a Marxist historian, if I remember correctly, and you’re saying that you think he got the he missed the big story of what happened after 1870? Could you please explain what was he saying? And how is what you’re saying? What what do you think the big story is, please,
Brad DeLong 07:19
Eric’s big story is that you know once upon a time, there was Vladimir Lenin, there was the Bolshevik Revolution. And it created world communism, which was the world’s only hope for utopia. And in the end, world communism was betrayed by exterior enemies outside it, and by interior enemies inside of it, and it expired. But before it expired, I managed to defeat the worst tyranny in human history, the Nazis, because without the Soviet Union, the Nazis would probably still be ruling Europe. And when it expired, that brought the end of human hopes for a really good society. And, you know, from my perspective, this is a story. It’s kind of the story of the Soviet Union as tragic hero betrayed internally and externally is, you know, it’s a story that is, in some ways, simply total bonkers. Unless you’re a strong believer in world communism, as it was formed in the middle of the 20th century, you know, and Eric was right, Eric was, you know, a young Jewish teenager in Berlin in the early 1930s. You’re watching The Nazis marched past calling for the immediate death of himself and all of his family in a time when everyone else was pussyfooting with the Nazis. And you know, only the Soviet Union and the Soviet Communist Party, Soviet led German Communist Party was willing to say, these are horrible people, we need to fight them. And so he made that political commitment as a teenager and you know, was never really able to outgrow it. I’m told that even at the end of his life, if you got a couple of drinks into him, you could get him to say that, you know, Stalin had been too harshly judged by history. And a very smart guy, you know, very learned historian, desperately trying to get it right. Yeah. And the fact that someone like me thinks he could still get it so wrong is very much a cautionary tale about how I should not be proud. And be aware that other people are likely to judge me in the future the way I judge Eric.
Gene Tunny 09:30
Right. And so what do you think is the big story after 1870? So you’ve got to, you’ve got a more optimistic view of history, obviously.
Brad DeLong 09:39
Yeah. Yeah. Well, maybe that 1870 really is the hinge of history. Right. But, you know, before 1870, your technological progress is slow. And you know about infant mortality is extremely high. You’re going to see half your babies die before you’re five. And do something like 1/3 of women are going to wind up without surviving sons, should they be lucky enough to reach 50? themselves? And do you know when the pre 1870 high patriarchy world you reach 50 without a surviving son, you have no social power whatsoever, you know, you have absolutely no account, you have no one to advocate for you. And so before 1870, pretty much whenever there was an improvement in human technology, the response was, oh, great, now I can try to have more kids and raise the chances I’ll have surviving sons above two thirds. And so you’ll from minus 6000, BC, on up to 1870. There is a lot of improvement in technology. Yes, and the upper class lives better, yes. But for most people, you know, you simply have 100, and you simply have a farm size only 102 50th as large potentially at 1870, as your ancestors had back in minus 6000. And you know, you’re still living at something like $3 a day, you’re spending 60% of your income on just getting your 2000 calories plus essential nutrients. And there are a lot of days when you can’t think about much other than you’re very hungry. And that’s the state of the world before 1870. And that means that unless you’re in an extremely lucky place, or like Australia, or an extremely lucky class, that life is going to be kind of brutal, short, and without very many options, which means that in most times in most places, governance is going to be how does an elite figure out how to grab enough for itself and maintain its rule over society. And after 1870, everything changes, technological progress becomes rapid. The technological competence of the human race globally doubles every generation, you quickly get a world in which people are kind of rich enough that infant mortality falls substantially. And with that falling infant mortality, and with the erosion of patriarchy, all of a sudden, you don’t have to concentrate a lot of effort on having children, to be confident that if you reach the age of 50, you’ll still be able to run your own life. And so you’ll we get the demographic transition, now headed toward a stable world population of 9 billion. So for the first time after 1870, technology wins the race with human fertility. And we begin to look forward to a time when humanity will be able to bake a sufficiently large economic pie so that everyone can have enough. And you know, people back in 1870, and before, you know, they thought most of the problems of society came because incomes were low, and technology was underdeveloped. And you had this elite running a kind of domination and exploitation game on everyone. And once you can bake a sufficiently large economic pie for everyone to have enough, those things should fall away. And the problems of properly slicing and tasting the economic pie, right? Have equitably distributing it and then utilising it so that people can feel safe and secure and live lives in which they’re healthy and happy. Yep, those should be relatively straightforward to solve. And so we today at least we today in the rich countries should be living in a utopia, which we are manifestly not. And so the story of history after 1870 is how we’re well on the way to solving the problem of baking a sufficiently large economic pie. While the problems of slicing and tasting of distributing and utilising it continues to flummoxed us.
Gene Tunny 13:57
So with 1870, that’s several decades after what is traditionally thought of as the start of the Industrial Revolution, is it and in there are a few things that come together. Around that time, would you be able to explain that please?
Brad DeLong 14:13
Well, I’d say that the industrial revolution itself, you know, that steam power and metallurgy and early engineering, you know, they were really really weren’t quite enough that they get the average rate at which technology improves along the world up to about half a percent per year. And of that maybe, maybe a third comes from the fact that you’re concentrating on that you can cut that you’re suddenly concentrating all the manufacturing of the world in the districts, most of them in England where manufacturing is most efficient. And you know, 1/3 of it comes from the underlying engine of science and discovery and engineering. And 1/3 of it comes because we were lucky enough that the last round of glaciers, that they scraped all the rock off of the coal around a huge chunk of Northwest Europe, which left you with a lot of coal at sea level that you could just pick up off the ground and ship it out. But come 1870 you’ve concentrated all the manufacturing and you know, you’re pretty much mining out the really easy coal and you have to go deeper, which is more expensive. But the possibility was that, you know, the industrial revolution would be not completely but largely over, except that in 1870, we got the development of the industrial research labs to rationalise and routinized the discovery and development of new technologies. And then the modern corporation, the modern corporate form to rationalise scrutinise, the development and deployment of technologies plus full globalisation, which provides us enormous incentives to deploy and diffuse technologies. And so all of a sudden, instead of half a percent per year, you had a 2% per year rate of global technological change. And while it was possible for human humanity to be fertile enough to kind of offset the half a percent per year technology growth before 1870 with greater fertility and a population explosion, after 1870, even the population explosion could not keep us poor. Yeah. And then we go through the demographic transition and the population explosion reaches its end.
Gene Tunny 16:35
Yeah. So this is the industrial research lab. So you’re talking about Thomas Edison in Menlo Park.
Brad DeLong 16:41
Yeah, Menlo Park and others. You know, I like Nikola Tesla. Because, you know, Nikola Tesla was, I suppose today, we’d call him neurologically divergent. He’s definitely not neurotypical. Which means that unless you can slot him in exactly the right place, you know, where he has lots of people surrounding him who will tolerate him being in A-hole, and pickup which of the crazy ideas he has that might actually be useful unless you have George Westinghouse to build an industrial research lab, to surround him with and then the Westinghouse corporation to deploy his technologies. While Edison is General Electric, and others are frantically trying to keep up because, you know, Tesla knew how to make electrons get up and dance in the way that nobody else did. Without that Nikola Tesla would have been no use to humanity at all, as it was he personally pushed the entire electrical sector forward in time by a decade. And that’s a wonderful set of things. That’s a wonderful set of meta inventions. You know, that turns the process of technological development from being a difficult one in which you have an idea, but then you need to be a human resource department and a executive, a marketer and impresario, an advertiser you know, a well as an engineer, in order to get anything done to one in which engineers can engineer and find people who are good at the other things, to kind of surround them and do all the things you need to do to actually deploy a technology and make it useful. And that really only falls into place around 1870.
Gene Tunny 18:23
Right, okay, yep. And what about this modern corporation or the modern corporate form? So corporations have existed in some form since well, the first few centuries? I mean, the East India Company, the Dutch East Indies Indies Company, yes, yeah.
Brad DeLong 18:40
No, no, but still, they were relatively, they were relatively small things and they were tight have very special the fact that anyone could kind of organise a form in which us have a special royal charter as well. And the idea that anyone could set up a framework which would be a a large, internal, centrally planned division of labour, which could expand and copy itself, but also which had all of these interfaces with the market economy so that it was focused on producing the things that people wanted or at least that people with money wanted. This is something that allows once you have a good idea, and once you’ve built it in one factory, you know, it’s then very natural for the corporation to say, Okay, let’s build it over in the next town. And let’s expand the factory, let’s licence it, let’s move it to another country. You know, all of that only happens to all of what you know, management. The Business School professor Herbert Simon used to call these red islands of central planning, you know, in mesh to connected with the green lines of market exchange. Those are very characteristic of the modern economy. And we really need to have those islands in there and working very well, you know, in order to be even nearly as productive as we are.
Gene Tunny 20:09
Right, and what would be the exemplars of that modern corporate form Brad, are you thinking of General Electric or DuPont of those sort of companies
Brad DeLong 20:18
In the early days, in the early days, it was things like the great farm machinery producers. Were I think the first because, you know, once you figure out how to make a Reaper or a harvester, or later on a combine, you know, demand for it is absolutely huge. And so you don’t want to have one small workshop, you know, one small workshop in some small town in Illinois or something, you know, making a Reaper when the Reaper can be put into use from the Murray Darling River Valley all the way to Argentina and up there. Yeah. Later on, it was Ford Motor Company and General Motors that were the classics. And now of course, I think it is, you know, Apple Computer, which is simultaneously the most to market economy and capitalist driven thing in the world, but also the orchestrator of this enormously complicated, and centrally planned division of labour all over the world with all of its suppliers, in which a relatively small number of people in Cupertino, California, can conduct an economic division of labour, that dwarfs that of the centrally planned Soviet Union at its most prosperous, in terms of how much money and resources are moved around in a way in which in response to commands and to requests issued by Cupertino, to produce the more than a billion iPhones that currently populate the world.
Gene Tunny 22:01
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It’s extraordinary for sure.
Brad DeLong 22:04
And, you know, we haven’t even gotten into its role as the pusher forward of electronics technology of modern semiconductor, whereby your Apple Computer pays the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation $30 billion each year, which it then turns around and uses to invest in pushing semiconductor technology forward to make circuits smaller and chips faster and bigger, which it then sells to Apple, which then puts into iPhones so it can earn the $30 billion it needs for the next round.
Gene Tunny 22:40
Yeah, yeah, for sure. And I mean, Apple is still innovating even though Steve Jobs is no longer around.
Brad DeLong 22:47
Jobs is gone. Yeah, yes.
Gene Tunny 22:51
Okay, we’ll take a short break here for a word from our sponsor.
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Gene Tunny 23:25
Now back to the show. Can I ask you about full globalisation? You talk about that? And then you talk about what happened later in the 90s with what you call re globalisation, I think and then there’s hyperglobalisation. What I think what your book reminded me of was just those the large flows of people, and also capital that occurred in the late 19th century and before World War One, and that’s something I think Polanyi wrote about, could you talk about that please Brad?
Brad DeLong 23:54
Oh, well, one thing is to say that, that kind of from 1870 to 1914, 50 million people leave Europe and also 50 million people leave Asia. The people who leave Europe by and large go to you know, Argentina, Chile, southern Brazil, United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand. They go there they bring European biotechnology crops and animals and so forth. In Australia, they find at least before the great drought of the 1890s that there is not a better place for European sheep than Australia. And so Australia before the drought of the 1890s becomes the place with by far the highest standard of living in the world. As you know the equivalent of the equivalent of OPEC instead of oil. It’s sheep. And instead of shipping petroleum and container ships, they ship out wool in steam powered ocean going ships and they produce the you know an amazingly rich and prosperous middle class civilization of its day, something that I don’t see know very much about. Except for the things I see are the backgrounds I see on Mrs. Fisher’s murder Mr. Rene Fisher’s Murder Mystery Show, which my wife says the clothes the clothes at does extremely well. And then Australia with its large middle class, you’ll powers the demand for Australian factories and Australia industrialising and becomes and remains an extremely rich and prosperous country. Brazil might have seen the been on the same trajectory. You know, Australia has land that’s wonderful for sheep. You know, Brazil in the second half of the 19th century was the best place for rubber. It was the place rubber came from. And so you know, you have the rubber tappers of Brazil making a good living, you have the growth of the Brazilian economy, you have the construction that European singers like Enrico Caruso or Jenny Lind, when they went on world tours, they would go up to Amazon to Manassas and performing them in Manassas Opera House and things worked very, very well, except that the British arrived and they grabbed some rubber plants from Brazil and they carried them back to Kew Gardens. And then the Belgians got a hold of them and they took them down to the Congo and then King Leopold began cutting off the hands of people who didn’t bring in enough rubber from the villages. And in Malaysia, the British Empire brought down workers from China combined it who were desperate to get out of China, given how small farm sizes were and how poor China was, combined it with British capital, and this Brazilian biotechnologies, so that Malaysia, Malaysia, the Malay Peninsula becomes the world’s biggest rubber producing centre in the world by 1914. And the enormous crash, and the enormous crash of the Brazilian rubber industry as well, because the rubber plant had left all its pests and parasites behind in Brazil. And so it grew like a weed on the Malay Peninsula. And, you know, the Chinese plantation workers brought down from the Pearl River Delta, were extremely happy that the British could pay them a quarter of what the Brazilian rubber tappers were used to getting. And they would still say we’re much better off than they would be back in China. That is, and this transfer of all kinds of tropical goods and plants around the world, right that Yemen finds itself suddenly faced with enormous competition from coffee grown in Indonesia, and in kind of Costa Rica as well. Which means that if you were in the tropics between 1870 and indeed, up until 1950, you’d find that whatever you export, its price was dropping like a stone because there was all of this extra competition from all of these extra sites for production opened up by this Asian migration. Well, the rich first world countries did quite well and did quite well in large part because immigrants from India and China were by and large kept out of Australia and the United States. And so wage levels in Australia and Australia and the United States stayed very high. And they got the middle classes in the middle class demand needed to provide the demand so that they could industrialise you know, while Brazil or Malaysia or Congo really didn’t have a chance to industrialise because, you know, no middle class large enough to buy the manufactured goods and no ability to export given how cheap and how good at manufacturing Britain was back then and how eager Britain was to export.
Gene Tunny 29:09
The story we tell ourselves is that it’s, it’s all about it was all about good governance as well. I mean, in good institutions.
Brad DeLong 29:17
Yeah, no bad governance can make something very country very poor very quickly. That and indeed, Arthur W. Economist, Arthur Lewis, you know, all those used to say, look, Australia and New Zealand are not just cousins of Canada and the United States, but also of Argentina and Chile, and in some ways South Africa. And, indeed, come 1914, Buenos Aires looks a lot like Melbourne. But then governance falls apart in the 1920s and 1930s. And even more so after World War Two. And now, you know, no one thinks of Argentina as being a country that is kind of on the same level of development of the Earth, Australia or Canada, because it simply is not. And yet, it certainly has the land, it certainly had the resources that had the education in 1914 it had the technology base, but bad governance can do terrible things. You know, you see this most with respect to communist, right that when the Iron Curtain failed in 1990, we could actually look, and we could see that those countries that had been ruled by the Communists were only 1/5, as rich as the countries immediately outside, immediately across the border. And you know, where that border was, was principally determined by where the Red Army had managed to march in 1945. Yeah, what’s the difference between Czechoslovakia and Austria? Yeah, yeah. Or Yugoslavia and Italy?
Gene Tunny 30:59
Yeah, very good point. I’d like to ask now about the what you call the is it the long 20th century? You talk about this period from 1870 to 2010? And is that the period where we were Slouching Towards Utopia?
Brad DeLong 31:15
Yeah, where every generation, we were doubling humanity’s technological competence. And it was really clear that we were solving the problem of baking a sufficiently large economic pie. And we were trying to figure out how to slice and tastes how to distribute and utilise it. And that was kind of flummoxed more sometimes than others. And people were trying various things. Some of them reasonable, and some of them absolutely horrible and genocidally destructive. Yeah, yeah. I’d say that’s what gives 1870 to 2010 its unit, you know, that we’re solving the what people thought was the big problem, but not at all solving what people thought were, but people back before 1870 had thought would be smaller problems.
Gene Tunny 32:03
Okay, and so 2010, that’s in the aftermath of the financial crisis. So that’s a pivotal event, in your view.
Brad DeLong 32:13
Except it’s not really a pivotal event, okay. It’s more like a pivotal 20 years. Maybe it starts on September 11 2001, when all of a sudden, a willingness to kill people because they worship God differently that we thought was over in 1648, at the end of the 30 Years War in Central Europe, after which people said, let’s not do that, again. We’re back. Maybe it continues in 2003, you know, when the United States stops acting like a relatively cooperative leader of the world, and instead says, We’re another great power, and we’re going to act like great powers do, maybe it’s 2007, when it becomes very clear that in the attack that an ideological attachment to the view that I’m rich, because the market has rewarded me, therefore the market must be a good thing. Had that that idea had hobbled the regulation of finance, and then come 2010 It’s clear, that same idea keeps people from responding to the Great Recession, by saying we need to get back to full employment rapidly instead, all over the globe, people are saying, well, you know, the market is a good thing. And the market has been doing this for a reason. And so you know, we shouldn’t artificially we shouldn’t artificially stimulate the economy. 2008, seemed to see the engine of technological progress itself to drop into a lower gear slow down by half or more. Starting in 2012-2013, we see the rise of anti democratic movements all over the world from you know, Modi’s version of national Hinduism to Viktor Orban and many, many others. And last, I’d say, come 2022, we have the return of major power war. Right, the idea that big wars rather than wars that are kind of a civil war component are a way to solve things. You know, even though if I wanted to convince the Ukrainians that they weren’t a separate nation, but only a Russian ethnicity, you know, I would send the Bolshoi Ballet and I would send orchestras to play the works of Tchaikovsky and I would send poets to read the poems of Pushkin in the general streets of Ukraine. I would not say send killer robots flying overboard to drop overhead to drop bombs and kill but you know the return of a major power war. Add to that global warming is now We’ll go not a distant threat. But lots of people were underwater in Pakistan early this summer and lots of people saying, Why is the Yangtze River five metres below where it’s supposed to be? It’s now a thing. And a thing for the three and a half billion people of Asia who live in the great river valleys and the monsoons and some with the coming of global warming. We have a different and more complicated and I don’t think we yet understand what the post 2010 story is. But it isn’t the technological progress is pulling ahead extraordinarily rapidly making us potentially all prosperous, and we only need to figure out how to distribute and utilise our wealth. Instead, the world faces other and probably bigger problems, and certainly more of them. So that’s why I bring it to an end in 2010.
Gene Tunny 35:56
Okay, okay. I’d like to ask you about what you call the I think it’s the neoliberal turn in your book. So you talk about how we changed or the philosophy the I don’t know, the dominant philosophy and government and politics change from social this, we’re talking about advanced economies change from social democratic, or whatever you want to call it to, starting in the 70s, and 80s, with Thatcher and Reagan. And we also had a variant of it here in Australia. You call it this neoliberal turn and would you be able to be good if you could explain what you mean by that? And also, I’d like to ask you about your this is great, one of my favourite quotes in your book, you wrote that Hyack. So Frederick Hayek, the Austrian economist Hayek, and his followers were not only Dr. Jekyll, side geniuses, but also Mr. Hyde side idiots, I love that. So if you could explain what you’re driving out there, please, that’d be great.
Brad DeLong 36:56
1945 to 1975 or so are absolutely wonderful years. peace, prosperity, the most rapid growth, at least in the Global North that has ever been seen before. Middle class society, everything seems to be going right. But come and after 1975, you know, there’s inflation, which leads to the general consensus that there’s something wrong with social democracy, that it’s handing out too many tickets to things more tickets to things than the economy and society can produce. And when you hand out more tickets, and there are seats, the result is going to be the tickets get the value that is also going to be inflation. And so social democracy needs to get a grip, and become, you know, more responsible and less willing to simply hand out tickets to anyone who asks, add to that the idea that it’s greatly over bureaucratized that the government is doing too much, and there are too many forms to fill out. Add to that, the idea that too many people have taken advantage of the social democratic system, you know, to grab benefits to which there were not in title. I remember in the late 1970s, as a young teenager, there were people who would come around with maps of where the people in Australia drawing unemployment benefits were. And the claim was that they were on the beaches. Yeah, you know, that you get unemployment benefit. And you say, Okay, I won’t look for another job for two months, I’ll go to the beach for two months, and then I’ll look for a job. That all kinds of things in which too many people were saying too many union members and welfare recipients were getting away with too much and not working hard enough. Yeah, that benefits for the slackers were too great than the taxes on the actual productive members of society were too high. And that the tax system was greatly discouraging investment. And thus, economic growth. And thus, the inflation and the slowdown of economic growth that we saw in the late 1970s. Were a result of the fact that social democracy had tapped out and it needed very much to be a rethink. And the rethink takes the form of Thatcher in the United Kingdom and Reagan in the United States. You know, the idea that taxes need to be lower, that the job creators need to be properly incentivized that, you know, the non rich need to be a little bit poor, so they’re a little bit hungrier and work harder. That sources of rent seeking, you know, people who have claims to income but who are not productive, need to have those claims erased , especially if they’re welfare recipients on the one hand, who haven’t been able to maintain a stable family, or if they happen to have lucked into a particular union that manages to have its kind of hands around the throat of some important part of the distribution system. You know, Ronald Reagan’s saying, I’m going to destroy the, Jimmy Carter in fact, Jimmy Carter was, in fact, launched the Airline deregulation effort in the 1970s. One big purpose of which was to make the lives of airline pilots a little less cushy. And Ronald Reagan followed that up by breaking the strike of the air traffic controllers. It was Jimmy Carter, who by deregulating trucking in the United States, you know, applied the same medicine to the then powerful teamsters union, saying, once deregulated trucking, you’re going to be exposed to all kinds of rail and non union competition as well, you know, in your ability to extract an extremely cushy life go. And the ability of the collected organised crime gangs of the United States to draw on the teamsters pension fund is going to be sufficiently reduced. So you have this great wheel around 1980. So much so that in 1994, Bill, Bill Clinton, who really is a Social Democrat at heart, wants to win another term, he feels he has to go out there and say that the era of big government is over. That just as Dwight Eisenhower, a very conservative person could only govern in the 1950s. By saying the New Deal, social democracy is a good thing, but I’m going to be a much better manager. Because I can say no to interest groups that are demanding too much while the Democrats are relying on those interest groups to turn out the vote. So you should elect me to be the president to run the new deal rather than let a Democrat. Yeah, so Bill Clinton was having to say that I’m going to be because I understand how valuable government can be, I’m actually the one who will do the best job of cutting it. So it’s so to do the most good. And that kind of lasted that kind of era in which neoliberal, this neoliberal view, that the market should be doing more, and the government should be doing less? You know, it really lasted up until the great recession since then, since then, we’ve had a time of confusion.
Gene Tunny 42:28
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, for sure. I’m just interested. I’m interested in your thoughts on the that neoliberal term? Because I mean, you’re someone you’ve got, you know, people who are very prominent in our time, and you worked with Larry Summers you’ve written and you’ve done research with, with Larry Summers, who was US Treasury secretary. I mean, how do you feel about all because Would you say there was some benefits to it? Because, I mean, Airline Deregulation, and I mean, that was good for consumers. How do you think about it now?
Brad DeLong 42:58
As they say, you know, in some ways Friedrich von Hayek really was Dr. Jekyll. Yeah, in that if you have a, you know, if you have a command and control system, you know, there’s somebody at the top, who’s issuing orders and everyone else is kind of not really using their mind that they’re kind of robots doing what the person at the top orders. And, you know, if you’ve ever worked in any large organisation, you know that the person at the top has very little idea of what’s actually going on down at the bottom. And will often be issuing commands about what you should do next that are best nonsensical, and that are worst highly destructive. You try to have a committee solve that problem of central command by establishing it by writing a rulebook. And then you have a bureaucracy because God knows the rulebook only covers about a third of the cases, it’s simply not possible for any small group to think about. But um, assign people private property and let them trade and exchange in a market. And all of a sudden, the people who are actually on the ground in the situation, you’ll have the ability to do things because the property is theirs. And also, as long as market prices are in accord with social values, they have a very strong personal incentive to do the right thing. Or at least the thing that makes money and then there’s the well, but our market price is in accord with social values problem, but if you can solve that problem, then a properly tuned market economy with private property is the best possible anti bureaucratic, you know, anti authoritarian crowdsourcing mechanism for helping people to organise themselves in order to do what is needed for the common good. Did you know much better to impose a carbon tax and say, you know, gas filling up your car was going to be expensive. Then too, as Jimmy Carter said to say, if your licence plate ends in an even digit, you can only fill your car with gas on even days and with an odd digit, you can only fill your gas on odd days. Friedrich von Hayek was a Dr. Jekyll positive genius and seeing this and seeing this very clearly. But as I say, he also was on Mr. Hyde style idiot. Because you’ll Hayek, having grasped on to this value of the market, he couldn’t think of anything else. And so he reached his position, which is the market economy will take modern science and technology and make us all prosperous, full stop, we need to be happy with that. We should not ask for anything else, we should not ask for an equitable income distribution or any form of social justice. Because if we do, we’ll find ourselves monkeying with the system. And when we monkey with the system, we will destroy the ability of the market to actually be productive and to make us rich. And ultimately, we’ll wind up on the road to serfdom. We won’t get social justice, and we will be at our we will make ourselves poor. And so the one thing we definitely need to do is whenever anyone starts talking about social justice, or income distribution or their rights to something that isn’t, that aren’t property rights, we need to tell them to shut up, you know that the only rights that matter are property rights, and that’s how it should be, you know, and yes, this is not social justice. You know, the market gives most things, not the people who deserved them, but instead of the people who are lucky enough to own the valuable pieces of property. But if you can’t accept that you don’t have any business doing politics or speaking in the public square. Yeah. And, you know, that’s profoundly unhealthy. That’s profoundly unhealthy in actually figuring out how we should utilise and distribute our wealth, but you know, Hayek stuck to that to the end. So much so that he was an enthusiastic supporter of Augusto Pinochet. Believing at some level that you know, Pinochet would reform Chile. And then once Marxism and Social Democracy had been stamped out, then you know, he could retire and the Chilean people could be allowed to go back to electing their governors again. But in the meantime, you definitely need it. You know, he called it the Lycurgan moment. And the myth of the semi mythical dictator, yeah, even though not a king of Sparta had established what people said was the Spartan system of government and war back in the Classical Age.
Gene Tunny 48:03
Yeah, I was shocked by that. Brad, when I read that in your book, I’ll have to go back and look at where Hayet wrote that because I mean, it’s quite shocking to think that someone who is a champion of liberty, and I mean, he’s inspired there’s a think tank in Australia, the Centre for Independent Studies, which I have a bit to do with which is inspired by Hyack. And so I mean, I’ve read Road to Serfdom, but I don’t remember anything like that, but I’ll definitely go back and look.
Brad DeLong 48:31
He gets cranky, he gets cranky or as he gets older. That, you know, in 1944, when writing the Road to Serfdom, he’s chiefly interested in trying to persuade a future British Labour Party government not to be really stupid with respect to nationalising everything in sight. But you know, he ages and as my father says when you get older, you discover that you are more like yourself and it’s not necessarily a good person. That back when you were younger and had to pretend not to be yourself and weren’t quite as much as yourself, maybe we’re better off right, Yeah. Yeah. There is a letter from Maggie Thatcher back to Hayet saying thanking him for one of his and indeed saying but you are recommending the use some Chilean and methods and do those are unacceptable given our constitutional traditions, and I haven’t been able to find out what this is in response to.
Gene Tunny 49:29
Right, okay
Brad DeLong 49:32
In the context of a world that is drifting towards Central planning and very heavy bureaucracy, it’s more understandable than as account. You know, Hayet’s, crankier parts are more understandable and useful as a counterweight than they are as you know, an accelerator, an accelerant for a kind of neoliberal era.
Gene Tunny 49:56
Yeah, I think you definitely make some I mean, a lot of what you’ve you’ve written I think is great. And I mean, I’ve been thinking about this myself, I think we’ve I feel it in Australia, we’ve probably managed things better than in the States. I mean, there’s definitely. And then the way I’ve thought about it is that some of the neoliberal policies we’ve enacted, I think, have been good for consumers, we cut tariffs, I mean, we used to have this very high tariff wall. So I think it was as late as 1988, or 89, we had a 57% tariff on motor vehicles. And so cars were, in real terms, much more expensive. So they benefited a lot. But there has been dislocation, but we seem to have manage that, because we’ve had a Social Security system and a public health care system. And I look at the states. And I mean, I mean, I think Americans, I think the US is a great country. But the lack of a public health care system, and the lack of a social security system, I think, is making things very difficult. And that’s meaning the politics becomes very, I mean, it’s just, it looks awful at the moment from over here. So yeah, that’s just a comment. But if you have any reflections, that’d be great.
Brad DeLong 51:09
Things are never as awful as they look on YouTube. Still, it’s still strong and rich, and you know the sense of a very, very strong sense of one nation, and we should all be pulling for each other. Which you won’t see if you go on YouTube or Twitter where it is indeed, the politics of you know, Ezra Klein says you get clicks only if you make enemies. And that’s really not how most people normally live their lives. But yeah, there’s a great book that’s getting some considerable play now by Elizabeth Berman called Thinking Like an Economist, you know, how efficiency replaced equality in the US public policy, which I think definitely could use a dose of the good Dr. Jekyll Hyatt, right. That says that demanding equality, demanding one size fits all rather than letting people crowdsource solutions on an individual level, is something that we should value greatly. And yet Elizabeth Popp Berman doesn’t value it at all.
Gene Tunny 52:21
Right. Okay. Okay. I’ll have to check that out. I might have to wrap up soon. But the final final question i’ve good is just referencing one of your quotes in your book where you talk about the power of some individuals, and you talk about the power of Keynes and FDR? Yeah. How do you think they would want to know it’s almost an impossible question, but how would they be diagnosing where we are today? And what needs to be done? Do you have any thoughts on that?
Brad DeLong 52:53
With respect to the Great Recession, Keynes would certainly say, I told you so. And with glory in it, because he was at some level of British upper class twit of the early 20th century. With respect to the rest, he would say that, by and large on my number with the predictions he made in a 1930 speech, he gave on economic possibilities for our grandchildren to have indeed come true. And that at least the global north is approaching the stage in which we do indeed have enough. And then our problems are that we’re kind of hag written by ideas and ideologies that were useful and essential in past poor age, you know, avarice, usery, and precaution. And that we’re also facing the prominent problem of the human race, which is how to take your wealth and resources and live life wisely and well. And he would say that he had hoped that we would have made more progress on learning how to live life wisely, and well than we have, and would have hoped that we were less hag written by you know, avarice, usury and precaution. By kind of not realising how wealthy we are. And you know, how broad open our possibilities should be, but being instead do to mean and ungenerous to ourselves and to others.
Gene Tunny 54:17
Yes, yeah. Okay. And what do you think? I mean, what would you have any thoughts on? I mean, what’s, what’s to be done, particularly in the US or in other? What other advanced economies? I mean, I mean, one of the challenges we’ve got here in Australia is how we pay for this National Disability Insurance Scheme. So we’ve got this permanent structural deficit in our budget now of about 2% of GDP. And the current government when it was in opposition committed to these what we call over here, these stage three tax cuts that are kicking in in a few years, where there’s, they’re more geared well, because the wealthier pay more tax just because of the way the system is set up. And the way these tax cuts work is that the bulk of the benefits go to the upper end. And there’s a big debate about whether it’s appropriate or not to have those tax cuts at the moment in Australia, but what are the levers? Is that you see, is it around? Is it taxation? Is that one of the levers for redistribution? Or is it regulation? What what do you see as the levers?
Brad DeLong 55:22
Well, you know, I think, I think the biggest and the best lever and in fact, the one in which the United States and Australia have historically been most successful, you know, is immigration, right. That over time, we have been very, very good at taking in people from elsewhere whose parents were not Americans, Australians, and making them into, you know, Americans and Australians. Like, I remember Maine Senator George Mitchell, you know, the guy who negotiated the Good Friday Accords in Ireland. And, you know, he looks like one of my great uncle’s, someone all of whose ancestors had been in Maine since 1750. And, you know, talked with an extremely strong accent, you know, um, and so actually, he’s simply a second generation immigrant, he’s half Irish, half Lebanese. He just looks and sounds exactly like my great uncles with their eight generations of, you know, hardscrabble time in the soil. But, um, we have enormously powerful and strong cultures, ideologies, and forms of Nash forms of national unity, that are actually not based on us all really being the descendants of our founders, and both countries willingness to take in large numbers of people from elsewhere. You know, Australia, taking in an enormous number of refugees after World War Two have been huge sources of national strength. And we are still largely empty countries, and you can move someone from Mexico to the United States, you know, from Malaysia to Australia. And you know, you are going to triple their productivity just by doing that alone. And that will generate a huge amount of potential wealth from a well we grow by immigration. Otherwise, the problem is that, you know, we had a steam power economy in 1870. And, you know, an electricity and diesel and chemical economy in 1900, and a mass production economy in 1940, and you know, a global value chain economy in 1990. And now we’re headed for info biotech economy and whatever worked in the sense of, you know, politics, economics and sociology, 30 years ago, back when the technological foundations of the economy are different, it’s probably not going to work well now. So anyone who says we need to go back to X is probably going to wind up unhappy. And so we should try to move forward into the future rather than trying to pick up models from the past. Although what those forward and the future models are, you know, that’s beyond me.
Gene Tunny 58:19
Okay. Okay. You’re telling the economic history story, the policy and then that’s, that’s for someone else.
Brad DeLong 58:28
But the big lesson of history is that trying to maintain social and economic systems past their sell by date as the technology changes underneath it just doesn’t work.
Gene Tunny 58:39
Right. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting point about immigration. We one of the one of the challenges in Australia we have is that, I mean, everyone wants to live in one of the big the three major capital cities. I mean, I’m in one of them, I’m in Brisbane, and Nick’s down in Melbourne, then Sydney is the, you know, the biggest, but the concern is that everyone wants to live in those cities. And there’s just not enough housing. I mean, we’ve got, I mean, I guess, it’s around. It’s in other advanced economies, too. But there’s a housing crisis and property prices have surged, although they are falling out, because the of the dynamics of the lending and what’s happened with the monetary policy, but they’re still very high rents are going up. So we’ve got concerns about housing availability. And in the short term, I think, if we’re bringing immigration back, I think that’s going to cause a lot of pressure. So we’ve got to manage that better and harder. No, there’s the environmental issues about allowing development. So I think, yeah, I agree with you about immigration providing benefits. So just see that in the short term. There are a lot of these absorption issues that we have to deal with.
Brad DeLong 59:48
A lot of people who think they have rights that things need to stay as they are. Yes, yes. And do you know to this, there’s a great Italian novel called I think Lampedusa, no written by Lampedusa, called Gattopardo, called The Leopard about Sicily in the 1860s, in which at one point, the young guy yells at his uncle, the count of Selena, you don’t understand in order for everything to stay the same. Everything has to change. Yeah, yeah. As the young guy goes off to join Garibaldi in the Italian revolution. And so I do think we need to look much more at the things that need to change. He says, sitting in a house built in 1897, we think, at a time, but it was surrounded by pear orchards. And now when it is half a mile or two thirds of a mile south of the university campus and two thirds of a mile north of the subway line. And so is a, that something so close to so many extremely desirable places, should house only three people right now. Rather than have been turned into a 10 storey apartment building is in some sense, an offence against land planning.
Gene Tunny 1:01:08
Yeah, well, I think we’ve got to find a better balance. I mean, who knows. That’s, that’s an issue for another episode, I think.
Brad DeLong 1:01:17
It is, you know, and we did actually build a cottage on our lot as soon as we were allowed to do so. But still. Yeah, so we did add to Berkeley’s housing stock. Yep. Still, you know,, the San Francisco Bay Area has seven and a half million people and looking back at the past 450 years of history, it’s easy to say how if we’d had a 1800s view toward development, we now have 20 million people, you know, we the size of Los Angeles in population. And it would probably be a better world I must say, because those other 12 and a half million people who aren’t here are in other places that are kind of less great to live in, and where they are likely to be less productive than they would be if they were here.
Gene Tunny 1:02:14
And just just finally, probably, you know, you’ve I don’t want to take too much of your time. But have one more question is, in your view, what are the most what’s the most important factor there is the governance, it always the agglomeration effects when they move countries because I know that Lant Pritchards crunched the numbers on this, and there’s this huge gain from moving people around the world. What’s the benefit? Where does it come from? Do you have thoughts on that?
Brad DeLong 1:02:38
A lot of it is agglomeration, thick market agglomeration effects that we don’t really understand that appear to be extremely large. And, but that also can very quickly turn into pollution and crowding effects if the local government is not competent at handling the process.
Gene Tunny 1:02:59
Yeah, I think that’s right. I think that makes sense.
Brad DeLong 1:03:03
And a lot more is that, you know, it is, throughout history, it’s always proven much, much easier to move people that where institutions are good, and where they can be productive than to somehow move institutions to where the people are, that attempts to build prosperity or build democracy in places where it does not seem to be strongly established, that those rarely go very well. And I would say, I do not really understand why that is the case. And I used to have a guru, a classmate of mine, who I went to about that, Alberto Alesina, to teach me. But alas, he dropped dead of a heart attack a few years. And I haven’t found another guru who I trust.
Gene Tunny 1:03:48
Okay, I might try and cover that in a future podcast episode. It’s a fascinating question. It just occurred to me then.
Brad DeLong 1:03:57
I love what Lant has to say about his numbers actually why his numbers are what they are.
Gene Tunny 1:04:05
Yes, yes. Yeah. I’ll put a link in the show notes to some of that work. Okay. Very good. Okay.
Gene Tunny 1:04:11
Well, I’m Professor Brad DeLong. It’s been a real pleasure. I’ve really enjoyed talking with you very much about your book and I’ll put a link in the show notes. And so if you’re listening in the audience, and please, I’d suggest getting a copy. Yeah. I’ve got it on Kindle. But I mean, it’ll be in bookstores and major bookstores in Australia I’m very sure. And yeah, Professor DeLong. Any final thoughts before we wrap up?
Brad DeLong 1:04:38
Just thank you very much. And I think be hopeful right that even though individually, each of us is just a jumped up East African plains ape who often forgets where he left his keys yesterday. Together, there are 8 billion of us and if we talk to each other together, we can be a very smart anthologie intelligence.
Gene Tunny 1:05:02
Absolutely. I think that’s a great note to end on. Professor Brad DeLong thanks so much. Okay, that’s the end of this episode of Economics Explored. I hope you enjoyed it. If so, please tell your family and friends and leave a comment or give us a rating on your podcast app. If you have any comments, questions, suggestions, you can feel free to send them to contact@economicsexplored.com And we’ll aim to address them in a future episode. Thanks for listening. Until next week, goodbye
Thanks to Josh Crotts for mixing the episode and to the show’s sponsor, Gene’s consultancy business www.adepteconomics.com.au.
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