Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century

 Book Author: De Long, J. Bradford

The ideological battle in the book is Hayak vs Polanyi, which we will come back to shortly. But the foundational layer of the leap forward is (anti)Malthusian. 

Unless you are an economist, the 3 names above probably do not mean much to you. Therefore, starting with the actual spot where the leap comes from - the Malthusian trap. Thomas Malthus theorised that population growth will outpace food production, hence trapping most of the human population in agricultural jobs.

And up until 1870 (argued by De Long), this was indeed the case. Which kept human production and improvement in standards of living - stagnant. The modern cooperation combined with industrial research laboratories, allowed innovation to move from a single person activity to a system. Incentivising humans to innovate in order to get rich and not simply survive. Ironically, getting rich in certain contexts is a stronger motivator than survival.

Humans at scale suddenly weren’t doing all in their power to survive, but now it was to get wealthy and rich. This obviously unlocked what our current economists call as wealth. 

De Long, than masterfully argues with himself that is this actually a good thing? And this is where he main ideological battle takes place: Hayak vs Polanyi

On one side is the thinking of Friedrich von Hayek, which champions the market economy's power to crowdsource solutions and create wealth ("The market giveth, the market taketh away). On the other side is the argument of Karl Polanyi, who observed that society inevitably pushes back against the market to defend human values and rights to community, a stable income, and social stability ("The market was made for man, not man for the market"). 

De Long does a good job of showing how his 20th century (1870-2010, due to more, or less overarching theme of centrality of economics in humanities “growth”; is battling these 2 main ideologies and, because of this tension we have not reached utopia. Even though a huge amount of knowledge and wealth has been created in this century. 

Why I Recommend This Book

A good attempt at explaining why even though humanity has existed for 10,000 plus years, the last 140 years have been the most advanced. 

Although, it doesn’t come up with a neat “solution” it does help initiate questions on what do humans want & need; and what is utopia?