Mindscape 209 | Brad DeLong on Why the 20th Century Fell Short of Utopia

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Жыл бұрын

Patreon: / seanmcarroll
Blog post with audio player, show notes, and transcript: www.preposterousuniverse.com/...
People throughout history have imagined ideal societies of various sorts. As the twentieth century dawned, advances in manufacturing and communication arguably brought the idea of utopia within our practical reach, at least as far as economic necessities are concerned. But we failed to achieve it, to say the least. Brad DeLong’s new book, Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century, investigates why. He compares the competing political and economic systems that dominated the “long 20th century” from 1870 to 2010, and how we managed to create such enormous wealth and still be left with such intractable problems.
J. Bradford DeLong received his Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University. He is currently a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley. and chief economist at the Blum Center for Developing Economies. He previously served as deputy assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury for Economic Policy from 1993 to 1995. He has been a long-running blogger, now moved to Substack. He is a co-editor of The Economists’ Voice.
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Пікірлер: 52

@koolguy728 Жыл бұрын

I've listened to almost every Mindscape and this one is an instant favorite. Brad is a great speaker and personality

@aaron2709 Жыл бұрын

Great conversation! In art, the 20th Century (Modernism) also begins at 1870 with Impressionism. However, it's shorter than DeLong's economic century, ending in 1960 with Pop art and the intellectual shift to Post-Modernism.

@chemquests Жыл бұрын

Analytical chemist here very excited hearing his background and breadth of knowledge

@rossmcleod7983 Жыл бұрын

Wow, this bloke can talk. I’m buying the book, another great interview, many thanks.

@davidwright6839 Жыл бұрын

The historical analysis of market economies up until recently were all based on a naive and antiquated notion of how wealth is generated. The idea was that someone would farm or make a product in excess of what they needed and could then sell the excess for a profit allowing them to buy other things they needed or save it for later. But this always ignored the question of how this exchange was made possible by some currency that everyone decided to accept in exchange. What everyone missed until Warren Mossler pointed it out in his Modern Monetary Theory was that the economy begins with a sovereign government creating a fiat currency out of thin air and spending it, thus creating a private money supply from the issuance of government debt. Government debt is the private economy's surplus. As long as the private economy can find the real raw resources (productive capacity) to satisfy the needs of the population without producing price inflation, there is no limit to the amount of wealth that government can create. The hard part of creating a utopia is getting people to agree on what is needed to make an equitable and just society without just trying to benefit their political donors on the left or right. Finding the money is as easy as it was when they sent out the PPP checks.

@daithiocinnsealach1982 Жыл бұрын

We seem at first mystified and awed by the processes we find ourselves shaped by but later by study the whole thing seems extremely simple

@liper13 Жыл бұрын

Market economies existed before phony government currencies, so there’s that….

@7heHorror Жыл бұрын

You got me! Well done. 🙏

@7heHorror Жыл бұрын

From subtle to explicit, a pleasant surprise. Please don't land along party lines, to avoid fueling the false dichotomy of the beltway uni-party.

@enisten Жыл бұрын

Two of my favorite people! :)

@user-le2pg2ub9n Жыл бұрын

Thank you Mr. DeLong for your social liberalism and clearly expressed ideas.

@MrFaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa Жыл бұрын

Someone get brad an Ethernet cable for the next podcast! It's amazing how many brilliant people just don't care about latency, and drop out

@howtheworldworks3 Жыл бұрын

It's greed!!! It's literally the single biggest and most widespread reason for why all human beings always failed at organising into a succeessful society.

@bryandraughn9830 Жыл бұрын

There was greed from the start so, how did we ever get this far? I'm just thinking it might be a simplification to assign a singular cause standing in the way of "utopia". Maybe?

@howtheworldworks3 Жыл бұрын

@@bryandraughn9830 I said it is the biggest factor not the only one. Of course it crossing with other facts that have evolved over time but most of those factors were positive in nature. Greed is one of the few and the most relevant negative factor that messed up with the human mind to keep people in a constant state of conflict and inability to fully and properly cooperate. Proof: -wars are all because of greed. People wanted more of everything so they took stuff from oters. -population growth is a result of the greed of creatures wanting more both in terms of sex and offspring for bad reasons. -wealth inequality is the most direct result of greed since people will become as greedy as they can given the social tools at their disposals and over time those tools became more and more efficient at making greedy people skyrocket their stuff by fooling others into thinking that they deserved everything. -greed of social status is also something that happened since forever but became far more accentuated in the broadcast era where the most status greedy people had easier and easier ways to caputre that status by means that were more varied and refined. Greed manifest in all aspects of living but it's only humans who especially most recently managed to magnify it to disgusting degrees. This bullshit will never stop unless the very mentality of greed will be rejected and banned in the same way that a 30 years old adult is being rejected from having sex with a 10 year old child. I am being very serious here. This is how much people have to hate greed in order for society to evolve in the right direction. I am at this stage with my disgust for greed but the vast majority of the population is not because they simply don't get it how influential greed actually is, both the instintual type and the socially constructed one.

@buckfozos5554 Жыл бұрын

@@howtheworldworks3 Well said. I've always equated population growth with a certain kind of greed, esp having more than 2 kids these days. It's not vilified in society but should be. Like you said, we need a collective aversion to greed, and to add another one: lying! I was told as a child not to lie but could have been shown the absolute destructive consequences of doing so, in any context.

@TheReferrer72 Жыл бұрын

@@howtheworldworks3 I think you have it backwards, Greed is the main factor for human development. If it was not for greed most people would just be content with what they have got and stick with the status quo, you know like living in caves! I thought this was well established with in Adam Smith's "The Wealth of Nations". When since can you even equate having more children as greed? Is it not the other way round for most people in developed societies where the middle classes tend to have less children because they want to keep there social status, they should be supported by government to have more children. Having a growing human population could be essential if we are alone in the Universe, and it wants to stay conscious. I mean it takes a huge well educated, material producing economy to drive the technological artifacts we have today.

@howtheworldworks3 Жыл бұрын

@@TheReferrer72 You are wrong. Greed developed humanity that is true but development itself is not a good thing in a certain context. It is the source of more and more problems that keep growing in shere numbers because living creatures can't seem to ever stop growing and harming everything in their way in the process unless there is a hard wall to stop them like the size of the belly, shortages, diseases and so on. Humans keep developing ways to bypass the natural hard stoppers to greed therefore continuously increasing it and the all the suffering that comes with it. You are just ignorant about the fact that overall suffering continuously increased over the years because you may have a biast humna social perspective in witch you either don't have to deal with it or don't know about it or don't care or probably all of the above. What humans should be doing right now in order to get a better and better society is deescalation. Less children, less factory farming, less producing less of pretty much everything but scaling it in such a way that everyone still has enough. That means stopping human beings from being so obsessed with quantity(greed) and focusing everything they have on quality(good development). That's the solution. Greed is, has always been and always will be the biggest problem of all living creatures but most other creatures are still far to stupid to even begin to understand what they are doing. Some human beings have begun to understand what is going on in the world but the vast majority are still far too stupid to even begin to understand so they basically live lives very similar to the other animals even if it's from the confines of massive web of lies called the human social fabric. Most people don't give a fk about what is going on outside their immediate surroundings and that is why they end up adding to the ever growing problems. You are no exception to this since you just regurgitate pro human supremacy bullshit that I have heard a million times before and every single time it's wrong. Not false but wrong. It's evil. Humans are selfish evil creatures capable of the highest amounts of suffering inflicted on both other human beings and any other living creature on this planet.

@spikarooni6391 Жыл бұрын

Epic so far

@spikarooni6391 Жыл бұрын

The calibre

@MNbenMN Жыл бұрын

Probably just an audio editing artifact, but wondering if this is actually some easter egg hidden in the podcast. After Delong says that chapters prescribing what's next "...always make the book stale, because a year after it's published those last chapters are clearly w...", it seems to cut out momentarily, and I think I hear Sean saying. "particles" just faintly in the gap around 1:22:39

@MNbenMN Жыл бұрын

Then again, maybe it's just a digital echo of Delong saying "articles"....

@martinpollard8846 Жыл бұрын

Its a Schrödingerian artefact

@JustOneAsbesto Жыл бұрын

1:10:05 Wow. Anyone remember who that was??

@philanderson3565 Жыл бұрын

it seems to me the true key to advancement of society lies in transportation and information propagation. improved economics is just a red herring which is its result

@robertlunn3678 Жыл бұрын

It sure doesn’t seem like we’ve got big brains. Look around.

@KrychaTbg Жыл бұрын

so Brad believes in DeLong 20th country ok

@HakWilliams Жыл бұрын

Look at the graph of fossil fuel use from all history starting in 1850.

@CircularSight Жыл бұрын

The powers that be cannot allow us to Evolve and Unite as a human race, lest they lose their absolute power.

@bryandraughn9830 Жыл бұрын

Many of us are united in that we are decent people who just want to live a decent life, no?

@tuckerbugeater Жыл бұрын

@@bryandraughn9830 You'll unite and then you'll find a scapegoat once you start infighting.

@UnMoored_ Жыл бұрын

In his book, does he dissect in detail the fact that both parents of a typical American family now have to work just to end up in debt, in contrast to a few generations ago when only one parent worked but was able to feed, clothe an provide an opportunity for the children to attend college? A new billionaire is being created everyday but increasingly more people are benefiting less and less from their efforts while a very small number of people are benefiting greatly but are contributing little while well paid lobbyists convince Congress to change laws in their favor.

@tuckerbugeater Жыл бұрын

You can't have depopulation and deconsumption without destroying a few families.

@mmmccomb7322 Жыл бұрын

An enjoyable conversation, but his notion of a 'long 20th century' falls somewhere between useless and nonsense. Yes, periodization is always somewhat arbitrary, but dithering over whether the 20th Century ended in 2003 or 2007 or 2010 is frankly ridiculous: a) it's far too soon to say if any of those dates have any meaningful break between before and after; b) mightn't, you know, the rise of the internet in the mid-90s be a slightly more sensible one?; and c) if your century begins in 1870 and ends in 1995 (or whenever he happened to start a new chapter), and has an age-defining event in the middle, perhaps the 'century' isn't a very good unit for historical analysis.

@MichaelEdelman1954 Жыл бұрын

In the end, all he can give us is that we should again try the non-incentive compatible social welfare programs of the past. I was expecting something deeper and more insightful. Instead, we get silly misrepresentations of exchange economies, and misreading of things like cryptocurrencies as market failures.. Part of this is his partisanship, I suspect. Many countries, like Switzerland, have successful, incentive compatible health care systems. We have ObamaCare.

@sunroad7228 Жыл бұрын

The mainstream narrative is that because of mass fossil fuels production, the world population increased exponentially. The newer thinking (2017) proposes that mass fossil fuels production necessitated the size of population of the world today. And sure enough, 6+ billion tonnes of coal produced annually, 100 million barrels of crude oil daily and atmospheres of natural gas daily - all don't come to the surface to end points of use - on the flying carpet. Carnot's cycle can also recognised when war-torn Iraq never lived a peaceful year since Britain invaded that country in 1914 for its resources, for example. Britain, in contrast, has seen WWI and WW II, both that some historians say - they were actually easily avoidable. The Energy Musical Chairs Game - might have been ongoing now for a century - unnoticed (ask Iraqis about it) The Tragedy of the Commons Finally Quantified: In any system of energy, Control is what consumes energy the most. No energy store holds enough energy to extract an amount of energy equal to the total energy it stores. No system of energy can produce sum useful energy in excess of the total energy put into constructing it. This universal truth applies to all systems. Energy, like time, flows from past to future. Wailing. kzfaq.info/get/bejne/q6lzp6d-17i-lGQ.html

@appercumstock3017 Жыл бұрын

A seldom heard correct view about this turbo economics/stockmarket crap.

@MrPiha Жыл бұрын

out with dogs, rolling in shit

@posthocprior Жыл бұрын

Sean irritatingly stopped Brad’s monologue with his observations and occasional question.

@joshua3171 Жыл бұрын

Picture of bull asked "ba" and see the whites of the eyes allows as a direction to where to look, communication, some don't like showung the eyes for a hide the food sorce

@joshua3171 Жыл бұрын

Didn't want to do democracies in a way that benafited everyone 5 seconds I am being rather judgmental

@joshua3171 Жыл бұрын

Of topic but what if gobekli tepe was an elaborate a deer(anamial) trap, that over turned into a settlement

@joshua3171 Жыл бұрын

How many broke people can afford to dress up at comic con