Memory / Book Review

Brad DeLong’s Long March Through the 20th Century

A sweeping new history chronicles a century of unprecedented economic progress driven by markets and innovation.

by Thomas Strand via Jacobin on December 15, 2024

Book

Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century

J. Bradford DeLong

2022

...or petulantly refusing to give capitalism its due. The twentieth century, DeLong tells us in Slouching Towards Utopia, “is fundamentally economic in its significance” and elucidating this requires reframing the era as the “Long Twentieth Century,” which he periodizes as 1870 to 2010.

DeLong’s grand narrative of modern global economic history consists of three great watersheds: the Imperial-Commercial Revolution (circa 1500), the Industrial Revolution (circa 1770), and the “post-1870 innovation growth acceleration.” It is estimated that the population of the world increased over fivefold between 1870 and 2010, from 1.3 billion to 6.8 billion, while global GDP increased by a factor of forty-five. This works out to an 8.5-fold increase in global GDP per capita.

A crude inference from this exercise is that humanity was living 8.5 times better at the end of the Long Twentieth Century than at the beginning — but this conclusion requires many caveats. GDP does not count labor performed in the household or community when the end products are not sold on the market. As a result, the substitution of market goods and services for nonmarket activities — a fundamental part of economic development —registers as a pure, rather than net, increase in GDP. Furthermore, the practices and institutions for recording market activities and producing complete GDP estimates have improved over time (but are still far from perfect).

On the other hand, GDP growth can understate welfare improvement when the quality of particular types of goods and services has increased without a corresponding increase in real price. What’s more, new types of products have emerged to fulfill historically novel wants and needs. Finally, GDP per capita is an average and does not account for distributional inequalities. The gains of the Long Twentieth Century were unevenly distributed both within and between countries. DeLong implores his readers to “never forget that the riches were vastly more unequally distributed around the globe in 2010 than they were in 1870.”

“Inventing Invention”

Questions about how to define and estimate economic well-being, both today and over the longue durée, are fundamental to DeLong’s argument about the historical exceptionality of the Long Twentieth Century. He claims this era “unlocked the gate that had previously kept humanity in dire poverty.” While these questions are understandably not a major focus in a book of such broad scope aimed at a general audience, a nod to the long-standing debates about poverty measurement would have been fitting. Regardless, something clearly started or escalated in the late 1800s to produce this explosion in economic productivity. But what? DeLong provides a three-part answer: “full globalization, the industrial research laboratory, and the modern corporation.”

DeLong compellingly describes the massive migrations of people in the period from 1870 to 1914, interweaving individual stories with broad trends. He traces the deglobalization of the period Hobsbawm termed the Age of Catastrophe (1914 to 1945), the postwar reglobalization, and the hyperglobalization of the late 1900s, facilitated by the rise of the shipping container and the revolution in information technology.