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

0:00:00.2 Sean Carroll: Hello, everyone, welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll.

0:00:04.1 SC: Whenever we talk about history in the grand sense of things, whether it's formally as historians, professionals or even just informally, it's very convenient to refer to a century, right? Like, what was happening in the 18th century or the 3rd century or the 5th century BC, or whatever it is. But of course, that's a little arbitrary, right? I mean, it just so happens that they're 100-year spans, it just so happens that we picked a starting point, they're not naturally breaking points there all the time, but we still have a feeling about the 17th century versus the 20th century, for example. So, the professionals will sometimes talk about a short century or a long century when they try to pinpoint the actual transition moments where things break up and you can sensibly talk about themes within this period of time.

0:00:54.6 SC: So today's guest, Brad DeLong, is a very well-known successful economist and someone who thinks in a very polymathic way about history, science, technology, economics, politics, all those things at once. He's proposing that we think about the long 20th century, that begins in 1870 and ends in 2010. Now, he knows that's not a century, but he thinks it's a useful unit of analysis, and he claims that the long 20th century is the first one in which economics is the most important way of thinking about the world. Well, you know, he's an economist, what do we expect?

0:01:34.9 SC: So that's going to be one of the questions that we're going to ask Brad, why is it economics? But roughly speaking, in 1870, he claims, a bunch of things happened at once: Globalization, corporations in the modern sense, also research labs, a sort of formalization of scientific and technological research, which really start to change how the world is organized. And a bunch of things happened that are kind of chaotic, you know, there's world wars, there is the Great Depression, and then maybe you can kinda see a battle shaping up post-World War II between what you might simplistically call free market capitalism and social democracy.

0:02:14.1 SC: And in fact, to make things a little bit more colorful and nuanced, Brad focuses on two individual people, Friedrich von Hayek, a champion of free markets and libertarian economics, and Karl Polanyi as a representative of social democrats. So, Brad is not counting real full-fledged USSR-style communism as really being a competitor. Obviously, it was a competitor politically, but it just didn't work very well economically. Going into the end of the 20th century, you know, what were the options that were on the table there? And the way that he spells it out, there was a moment in the years, days after World War II, when you might imagine social democracy kind of winning.

0:02:58.5 SC: There were heavy taxes on wealthy people, a social welfare net, a safety net was being assembled, both in Europe and the United States, and then it kinda stopped [chuckle] being assembled. You know, it didn't cure inequality, by the way, there were still plenty of problems even in those years, but then there was a shift, circa 1980 with Reagan and Thatcher, etcetera, towards more free markets, lower taxes, less of a social safety net.

0:03:23.5 SC: And Brad draws the ending point of the long 20th century at 2010 as sort of the time when we realized like, No, this is just not working, right? We're beginning to have financial crises, things are kind of breaking down, we've got do better than that, people are being burdened by debts. But the interesting frame that he uses for this is that things have gotten a lot better in some very, very manifest ways in the 20th century, while at the same time, things were really, really terrible in some very, very manifest ways in the 20th century, and he wants to emphasize we can't ignore either one of those.

0:04:00.7 SC: So his new book that he's just come out with, a very long, very magisterial book called Slouching Towards Utopia, the idea being that in some ways you might have imagined we could realistically aim for something utopian given the technological and intellectual advances of the long 20th century. And some people did aim for that, but we have clearly fallen well short. Why is that? Why was utopia possible? Why did good things happen about median wealth, life expectancy, things like that? Why did such terrible things happen? There's probably more there than can fit in an hour-long podcast, but at least we'll give you a little sketch of the broad scope of things.

0:04:40.5 SC: So occasional reminder for those of you who are fans of Mindscape, we have a Patreon that you can join at patreon.com/seanmcarroll. Patreon supporters get ad-free versions of the podcast, as well as the privilege of asking Ask Me Anything questions once a month. So, feel free to join, throw in a dollar per episode or whatever you feel like doing, and whether or not you do that, we'd love to have you here as members of the Mindscape community. So with that, let's go.

[music]

0:05:22.2 SC: Brad DeLong, welcome to the Mindscape podcast.

0:05:25.9 Brad DeLong: It is fabulous to be here. I've listened to about 30 of the Mindscape podcasts, usually while out with the dogs. And it's been a very good thing for me to do, except at those times when my situational awareness needs to be focused on a dog that has found something too interesting and instead I'm focused on you and what you're saying.

0:05:48.5 SC: One of the nicest compliments I was ever given was that someone said that mine was the only podcast where they didn't listen to it at two times speed, they had to listen to it at regular speed, so.

0:06:00.1 BD: Oh. [chuckle] I see, okay.

0:06:00.9 SC: Something to aim for. What was your favorite episode so far?

0:06:05.7 BD: Oh, you would put me on the spot. I confess it was the Krebs Cycle.

0:06:10.7 SC: Yeah, that was a classic, sure.

0:06:12.0 BD: It was Powering Biology. It was Nick Lane. That was really neat and really absolutely fabulous. Absolutely fabulous to see, and I was very happy to listen to that one.

0:06:25.2 SC: Good, very good. Anyway, I did not want to put you on the spot, you have... You have written a large, impressive book that we need to do a...

0:06:32.0 BD: I have.

0:06:32.7 SC: To do injustice to... And the first thing I want to say, and I don't think I've ever said this before to an author on the podcast, but congratulations for getting the book out.

0:06:44.5 BD: Thank you.

0:06:44.6 SC: I was doing a little bit of preparation for our chat, and I came across a column in which Paul Krugman referred to your "already classic though not yet complete book."

0:06:56.9 BD: Yes, yes, yes.

0:06:58.3 SC: And this column was published in June 2000.

0:07:04.5 BD: Yes, okay.

0:07:06.5 SC: So you've been working for a while.

0:07:06.6 BD: Well, at that moment, then, there was only a draft of the first chapter.

0:07:11.8 SC: Already a classic.

0:07:13.5 BD: That is back in the 1990s. Yep, back in the 1990s, I decided that someone really ought to write an economic history of the world, but one that started not with... Not with pushing pieces of flint against each other to get sharp edges, or with the Industrial Revolution, because in some degree, those really did not matter that much. Up until 1870, you see, technology advanced, human technology advanced slowly, and we kind of learned to do more stuff. The problem was that technology was advancing slowly, and also that in nearly all human societies, if you're a woman, and to a lesser degree, if you're a man too, the only way you have any social power in your old age is if you have surviving sons.

0:08:16.6 BD: And if population growth is slow, which it must be if technological progress is slow, then about a third of women won't have surviving sons, and those produce irresistible Malthusian pressures to keep trying to have kids in the hope that one of the sons will survive. And until you get over the hump, technology advances, but population advances as well, and so you have people with better technology across the centuries farming smaller and smaller plots, so that it really looks like the worldwide standard of living in 1870 was not that different from what it was in minus 6000.

0:09:00.3 BD: Much, much better technologies on the one hand, but much, much smaller average farm sizes on the other. Thus up until 1870, very little changed from this extremely broad perspective, and yet after 1870, everything has changed, and that was the important thing to make, to mark out when you write an economic history of the world.

0:09:25.6 SC: Well, yeah, the year 1870, we're going to have to get into, you make a very clear claim that that was the watershed moment as opposed to other ones that people have chosen, but let me even be more backgroundy than that and ask about the decision to write a history, an economic history, right. I mean, as you are also very clear about, to condense over 100 years of human activity into even a long book is quite an active condensation, you need a grand narrative to pretend to pull it together. What are the pros and cons of trying to impose a framework, even as nuanced as it might be, on such a grandiose set of things?

0:10:14.3 BD: They're absolutely, totally horrible. You know what it is to write a book. In fact, you've written a lot of books and they're all, as best as I can see, very, very good books.

0:10:29.0 SC: Thank you.

0:10:30.0 BD: And as opposed to an article, which simply has to have a point and make an argument and report a result, and for whom almost all the readers will be people who you can arrest at the start by telling them the point or the result, and then you simply make the argument, and after 10 or 15 pages, you're essentially done and then you clean up afterwards with all the loose ends and so forth. You have a message and you say that message and boom, that's it.

0:11:06.2 SC: With a book, you have to grab someone's attention and keep it when it's not clear what the ultimate end of it will be. Which means there has to be something interesting on every page, and then there has to be a reason to make people turn the page. There has to be a sense of narrative flow and what happens next, which is, in my experience, much harder in non-fiction than fiction, at least many fewer non-fiction writers manage to do that to me then fiction writers. And then there is perhaps the hardest thing of all, that as people accumulate these facts and turn the pages forward, they have to feel they're constructing some kind of web or structure of knowledge.

0:11:57.5 BD: Everything has to make sense. Things have to fit together. It can't just be eight different points, all of which are clever, which I've put into this book, which by the way, I think is the one thing wrong with Will MacAskill's excellent What We Owe The Future, which you were talking to someone about recently. So arresting facts or anecdotes, narrative pull, and then a grand narrative to guide the structure, which is going to be false, but which you have to have in order to make the book work. It seems to me the difficulty of the problem goes up at least with the square of the number of pages.

0:12:43.4 SC: And your number of pages is pretty dense.

0:12:48.4 BD: And so yes, an awful lot of work, which I think is the main reason that having written a first chapter back in 1998, and sent it around saying, "Should I write this?" the thing does not come out until 24 years later.

0:13:03.5 SC: Well, and one of the... Again, you're very clear about what it is you're claiming and why it is interesting and different, you're not hiding your assumptions in any way, and you talk about the long 20th century. So you begin in 1870, you end in 2010. The beginning and ends of the century don't always line up with historical development, so that's a fun thing to do, but I guess the first obvious substantive question is, if you asked a person on the street what was the 20th century about, to the extent that it was about anything, I bet a lot of people would say the wars, the world wars, the Cold War, a lot of people might say political systems, democracy, communism, fascism, some people might say science and technology, cars, planes, computers, the internet, and you're making the substantive claim, no, it's actually about economics. So, explain that.

0:14:07.2 BD: Well, let's say science and technology play an infinite amount, have an infinite an amount to do with it, but I'm looking back at the years, say, since minus 6000, and I'm looking back at the fact that the standard of living of, say, Thomas Jefferson's slaves in 1800 does not look that much different than the standard of living of Marcus Tullius Cicero's slaves in the year minus 50. And I'm constructing an extremely crude index of human technological competence over the ages, in which it's just a take on what we think average living standards were at any point at the time worldwide, and we multiply that by the square root of population, and that gives us a nice index of our ability collectively to manipulate nature and to organize ourselves productively.

0:15:03.0 BD: And you look at those three things, and 1870 stands out like a sore thumb as what you would call a phase transition, the point where things change and where whatever history was beforehand, it looks very different afterwards.

0:15:20.7 SC: But sort of systematically, I could imagine attributing that change purely to science and technology, or purely to political progress or degradation, but is it an economic systems change or an economic attitude, or is it just that you are...

0:15:37.8 BD: You have to say it's all... You have to say it's all of those.

0:15:41.3 SC: It's all of those, okay.

0:15:44.1 BD: That you have to have a certain sense of scale, enough people talking to each other, so that people with different ideas can communicate and effectively bounce them off of each other, and enough of a system of memory. You need to have a habit of empirical investigation and a way of keeping track of things, and almost surely the assigning of ruthless priority to successful experiment, as opposed to saying that the ideas we're going to claim as true or think about are those that make us happy with our current social order and cement it, say. That the move to experiment is absolutely massive and important.

0:16:29.6 BD: You need to have, let's say, you almost surely need to have a market economy of some sort, because that's pretty much the only way to crowdsource the problem of figuring out what to produce and how to produce it better. That is, try anything other than a market economy and decision-making is concentrated somewhere, and it's concentrated somewhere where the knowledge probably isn't, and you also are not turning every single human brain to thinking, "My life could be better if I could figure out a better way to do this."

0:17:07.0 BD: But all of this up until 1870 or so, all of this gets you is a rate of technological progress of less than half a percent per year, rising substantially over time. It's not a half a percent per year before 1500, it's more like one twentieth of a percent per year, and then it accelerates, but even if your technologies are getting better at half a percent per year, that kind of gets neutralized if population is growing at 1% per year. And we know that a pre-industrial, no artificial birth control human population that's not nutritionally stressed, that such a thing quadruples in a century; it grows at maybe 1.4-1.5% per year.

0:18:07.3 BD: Half a percent per year of technological progress is not enough to get from out from under the hammer of patriarchy and the requirement that you have surviving sons in order not to be burned as a witch in your old age. And so you're kind of trapped in this, you're in the Malthusian trap, even up to 1870, even with all the wonderful things of automatic textile machinery and steam engines and coal and better metallurgy and so forth. It's in 1870 that things switch, that technological progress more than quadruples again, that you get technology growth rates of 2.1% per year, more or less constantly from 1870 to 2010, as opposed to less than half.

0:18:56.2 BD: And I think this happens because we finally get the last pieces of the institutional configuration to fall into place, the industrial research lab to rationalize and routinize discovery and development, the modern corporation to rationalize and routinize some development and deployment, and then the fully global market economy to make it extremely profitable to deploy, but then also to give everyone else a chance to look at you and figure out how to copy what you've done, and so diffuse the science and technology that are at the core of it all over the world, so that today we have a world massively richer than anyone before.

0:19:40.9 SC: So it's those three things, just to repeat, just to drive it home, since this is so important to the argument, three things roughly coincided circa 1870: The corporation, the industrial research lab, globalization. Is there... Just saying those things out loud makes me want to ask why did they suddenly coalesce around 1870? Were there some underlying things, or is it just they finally percolated up? So you're not giving credit to the Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, there's some... There's some credit there, but they mature around 1870.

0:20:17.4 BD: Those are all important, those are all back there. But at least you can argue that those just give you steampunk work. Those still give you a world in which the population is growing at maybe 1% per year or less, and technology is advancing, but better technology, but smaller farm sizes with a growing population, and it's very hard to get agricultural productivity up. You know that in the Industrial Revolution century, you were sending people 10,000 miles away with pick-axes in order to knock bird shit off of rocks in the South Atlantic and then move it back to England so you can't have farm enough... You can add enough nitrogen to get the farm... Keep the farms going, to keep the population from starving.

0:21:11.5 BD: The steampunk world's not a terribly attractive one, it's one in which most people are still at dire poverty at what the World Bank says as $3 a day or less still. And that's the world we're in, even with the Royal Society and trust nothing but experiment and the Enlightenment, and marvelous machines and so forth. Why in 1870? Well, there is a great discontinuity in getting the telegraph, and as important, the submarine telegraph, which is a really, really hard technological problem to solve, and also these screw-propellered iron hulled steamships, things that mean that it's a lot cheaper to ship wheat by railroad from North Dakota to New York, and then by steamship from North Dakota to Hamburg than it is to carry rye from swamps in East Prussia to the local river and then down the river on the barge and then so forth.

0:22:24.9 BD: That all of a sudden getting your staple commodities from anywhere in the world is a real important thing that one might analogize to a phase change, and that just kinda happens from cumulative technological advance. The industrial research lab and the corporation: A lot of the corporation is owed to the US Civil War and finally having to figure out how to assemble a 2.1 million man army and send it some place. And as for the industrial research lab, well, rationalizing and routinizing things, very hard to know where it came from, quite possible we would not have gotten it. But before the industrial research lab, if you're an inventor, you also have to do everything else: Scientist, engineer, machines, technician, financier, impresario, pitch man.

0:23:38.2 BD: And so it's very, very difficult to get crazy people who are very good at science and invention to be able to specialize. My favorite example is Nikola Tesla, who genuinely could make electromagnetic fields get up and dance in his day in a way that... I mean, you can say it was all in Maxwell's equations. In fact, you can say that all of special relativity is in Maxwell's equations. Nobody noticed it for 50 years. But no one understood how crazy the idea of, say, long-distance distributing alternating current high power could possibly be until Tesla, and he pushed that through, but the only way he pushed that through was because George Westinghouse found him and surrounded him with an industrial research lab, because otherwise he was totally socially inept and incapable of carrying through on anything.

0:24:46.1 BD: And it is absolutely crazy. I'm going to transfer energy from one place to another, not by sending electrons with energy, but by just shaking them 60 times a second?

0:25:00.9 SC: Yes, no, I struggled with it myself, as a youth, but... But so in some sense it's an efficiency revolution rather than some particular big idea. We had all these little ideas about science and technology and so forth, but globalization and research and corporate organization helped us take advantage of them and therefore increase the rate of economic growth.

0:25:23.9 BD: And massively increased the scale. Critical mass is the other good analogy, perhaps, that instead of someone inventing something and that invention then kind of diffusing and being perfected or at least improved starting with 1870, and indeed it's called the Second Industrial Revolution and indeed Robert Gordon wrote a wonderful book about it. It's kind of boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom in sector after sector, technology after technology, thing after thing. And then, I could have written a lot of books with 1870. I could have concentrated on science and technology, I could have concentrated on technology and corporate form, I could have concentrated on corporate forms and industrial structure and industrial succession, I could have concentrated on how wealth and mass literacy and mass communication led to people like Karl Popper and so forth, hoping for an open society.

0:26:30.8 BD: I wound up concentrating on political economy. That is, if technology's advancing so far that your entire economy is revolutionized every single generation, and thus all of the society and politics and culture built on top of that found their foundations totally different after one generation than they were before. And people have to try to rebuild social and economic institutions so that they can cooperate and govern themselves on the fly. That's a hell of a ride. That's a very difficult process that has many things, both wonderful and terrible happening at [0:27:09.0] ____ it.

0:27:12.1 BD: And so I wound up having to pick one thing, having to pick one grand narrative, choosing the political economy one. Not so much the details of how this enormous pace of technological advance happened, but with it happening in the background, how did human societies and politics react. And how did we manage to both become rich and also kill a 100 million of our fellows.

0:27:36.7 SC: This is a good question.

0:27:37.0 BD: And of course in the 20th century.

0:27:40.6 SC: And I do want to get to the 20th century, but the other thing, I think to emphasize that you do very effectively is, how poor we were before 1870. Not just sort of average income, but especially, you correctly emphasize child mortality and the danger of just giving birth. It was a different world before 1870.

0:28:01.6 BD: Yes. Oh, yeah, like British Queens of England, between William the Conqueror and Queen Victoria. By my count, one in seven of the Queens of England die in childbirth. And these are the most cosseted women in the... In all of southern England. Being female is not for sissies.

[laughter]

0:28:27.2 BD: Back in the... Before modern medicine, modern technology. And we can argue about whether that's because as a species we're really, really kludgy as far as childbirth for lots of reasons connected with our big brain-ness and other things, or whether we can argue that it's just that after we invent agriculture, the agrarian societies are really horrible places. That average adult male height dropping from 5'8 to 5'3 or so, when we move from being hunter-gatherers to farmers. Our teeth getting infinitely worse, enormous additional... Plus the fact that a population that ought to be growing at 1.5% per year under pre-industrial conditions, if you're not nutritionally stressed, is instead growing before 1500 at only one-twentieth a percent per year. And it's not because other animals are eating us, except for the microorganisms, the micro-parasites.

0:29:41.9 BD: It's because we have... We are either imposing enormous social pressure on people to delay the age of marriage well into the late 20s, which is happening in some societies, or it's because our population has grown and our farm sizes relative to technology are so small, that women are so malnourished that ovulation is becoming hit or miss, and children are so malnourished that their immune systems are highly compromised and they're being carried off by the common cold. That the world in which a woman has to have eight pregnancies for six live births for three children to survive to the age of six and then for two to actually reproduce and, even then, one third of women are left without surviving sons. Watching that many of your babies die and watching them be that hungry, that they're 5'3 rather than 5'8 at their adult height, that has to be a life with enormous amounts of misery and unhappiness that you wish you could avoid built into it at its core.

0:30:57.6 SC: Good. So agrarian societies were bad, and not only bad compared to what came after them, but also compared to what came before in many ways, which is fascinating to me, it's a self-imposed kind of suffering, right?

0:31:11.6 BD: In many ways, in many ways, yes. You do see... Certainly, skeletons we dig up before the Agricultural Revolution are bigger and a lot buffer than the skeletons of your typical peasant or your typical agrarian-age person, unless there's someone extremely lucky, like the inhabits of San Francisco Bay who found that little to eat other than shellfish.

[laughter]

0:31:37.6 BD: Or say the Comanche or the Sioux after the horse escapes from the Spaniards, who can actually have a strong technological advantage as they hunt and gather the buffalo.

0:31:48.3 SC: And also apparently hunter-gatherers have a lot more leisure time than agrarian workers do.

0:31:55.6 BD: They might do, although there is the question of... There's the question of what leisure time for an animal really is.

0:32:06.3 SC: Sure, fair enough.

0:32:06.4 BD: That is, I have two dogs. They love to run about, they sleep a lot. We're trying to [0:32:13.7] ____ the labrador retriever from blowing up to become a spherical dog of radius R, which means [0:32:22.3] ____ doesn't get to eat nearly as much as she would want to. And so clearly the energy budget constrains them in a bunch of ways, that lots of their daily sleeping time is not really leisure, but is recovering from trying to figure out how to climb a tree to eat a squirrel, which the older one is still trying to do. He's seen squirrels can climb trees, why can't I?

0:32:51.5 SC: Optimism, it's great.

0:32:54.8 BD: Good question. We're different, that if you think of people or animals that are in some sense near the edge of their energy budget, a lot of the leisure is downtime, but we have these big brains and yes, they're enormously energy-intensive, but still, at least some of the time, they keep functioning during what is what you would think of as biomedical, low energy expenditure downtime. And we think about lots and lots of things, except less of course, when we've simply exhausted ourselves and are too tired to think productively.

0:33:41.6 SC: So it sounds like there's a whole another book here, but I do want to... I do want to get to the 20th century.

0:33:47.0 BD: There are many, there are many other books here, there are many ones, yes.

0:33:50.7 SC: So in 1870, things happen, things come together, this is often a feature of phase transitions that they actually happen sometimes after the initial wheels were put into motion. And of course, there's going to be a lot of people who maybe say look, sure, economic growth and technological innovation skyrocket, they finally outpace population growth, but what we get in the 20th century is hundreds of millions of murders and deaths, and we also get vast inequality, so... I mean, you have a...

0:34:26.4 BD: We do, we do.

0:34:26.5 SC: We'll get into the nuances, but what is your grand narrative of the 20th century?

0:34:29.8 BD: I mean, look, you go and look at this book, Tommaso [0:34:33.7] ____, this book, The City of the Sun, or Francis Bacon's work around 1600. For the first time, people are saying, "Hey, wow, wait a minute, we have better technology now, clearly and visibly, than we had a century ago." A thing that people haven't noticed beforehand, because it hadn't really been true, and you know, Francis Bacon talks about enlarging the human empire for the effecting of all things possible, and people begin to think maybe there'll be a good technology in which we are much more capable of doing things as a species in the future, and people then turn around and reflect on that.

0:35:18.7 BD: And the dominant reflection, this goes back into Aristotle, is that in a poor society, everybody can't have enough, and if you and your family are going to have enough, given how low average productivity is, the way you're going to do that is to become part of an elite that actually lives well by taking a lot of stuff away from others, by an exploitation and domination machine. You have thugs with spears, you have their tame accountants, their tame propagandists, their tame bureaucrats. The propagandists explain why all of this is actually the way things have to be and is good, the accountants and the bureaucrats keep track of where the stuff is to make sure you get your large share. The bureaucrats issue commands and say, we'll send the thugs with spears after you if you don't organize things.

0:36:19.8 SC: It does seem familiar, yes.

0:36:21.5 BD: And then most of history is, because it's written by the people who can write, is written by the propagandists, the bureaucrats and the accountants, and presumes that not only is humanity poor, but there's this exploitation and domination machine going on, which means that even the elite spend a lot of time exploiting and dominating each other because that's what they're used to do. And after 1870, the prospect is we can bake a large enough economic pie so that everyone can really have enough, you know, no longer have to see half their babies die, no longer spend much of their time worrying about how hungry they are or how cold they are, or how wet they are.

0:37:08.3 BD: And you know, given that all the requirements that you have this vicious exploitation and domination machine is going away. The story of the Vladimir Lenin in 1916 in Zurich being asked how is it that communism could possibly work, wouldn't people just grab all the stuff? And looking at his lunch partner and saying, I notice you haven't grabbed the sugar bowl, put it in your coat and run off with it yet.

0:37:38.3 BD: From the perspective of 1870 or before, once you solve the problem that baking a big enough pie, you have the problem of slicing it equitably so that people have enough, or at least so that inequality doesn't bind that tightly, and then the problem of utilizing it to live lives in which people are kind of happy, healthy, secure and safe, those would seem to be smaller second order problems because our marvelous technologies would have solved the first order problems. And yet those problems, the problems of slicing and tasting have flummoxed us since 1870. We manifestly do not live in a utopia.

0:38:23.0 BD: We as a species, that is. When I look around at the life of a tenured professor at a research university where I don't have four teaching preparations a semester for eight classes a year, it looks pretty damned utopian to me. But with the exception of people like us, we are manifestly not in anything like a utopia. And so, one big question is, why have we done such a bad job at collectively solving the problems of slicing and pasting, when, with our scientists and engineers, and then with our engineers and corporations, and then with our abilities to organize and our technicians, we have done such an absolutely marvelous job at solving the problem of producing enough.

0:39:15.7 BD: So that now you look at the depths of the production process of a lot of things around us. And you know, it is very hard to believe that people have been... That jumped-up East African plains apes with many problems with their mental heuristics have been able to actually make, say, the M1 Apple silicon micro-processor that Apple designed and that TSMC has managed to manufacture, can actually be something done by humans. To make stone carry electronic charges in such a way that they process information at such a scale is something I still cannot believe this has been created by a bunch of jumped-up monkeys.

0:40:09.0 SC: So to vastly over-simplify, if I can put it this way, the Scientific Revolution, Industrial Revolution, the Enlightenment maybe, let us conceive of utopia in a way that we couldn't before. The efficiency revolution circa 1870 made it plausibly attainable, and the world historical question is, How come we've done such a bad job at actually making it happen.

0:40:34.5 BD: Yeah, yeah. Now, it's not like a horribly bad job, right? Average income per capita in the world today is something like $13,000 a year, while it was maybe $1200 a year back in 1870 and maybe $900 a year back in 1500. And there's the question of... That is, measures of income per capita are kind of measures of how much things cost, but what we'd really like would be measures of how much things are worth to people, adding consumer surplus on top of factor cost.

0:41:15.5 BD: And certainly, when I look at my life, there are an awful lot of goods, mostly related to information and knowledge and entertainment, in which there seems to be an enormous wedge between how much it's worth to me and how much it costs. Like you know, like you. And I read one of your books, I maybe pay $12 for it on the Kindle, of which you get $1.20, and yet I spend maybe three or four hours interacting with it, which means in some sense I read words and then I argue with you, or at least I spin up a sub-Turing instantiation of what I imagine your mind to be from the black marks on the page, run it in the wetware and then in a kind of schizophrenic [0:42:07.7] ____ converse and argue and say, This is wrong, and so forth.

0:42:13.4 BD: And those four hours are worth an awful lot more to me than even a $1.20 or $12. I'd willingly pay $100 or $200 for the experience. And yet this enters the GDP accounts with only $12 of value, and vastly more than the factor cost and vastly more than the $1.20 that you actually get. So from one perspective, I am in a parasocial relationship with you, in which I'm an enormous beneficiary and owe you enormous amounts of stuff in some Indo-European gift exchange.

0:42:58.1 BD: There's that question, and the techno utopians say our GDP statistics are flawed because of the shift to information and entertainment goods, and they may well be right. But even if we don't take account of that, even if we just take what are things worth in terms of how much they cost, average living standards 15 times what they were in the battle of agrarian age, where your boys grew up to be 5'3 and you were hungry a lot of the time. That's a huge accomplishment. That's a wonderful thing. It is a horror and a scandal that we still have 500 million people living at a pre-industrial standard of living in such a rich world, but it ain't utopia.

0:43:46.5 SC: It's not. And for grand narrative purposes, in part, you set up the battle for the soul of the 20th century as one between Friedrich von Hayek and Karl Polanyi, Polanyi, whose name I can never get right. And some people... And that's weird. That's a little provocative right there. People might be thinking, Well, it shouldn't be like Karl Marx and Keynes or Adam Smith or something like that. But you have your reasons, and Polanyi in particular is less well-known on the street, probably than even Hayek is, so what's your reasoning for...

0:44:25.5 BD: He's vastly less well-known.

0:44:27.5 SC: Yeah, exactly. He's even less well-known to me than his brother, Michael.

0:44:30.9 BD: Oh, yeah. Oh, his brother Michael in many... And I actually played with doing Michael rather than Friedrich von Hayek, because Michael Polanyi, with his mercenary and fiduciary institutions and sources of science and so on and so forth is, I think, a broader and much deeper thinker than Hayek, who is just one piece of Polanyi, who is the kind of mercenary institutions, the advantage of the market economy as a crowdsourcing mechanism of a particular way dedicated at creating value, as opposed to Michael, who is that, but is also saying, Oh, and by the way, we have this very different institution called science with its extraordinary ruthless and incredibly cruel assignment of priority, which is a fiduciary institution that produces enormous amounts of knowledge, and so have it be a battle of the brothers.

0:45:24.8 SC: That would have been good. I think...

0:45:27.4 BD: Between Michael Polanyi saying, we need science as a fiduciary institution to generate the knowledge, we need the market economy in order to crowdsource the problems of turning this knowledge to productivity, and then we have a good society. And then his older brother Karl Polanyi saying, Wait, wait, wait. If you have a market economy, what that means is that your only source of social power or influence, your only way to get things accomplished that you want accomplished is if you have wealth. That the only rights that the market economy recognizes are property rights, and the only property rights that are worth anything are those that help in making whatever the rich have a serious jones to have.

0:46:16.0 BD: And Karl Polanyi says that can't be a society, people cannot stand for that, people do not stand for the idea that only those who are lucky enough to be wealthy in any generation, that they are only people who have any influence or power or authority, and that everyone else has to bow and scrape and desperately hope for crumbs. And it's that, it's that... Yeah, but Michael Polanyi is even less well-known in the circumstances than Karl, so I went with Fred.

0:46:47.6 SC: Yeah, so... And Hayek is a pretty well-known guy in the social sciences, has his acolytes, and I think he's a good foil as kind of the apotheosis of free market classical liberalism/capitalism, right, and you do, you criticize him...

0:47:05.6 BD: Especially in the... Except in his old age where he gets really cranky and semi-fascist.

0:47:10.3 SC: You know, who amongst us does not get cranky in different ways?

0:47:14.6 BD: He sees the problem, right? The problem is that we need the market economy and thus the priority of property rights in order to get out of the traps of over-bureaucratization and central planning, and actually get a world in which everyone can have freedom to try to do things for themselves that they like, and with market incentives, that means everyone has a powerful incentive to figure out how to be more productive and thus make things better for all.

0:47:46.3 BD: It's a marvelous way of turning not just the one human brain of the director of planning but every one's brain to figuring out how can we become a more productive and better society. The problem, Hayek says, is that this is unjust and unfair, that in a market economy, you have social power and influence only if you're rich, which means you had to have control of the right resources at the right time in the right place.

0:48:17.5 SC: Sorry, you said Hayek. The problem Hayek says, was that...

0:48:20.8 BD: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And Hayek said, Well, gee, this is a problem, that the market economy will produce wealth and thus abundance, but it will not produce social justice. And so the right answer is to throw social justice over the side, it's a mirage. We do not dare ask for it, because if we ask for society to produce not just the abundance and wealth that a market economy can produce, but if we ask it to produce social justice as well, we'll wind up destroying its ability to produce wealth and we'll be on the road to serfdom.

0:48:57.4 SC: And what years is he saying this?

0:49:00.4 BD: And that's Hayek.

0:49:00.9 SC: What years?

0:49:01.0 BD: Saying it's not great, but it's the best we can do.

0:49:06.4 SC: When is he saying this?

0:49:08.1 BD: I'd say the 1940s and 1950s.

0:49:12.2 SC: Okay.

0:49:13.3 BD: He's saying we understand the attraction of social justice, but it's a temptation we must resist. The places in the road to serfdom where he credits and praises his British Labour Party intellectual adversaries, saying, You're brave people, you're benevolent people, you're kind of bold people, you want only the best for humanity, but it's just not going to work. We have to retreat to the market.

0:49:41.6 SC: Yeah, by this time in the '40s and '50s, sort of the battle lines have already been pretty clearly drawn between capitalism and socialism, right? And he's arguing that... I mean, to greatly over-simplify, whatever... Let's say, let's take inequality as one of the purported evils of capitalism, and Hayek wants to say, Well, you think you're going to battle inequality by having some centralized government control or levers, but that's going to lead you right to authoritarianism, there's no other choice.

0:50:19.8 BD: Yep.

0:50:22.3 SC: And you contrast this with Polanyi, who wants to say the unfettered market is just a little bit inhuman. He really is emphasizing the human side of things in a nice way.

0:50:32.4 BD: Yes. Yes. Well, that Karl... You know, Karl Polanyi is one of these people whose work or whose ideas are great, but you know, his ability to express them is rather lousy.

0:50:49.4 SC: Plenty of those, yeah.

0:50:53.3 BD: But last Monday I was having coffee with a professor friend who read my book and said, after I read your book, I felt I had to go and finally read Polanyi. Horrible, horrible. Absolutely horrible. I don't know if this is people who were originally raised in German writing in English or if it's something else, but it's some more... Certainly, a bunch of people are badly translated from the German, of whom I think Max [0:51:28.8] ____, Max Weber is the most primary of people whose ideas are great, but their books are almost unapproachable. Hyman Minsky was another such, right, that practically everyone knows about Hyman Minsky is actually reading Charlie Kindleberger's version of Hyman Minsky, where Kindleberger takes Minsky's framework and uses it to tell lots of stories about manias, panics, crashes, financial fraud, financial crises and so forth.

0:52:00.1 BD: I mean, I would say that Polanyi's central point is, yes, the market is immensely powerful and productive, but it's not good for humans, that the only source of social power in a society be that the rich are the only people whose words count, and furthermore, people simply will not stand for this, they will revolt in one way or another, that people insist that they have a right to the kind of life that they expect that they were going to live and to a certain amount of stability in their community and in the built environment around them. People insist that they have a right to a level of income which they kind of deserve, given how hard they work, and given how hard they trained in order to it, and people believe that they have a right to stability, that their job be there or if one job ends another one to show up for.

0:53:05.6 BD: And the idea that all three of these things, that the fabric of your life and your environment, your level of income, of command over resources, and indeed the stability that you know where your thousand calories plus essential nutrients are going to come from next year or even next week, that all of these are at risk and at hazard, depending on whether the system that you're embedded in passes some maximum profitability test made by some 30-year-old rootless cosmopolite 5000 miles away who's never seen you. People simply will not stand for this, and it becomes really, really important when technology is revolutionizing the economy every generation, and thus requiring that things change and things change massively simply because the old ways do not work.

0:54:08.0 BD: So the imperatives of the market economy try to reduce everything to property rights, and then try to reorganize everything so as to make the property rights as valuable as possible, and that is the application of science and technology to production, and that makes us rich. But everyone around says, WTF, exclamation point. This is not what we ordered, you know, and people react, and they can react smartly and dumbly, they can establish welfare states, or they can assemble in large crowds in Nuremberg and acclaim the Fuhrer, they can wage wars, they can establish gulags, they can shoot people and send them to concentration camps, they will react.

0:54:56.6 BD: And so you will have this dual fight, during which the market economy attempts to abolish society understood as other sources of social power and influence and voice other than property, and society will respond, will counter by trying to curb the market and also trying to achieve what it thinks of as social justice, in which other forms of social power are validated and in which people kind of get what they deserve. And any society's view of social justice, it may well not be a very just thing. I mean, consider all the people who voted for Donald Trump because they thought that he would properly deal with minorities who had all been gotten things more than they deserved under Obama because of the free Obamaphone program.

0:56:01.3 BD: But you have heartbreaking stories of Hispanic factory workers in Kansas, whose education and training programs are being cut by half, and don't understand why Trump is attacking them rather than attacking the many other people who, as Mitt Romney said in the 2012 election, were always was going to vote for the Democrats because the Democrats gave them free stuff that they didn't deserve, and he was never going to convince such people to take responsibility for their lives.

0:56:41.5 SC: Yeah. So the... I mean, the main dividing line I think that you want to talk about and work through in the book, it's not communism versus capitalism. There was for much of the 20th century a Cold War, and there was this whole part of the world that purported to be communist, and we can argue whether it was or not, but there's the sub-debate within the Western world about more or less free market capitalism versus social democracy. Is it fair to sort of associate Polanyi with the social democracy side of that?

0:57:17.2 BD: Well, I'd say it's social democracy heading over into socialism.

0:57:21.7 SC: Yeah, okay.

0:57:22.6 BD: That, you know... Social democracy is very much we should have a market economy, but we should also have a lot of publicly provided stuff, right, of stuff that's simply not part of the market, everything from parks to civilized countries' healthcare that we simply take out of the market, education, or at least primary and secondary education, those really are things we should provide for everyone by virtue of their status as citizens and residents, rather than requiring that people pay for them, a whole bunch of public provision. And then a whole bunch of income redistribution as well, progressive taxes and kind of benefits provided to [0:58:11.5] ____, and cash benefits, so that even the poor have some social power to get things done.

0:58:18.5 BD: And Polanyi would say, and in fact did say that, yes, this is a good system. You know, is it sustainable? You know, that people have a very strong sense that the kinds of social power people should exercise are those that are appropriate to what they deserve and what their role is. And there seems to be a very strong thing that too much income redistribution is in some sense unfair. That back when I worked for the Clinton administration, we found ourselves always saying that our social insurance programs were for hard-working American families, as opposed to citizenly, citizen entitlements, but somehow saying that people should have things, should have a good life because they were citizens, or at least have social power to accomplish things, you know, dress up like Spock at Comic-Con, even if they weren't working hard. That offended people enormously.

0:59:24.4 SC: Politically incorrect, yeah.

0:59:25.6 BD: Yeah, yeah, although it was strange, that kind of... I've gotten about $30,000 a year extra since birth on average, because my grandfather was very smart and very lucky and employed a bunch of engineers who did a bunch of very good things, including figuring out how to desulfurize natural gas, which is not only very valuable in terms of allowing you to use natural gas without stinking up the place, but also for carbon-hydrogen bonds in the methane molecule and only two in a hydrocarbon chain, that as far as global warming is concerned, natural gas is only half the damage of the longer stuff.

1:00:20.1 BD: And so he became the richest man between Tampa and Orlando for a while as a result of this, and I've gotten about $30,000 a year of resources for me and my family from that. Very few people are as offended by that, or at least very few people on the center and the right are as offended by that. My left-wing friends are truly totally offended, as are offended by one relatively poor guy in Wichita actually getting a cell phone they didn't pay for because George W. Bush pushed through this program about how we ought to democratize cell phone access as the payphones were vanishing, and right-wing nut jobs then decided to call these things Obamaphones.

1:01:12.6 BD: That's an interesting... That's an interesting thing about societal perceptions of social justice. But I've gotten ourselves off on a tangent...

1:01:21.9 SC: You have, that's okay.

1:01:23.9 BD: The main point was that... The main point was that social democracy, the combination of a market economy, public provision, and then a whole bunch of entitlements, even means-tested entitlements for people as citizens, that seemed to fail its sustainability test in the global north, at least, in the 1970s. And you get the rise of Reagan and Thatcher and the shift to a different and more fraught way of thinking how we should organize society, which historian Gary Gerstle calls the neoliberal order, with which we're still grappling, and which is... Just even if social democracy failed to satisfy people's beliefs about what a utopia should be like, neoliberalism seems to satisfy people's beliefs even less well.

1:02:16.9 SC: Let's give the... As you say, there was this reaction against the maybe feeling that social democracy was effective in winning in the decades after World War II, in the '70s and '80s, and Hayek was one of the people who kept getting referred to. There is an argument to be made there, even if we disagree with it, there was an argument, you talk about Ronald Coase in your book and how he would argue that even if you think something unfair is happening, it's just because the market isn't as leaned into as it should be, like if you really let the market do everything, then any unfairness can be purchased and that's good.

1:03:01.7 BD: Yes, yes, yes, yes.

1:03:04.7 SC: So in part, I want to say that that's famous because of...

1:03:08.5 BD: In some sense, this is a University of Chicago intellectual move, where it looks like the market is failing, it's actually succeeding if you look deeply enough at it. And this is counterposed to the Berkeley intellectual move, that even if you think the market is succeeding, if you look deeply at it enough, it's failing in some more subtle way.

1:03:29.0 SC: And why does that... I think that that's obviously wrong and in part because of both computational and communicational and power exertion inefficiencies in human beings. It's easier to abuse individual poor people than it is to have a completely efficient market. Is that your favorite explanation for why that fails or do you have a different one?

1:03:55.9 BD: I think that's a very good one. That is that, you see this I think most in finance, that is... It's very easy to explain why, say, I and the people at Phil's Coffee half a miles away are in a mutually productive gift exchange relationship that makes both of us much better off. That is, they have good coffee. I have money, which is generalized social power that could do good things, that can do things. The marginal value of my money, or at least the last [1:04:37.5] ____ of it, is a lot less than my marginal value of a good cup of coffee early in the morning. I benefit enormously from being able to go down to Phil's and get them to give me some coffee in exchange for money, and in return, they have coffee, they have huge amounts of coffee.

1:04:56.6 BD: If they were to take the coffee that they have and actually try to drink it in a day, their livers could not cope and they would die. So we have a clear win-win exchange where I'm exchanging money for something I find extremely useful, or am at least addicted to, because people like Michael Pollan would say I really should live without this stuff. It's a nerve poison for bugs, after all, why are you drinking it? The problem is when you go into finance, what you're doing is, it's money now versus money later, it's money in this state of the world being, as opposed to money in that state of the world.

1:05:41.5 BD: It's maybe we rearrange these money flows a bit, because that way we'd better align our incentives to be careful, but it's not that we're trading good for good or money for good, it's we're trading money for money, and so whatever actual value created there, me valuing money later more and money now less and then valuing money now more and money later less, those are very, very thin, which means that there are in general two ways to make money in finance. One of which is to actually find one of these margins where there is a win-win exchange, because the money at different times and states of the world is actually worth different amounts to different people. And the other is to find someone who doesn't understand the risks you're asking them to bear and load the risks off on them.

[laughter]

1:06:42.0 BD: And we see this in finance over and over and over again, which is one thing that makes it so enormously attention-grabbing. We're seeing this right now with the great crypto meltdown. It's lots of places where the market is manifestly working enormously horribly and lots of people are taking on risks they do not understand and getting cheated out of enormous amounts of social power, and lots of people who actually are somewhat malevolent psychopaths, or at least grifters who have managed to convince themselves that they're not grifters, who have run a grift not just on their customers, but on themselves, are winding up with fabulous amounts of social power that they then can use to control things off into the future.

1:07:36.1 BD: And the great crypto boom and meltdown is not anyone's idea of what anything like a utopia should look like. And you can say that this is the complete efflorescence of how a market economy is actually not that good in aligning our collective actions with what a good society would achieve. But then once you admit that, you then have to kind of generalize and move on down and saying how important and powerful are other market failures and all the other parts of the economy as well. And so the hard position that the market giveth, the market taketh away, blessed be the name of the market.

1:08:25.9 BD: Hayek would say that we have to go there because bureaucracies are worse, because market and bureaucracy are the only things we really know how to do, and as long as we can say the market giveth, the market taketh away, blessed be the name of the market, we avoid the temptation to reach for social justice via bureaucracy, which is in the end going to send us on the road to serfdom. So it's in some sense a noble lie in platonic, it's not something we believe that's true, but it's something we need to believe to have as good as a society as we can.

1:09:04.2 SC: Why did you pick 2010 as the end of the long 20th century? What happened then that was equivalent to 1870?

1:09:12.4 BD: We had a huge argument about this.

[chuckle]

1:09:20.9 BD: One possibility was to say that a key part of the kind of thing was not just corporation, research lab and globalization, but American exceptional. The United States as what Leon Trotsky called the furnace where the future was being forged, the place that was leading the world into the future and hoping to find the road to utopia in the 20th century. And that kind of came to an end in 2003 when George W. Bush threw over the United Nations project, then even the NATO project, and said that the United States is not the benevolent hegemon trying to guide the world to do a peaceful future, but that we're going to assemble the pieces of, a coalition of the willing. And in the words of one Bush administration official, pick up some shitty country and throw it against the wall.

1:10:15.7 BD: So you can say that kind of that dropping away of American exceptionalism is a piece of it. You could date it to 2006 when the numbers start going bad on the information technology revolution, and it looks not like a continuation of 2%, three-year growth, but instead technology growth in the global North, at least, appears to have halved, at least according to our conventional measurement, says Intel stopped pickpocketing and, as some people say, the neoliberal dismantling of the great corporate research laboratories in the interests of pursuing short-term profits did a huge number on all of your colleagues in the applied physics...

1:11:04.3 SC: I know that one, yes.

1:11:04.3 BD: And applied chemistry as fields, they're... What was supposed to be a huge number of effectively tenure-track jobs in all kinds of research labs kind of vanished, and so all of a sudden getting jobs like yours became a lot, lot harder. So that the best physicists I know after assistant professorships, and so that Wellesley and Princeton wind up going either into finance or into game design for wizards of the Coast, and so forth, which you know, are wonderful things to do, or can be wonderful things to do, but you really do not need a physics PhD in order to do them.

1:11:52.8 SC: It is a potential example of the market failure, yeah.

1:11:56.2 BD: We could call it 2007, when it became very clear that Alan Greenspan's bet that the Federal Reserve could kind of handle any financial weirdness that have emerged and that we did need more experimentation in financial vehicles, because the old ones weren't doing that great a job, turned out to be a huge mistake. It could be 2010, when the world decided that... That in some sense, the Keynesian idea that you prioritize full employment whenever something goes wrong with the economy, that that was massively rejected by a bunch of people, largely for, I think, the ideological reason that they had convinced themselves that once you allow that Keynes is right, then you really can't believe that the market distribution of wealth is a good thing. And so we had this lost half decade from 2010 to 2015, when at least the great and good were very happy because stock prices were high and inflation was low, never mind the fact that unemployment was high and no real person dared ask for a raise.

1:13:09.0 BD: Or you could take 2016, when all of this came due with the rise of what people tend to call populism, but which Madeleine Albright called a renewed fascism, and who am I to argue with her, managed to actually win a presidential election in the United States of America. In the end, I rejected 2016 because I see Donald Trump as a symptom rather than a cause, that it would be saying the popping the appearance of a boil rather than... Or of the bubo rather than getting bitten by the flea as kind of catching the... If you catch the bubonic plague. Rejected 2003, because although American exceptionalism was an important part of it, I didn't think it was a primary part of it.

1:14:13.2 BD: And in 2010, and the failure to prioritize full employment seems to me to be a good point in the middle to balance. Plus, plus, plus, since 2010 we have... We not only no longer have American exceptionalism, that kind of God knows no one in China thinks they have anything to learn from the United States after Trump today. And not only do we have slower technological growth, but we do have the inability of the world to even try to deal with the new major challenge to the humanity of the 21st century, that of global warming. And it seems that around 2010, though, that there still were a bunch of people who were pretending that the El Nino year of 1998 was an anomaly, and that since 1998, there really hadn't been any global warming.

1:15:19.1 BD: After 2010, even the paid shills of the oil companies kind of dropped that argument. And so the story of our increasing wealth and our failure to build a utopia on it seemed to end, and the time in which the history of the world will be largely what does global warming do to us seemed to me to begin.

1:15:46.1 SC: That's fair. Okay. But to be unfair, I know the time is running out, so I'll ask you one last question. What do we do about it? What is the right system? How do we fix all this? How do we pick up our pace of slouching toward utopia, given what we've learned?

1:16:07.2 BD: Well, you know, I'm at bottom, I'm still a semi-unreconstructed social democrat. I think we should try that again, and we should try that again by saying that we're now rich enough that people are generally inventive and ingenious and are good at finding things to do, and if for some number of people finding those things to do does not involve making much money, well, you know, that really isn't a problem. We are a rich and an abundant society, and so what if we have an awful lot more artists and because players than in some sense we need. They'll go on Tiktok and amuse some people, and the fact that there isn't a major money flow associated with this isn't a problem. That the idea that people have to work hard in socially appropriate and respected ways really should be something we start trying to banish from our mental universe.

1:17:19.5 BD: And so have a bunch of public stuff, and have a bunch of income support problems, and recognize that mothers raising small children and people taking care of their aunts and uncles and so forth are actually doing extremely valuable social work for humanity, that in a good world, we all would have baby boomers, that most of our wealth, in fact, indeed all of our wealth is due to things that none of us have ever paid for. None of us pays royalties to the descendants of Ishbaal, who first decided in 1000 BC that you should use a stylized picture of an ox to represent the phoneme "buh," that that's an incredibly valuable thing.

1:18:12.7 BD: James Clerk Maxwell and his predecessors, none of us are paying a royalty to them for understanding how it is that we can actually can start to make electrons dance in a way that is... Look, it's all fabulously extraordinary. If you, as a jumped-up East African plains ape, this idea that there is, that rather than kind of tissues and things you push and pull and can break, that underneath this, there's this incredibly complicated level of microscopic balancing forces that are so extraordinary powerful that if only one thing goes slightly wrong... And you know, that horrible accident in Orinda, California a decade ago, where two people in a bucket truck got within four feet of one of the extremely high voltage lines coming through, and they die, four feet of air is insufficient insulation, given how much energy is flowing through it and flowing totally invisibly without any signs of effect, just because the normal electrical field balance and the fact of neutrality and the macroscopic has been peeled away and the electrons are shaking 60 times a second, that's...

1:19:54.8 BD: As Elizabeth Warren said it, no one became rich by themselves, we all build on top of this enormous structure of knowledge, and we also all rely on this enormous cooperative division of labor by which, you know, the... You know, Adam Smith says, we don't trust to the benevolence of the butcher to sell us meat, instead it's an exchange of money for meat, but in some sense that's wrong, that if the butcher were really self-interested, we come into the shop, he hits us over the head, butchers us and sells us as long pig, takes our money. We have an enormously productive and cooperative division of labor, and we should recognize that. However, however, that's utopian, in an unsuccessful sense. People really, really want people to get what they deserve, in both good and bad senses, and we have to figure out a way in which we can have a peaceful, prosperous and civilized and well-running society, given this enormous human belief, which has all kinds of bad consequences, one of which is now going away 12,000 miles from now, where Vladimir Putin has convinced huge amounts of Russians to try to convince a lot of other people in the world that they are not Ukrainians after all, but rather Russians too.

1:21:37.6 BD: I don't know. That is my... One of the ways I close the book is to refer to John Maynard Keynes back in 1924, when things looked similarly bleak, that is the system that had supported rapid economic growth worldwide between 1870 and 1914 had broken down in World War I, and wasn't being successfully built, and he essentially said, we need to think harder. And so I think I need to think harder. But one advantage of this is that now I get to write a bunch of articles about what ideas I can come up with for this, and I have not included in my book a last chapter on what you need to do next, which... And last chapters are always unconvincing in social science, and they always make the book stale, because the year after it's published, those last chapters are clearly wrong.

1:22:42.4 BD: And so let me dodge your question, let me say have me on in a year to talk about my articles, because it's only by not answering that what are we going to do next question that I have a chance of actually making my book not a kind of ticket-punching exercise or something that's going to win applause at the moment, but actually a useful treasure for all time.

1:23:06.0 SC: As an empirical fact, people who write a book and then say I'm going to follow it up with some articles always end up writing another book. So you might have another book in the future that will give us all the solutions to these questions.

1:23:19.1 BD: Oh, yes. There may well be... There may well be several.

1:23:22.6 SC: That would be great. Okay, Brad DeLong, thanks so much for being on the Mindscape podcast.

1:23:26.4 BD: Thank you. This is an extraordinary pleasure, and let me thank you very much again for doing this. You've been doing this for quite a while now.

1:23:35.2 SC: Four years. Yeah, yeah, it's my way of forcing myself to read all these books, it works.

1:23:42.3 BD: And you know, it's been an extraordinarily successful and value thing, valuable thing for you to do, and yet another way in which I feel kind of one down in our parasocial gift exchanging relationship.

1:23:57.5 SC: We'll talk about eigenvalues of the Hamiltonian at some point, then we'll even it up, okay?

1:24:03.1 BD: Alright, okay.

1:24:03.7 SC: Alright, Brad, thanks. Take care.

1:24:03.7 BD: Alright, thank you very much. Yeah, goodbye.

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