I'm not qualified to say what's BigTime wrong. Like J. Michael wrote, causality of growth seems unclear, but then again, there's only one historical trajectory with a ton of political and circumstantial messiness, so maybe it's not possible to tease out the causal effects of technology, policy, demographics, war, political economic systems, trade & globalization, etc, etc. esp. tracking macro statistics to tell the big story, which aren't fine grained enough.
I will say I'm still wrestling with at least two big things. First, the framing in terms of Hayek-Polanyi is intriguing, but I kept thinking I read (struggled through) Polanyi differently. I'm not sure he was about rights and protective policy-making "regulating the market" (?) in the way you apply to 20th c. America, esp. growth 1940-1980 "social democracy." Polanyi's complaint, as I understood it, was the early or original commodification of land and labor during the "creation" of markets out of local social fabrics, which were ripped apart -- and the aftermath of that, resulting in legislation that curtailed markets. Against Hayek, the question may be less about whether unrestrained or regulated/restrained markets are better, and more about how policy intervention when social impacts are great becomes *inevitable*. It's *always* political economy. A "free market" is an abstraction.
The second thing I keep wrestling with, not just from the book, has to do with "progress" in all its political economic guises, from the Progressive Era (against -- or in bed with -- Gilded Era robber barons), progressivism (as a political movement throughout the 20th c), to the rise of the today's Progress movement and techno-optimism (against, say, degrowthers, environmentalists/climatists, anti-technologists, anti-capitalists, etc.). There are tensions in these similarly named movements as to what constitutes progress in the first place, if it's possible or desirable, and how markets and governments are or aren't (should or shouldn't be) involved. Progress-related questions should be empirical -- to the extent people hold similar values or goals (definitions of progress) -- but maybe because causality isn't clear, we're still reduced to political debate and unfounded philosophical (ideological) confidence in one mechanism or another (markets, government policy, technology, trade, globalization, etc).
What does seem very clear, and comes out crystal clear in the book, is that something unique happened since 1870 even with all the chaos of world wars, great depression, globalization, extreme variations in political economies (liberal democracies, fascism, communism), civil rights, north-south, philosophical arguments, etc. We escaped Malthus (population is even leveling off or in decline!), economic growth has been continual, and the history of the 20th c has to be written as an economic one. No guarantees, we shouldn't take growth for granted given long history, but it's now been so many generations and the dominant factor of human life in our era IS this growth. And that's (mostly) a very good thing.
Yes! Exactly! But it was 600 pages as it was. It really does need to be complemented by Gordon, and Vaclav Smil... Yours, Brad DeLong
I learned a lot from this review, having just almost-finished deLong's book myself. I've put Gordon's book on my list! Thanks for writing.
So what do you think I got BigTime wrong in it? Yours, Brad
I'm not qualified to say what's BigTime wrong. Like J. Michael wrote, causality of growth seems unclear, but then again, there's only one historical trajectory with a ton of political and circumstantial messiness, so maybe it's not possible to tease out the causal effects of technology, policy, demographics, war, political economic systems, trade & globalization, etc, etc. esp. tracking macro statistics to tell the big story, which aren't fine grained enough.
I will say I'm still wrestling with at least two big things. First, the framing in terms of Hayek-Polanyi is intriguing, but I kept thinking I read (struggled through) Polanyi differently. I'm not sure he was about rights and protective policy-making "regulating the market" (?) in the way you apply to 20th c. America, esp. growth 1940-1980 "social democracy." Polanyi's complaint, as I understood it, was the early or original commodification of land and labor during the "creation" of markets out of local social fabrics, which were ripped apart -- and the aftermath of that, resulting in legislation that curtailed markets. Against Hayek, the question may be less about whether unrestrained or regulated/restrained markets are better, and more about how policy intervention when social impacts are great becomes *inevitable*. It's *always* political economy. A "free market" is an abstraction.
The second thing I keep wrestling with, not just from the book, has to do with "progress" in all its political economic guises, from the Progressive Era (against -- or in bed with -- Gilded Era robber barons), progressivism (as a political movement throughout the 20th c), to the rise of the today's Progress movement and techno-optimism (against, say, degrowthers, environmentalists/climatists, anti-technologists, anti-capitalists, etc.). There are tensions in these similarly named movements as to what constitutes progress in the first place, if it's possible or desirable, and how markets and governments are or aren't (should or shouldn't be) involved. Progress-related questions should be empirical -- to the extent people hold similar values or goals (definitions of progress) -- but maybe because causality isn't clear, we're still reduced to political debate and unfounded philosophical (ideological) confidence in one mechanism or another (markets, government policy, technology, trade, globalization, etc).
What does seem very clear, and comes out crystal clear in the book, is that something unique happened since 1870 even with all the chaos of world wars, great depression, globalization, extreme variations in political economies (liberal democracies, fascism, communism), civil rights, north-south, philosophical arguments, etc. We escaped Malthus (population is even leveling off or in decline!), economic growth has been continual, and the history of the 20th c has to be written as an economic one. No guarantees, we shouldn't take growth for granted given long history, but it's now been so many generations and the dominant factor of human life in our era IS this growth. And that's (mostly) a very good thing.