What Brad DeLong Missed in His History

Technological and economic history cannot be disentangled

Technological history has few friends: historians tend to dislike technology, and technologists tend to dislike history. Consequently, most work done around the “history of technology” tends to focus on the Industrial Revolution (see, for example, the excellent Substack “Age of Invention”) or, to a lesser degree, on important technological companies (e.g., James Cortada’s outstanding work on IBM).

In this post, I want to make the case for technological history. Rather than going about this in a theoretical manner (as I did for history as a discipline in my previous post), I want to use Brad DeLong’s recent work Slouching Towards Utopia as a case-in-point. This book, an instant classic, illustrates my argument nicely as it is a near-perfect example of what happens when an excellent economic history book eschews technology almost entirely.  

Before I get into that, though, let me recap Slouching briefly for those who have yet to read it. Essentially, DeLong tells the story of the “long 20th century,” starting in 1870 and ending in 2010, emphasizing the tremendous economic growth of the period. “The 140 years between 1870 and 2010 of the long twentieth century were, I strongly believe, the most consequential years of all humanity’s centuries,” he tells us on the first page.

On this point, he makes a very forceful argument. The world prior to the 1870s was the world of Malthus, in which population growth escalated starvation and disease levels until the population fell back down. This depressing cycle dogged humanity, resulting in a world of hunger, famine, and death that is mercifully foreign to us now.

What unlocked this new world? The Industrial Revolution. DeLong describes the period of 1870-1914 as a sort of “El Dorado” in which living standards increased dramatically, as did life expectancy and population growth (page 165). The world wars dramatically interrupted this progress, as did the Great Depression. But, in 1940, the world experienced ‘Les Trente Glorieuses,’ of strong economic growth (under high taxes, DeLong notes excitedly) until the 1970s. 

The coverage of the post-1970 period is a downer, as you can imagine. Delong is convinced that the anger caused by the oil crises led to the rise of neoliberalism in Thatcher and Reagan, which, of course, did not produce economic growth. The result was that expectations grew faster than living standards, leading to a malaise that ultimately gave way to the populism we’re now experiencing.

Now, I admit that I’ve simplified a lot here, but hopefully, you can still see why this book is so good. Specifically, there are a couple of reasons this book deserves its newfound place in the canon of economic history. First, the periodization (1870-2010) is brilliant. Second, it’s a masterful retelling of the economic growth of the time span. Third, it excels at weaving economic philosophies (namely, Hayek and Polanyi) into an insightful narrative that juxtaposes policy choices over the period. If you are looking for one book on the economics of the 20th century, this is it (though Gordon’s The Rise and Fall of Economic Growth is related and may be what you really want, as I discuss below)!

Nonetheless, this is a “high” history of the 20th century. It focuses on topics like the political machinations of laissez-faire Republicans and the erudite philosophies of Karl Polanyi. While DeLong wisely avoids many indulgences popular to the genre (e.g., long rants on fascism, discussions on why communism failed, analyses of military strategies in the world wars, etc.), he nonetheless commits to lengthy discussions of Keynesianism, invectives against Milton Friedman, and a general focus on the ‘great men’ of the twentieth century. 

If the ‘good guys’ are (perhaps not surprisingly, given that DeLong worked for the Clinton administration) policymakers who understood economic theory and implemented it adroitly, the hero is economic growth itself. Economic growth is the benchmark for progress and the measure of welfare. It is the cause célèbre of the book. And, in fairness, DeLong acknowledges this - it’s a core argument of the book! History “became economic” in the 20th century (page 24)! 

While all of this is correct, it’s also unsatisfying. What caused the economic growth? Again, DeLong argues (also correctly), “Technological cornucopia was the driver” (page 24). But how did it do so? The curious reader will read on, only to make it to page 469 and find, “I have not written much in this book about precisely how new technologies have advanced human collective powers over nature, about how they allowed us to organize ourselves in new ways, and what they were, and what they did. I have simply written about the rate of growth…” Truer words!

It is not wrong of DeLong to say that technology drove growth, but his is a book about growth and not about technology. But it is, in the immortal words of Schumpeter (who also gets a fair bit of attention in Slouching), “like telling the story of Hamlet without the Danish prince.” If technology was the key, why the parade of thinkers and politicians? One could make the argument that it was their ideas that led to the technologies, but DeLong’s doesn’t. There is no discussion on the innovations Reagan prevented or the technologies the market precluded us from enjoying. 

In this regard, Gordon’s Rise and Fall is a much more satisfying read. Rather than a history of theory and policy, Gordon goes into exceptional (excruciating to some, but not me!) detail about ‘life on the ground’ by discussing working hours, caloric intake, household appliances (e.g., toilettes get a fair bit of airtime, rightfully!). While Gordon still tells a story of economic history and one still focused on growth, he provides a much more tangible narrative.  

Not discussing the technological changes of the period and their drivers creates two problems for DeLong. First, it’s hard to understand what economic growth means. It’s challenging to interpret numbers like the world had “three times” the amount of technology that it had in 1920 as compared to 1870 (page 166). Moving to the 21st century, what does it mean to say that expectations for growth were too high relative to output in a world that gave us YouTube and Facebook? Were these not the ‘right’ technologies (I’m sure we could all think of ones we would have liked better), but what technologies did we need to avoid populism?  

DeLong’s second problem is theoretical. He’s clear that the outcome the reader should care about is economic growth (noted above). He also makes it plain that the driver for this is technology - that’s the ‘mechanism,’ to use social science jargon. What, then, is the role of economic policy? Presumably, it’s to drive technological development. But how does it do that? Why did it work so well in the pre-1970 period and so poorly during the post-1970 period? What technologies do we need for the consumer to have the optimism of the post-war era? On these questions, the reader is left unsatisfied. 

But there is a deeper problem here than a lack of intellectual satisfaction. Throughout the book, DeLong argues that those who see the market as unerring (‘the market giveth and the market taketh away’ he writes in a mocking motif throughout the book) are utterly wrong and fail to understand human needs, as Polanyi did. This is all well and good (though it reads like a strawman in 2023; this argument would have seemed more relevant during the Clinton years when many libertarians were in positions of power), but in his telling, technological growth slowed as the government grew. What does that mean for his theory? The US government was minuscule in 1890, and yet this was ‘El Dorado;’ If leaning less on the market is a good thing, then surely we should have expected technological development (and therefore, economic growth) as the government grew (as measured by government spending).

DeLong’s answer is (you won’t be surprised to hear) that the government grew in the wrong direction. It did not create good policies but bad, neoliberal ones that grew government but benefitted only the wealthy. Whether or not this was inevitable with the growth of government (as somewhat ironically, Hayek argued), I’ll leave you to decide for yourself. The essential point I wish to make is that what began as an economic history book ends as a sort of center-left fable. Avoiding the tangible mechanisms of technological development forces him to grasp for the ethereal mechanisms of economic philosophy, resulting in a comforting tale for those who train liberal (but not too liberal!) government economists for a living. 

I fear here that I’ve picked on DeLong too much. Though I find the latter part of this book unsatisfying, it is an excellent history of US economic policy through the 20th century.  My point here is that economic and technological history are inextricably linked, and telling one side of the story without the other is fraught, particularly in the post-industrial revolution period we live in. Though it is hard to understand how technologies develop, avoiding that effort increases the temptation to lean into ideology and politics, which helps neither the discipline nor the reader.