By J. Bradford DeLong
The story of the major economic and technological shifts of the 20th century
Subject
Themes
Around 1870, three developments shattered the Malthusian trap that had kept humanity in grinding poverty for millennia. The industrial research laboratory systematised invention itself; the modern corporation organised communities of competence to deploy innovations at scale; and globalisation, driven by cheap steamship and railroad transport, connected markets and peoples across continents. Together these forces launched an unprecedented acceleration: a quantitative index of useful human knowledge began growing at 2.1 percent per year, compared to 0.45 percent before. Humanity's productive power would multiply more than twenty-fold by 2010.
Around 1870, three developments shattered the Malthusian trap that had kept humanity in grinding poverty for millennia. The industrial research laboratory systematised invention itself; the modern corporation organised communities of competence to deploy innovations at scale; and globalisation,…
J. Bradford DeLong occupies an unusual position in the landscape of economic history. A professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under the Clinton administration, DeLong combines academic rigour with direct experience of…
The central intellectual framework running through the entire long twentieth century is the unresolved tension between two fundamentally different visions of how society should be organised. Friedrich von Hayek championed the market economy as a crowdsourcing mechanism that incentivises and…
Joseph Schumpeter coined the term "creative destruction" to describe capitalism's essential nature: it incessantly revolutionises its own economic structure from within, destroying old industries and ways of life while creating new ones. This process drove the extraordinary material progress of the…
One of the most striking features of the long twentieth century is the vast and persistent gap between the global north and the global south. In 1870, British income per capita was perhaps $6,000, at least double anywhere outside a charmed North Atlantic circle. By 2010, despite extraordinary…
The long twentieth century reveals a persistent tension between economic transformation and political institutions' capacity to manage it. From 1870 onward, the accelerating pace of technological change and globalisation created pressures that existing governance structures were rarely equipped to…
One of the most paradoxical insights emerging from the long twentieth century is that humanity's unprecedented material progress failed to produce a corresponding increase in felt well-being. Between 1870 and 2010, average global income per capita increased roughly 8.8 times, extreme poverty fell…
For millennia, humanity was caught in the Malthusian trap. Thomas Robert Malthus argued in the late eighteenth century that human sexuality, unless restrained by patriarchy and religion, would always push population growth to the edge of starvation. This was not mere theory; it described reality.…
As economic growth accelerated after 1870, political systems in the global north began to shift. James Madison had designed the American republic so that only propertied men would choose wise representatives. Andrew Jackson's populism opened politics to white men without property. The Civil War and…
In 1909, Norman Angell argued that war had become economically pointless. He was right about the economics but catastrophically wrong that humanity had therefore outgrown it. Nationalism, not economic calculation, drove the decisions of 1914. Max Weber, a centre-left German liberal, openly declared…
In the early nineteenth century, Say's Law held that general overproduction was impossible because nobody produces for sale without intending to buy something else. Keynes demolished this reasoning, showing that people might choose to hold money rather than spend it, creating a deficiency of…
Solzhenitsyn observed that ideology gives evildoing its justification and enables murder on a scale of millions. Three ideologies competed in the interwar period: market worship, really-existing socialism, and fascism. All three prescribed fundamental economic reconfiguration, and each would be…
The Cold War was a paradoxically productive rivalry. Despite terrifying brinkmanship and vast expenditure on weapons of annihilation, the US-Soviet confrontation arguably accelerated human progress toward prosperity. Nikita Khrushchev, one of Stalin's more bloody-handed henchmen, advocated "peaceful…
After World War II, the global north sprinted toward material prosperity, but the benefits were distributed along deeply unequal lines. White men in wealthy nations enjoyed low unemployment, rising wages, and compressed income distributions. Racial minorities and women remained largely excluded from…
The neoliberal turn after 1975 rhymed with the post-World War I breakdown of the first economic golden age. The proximate causes were the stagflation of the 1970s, the oil shocks, and the breakdown of the Bretton Woods monetary system, but the deeper drivers were intellectual and…
By spring 2007, the well-thinking in the United States saw little reason for alarm. Productivity growth was strong, inflation tame, and the "Great Moderation" of the business cycle seemed to confirm that neoliberal economics had delivered stability. Rising inequality troubled few in power. Voters…
By J. Bradford DeLong
Subject
Themes
Around 1870, three developments shattered the Malthusian trap that had kept humanity in grinding poverty for millennia. The industrial research laboratory systematised invention itself; the modern corporation organised communities of competence to deploy innovations at scale; and globalisation, driven by cheap steamship and railroad transport, connected markets and peoples across continents. Together these forces launched an unprecedented acceleration: a quantitative index of useful human knowledge began growing at 2.1 percent per year, compared to 0.45 percent before. Humanity's productive power would multiply more than twenty-fold by 2010.