J. Bradford DeLong, Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century (Basic Books: New York, 2022)

What can I say about Slouching Towards Utopia by blogger and economist Brad DeLong? This book is a grand narrative of the era of modern economic growth, 1870-2010. In this period incomes in many North Atlantic economies grew several percent a year for decades, and for the first time there was enough for everyone in some countries to be fed and housed and clothed and doctored. But even if all of our material needs were met and we had better entertainment than a King of Kings, we did not feel like we lived in Utopia. It is framed around a debate between Friedrich Hayek and Karl Polyani, the first arguing that people should just accept the strangeness of markets in return for wealth, and the second replying that people in fact feel that they have rights to some control over their shape and population of their community, the ability to earn a living from skills that they suffered to acquire, and who is rewarded and who punished. Deny people control over these things and they will react violently and outside the market, regardless of what theorists say that should do. But how on earth can I respond to it?

Slouching Towards Utopia is a professorial book not a journalistic book, so it draws on decades of thinking, writing, speaking, and debating rather than parachuting in, talking to a few people who seem to know a lot or just catch the eye, and flying out to announce exciting discoveries. But it is still a big ideas book, or as DeLong prefers to call it a grand narrative. Grand narratives say “this” when in truth it is sometimes “that” and sometimes a third thing (p. 339). They claim that things are known which can only be guessed at. Most grand narratives are “not even wrong.” Almost any paragraph of this book poses two or three fun subjects for debate. But this week, I will put most of them aside and show how this book tells one story while the author wants to tell a different one.

A Grand Narrative

Slouching speaks of things which were, and things which are, and things which will be. It starts from the observation that the population clearly grew from the invention of farming to the 19th century but incomes did not. That might seem counterintuitive, since people in Pennsylvania in 1850 clearly had more and better material goods than people in Iraq in 6000 BCE. They could buy steel knives and silk petticoats and printed sermon-books and four-wheeled wagons. They could eat both corn and barley, with sides of turkey and beef, flavoured with mint and chili pepper. Neolithic gardeners had none of these durable goods, and almost everything which they did have was available to the Americans. But into the 19th century, most of people’s incomes went to food and drink (and most of that food was a few different grains, or a short list of nuts and tree fruits, or the meat and milk of a few favourite animals). Products as sophisticated as housing or cloth only made up 20% or so of most people’s expenses. So speeding up spinning with spinning wheels or speeding up woodworking with bronze tools did not help as much as increasing production of basic foodstuffs. And places where we can estimate population such as medieval England seem to have been stuck in Malthusian traps. If people started to eat better, more of their babies would survive, and the same land would have to be divided among more people. Everyone in the next generation would have to work a bit harder to eat the same amount.

DeLong is an economist, and economists love to model things as exponential growth. So DeLong makes up numbers for world population and GDP in 6000 BCE, 1000 BCE, 1 BCE, and 1500 CE and estimates rates of growth in income around 0.04% per year and growth in population of 0.09% per year (p. 32).¹

By late in the nineteenth century, this had changed. People in Britain and the United States started to be healthier and more numerous and richer in durable goods all at once. This trend had some ups and downs but it also spread around the world and it never really reversed for more than a decade or so. By 2010, almost everyone in the world was visibly richer than their ancestors had been in 1870. Slouching attributes this to causes such as the invention of the modern corporation and the industrial research laboratory (“the invention of invention” p. 62), improvements in transportation and communication such as telegraphs and iron-hulled steamships, and the integration of the world economy under the hegemons of the British Empire and the United States (“globalization”).

Slouching ends in the recent past, but it is optimistic about the future. Incomes are no longer increasing as fast in the rich countries, but much of the world is still poor, and prosperity in the rich countries which grows at 0.5% a year instead of 2% a year is still growth. “There is every reason to believe prosperity will continue to grow at an exponential rate in the centuries to come” (p. 11)

This is a grand narrative about incomes and population and exponential growth, three of economists’ favourite things. It is a narrative where before 1870 population grows slowly and prosperity barely grows at all, then from 1870 to 2010 both grow rapidly, and after 2010 prosperity is likely to continue to grow while populations stabilize or shrink. Economists love to tell grand narratives about trends, even though they know why historians have trouble believing in them. I have not written a book with a grand narrative. But I can summon the old magic of Max Weber and use the facts in this book to tell a different story.

A Counter-Narrative of What Was

Historians and archaeologists are trying to imagine how agriculture originated, and how it spread. The archaeological evidence, of course, is only useful if interpreted, and the interpretations depend on ideas of what sort of thing causes what, of how societies, and economies work in general. I find the problem very interesting, because these very abstract ideas appear in the raw, so to speak.

Phil Paine, “Who Wrote Don Giovanni?” http://www.philpaine.com/?p=1105

urban dwellers in Roman Egypt had a better life expectancy than eighteenth-century Londoners

Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms (2008)

I don’t see much value in estimating the population of the world in 6000 BCE when we can’t agree on the population of the Americas in 1492 within a factor of 20, and took decades to agree on the population of the Roman empire under Augustus within a factor of two. But we do have data on population and prices in specific places such as England since Domesday Book or Achaemenid Babylonia. These show cycles of rising and falling, with rising population tending to correspond to falling wages and vice versa. In the best times, an ordinary worker or peasant might consume twice as much as the worst times.

I think most people could agree that populations tended to slowly increase, particularly when new crops or methods of farming were introduced. The introduction of potatoes to Ireland, heavy plows to northwest Europe, or wet rice farming to China caused an increase in population, because the same field could produce more calories, and people used these calories to bring more children through the dangerous years of infancy. But its not clear that standards of living trended upwards. People in the 18th century often had more durable goods than people in the Neolithic, but they also lived in more crowded, degraded environments. The size of fish off the coast of Great Britain has been falling for centuries;² southern Iraq suffered from salinization from thousands of years of irrigating a former seabed. Economics is all about tradeoffs and exchange, and very many people have chosen to live somewhere thinly populated but healthy and free over somewhere densely populated but festering with sickness and bossed over by kings and landlords. But regardless of this, data before the 19th century shows standards of living rising and falling in cycles, not stable with a gradual upwards trend.

We can see one reason why human welfare rarely trended upwards for long when we think about health more broadly than fertility and infant mortality. The things which allow workers to specialize and ideas to spread, such as living in cities, make it easier for diseases to spread and dietary deficiencies to become common. A traveling journeyman can teach a craft technique or share a business opportunity but might also leave a new parasite in the local earth or infect the milkmaid with syphilis. One of the simplest ways to stop disease from spreading is to block roads, which makes economists sad but the World Health Organization happy. DeLong’s ancestors were not the first or last to flee a city when a crowd disease arrived.

DeLong begins his list of plagues of globalization with the 1889 Asiatic flu (p. 171), but I would have begun with cholera. For thousands of years, people in some parts of India drank tainted water and suffered terrible diarrhea until they dehydrated and died. That was just a local danger, like how people in parts of Italy got sick with malaria, or people in the Arctic had to learn not to eat the livers of polar bears. Cholera seems to have escaped India in 1817 as a result of Britain’s new hegemony over world trade (and India). Ten years later the next pandemic reached the Americas and became global. Europeans and settlers were only able to get it under control by inventing the discipline of public health and creating physical infrastructure and social systems to separate feces from drinking water. In past societies with great material wealth, such as the Roman empire, its not clear to me that the health benefits from tiled roofs or plastered aqueducts outpaced the health dangers of crowding people into cities and moving them back and forth. Height is a good proxy for health and nutrition, and height in Europe also goes up and down before the 20th century, rather than having a clear trend. Notably, it is higher in the material-poor early middle ages than the material-rich Roman empire or nineteenth century.

A Counter-Narrative of What is and What Will Be

Beginning in the 19th century, population and welfare begin to rise at the same time across much of the world. But countries which tried to imitate the richest countries often failed, and growth in any one country often stalled. Slouching gives examples from the USSR and Mao’s China to Mehmet Ali’s Egypt (which tried to specialize in weaving cotton but failed to turn English machines into effective mills), Zambia (about as industrialized as Portugal on independence but did not flourish afterwards), to Argentina (one of the wealthiest countries in 1914 but firmly middle-of-the-road in 2010). By the time states in the West Pacific took off, growth in Japan and the North Atlantic was slowing.

Economists can calculate, but physicists can too. Colleagues like University of California physics professor Tom Murphy have done the math and have trouble answering questions like “if energy use continues to grow exponentially, won’t we eventually boil the Earth – literally?” Economic growth that is decoupled from energy consumption won’t look much like GDP, and there are only so many hours in the day to enjoy our futuristic entertainment centers or teleport to our beach huts in Maui and stroll on the beach. Even if we avoid ecological catastrophe, a devastating plague, exhaustion of resources, and the replacement of humans-as-we-know them with something else, growth in prosperity is likely to end within the next century or two because of physical limits.

Instead of a narrative about exponential growth which is very slow then fast then slow, this is a narrative where wealth, health, and population are three interconnected systems which rise and fall in cycles. Where your society was on these cycles had much more influence over your life than any long-term trends did. Beginning about 1870, all three start to rise in some parts of the world, and by 2010 most of the world has experienced decades of all three improving. But this growth often sputters and dies out, and it is likely to hit physical limits in the near future (birthrates have already collapsed below replacement in every rich country, and life expectancy is stalled).

As a historian, I don’t think that exponential growth is the natural state of things. I think in terms of cycles and tradeoffs and phase changes. The simultaneous rise in health, wealth, and population in the long 20th century was a new thing in world history, and much of the world is transitioning into a new state. I think that looking at the past with a mind trained on the long 20th century is a mistake, and so is imagining the future that way.

Conclusion

Slouching Towards Utopia is a book about many things, and its model of societies as exponentially-growing populations and GDPs is just one of them. One of the pleasures of a book like this is all the threads it gives readers to pull on.

• Were people in the Americas caught in the same Malthusian trap (and deadly partnership with their livestock) as the English in the last thousand years? They did not have patriarchal religions, and cities like Tenochitlan impressed European visitors for being clean and wealthy. First Nations camps on the prairies seemed dirty to some visitors, but people moved often enough and lived in small enough groups that disease may not have been a terrible problem. The Six Nations had a lot of eye infections from living in bark longhouses through a Canadian winter but I don’t get the impression that they lost most of their children until European diseases arrived. In a recent blog post, DeLong speaks about Industrial Era colonialism in terms which seem to fit European colonization of Egypt or Chinese colonization of Tibet better than British colonization of Highland New Guinea or Canadian colonization of the Arctic.
• Scientific medicine and public health emerged at about the same time as DeLong’s long 20th century. What would happen if we looked at useful knowledge such as how to save a drowning victim alongside useful knowledge such as how to operate a power lathe or organize a Chamber of Commerce? Isn’t it as surprising that it took thousands of years to learn that drinking salt and sugar could treat dysentery as that it took thousands of years to invent the flying shuttle? (warning: has a textile-history myth about “old-timey cloth was really narrow” as if giant cloaks and woolen broadcloth were not things)
• Why did so many key figures from the long 20th century come from the Austro-Hungarian empire, and why did most of them have to emigrate to find employers who could make use of their talents? It was not just the Martians but also Sigmund Freud, Nicola Tesla, and Karl Popper. Someone who reads a few European languages could write How the Austro-Hungarians Invented the Modern World.
• Information seems key to living well, but why has it always been so hard to monetarize (p. 57)? This is not just true of books and newspapers but also third places like Hermann’s Upstairs where people in a trade talk shop. What does this say about capitalism? Patent law was created to give a financial incentive for sharing practical knowledge with the public.
• By the middle of the 20th century, both communist and capitalist societies had taken the wealth of the Electrical Age and used it to make and market cheap cigarettes and vodka. These had disastrous effects on health. Could the story of how we overcome those have something to say about how we could escape the hedonic treadmill or the tendency of markets to reward people for creating and serving addicts?
• Does developmental economics have anything to say about the Achaemenid empire or the efflourescence in the Neo-Babylonian empire? DeLong is frank that theories of economic development seem plausible but people who faithfully follow them do not always succeed!
• While the statement about how many pregnancies and childbirths the “typical preindustrial woman” had is best forgotten (p. 16 and passim), the historical demographics and marriage patterns of actual societies are fascinating! Wikipedia on Western European Marriage Pattern is one place to start. Many people tell a narrative that cities before the 20th century were hotbeds of disease, and while that is true of some of them, demographic historian Gregory Clark seems to say that people in early modern English cities could not reproduce themselves because they had fewer children than countryfolk. And long before latex condoms and the pill, many woman in England remained unmarried and childless, perhaps because English law was so unkind to married women or because marrying and having children was so dangerous for women.
• Corporations and industrial research laboratories let someone like Nikola Tesla specialize in inventing (p. 35). And yet many novelists and comic artists have found that the most efficient way to make money is to self-publish, rather than partner with a corporation to organize the ten different trades involved in turning a manuscript into a novel and getting it to customers. American software developers are some of the highest-paid workers who have ever existed, and in the past 20 years their bosses have replaced DBAs and testers with generalists and full-stack web developers. Economics 101 says that a team of specialists with economics of scale should produce better faster work, but people in these industries behave otherwise.

There are many anecdotes to follow up on, whether the career of union organizer Walter Reuther (killed when a small plane crashed after being so poorly maintained that some believe it was sabotaged, pp. 408-9) or the estimate that 10% of the world population moved between continents between 1850 and 1920 (p. 483).

Most of the book praises and scorns the economic policies of various governments (particularly US governments, but figures such as Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and Deng Xiaopeng get their turns). For many readers that will be more interesting than the model of world history. Another major theme is a dialogue between neoclassical economics and its critics, such as the feminists who have noticed that female labour and social reproduction is hard to monetarize but still essential (and if women enter the waged workforce, that domestic labour and social reproduction still need to be done, so women either work a second shift or someone else’s daughter gets paid to do the same tasks). DeLong is proud of his profession of economics and his time in Bill Clinton’s Treasury Department but has niggling doubts whether feminists and social democrats were more right than he thought at the time. But I think that this book would have been better if it presented exponential growth as typical of the long 20th century, not as the way economies usually behave.

Full disclosure: I have exchanged a handful of emails with the author over the years

I don’t have a tenured professorship that subsidizes my writing, just people who support this site. Thanks to every one of them! If you found this helpful or enjoyable, shares and donations are appreciated.

Further Reading

Gregory Clark, “The Condition of the Working-Class in England, 1209-2003” https://faculty.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/papers/wage%20-%20jpe%20-2004.pdf Later published as https://ssrn.com/abstract=869754

Alice Evans, The Great Gender Divergence (blog) https://www.ggd.world/

Jack A. Goldstone, “Efflorescences and Economic Growth in World History: Rethinking the ‘Rise of the West’ and the Industrial Revolution,” Journal of World History, vol. 13 no. 2 (2002) pp. 323-389

Jakob B. Madsen, “The aging society: Is growth reverting to pre-industrial levels in the 21st century?” Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Volume 229, January 2025, 106849 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jebo.2024.106849 (shares DeLong’s assumption that growth is something that economies are expected to do and the only question is how fast)

Ian Morris, “Economic Growth in Ancient Greece,” Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics (JITE) / Zeitschrift für die gesamte Staatswissenschaft, Vol. 160, No. 4 (December 2004), pp. 709-742

Richard H. Steckel, “New Light on the ‘Dark Ages’: The Remarkably Tall Stature of Northern European Men during the Medieval Era,” Social Science History, Summer, 2004, Vol. 28, No. 2 (Summer, 2004), pp. 211-229

(scheduled 8 January 2025)

1. If you want the details why world population figures much before the 20th century are numbers from nowhere or decorative statistics, a good paper is Timothy W. Guinnane, “We Do Not Know the Population of Every Country in the World For the Past Two Thousand Years,” The Journal of Economic History, Vol. 83, No. 3 (2023) https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/items/6c7f7b04-c2c4-4e34-a3b1-bbe740ddb4df/full I have a blog post on Economists vs. Historians on Economic History. ↩︎
2. It might be worth expanding on this because Gregory Clark used some types of fish in his price estimates on the assumption that a fish in 1300 was the same as a fish in 1900. This was probably true for short-lived fish such as herring and salmon, but not fish that can live for decades or centuries if nobody catches them in a net or drives them into the shallows and spears them. I’m not the person to talk about some of Clark’s other eccentric ideas but as a resident of the Salish Sea fish are of interest! ↩︎