Is Anything In “Slouching Towards Utopia” Wrong?
Most grand narratives are neither wrong nor right. They violently simplify reality, or say things which are so vague that nobody can agree what would make them true or false (not quite the same as cold reading but related). They leave out alternative points of view, such as whether the Korean War was driven by international Communism or just one phase in an internal Korean conflict between nationalists and communists. But you can still check some of the facts that are used to support the big statements. Is anything in this book by economist Brad Delong flat out wrong?
The footnote to Clark’s Farewell to Alms pp. 91-96 does not support the claims about how many pregnancies, childbirths, and surviving children the “typical preindustrial woman” had, and the data from specific historical societies contradicts those claims (p. 16). Clark counts deaths not pregnancies or births because he has sources for those (and the estimate in Slouching that two thirds of children died before puberty is quite high, I often see the figure of 50% or up to 50% thrown around).1 In an interview DeLong attributed his statistics to Elizabeth Weyland Barber but I do not see them in the book he mentions.
The description of steel production on pages 63 and 64 misstates the carbon content of steel by an order of magnitude (steel is 99-99.5% iron not 90-95%) and repeats the academic half-truth that most steel was made from wrought iron. As people have experimented with bloomery furnaces, they have discovered that there are many ways to make steel and iron and that its harder to make nothing but soft iron than to make some hard steel and some soft iron. In recent times the Japanese used this by sorting and grading the metal, with soft ductile pieces for nails and plate and hard brittle pieces for cutting edges. There were probably many different processes in use, with the versions documented in eighteenth-century Scandinavia and twentieth-century West Africa just a few of many.
Wikipedia claims that Nikoka Tesla’s time as a ditch-digger was a few days or months in 1886 not “a couple of years” (p. 67).
Nazi Germany never left the gold standard (p. 220), and the Öffa bills which secretly expanded the money supply within Germany were introduced in 1932 not 1933 (the Mefa bills came later). The Öffa and Mefa bills were like when Christian Roman emperors quietly added a few percent of silver to the golden nomisma without telling anyone outside the mint, not like when governments in the 1970s declared that they would no longer exchange banknotes for precious metal at a fixed ratio. Wikipedia has an article on the Reichsmark (German currency 1924-1948).
Those seem like fairly minor errors, whereas my disagreements with the concepts behind the book feel more substantive. Its a good idea to read a book like this like you would listen to an undergraduate lecture, not trusting every fact but focusing on the general narrative and way of approaching the problem. I am unsettled that the reference to numbers in one of DeLong’s favourite books seems incorrect, and I am not a specialist in contemporary history.
Do my gentle readers know of any other sanity-checks of this book, especially by people other than American economists? The reviews by Joel Mokyr (Economic History Association) and Thomas Strand (Jacobin) don’t seem to comment on the details, neither do the informal reviews by people like economics blogger Noah Smith. DeLong was hard on David Graeber for one paragraph in Debt, and sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
PS. I violated Betteridge’s Law of Headlines! That is more common than you might think.
(scheduled 8 January 2025, added footnote 8 March 2025)
Edit 2025-03-12: added link to the original book review
- eg. Robin Fleming, Britain After Rome (Penguin, 2011), 353 “What about child mortality? It is usually impossible to determine, since children, especially those under the age of 2, are missing from most early medieval cemeteries. Only three cemeteries (from England in the fifth to the sixteenth century) seem to contain all the children that they should, so it is only here that we can estimate the prevalence of child mortality. … Very nearly half of the individuals buried in each of those three cemeteries were children under the age of 17.” ↩︎
“I am unsettled that the reference to numbers in one of DeLong’s favourite books seems incorrect”
DeLong is an economist: you can’t expect him to get numbers right. That he knows nothing about the composition of steel is striking: in my day we were taught such stuff early in secondary school.
Let me give you a more general proposition: it seems to me that people are extraordinarily ignorant of how Western countries made their livings before, say, 1900. There are lots of people who understand nothing about agriculture, steel making, coal mining, ship building, textile mills, and so on. Who imagine that mass production and production lines are 20th century novelties. Who get the introduction of, for instance, electrical lighting all wrong. And so forth. Whereas I think that how people made a living is an interesting topic.
P.S. I read a quotation from Marx the other day. He didn’t seem to realise that cows were usually milked in the early morning.
Sometimes people take decorative statistics, decide they don’t feel large enough, and start to add, subtract, multiply, and divide until they feel impressive enough. Trying to count pregnancies which naturally aborted before the quickening feels like such a strategy, because before the nineteenth century women had no way of knowing of very early pregnancy, and we certainly can’t know the ratio of conceptions to births. Even today a few women discover they are pregnant when they go into labour!
But if anyone can find DeLong’s source we can look at it!
I’m also not sure that anyone, even economists, has a feel for what a standard of living of USD (PPP-1990) 1/person · day in 1900 would mean! Nobody in 1900 could buy antibiotics or an airline trip, nobody in 2000 could buy life in a less crowded and environmentally-degraded world. So why use the number when you could describe the details? The purpose of symbols is to communicate.
And isn’t the way that until the 20th century people often abandoned the US way of life to live with First Nations or Polynesians revealing? Economics is all about tradeoffs, and if you focus on made-up averages of things nobody ever measured you can’t see the differences between societies which made people move between them. There were Hawaiians, Japanese, Chinese, Metis, Brits, Black Americans, and Continental Europeans in the future British Columbia by the 1860s.
Books on daily life like “The Domestic Revolution” by Ruth Goodman seem like they reach a different audience.
At least Max Roser gave talks about how much trouble was saved by the washing machine in between the charts and animations of data. And AFAIK most of his numbers were measured not made up because they came from the 20th century.
Kevin Drum, in a short review with a link to a technical preface, does give some pushback: particularly as to its (in his view) arbitrary timing.
https://jabberwocking.com/slouching-towards-utopia-the-actual-review-itself/
For myself, I have a different issue. Delong is a classical liberal and standard US political liberal. He tends to view all of our progress as a good thing if we could just get it right and learn to be nice to each other.
My pushback would be that the technology often follows expanding sources of energy. Expanding is important. We rarely give up any old sources when we find a new one. We keep using, often expanding actually, it and then exploit the new one. With this expansion has come a huge demographic change.
The math is a bit iffy on these continued parallel expansions.
If I wanted a detailed takedown, I might look at Jean-Baptiste Fressoz – More and More and More : An All-Consuming History of Energy
I have not finished it, and I don’t agree with all that the author states, but it is a well thought out direct attack on current (even expert) assumptions. So if DeLong is just giving us a general potted theory of history as a thesis, to falsify it, you have to attack the history.
Sounds like the side point in my review that GDP is more or less energy consumption, and when people have done the math energy consumption on Earth can’t continue to grow a few percent a year for a few hundred more years (and “just get more efficient” and “just grow the rest of the economy” run into limits too).
Its hard to tell from the diagram in the technical preface whether Drum and Delong disagree about facts (estimates of GDP per capita) or interpretation (one exponential curve or several with different growth rates). I would need a comparison of the actual numbers the two are using. And there are plenty of cases, say the Roman empire, where material wealth does not lead to an improved quality of life. And before about 1870, standard of living and population are often two contradictory cycles. In real history the Japanese did not push the Ainu out of Hokkaido until recently, whereas in a 4S computer game they would do it early. Actually, I would have liked to see Delong engage more with James C. Scott and his arguments that some types of polity specifically encourage farming and population growth (with the accompanying diseases and absurdities like trying to push rice paddies deeper and deeper into the mountains) while others don’t have that incentive? Canadian historian Janice Liedel once had a good rant about attempts to find a natural rate of population growth in historical sources.
Almost all our sources for the supposed inevitability of population growth before the 20th century are from patriarchal agrarian kingdoms like the Achaemenid Empire which are not the only form of social organization!
England did actually switch from using mostly wood to mostly coal as fuel beginning in Elizabethan London (Anton Howes the historian and Substack blogger). Forests were cut down and turned to fields or pasture.
Yes, Fressoz correctly notes that coal was used initially as a heating fuel, not for mechanical energy. However, the English did go to the Baltic and North America for timber (he notes that the timber used to prop up your coal mine shafts also counts) for their masts and with the overall economic expansion, far more wood is used today than in 13th century when the switch really started going. Wood not used as fuel can just as well get used for something else, which is also true for the repurposing of crude oil derivatives.
I am not sure how the idea that it is agrarian based societies are the culprit is particularly relevant in that that is how we got to be pushing 10MMM population, and any switch away from that will likely be involuntary. That the fraction of people that remain may eventually be better off is cold comfort to the huge % of the population (as with Rome) that don’t make it through the collapse. You won’t feed 10MMM as a hunter-gatherer.
Delong and I think Kevin Drum want to tell a story about global, long-term trends with a single direction. But there is another possible story where in the 19th century the British empire and its former colonies force the entire world into their capitalist system with its own specific dynamics, whereas previously even somewhere like India there were lots of people who looked at the rajas and the Stupas and said “no thanks, we will live in the hills and jungles where we can be free and healthy but nothing much ever changes.” I think somewhere Delong talks about China and India being in a “rising population, falling standard of living” phase of the Malthusian cycle when the British empire reached its peak but his worldview is focused on giant agrarian and industrial empires.
I think the good in books like this is that they start conversations about each of our unprovable big ideas about history, but I don’t have energy to articulate mine very well.
After he got sick Steve Muhlberger mused about how much opening at gunpoint there was in the 19th century, from the Upper Canadian conquest of Prince Rupert’s Country to Australia to Japan https://smuhlberger.blogspot.com/2019/03/manifest-destiny-on-global-scale.html
Delong seems quite attached to the US empire or hegemony or whatever you want to call it.
It can be fun from moving from academic-historical “exactly what year did the Persians reconquer Egypt?” to grand narratives.
“Delong is a classical liberal” Up to a point, Lord Copper. When I used to visit his blog and comment on it he clearly believed in censorship.
One problem with the Internet and social media is that we see people’s political words but not most of their actions. Although its not just the Internet where white-collar folks with above-average incomes can express lefty ideas until something threatens their supply of cheap and obedient servants and then they sound like any small businessowner.
Alec Nevala-Lee wrote something about the difference between the Futurians understanding politics as arguing with other nerds, and RAH understanding it as hiring some bums to pose as campaigners for the other party.