The 20th century has often been called the short century: for many it would have started with the First World War in 1914 and ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
By contrast, for J. Bradford Delong, assistant secretary general of the Treasury Department in the Clinton administration and professor of economics at Berkeley, what he calls the long 20th century began around 1870 with a triple milestone: the rise of globalization. , of the industrial research laboratory and of the modern corporation. Together they would mark the beginning of a series of changes that began to lift the world out of the extreme poverty that humanity had suffered during the previous ten thousand years, since the discovery of agriculture.
A long 20th century that in his opinion would end in 2010, when the main economies of the globe were reeling from the Great Recession, which had begun in 2008 and was not followed by economic growth comparable to that which had been the rule since 1870. And in the years since the Great Recession, with the realization that the system was no longer working as it should, there have been destabilizing waves.
For Bradford Delong, who now addresses that long century in Camino a la utopia (Deusto, 2023), the 140 years that go from 1870 to 2010 were the most important in the history of humanity, the first period in which its evolution was directly linked to economics. And at times it bordered on utopia, although now it seems rather dystopian, including populism, inequality and global warming. The rate of economic growth shot up from 0.45% per year before 1870 to 2.1% after. There was an expansion of the stock of useful ideas for manipulating nature and organizing human talent. In per capita terms, in 2010 the average world income was 8.8 times greater than in 1870, although that wealth was distributed more unequally: the market economy solved the problems it posed to itself, but society did not. I wanted those solutions, denounces the author.
And he attacks Friedrich Hayek’s mantra that the market gives, takes away, and blessed be the market. It does not seem to him a stable principle for organizing society. A Hayek whose proposals he dismisses as semi-liberal because, in addition to freedom, they rested on inherited or designated forms of authority.
After 1945, he points out, the forced marriage of Hayek’s property rights and Karl Polanyi’s social rights, a marriage blessed by Keynes, helped to raise the developmentalist social democracy of the North Atlantic. That was, he says, the best we’ve done so far. The attempt failed by failing its own stress test, in part because a single, rapidly growing generation set the bar too high, and the pair were disbanded by dissidents from the left and right amid a turn to neoliberalism.
Today, the author believes that an observer from centuries ago would wonder how, having achieved divine powers to dominate nature, we have done so little to build a truly human world.