“Slouching Towards Utopia” is an impressive book, written with wit and style and a formidable command of detail
Save time by listening to our audio articles as you multitask“Slouching Towards Utopia” is an impressive achievement, written with wit and style and a formidable command of detail. Ambitiously, Mr DeLong seeks to redraw the temporal map. Many historians—among them the late British scholar Eric Hobsbawm—have preferred to chop modern history into a long 19th century, stretching from the French revolution to the crisis of 1914, and a short 20th, ending with the fall of communism.
The step-change in growth stemmed from technological advances, specifically three meta-innovations that drove rapid and sustained progress: the modern corporation, the research laboratory and globalisation. Thanks to these, a widening part of humankind hurtled towards “economic El Dorado”, a land of plenty that prior generations could scarcely have imagined.
Had the denizens of the 19th century known how fantastically wealthy their descendants would become, many would have supposed those heirs lived amid peace and contentment. Yet building harmonious societies out of material abundance has proved maddeningly difficult. In the aftermath of the second world war, though, the mix of a market economy and a generous safety-net made for a happy marriage of Hayek and Polanyi—“blessed by Keynes” , who provided the insight that governments should act to prevent recessions. The union bore fruit, in the form of a three-decade post-war run of torrid growth never matched before or since. And yet the last third of Mr DeLong’s long 20th century was coloured by disappointments.
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