Hi everyone! I am Brad DeLong. I am about to publish a book, Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Long 20th Century, 1870-2010 <bit.ly/3pP3Krk>. It is a political-economy focused history. Ask me anything!

The long 20th century—the first whose history was primarily economic, with the economy not painted scene-backdrop but rather revolutionizing humanity's life every single generation— taught humanity expensive lessons. The most important of them is this: Only a shotgun marriage of Friedrich von Hayek to Karl Polanyi, a marriage blessed by John Maynard Keynes—a marriage that itself has failed its own sustainability tests—has humanity been able to even slouch towards the utopia that the explosion of our science and technological competence ought to have made our birthright. Whether we ever justify the full bill run up over the 150 years since 1870 will likely depend on whether we remember that lesson.

Friedrich von Hayek—a genius—was the one who most keen-sightedly observed that the market economy is tremendously effective at crowdsourcing solutions. The market economy, plus industrial research labs, modern corporations, and globalization, were keys to the cage keeping humanity desperately poor. Hayek drew from this the conclusion: “the market giveth, the market taketh away: blessed be the name of the market.” Humans disagreed. As genius Karl Polanyi saw, humans needed more rights than just property rights. The market’s treating those whom society saw as equals unequally, or unequals equally, brought social explosion after explosion, blocking the road to utopia.

Not “blessed be the name of the market” but “the market was made for man, not man for the market” was required if humanity was to even slouch towards a utopia that potential material abundance should have made straightforward. But how? Since 1870 humans—John Maynard Keynes, Benito Mussolini, Vladimir Lenin, and others—have tried solutions, demanding that the market do less, or different, and other institutions do more. Only government, tamed government, focusing and rebalancing things to secure more Polanyian rights for more citizens have brought the Eldorado of a truly human world into view.

But ask me anything...