The Story Continues, You Know?

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You and I did a symposium with Greg Clark about his book farewell to alms, which is wonderful since then he's had other books. What do you think of his approach to economic growth after all these years now that you've thought about it written your own book? Well, his approach is the huge kind of approach, there's the largest scale. I'm looking at the 20th century, which is a considerably smaller scale thing. And so what I'm most interested in is how we get our 2% per year productivity and real income growth after 1870.

Brad DeLong, professor of economics at UC Berkley, OG econ blogger, and Tyler’s Harvard classmate, joins the show to discuss Slouching Towards Utopia, an economic history of the 20th century that’s been nearly thirty years in the making.

Tyler and Brad discuss what can really be gleaned from the fragmentary economics statistics of the late 19th century, the remarkable changes that occurred from 1870-1920, the astonishing flourishing of German universities in the 19th century, why investment banking allowed America and Germany to pull ahead of Britain economically, what enabled the Royal Society to become a force for progress, what Keynes got wrong, what Hayek got right, whether the middle-income trap persists, his favorite movie and novel, blogging vs. Substack, the Slouching Towards Utopia director’s cut, and much more.

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Recorded November 11th, 2022

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