The End of the 20th Century

4min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

A key part of the thing was not just corporation research lab and globalization, but you know, American exceptional. The United States says what Leon Trotsky called the furnace where the future was being forged. And that kind of came to an end in 2003 when George W. Bush threw over the United Nations project. It could be 2010 when the world decided that Keynesian idea that you prioritize full employment whenever something goes wrong with the economy was massively rejected by a bunch of people.

People throughout history have imagined ideal societies of various sorts. As the twentieth century dawned, advances in manufacturing and communication arguably brought the idea of utopia within our practical reach, at least as far as economic necessities are concerned. But we failed to achieve it, to say the least. Brad DeLong’s new book, Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century, investigates why. He compares the competing political and economic systems that dominated the “long 20th century” from 1870 to 2010, and how we managed to create such enormous wealth and still be left with such intractable problems.

Support Mindscape on Patreon.

J. Bradford DeLong received his Ph.D. in economics from Harvard University. He is currently a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley. and chief economist at the Blum Center for Developing Economies. He previously served as deputy assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury for Economic Policy from 1993 to 1995. He has been a long-running blogger, now moved to Substack. He is a co-editor of The Economists’ Voice.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.