Thet Technological Progress More Than Quadruples Again

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Half a % per year of technological progress is not enough to get out from under the hammer of patriarchy. And so you're kind of trapped in this year, in this multhusian trap. Even up to eightee 70,. even with all the wonderful things of automatic textile machinery and steam engines and coal ando better metalurgy and so forth, it's in eigteen 70 that things switch. Thet technological progress more than quadruples again. You get technology growth rates of two point one % per year, more or less constantly, from 18 70 to 20 ten.

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.

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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.

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