One in seven of the queens of england die in childbirth. Being female is not for cissies back in the before modern medicine, modern technology. Average adult male height dropping from five foot eight to five foot three or so when we move from being hunter gatherers to farmer s ore teeth getting infinitely worse. A population that ought to be growing at one and a half % per year under pre industrial conditions, if you're not nutritionly stressed,. is instead growing before 15 hundred at only one twentieth % per year.
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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