Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century
By J. Bradford DeLong
Basic Books 2022

As economic historian J. Bradford DeLong clarifies at the start of his new book, Slouching Towards Utopia, he’s pegging the beginning of the “long” 20th century around 1870, marked by “the triple emergence of globalization, the industrial research lab, and the modern corporation,” and the ending in 2010, “with the world’s leading economic edge, the countries of the North Atlantic, still reeling from the Great Recession that had begun in 2008, and thereafter unable to resume economic growth at anything near the average pace that had been the rule since 1870.” This timespan is the setting for what DeLong refers to as his “grand narrative,” and at first glance, the end results of that long 20th century look pretty good, as DeLong is the first to describe:

The consequences of the long twentieth century have been enormous: Today, less than 9 percent of humanity lives at or below the roughly $2-a-day living standard we think of as ‘extreme poverty,’ down from approximately 70 percent in 1870. And even among that 9 percent, many have access to public health and mobile phone communication technologies of vast worth and power. Today, the luckier economies of the world have achieved levels of per capita prosperity at least twenty times those of 1870, and at least twenty-five times those of 1770 – and there is every reason to believe prosperity will continue to grow at an exponential rate in centuries to come.

And yet, according to DeLong, “the history of the long twentieth century cannot be told as a triumphal gallop, or a march, or even a walk of progress along the road that brings us closer to utopia.” The true situation, “is, rather, a slouch. At best.” He sets about recounting the history of the long century, checking in on every major economic depression in the years since the American Civil War and of course citing every major economist from Friedrich von Hayek to Joseph Schumpeter to John Maynard Keynes. And he broadens the scope of his narrative to include commentary on larger historical events – as, for instance, when he can hardly contain his astonishment over Adolf Hitler’s mania for re-arming Germany once he took control of the country. “Political effectiveness we understand,” DeLong writes. “But weapons? Armies? Hadn’t World War I taught the Germans, and even the Nazis, and even Hitler, not to do that again? No, it had not.”

These historical asides are so winningly conversational that they very much help to make the book’s 600 pages surprisingly easy reading. Part of this is likewise attributable to DeLong’s semi-ironic adoption of a “grand narrative” (even though Ludwig Wittgenstein considered such grand narratives “nonsense”), which he doesn’t exactly hide under a bushel. One of the main reasons why humanity’s progress towards utopia has been more of a slouch than a march, you might ask? DeLong cites many factors (this is not a simple book, much though you at times get the impression its author would have liked it to be), but his central villain is gently indicated when he refers to the market economy as “that Mammon of Unrigtheousness.”

The free market economy pops up repeatedly in these pages, always wearing a dark, oily mustache like Daniel Day-Lewis deep in character as a homicidal maniac. People are no sooner starting to feel some free-range autonomy, able to smile and play with their children and lay away a little nest egg for the future, when suddenly up pops the market economy to ruin everything with the ravages of prosperity. And DeLong is always on hand when that happens, ready with choice sarcasm: “We again hear echoes of our whispering chorus,” goes one such passage. “The impersonal market had taken from some, given to others, and greatly increased the total; blessed be the market.” One senses a bit of disaffection.

With all due respect to the Great Depression, the crucial economic watershed in DeLong’s long century was the enactment of one of the single worst acts of public pillaging since Alaric sacked Rome: the neoliberalist fantasy-religion of supply-side economics, particularly as embodied in the economic policies of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, which “began the process of destabilizing the distribution of income in a way that has led to our Second Gilded Age.” On this point DeLong’s carefully-modulated scorn encompasses both the imposters of this religion and those afflicted by it:

The neoliberal turn was very successful in restoring the growth rate – and more than restoring the growth rate – of the incomes and wealth of those at the top. The rich had the largest megaphones, and they trumpeted the fact that their incomes were growing rapidly. And those lower down, who voted for candidates and politicians who had turned the wheel and made the neoliberal turn? They were told that if only they were sufficiently worthy, the unleashed market would give to them too, and they more than half believed it.

And in the end, are we any closer to Utopia? Or has all this slouching been in vain, except for hideously enriching 60 people out of a world population of 8 billion? DeLong recalls that the future seemed bright during some hazy Clintonian heyday, but then, he notes, post-2010 America elected Donald Trump, and every kind of Utopia suddenly seemed not only further away but permanently out of reach. Whether that betokens the end of the quest or what he refers to as a whole new narrative, DeLong doesn’t say. But either way, he’s written the most entertaining End Times narrative since The Late Great Planet Earth. 

—Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor. He’s a books columnist for the Bedford Times Press and the Books editor of Big Canoe News in Georgia, and his website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.