willing but I don't have the book yet.

I'm in. I finished the book about a week ago.

I got to the part where the wizard explains that it isn't safe to travel with the name "Baggins."

I don't understand the deal with this bunny. Is Pat its name or some kind of verb?

3: one does not simply slouch towards Utopia.

I bought it, so I'm in.

That gets us to four, with me -- any more takers? And for those who haven't read it yet, what do you think about timing?

I've read about 80%. I'll write a global response but not a summary. Timing, anytime a week hence.

I was kinda hoping you all would read it and I could copy off you.

I would indeed like a group to read this with; I lack the theoretical grounding to really give it its due on my own but with other people to bounce things off of I can fill in the gaps.

I mean, no guarantees anyone else has any theoretical grounding. I sure don't.

Okay, this sounds like enough interest. I'll do a summary of the introduction and the first two chapters to go up next Monday. Volunteers for later segments?

I'll write a global response but not a summary.

I will mention, I'm not sure that a chapter-by-chapter summary will work all that well. For example I found the chapters about WWI, 20s & 30s, and WWII fascinating, and some of my favorite parts of the book, but I don't know how I'd summarize them without just repeating big chunks of information.

Maybe it would be better to do a CT-Style book event in which each person just writes a general response to the whole book. It would mean that much of the book would probably never be covered, but it might make for better discussion threads.

11.1: I have issues with induction as a method.

I'm in but don't have the book yet. I Can take a section towards the end.

This post prompted me to order it. I can tell I'll be behind the curve in more ways than one, so I won't promise to write anything.

FWIW -- This set of blog posts is interesting and gives Brad a chance to re-state some of his big-picture beliefs about the century.

Timothy Burke: https://timothyburke.substack.com/p/the-read-brad-delong-slouching-towards

Brad DeLong's reply: https://braddelong.substack.com/p/a-semi-platonic-dialogue-on-slouching

TB: Perhaps because more structural explanations of at least some of those seeming patterns unbalances the book's desire to walk between Polanyi and Hayek and to see the economic history of the 20th Century as also balanced between them...

BD: We do make our own history--albeit under circumstances not of our own choosing...

TB: If one were to conclude that market economies predictably favor certain kinds of "bad choices"--perhaps actively enable them--then that's more than Polanyi's thought that the market can't satisfy all human needs for justice and fairness, it's that markets--or more abstractly capitalism--have an attractor towards empirically bad outcomes...

BD: Why "capitalism" rather than "human nature"? Certainly pre-capitalist modes of production seem to have had attractors toward outcomes that, to me at least, look significantly worse. And so do those societies that claimed to be moving toward post-capitalism.

TB: There have been so many "bad choices" that they hardly seem like accidents...

BD: But there also have been a lot of good choices! Humanity is on the cusp of baking a sufficiently large economic pie, after all! With all of its flaws and murders, the "economic El Dorado" world of 1870-1914 was a vast improvement on its predecessors! The post-WWII trente glorieuses in the Dover-Circle-Plus likewise! As has been the post-1980 Neoliberal Era in China and India.

Yes, our being flummoxed by the problems of distribution and utilization is a scandal and a disgrace. Yes, the circumstances of the bottom billion today are a crime and an atrocity.

But it is not at all clear to me that any form of "pessimism of the intellect" is really justified. I do think that the next two generations are likely to see a richer world having a rougher ride than the world has had since 1945 at least. But I do not see us as structurally doomed at all!

But there also have been a lot of good choices! Humanity is on the cusp of baking a sufficiently large economic pie, after all!

I have a very hard time taking a person who makes such claims seriously. It requires a specific kind of myopia to attend only to the narrow slice of happy projections and ignore the climate horrors and resource crunches.

17: Don't forget overpopulation, Clover. By the 1970s we will inevitably face famines that will kill hundreds of millions of people.

18: As if recurring projections of utopias aren't also a phenomenon. That doesn't inform our current situation, that just demonstrates there are appetites for predicted utopias and dystopias.

It requires a specific kind of myopia to attend only to the narrow slice of happy projections and ignore the climate horrors and resource crunches.

It is clearly a perspective, one that I _mostly_ share*, but not a neutral view (if one was possible). I do think he's correct (if a little flippant) on this point:

TB: I'll start with a big and abstract objection... not limited to DeLong.... Many economists and allied thinkers... [say] that we live in a world of unimaginable wealth.... That... makes the entirety of premodern economic history into an undifferentiated blob of bleak and unrelenting poverty...

BD: Well, wasn't it?

Before 1870 technological progress was too slow, and patriarchal and other pressures for fertility too strong, for humanity to ever escape from its ensorcellment by the Devil of Malthus. There was no possibility for humanity to produce at utopian scale; bake a sufficiently large economic pie so that everyone could potentially have enough. Governance and politics was then overwhelmingly some élite running a force-and-fraud domination game so that its members could have enough. Build high cultures, yes they could. But at bottom, those high cultures were made and lived by a coalitions of thugs-with-spears with their associated toadying propagandists, bureaucrats, and accountants.

* As I said in comments to a previous post. My default attitude is to spend more time thinking about factors that indicate that the future will be worse rather than better -- but I don't pretend that's a full assessment of risks and opportunities, just a temperament. Part of what I've found interesting in the book is to think about both _change_ (human history extends back thousands of years, but look how much has changed in the last 150), and _success_ (as BdL put it, the 20th Century was both Great and Terrible, but more great than terrible.)

My personal view is that something akin to economic utopia (i.e. removal of poverty as the norm for humanity) is possible now, wasn't possible before, and won't happen now because of deliberate choices of the powerful.

21 is, broadly speaking, the perspective of the book as well.

Yeah, it's in the air.

21: poverty is already not the norm for humanity. The median person in the world has a daily income of about four times the extreme poverty line. (9% of people live below that line.)

Whatever definition of poverty you use, more than half the world isn't in it. https://devinit.org/resources/poverty-trends-global-regional-and-national/

"Norm" isn't the right word. Just that it is a very common condition and I don't think it has to be now.

100% agree that more people are in poverty than should be, and many more are closer to poverty than I would like - it's just that I think that a lot of people have a kind of instinctive picture of the world left over from, probably, the 1960s or 70s, in which most people live in absolute desperate poverty, and that simply isn't the case and hasn't been since at least 1990.

I just paid full price for this book at my local bookseller. It sure has a lot of pages!

I'm not good for a summary, but I will try to keep up.

26: Yes, that's true. We're talking about the world, but I'm thinking of America in 2022 when I talk about the choices of the powerful.

May a humble lurker say that he disliked the book? And not, primarily, due to disagreement with the big picture argument. Rather, it did not feel like what I wanted an extended work of economic history to be. It felt like an overlong yet spotty mishmash of potted political history, data dumps, and chatty blogisms.....

It felt like an overlong yet spotty mishmash of potted political history, data dumps, and chatty blogisms.....

[BD] It's 600 pages. There was a moment when I had written 1000, with no central thrust, no single Grand Narrative for readers to hold onto and follow. And I needed one. So I took a chainsaw and cut the book down to the particular Grand Narrative I found myself most excited about at that moment.

I liked some of the digressiveness. As I mentioned above, I thought the chapters on WWI, the inter-war period, and WWII, and they felt fairly stand-alone and not dependent on the Grand Narrative.

It felt like an overlong yet spotty mishmash of potted political history, data dumps, and chatty blogisms.....
Okay fine I'm in.