I read what you had to say, Nick, and enjoyed it! I'm unqualified to do more than that on these threads.

Thanks! I was excited when I realized that I had something to say, but then it got long.

One of the many mistakes I made in the book was my failure to properly distinguish between Polanyi and Polanyians--the people pushing the ideas that he focused on. (Similarly, right now Tyler Cowen is made at me because he thinks I failed to properly distinguish between von Hayek (90% Dr. Jekyll, 10% Mr. Hyde, according to Tyler) and the Hayekians (who I see as 40% Dr. Jekyl and 60% Mr. Hyde.)

Polanyi was a democratic socialist.

Polanyians are people reacting against the market's declaration that the only rights that matter are property rights, and that only those with something valuable to sell on the market have social power and social voice. Polanyi identified their goals as seeking to keep three things--land (your environment and community), labor (an income that you deserved, coupled with others never getting greater incomes than **they** deserved), and finance (stability, in the sense that the material fabric of your entire life should not suddenly evaporate because it fails to pass some maximum-profitability test conducted by some rootless-cosmopolite financier 5000 miles away)--from being **commodified**, from being turned into the playthings of the market.

Polanyians sought some different form of social justice than "the rich do what they want, while the non-rich suffer what they must". But that could be good or bad, and it was not necessarily egalitarian. Specifically, a right-Polanyian reaction against Black people getting above themselves was a key to the Neoliberal Turn in the U.S. in 1980...

"Given the list of three key changes in the organization of human and economic life ("globalization, the industrial research lab, and the modern corporation") there's minimal attention paid to the ways in which those shaped the power of government as well as the economy..."

Yes: this is a big flaw in the book: it was supposed to be half industrial research labs-industries-Schumpeterian creative destruction, half von-Hayek-Polanyi political economy. But I lost the balance in the final edit...

Re: "I thought the discussion of race was occasionally tone-deaf and, compared to the rest of the book, stuck more closely to familiar stories and symbols."

What stories do you think would have been better ones to tell here?

Re: "The book you see an impressive breadth of historical knowledge, fondness for a good anecdote, and an unapologetic presentism in his reading of history. DeLong never buries the humanity in the history that he writes about. He's often empathetic and generous, but the anecdote is directed at how a modern audience sees themselves (and their sense of history) more than recapturing the past..."

Well, actually aiming at recapturing the past has huge problems. That of the past that is accessible to us is, overwhelmingly, the words and material objects left behind by the élites, and from this we can construct a picture of how the élite viewed itself and how its members lived their lives. The problem is that because the economic pie that was being baked could not be large anough, the principal occupation of the élite was to run a force-and-fraud exploitation-and-domination game on the rest of society. Thus the overwhelming majority of attempts to recapture the past find themselves painting over a great deal and seeing the rest through rose-colored glasses so that we do not recoil in horror and put the book down. So "presentism" is kind of our only option if we want (a) readers and (b) not to lie.

Science fiction author David Drake describes this problem in his recounting of his filint the serial numbers off of the "Odyssey" and using it as a framework for his space-opera adventure novel "Cross the Stars" :

> "I had to allow for... cultural differences. Odysseus caps his victory by slowly strangling-the process is described in some detail-the female servants who have been sleeping with Penelope's suitors. This is only one example (although a pretty striking one) of normal behavior in an Iron Age culture which is unacceptable in a society that I (or anybody I want as a reader) would choose to live in. I might've been stupid enough to follow the structure of an ancient epic in a modern space opera, but I wasn't going to describe a hero with the worldview of a death camp guard..."

The "Odyssey" passage is:

> "'When ye have set all the house in order, lead the maidens without... and there slay them with your long blades, till they shall have all given up the ghost and forgotten the love that of old they had at the bidding of the wooers, in secret dalliance.'... They led the maidens forth... and wise Telemakhos began to speak to his fellows, saying: 'God forbid that I should take these women's lives by a clean death, these that have poured dishonour on my head and on my mother, and have lain with the wooers'.

> "With that word he tied the cable of a dark-prowed ship to a great pillar and flung it round the vaulted room, and fastened it aloft, that none might touch the ground with her feet.

> "And even as when thrushes, long of wing, or doves fall into a net that is set in a thicket, as they seek to their roosting-place, and a loathly bed harbours them, even so the women held their heads all in a row, and about all their necks nooses were cast, that they might die by the most pitiful death.

> "And they writhed with their feet for a little space, but for no long while..."

The very sharp Emily Wilson confronts this passage and starts spinning like a top, because she likes the "Odyssey", and Odysseus. She justifies their view of their actions as necessary but regrettable exercises of Iron-Age kingship:

> "Do Odysseus and Telemachus think it's right? Yes, but... it's about being respected and controlling memories and (re) gaining power. Telemakhos... associates the killing with getting rid of dirt from the house. It's right to take out trash, but not the same kind of 'right' as self-defense or vengeance..."

And then she tries to open a space between the viewpoint of Odysseus and the viewpoint of Homer:

> "Does THE TEXT show (consistently?) that it's right? Tough question, not skippable. Narrative shows us why Odysseus and Telemachus want them dead. It also shows us what it feels like for them to be terrified and strung up (bird simile). They don't feel their deaths as "right". Is their pain and their deaths... presented as justifiable... a necessary cost for the restoration of Odysseus's household in something like its original state? Maybe. Maybe not. Important grey area..."

And here I say: NO!

The people before whom the "Odyssey" was recited--the Iron-Age target audience--are drunken warriors and their tame accountants, bureuacrats, and propagandists. They applaud when the poetic bards approve of heroes with the "worldviews of death camp guards". That is because that his who they are: they have managed to become, thrive, and remain among the _telestai_, and they have managed to do so skillfully apply brutal punishments and generous rewards to hold their little piece of order together with themselves at the top in the wrack after the collapse of Bronze Age civilization.

The listeners to the "Odyssey" in the period of its composition will approve of--and the young males will learn to model themselves on--the acts of Telemakhos here, as he denies the slavewomen anything like an honorable death by the sword and instead gives them a pitiful and terrifying death by strangulation. That is how the age in which the Odyssey grew has left it mark on the text and story.

I do think it is a grey area.

I do think Emily Wilson desperately needs to be "presentist", and to add things to the text that are not there in order for her to be able to continue to read and love the "Odyssey". And so we get:

> "I think the capacity of literature to create these kinds of rich complex questions or fault-lines, between what this or that character thinks, and what the whole poem or story might be saying, is one of the biggest reasons why literature matters. It makes us see/feel/be more..."

How does she do this? Well, as Teresa Nielsen Hayden once wrote, reading takes place not on the page but between the ears:

> "[Readers] mix the handful of exposition you give them with the story you're telling, transform it into a detailed real-time color 3D movie in their heads, and credit the whole thing to you. If they take a liking to a character, they can spin an entire human personality out of four facts and a couple of reaction shots, and experience that thing they create as a person that they know. You rely on them. Storytelling wouldn't work if the audience wasn't constantly filling in the details from the hints that you provide. Most of them are surprisingly good at it..... You can't make it stop happening...

And it is not on the page but between Emily Wilson's ears that the "Odyssey" gets deepened: She "fills in the details from the hints" thus: She agrees that Odysseus and Telemakhos believe that they are doing what is necessary--δικη--and perhaps even righteous: the kind of thing a man with a comprehensive understanding of the situation--πολυμαχοσ--would do. But her personal 3-D movie allows and encourages an identification and empathy with the murdered slavewomen, more than and beyond just noting that their terror at their pitiful death is a salutary thing that will keep the slavewomen of Ithaka on the straight-and-narrow in the future. She thinks the passage raises the question for not just female and wise male but young male listeners around an Iron Age campfire of whether Odysseus and Telemakhos here are not being their best selves, are not properly and fully αριστοι. She sees it as provoking the same catharsis of pity and fear in all listeners back then that it does with us today.

And I do not think this is right...

6: Hilariously, I had that post (about David Drake and the Odyssey) in my notes when I was writing my entry -- specifically to talk about the question of historical imagination. I didn't link to it, in part because I didn't want to include too many extraneous links, and in part because the post itself wouldn't load in my browser, but I did find it in the wayback">http://web.archive.org/web/20180819081137/https://www.bradford-delong.com/2018/07/homers-odyssey-blogging-like-little-birds-they-writhed-with-their-feet-but-for-no-long-while.html">wayback machine.

Re: "I thought the discussion of race was occasionally tone-deaf and, compared to the rest of the book, stuck more closely to familiar stories and symbols."

What stories do you think would have been better ones to tell here?

Good question -- maybe somebody else will have a good answer. I could think of a handful of ideas for the postwar period, but less that would fit into the timeframe of Chapter 3. With a little googling, I find this essay which I think is is a helpful supplement, but it doesn't offer any immediate anecdotes.

The period from 1890-1920, is often called the "nadir" of African American history, yet African Americans kept hope alive and forged new political weapons during this time. It may be helpful to think of southerners in 1890 as the baby boomers of the nineteenth century. Two decades after the Civil War, the southerners who came into power in that decade had been young during Reconstruction and educated after Emancipation. Members of this generation had not fought in the Civil War; nor had they been enslaved. When they came of political age, the white people were determined to find new solutions to "the Negro Problem," and their black cohort was just as determined to win its fair share of opportunities and resources.

...

In addition to education, black people came to own 25% of southern acreage by 1900, compared to the 3.8% that they owned in 1880. By 1910, African Americans owned between 16 and 19 million acres.6 Moreover, African Americans started their own businesses and factories. At Union, South Carolina, Fonvielle visited a gigantic cotton mill owned by a black man, which employed both black and white labor. A decade later, no cotton mill in the South would employ African Americans at all.

But by the time he got to Spartanburg, South Carolina, Fonvielle's education in the new white supremacy began. "When I arrived at Spartanburg--which is a pretty town--I was reminded that I was in the South by the appearance of two sign boards at the station, which told me: 'This room is for colored people.' 'This room is for white people.' . . . Those signs perplexed me, for I had never seen anything like them before. Then the whole thing burst upon me at once, and I interpreted it to mean: The Negroes must stay in here and not in the other room, and the 'superior' civilization goes where it pleases."

Polanyians are people reacting against the market's declaration that the only rights that matter are property rights, and that only those with something valuable to sell on the market have social power and social voice. Polanyi identified their goals as seeking to keep three things...

In this case, why does "Polanyians" come out the other end of this discussion as a useful term when talking of anything other than Polanyi's writings? In this telling, almost everyone but a hard laissez-faire libertarian is a Polanyian. New Deal liberals, Nazis, Communists, theocrats, Proudhonnists.

I could think of a handful of ideas for the postwar period

Looking it up, I see that the Highlander Folk School started in 1932. Earlier than I thought, but not early enough to fit into that chapter.

In case people don't click through, reading that wikipedia page is really inspiring.

It was originally focused on labor issues and labor organizing, but shifted to civil rights. Provided formative experience for a number of civil rights leaders ("[John] Lewis revealed later that he had his first meal in an integrated setting at Highlander"); introduced the song "We Shall Overcome" to the world and then, in the 70s, got involved in the Environmental Justice movement (growing out of an interest in worker health and safety).

(Sorry not to be more engaged -- work is requiring me to work today. I'll check in later.)

Updated link to DeLong's post (quoted in the anonymous comment 6) about the Odyssey. Just to be clear, when I referred to his "unapologetic presentism" in the OP, that wasn't a complaint. I don't think it represents a lack of concern or empathy for the historical subjects, but rather a style of presentation.

10 also led me to discover that (something you all probably knew already) Rosa Parks wasn't arrested for sitting in the front of a bus in Montgomery, rather than in the back where black people were supposed to be sitting, like I thought she was. She was already sitting in the "colored" section, as the law required, but the white section was full and the bus driver wanted her to move even further back so that some white passengers could sit in the colored bit.

14: I didn't know that, although I probably heard it at one time or another! Doesn't match the myth, I guess.

(I've always been peeved by Garrison Keillor trying to further mythologize it in a monologue describing her as just tired, as if it weren't (creditably) planned in advance.)

He's bad with statistics too. There's no way all the children can be above average.

Re: "'Polanyians are people reacting against the market's declaration that the only rights that matter are property rights, and that only those with something valuable to sell on the market have social power and social voice. Polanyi identified their goals as seeking to keep three things...' In this case, why does "Polanyians" come out the other end of this discussion as a useful term when talking of anything other than Polanyi's writings? In this telling, almost everyone but a hard laissez-faire libertarian is a Polanyian. New Deal liberals, Nazis, Communists, theocrats, Proudhonnists."

Because I fucked up. There are Polanyians, who are people who follow Polanyi in their politics. There are Polanyians, who are people who follow Polany in their analyses. And there are Polanyians, who are people who move under the influence of the forces Polanyi identified--the reaction of "society" against "market"--who are, as you say, "almost everyone but a hard laissez-faire libertarian".

The only quibble is that there are an awful lot of people who are libertarian at the margin when it is to their advantage...

Homer Plessy was also arrested by prior arrangement in order to create a test case. But that didn't turn out so well.

16: the implication is obviously that all the adults are below average.

I really enjoyed the Herbert Hoover reappearing in the Empires chapter. I'm really enjoying the book overall. The biography sketches and conversational history are both good. I'm curious whether there have been meaningful comments from Chinese historians/economists about the depiction of the Boxer rebellion and collapse of the Qing.

Is there any sense in in trying to describe Galbraith's ideas as coaligned with Polanyi's? Galbraith pointed out a bunch of unfortunate consequences of US market-based allocation of resources in the fifties; he used a phrase, private splendor and public ruin or similar? Asking, I don't know history of economic thought, I liked Galbraith's book.

The whirlwind view of reconstruction I liked also, good as a complement to more methodical discussions.

I'd love to contribute thumbnails and thoughts for an installment, but am only in the middle of Ch 5 now, so pacing I guess.

I liked the page design. My dad's aiming to get a copy, the good Czech book chain has hard copies.

dammit, I'm two chapters behind again. I don't think I'll ever catch up.

Re: "Is there any sense in in trying to describe Galbraith's ideas as coaligned with Polanyi's? Galbraith pointed out a bunch of unfortunate consequences of US market-based allocation of resources in the fifties; he used a phrase, private splendor and public ruin or similar? Asking, I don't know history of economic thought, I liked Galbraith's book."

Yes: Bob Reich thinks I screwed up BigTime by having it von Hayek-Polanyi, rather than to have had von Hayek triple teamed by Polanyi, Keynes, and Galbraith...

Tyler Cowen, on the other hand, thinks I was much too mean to von Hayek...

I remember being young and encouraged to read Hayek. It's one of those things that people did in the 90s and later regretted.

So what was "reading Hayek" the Gateway Drug for?

Freakanomics, for amateurs?

24: Reading Tyler Cowen's blog.

24: serfdom, but not in the way that they expected

Another egregious (and totally unnecessary) error, I will leave to Ajay's tender mercies:

Woodrow Wilson ... had the only effective army [in 1919]

(That quote is pulled from Chapter 6 but being a military claim is better handled under WWI.)

the Prussian way of war--if you fail to win quickly, sue for peace

News to Frederick II, among many others.

29: I will hold off answering that one until I have finished my current Prussian history streak. Am about halfway through Christopher Clark's "Iron Kingdom" and Isabel Hull is next up on the stack.

"Slouching Toward Utopia" is also on the stack, but my reading time is finite, and my rate of progress is being slowed by the fact that Clark is hard going and I can only manage about 40 pages at a time before having to stop and switch fire to a Mulliner story or something.

Re Hoover, the sheer scale of the international famine relief effort in the USSR in the early 20s is incredible - it's probably one of the greatest things the US did in the entire 20th century, and needs to be better known about (entirely understandable why it was downplayed by both sides after the fact, of course). The ARA probably saved the lives of at least ten million people.

That is an impressive quantity of spam links.

I'm tempted to click through on the one at the bottom that contains the intriguing phrase "elope or not elope".

Presumably the rest of the decision tree includes "Gretna Green/Las Vegas/Other destination", "on horseback" and "at dead of night" being assumed.

I'm amused by the link that says, "Laptop+Cannot+Boot,+Preparing+Automatic+Repairs+-+Fails#answer746800"

What stories do you think would have been better ones to tell here?

Mulling this over last night I'd add a couple comments:

1) An example of a book selecting a less-famous (but still well known) figure to focus on is Adam Gopnik writing about Bayard Rustin in A Thousand Small Sanities (a book that pairs well with Slouching Towards Utopia).
2) I'm not really making the argument for Highland Folk School, but I would note that (a) it would tie directly into your description of Polanyi and, if it was a short anecdote in the chapter on the inter-war period it would connect to Roosevelt's policy experimentation. It does have the disadvantage of framing the Civil Rights movement with a story about an institution started by a white hillbilly.
3) I would still be curious if anyone else agrees with me that it's a question worth thinking about and/or has any other suggestions.

Be an ANTELOPE not a CAN'T ELOPE.

Re: "Once German dreams of a swift victory were dashed, and everyone went to their trenches, the logic of the Prussian way of war--if you fail to win quickly, sue for peace--fell out of favor..."

Ah. That **is** a boo-boo. The idea was supposed to be:

1. Prussia has no natural defenses and a poor population.
2. Hence if it is going to win, it must win quickly.
3. Hence the Prussian Way of War--strike first, strike hard, strike from an unexpected direction.
4. The logic of the Prussian Way of War is that you are going to lose a long war.
5. Therefore if you fail to win quickly, logic says sue for peace.
6. But that is not how the German army worked.

And then we go off to the next sentence:

"The German officer corps' adherence to Totenritt--a willingness to undertake a "death ride"--held sway, so that carrying out senseless orders to the best of one's ability substituted for logic."

Should be "...the logical implication of the Prussian way of war - that, if you fail to win a quick victory, you must either sue for peace or face inevitable eventual defeat - fell out of favour..."

Also needs more Kadavergehorsamkeit.

Also -- looking ahead a little bit -- I don't think anybody has volunteered for the next section, but it might make sense for us to skip a chapter coming up.

If the next person did Roaring 20s, Great Depression and ONE OF Communisim/Fascism (skipping the other one), then the following section would be WWII, Cold War, and Economic Development in the Global South (which would work fairly well together as a group).

On the OP, I really liked Nick's characterization of the way that Delong handled history quickly and episodically -- in reading, it often felt like a taste of an era, which worked well for me. Part of that, I suspect, is that while I have a good overall sense of history (sufficient to slot the pieces that Delong picked into a broad context), I don't have deep knowledge of periods in the book. That helps to keep me away from wishing there was more depth to the examples cited - but it also means that I'm unlikely to catch errors.

Related to being unlikely to catch errors, I did read through Slouching quickly, so I could reread and tackle writing up the next clump of chapters. I'll point out my limitations-- I'm broadly interested in economics and history, but am by no means an expert in either. (I guess that's an "I volunteer as tribute" for LB.)