Hello everyone, welcome to the Weinskate Podcast. I'm your host Sean Carroll. Whenever we talk about history in the grand sense of things, whether it's

formally as historians, professionals, or even just informally, it's very convenient to refer to a century, right?

Like what was happening in the 18th century or the 3rd century or the 5th century, BC, or whatever it is?

But of course, that's a little arbitrary, right?

I mean, it just so happens that there are hundred-year spans,

just so happens that we picked a starting point. They're not naturally breaking points there all the time.

But we still have a feeling about the 17th century versus the 20th century, for example.

So the professionals will sometimes talk about a short century or a long century when they try to pinpoint the

actual transition moments where things break up and you can sensibly talk about

themes within this period of time. So today's guest,

Brad DeLong is a very well-known successful economist and someone who thinks in a very polymathic way about

history, science, technology, economics, politics, all those things at once.

He's proposing that we think about the long 20th century that begins in

1870 and ends in

2010. Now he knows that's not a century, but he thinks this is a useful unit of analysis and

he claims that the long 20th century is the first one in which economics is the most important way of thinking about the world.

Well, you know, he's an economist. What do we expect?

So that's going to be one of the questions that we're going to ask, Brad. Why is it economics?

But roughly speaking, in 1870, he claims a bunch of things happen at once, globalization,

corporations in the modern sense, also research labs,

sort of formalization of scientific and technological research,

which really start to change how the world is organized. And a bunch of things happen that are kind of chaotic, you know,

...