Slouching towards economic utopia (with Brad DeLong)

Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer

Civic Ventures

Business, Government, News, Politics

4.8 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 21 March 2023

⏱️ 42 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Between 1870 and 2010 an unprecedented explosion of material wealth transformed the globe, but that wave of prosperity failed to create a fully functioning and equal society. How did we manage to create an economic pie large enough for everyone to share, but then fumble dividing that pie up equally? Brad DeLong explores this question in his new book, Slouching Towards Utopia, which looks at the economic history of the twentieth century and why it matters today. J. Bradford DeLong is an economic historian and a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley. He was a deputy assistant secretary of the U.S. Treasury during the Clinton administration. He writes a widely read economics blog, now at braddelong.substack.com Twitter: @delong Slouching Towards Utopia https://www.basicbooks.com/titles/j-bradford-delong/slouching-towards-utopia/9780465019595 Website: http://pitchforkeconomics.com Twitter: @PitchforkEcon Instagram: @pitchforkeconomics Nick’s twitter: @NickHanauer

Transcript

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0:00.0	Market capitalism has proven to be the most consequential problem-solving social technology
0:10.4	ever invented.
0:11.6	Before 1870, humanity had no chance of baking a sufficiently large economic pie.
0:17.6	We have created enough abundance for everyone to live a dignified and stable life, but we
0:25.3	still manage to mostly screw it all up.
0:33.0	From the home offices of civic ventures in downtown Seattle, this is pitchfork economics,
0:38.0	with Nick Hanauer, the best place to get the truth about who gets what and why.
0:48.9	I'm Nick Hanauer, founder of Civic Ventures.
0:52.2	I'm David Goldstein, senior fellow at Civic Ventures.
1:00.6	Goldie today, we get to talk to a really interesting person, the economic historian Brad DeLong,
1:08.6	about his new book, Slouching Toward Utopia.
1:12.4	You know, it tells basically the economic story of society from the years 1870 to 2010,
1:18.8	which he calls the most consequential years of all humanity centuries, and he's almost
1:24.3	certainly correct.
1:25.7	It's a fascinating tale of economic evolution and the way in which, in particular, markets
1:36.6	affected society in super profound ways.
1:40.8	Right.
1:41.8	I think what's interesting, Nick, is that it addresses attention that you and I have talked
1:46.5	about and have written about and are in the process of writing about.
1:52.2	And that is the fact, and I think this gets to why to the title of the book, the fact
1:57.3	that market capitalism has proven to be the most consequential problem solving, social
2:07.4	technology ever invented, that it has lifted billions of people out of poverty and into
	...

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