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The Multi
m
illennial
Perspective
J. Bradford DeLong
U.C. Berkeley, WCEG, and NBER
2017-01-11
key
:
http://tinyurl.com/dl20161129a
html
http://www.bradford-delong.com/big-history-the-multi-millennial-
perspective.html
pages:
https://www.icloud.com/pages/
0WhM60Lk2bLhiITPcy30b2OMg
Notebook: Twentieth Century Economic History:
http://www.bradford-
delong.com/twentieth-century-economic-history-1.html
Economics Teaching Master:
http://www.bradford-delong.com/-
_housekeeping_-this-page-edit-this-page.html
1895 words
1
I.
The View from the Far Future
A. The Multimillennial Perspective
Take a
multi
millennial perspective
:
2000, 3000, 4000 years from now, what will professors--if
there are professors--in universities--if there are
universities--teaching classes--if there are classes--about
what they will then call "ancient history" teach? They will
spend more time on the long 20th century then on any other
earlier century. It will be salient, in that more and more that
is important happened in the age than in any equal earlier
length of time.
Between the appearance of the iron-hulled oceangoing
steamship, the submarine telegraph cable, and the industrial
research lab around 1870 and the business cycle collapse
followed by the anemic recovery of 2007-2015, the world
was transformed more and more thoroughly than in any
earlier
epoch of its or even many times its length. The two
millennia of the discovery of agriculture and herding and
the unknown period that marked the discovery and
diffusion of fi re might have matched it, and the invention of
language surpassed it. But otherwise, of all eras that the
human race has experienced to date, the long 20th century
was the axis on which the wheel of history turned.
This is not to say that people 2000, 3000, 4000 years from
now will spend a lot of time thinking about what they will
2
call "ancient history", and we now simply call "history": A
lot of water will flow under many bridges in what will be
our future and their past. But what of their attention they do
focus on us and our predecessors will give a large place to
us and to our four generations of immediate ancestors.
The fi rst thing that they will stress is that the history of the
long 20th century is predominantly economic, or rather
political-economic history.
B.
Before 1750 the Economic Is in the
Background
If you are telling a story of the history of fi ve hundred years
ago, you most-likely focus on Martin Luther and Jean
Calvin’s Protestant Reformation, on the Spanish conquest
of the Americas, on the rise of the Shāhān-e Gūrkānī—the
Moghul Empire—in the Indian subcontinent, and maybe a
couple more. Those are the axes of the history of the 1500s:
religion, expansion, and conquest. And the same for other
earlier centuries: the rise, diffusion, and fall of dynasties,
empires, religions, and cultures are the axes of history, with
perhaps some reference to what the cultures of material
subsistence in the background were and how they slowly
changed. The economy was not on the main menu.
This is not to say that there was no economic change before
the British Industrial Revolution, before the eighteenth and
nineteenth century age of the spinning jenny, power loom,
3
steam engine, coal mine, and iron works. The windmills,
dikes, fi elds, crops, and animals of Holland in 1700 made
the economy of its countryside very different indeed from
the marshes of 700. But pre-industrial technological
progress led to little improvement in the standard of living
of the average human: improvements in technology and
productive power by and large did little but raise the
numbers of the human race, not its material standard of
living. The main action of history was elsewhere.
This main action starts to move in the political-economic
direction in the eighteenth century, with the stirrings of
what were to become the
industrial
and
democratic
revolutions
. Certainly the grand narrative of the semi-long
19th century from 1750 to 1870 is a twin story.
Half of it is the democratic revolution--growing from the
seeds of Holland and Britain to its flourishing in America
and its troubled career in France, but changing the terms of
the debate so that the burden of argument began to rest on
those opposed to democracy.
The other half of it was the industrial revolution--the
invention of the technologies of the age of coal, steam,
cotton, and iron and the accumulation of capital needed to
turn the invented technologies into real machines. But from
the perspective of 1860 the thing that forced itself on your
attention was how narrow and concentrated both stable
4
democracy and industrial civilization were. Would they
spread? Would they persist?
C.
After 1870: The Salience of the
Economic
Thus 1870 does mark a real game change.
We do not know what of the cornucopia of our and our
immediate predecessors' art, literature, culture, and
philosophy our successors millennia hence will fi nd
valuable and resonant. Perhaps from a multi-millennial
perspective future historians will fi nd some aspect of our
art, our culture, our literature salient and worthy of great
focus.
But probably not.
Probably students will be taught that one key difference
between the history of our long 20th century and earlier
cents is precisely that what is salient is the economic. That
is very different from all previous history, running from the
evolution of humanity, the acquisition of language, the
radiation from Africa, the invention of agriculture and the
domestication of the goat ten thousand years ago, and the
invention of writing fi ve thousand years ago up until 1870.
They will learn that the major theme has to be that the
history of the twentieth century was overwhelmingly
5
economic, and was—all in all—glorious. It has an
extremely depressing middle from 1914-1945 and, in many
places, 1975 or 1989: a wolf-fanged century, wrote Russian
poet
Osip Mandelstam
, “but I am not a wolf”. And our
ending today is deeply shadowed.
But it is—so far—much more happy than tragic.
Yes, forms of religious strife and terror that we thought we
had left behind several centuries ago are back. Yes, failures
of economic policy that land countries in depression that
we thought we had learned how to resolve decades ago are
back, as are their depressing sociological consequences for
the integrity of society's web and the sanity of its politics.
Yes, nuclear weapons and global warming pose dangers of
a magnitude that humanity has never before confronted.
Nevertheless, all in all the North Atlantic today is a
(relatively) free and prosperous region. The rest of the
world is, if not free and prosperous, at least closer to being
so than at any time in the past. And much of it is coming up
fast.
That will most likely be their Grand Narrative, millennia
from now.
6
II.
Four Major Threads
And as components of this grand narrative, they will in all
probability select out four threads to focus on:
1.
The twentieth century saw the
material wealth
of
humankind explode beyond all previous imagining.
2.
In large part because of advances technology,
productivity, and organization--and the feelings of
social dislocation and disquiet that these advances
generated--the twentieth century’s
tyrannies
were the
most brutal and barbaric in history.
3.
The twentieth century saw not just wealth explode it
saw very many left behind: the
relative economic
gulfs
between different economies grow at a rapid
pace.
4.
Governments'
inability to manage
their economies--to
arrange economic policy to provide consistent, durable,
distributed, and equitable advancing prosperity.
Crashes and depressions that destroyed and delayed
prosperity, surges of inequality that maldistributed it
and concentrated the benefi ts among a few, and
harebrained pursuit of false and fake utopias--these
were depressingly common in the twentieth century.
Perhaps they will fi nd time to mention--although probably
only briefly--six more subsidiary threads that I, at least,
judge as looming large:
7
1.
The
great
Milanovic
-Kuznets inequality waves
that
characterized the century.
2.
The
demographic and feminist transition
that raised
women from the status of a subordinated caste.
3.
And, more generally, how
societal
status
orders were
steamed away
—
no matter how established or ascribed,
ethnicity, caste, and other sociological status groups
lost much of their salience.
4.
The
Polanyian
perplex
: creating a society in which the
only rights that really mattered were property rights ran
into people's very strong belief that they had rights to
maintain their communities, receive their incomes, and
work in their occupations--that the attempt of a market
society to transform land, labor, and fi nance into
"commodities" was, always and everywhere in the
twentieth century, playing with fi re.
5.
The coming of
robots and the rise of the overclass
:
was the potential replacement of human brains as
cybernetic machine-management and routine
transactions-processing cybernetic control mechanisms
truly a threat to human society? Before the twentieth
century the strong muscles of human backs and thighs
and the nimble fi ngers of human hands had lost much
of their scarcity and thus much of their economic value
in a free market. A horse could pull more and a steam-
powered automatic loom could weave more.
6.
The
fall of formal empires
as strong nationalism--the
belief that one of the most fundamental rights was the
8
right to be ruled by members of one's own
ethnolinguistic fraction--spread from northwestern
Europe to become a near-universal foundational belief
in nearly all human societies.
And somewhere, lurking in the background, there is the
mystery of the
Great Filter
. We--tool-using language-
speaking world-populating jumped-up East African Plains
Apes--have been around for less than 100,000 years. But
when we look out at the universe we do not see our peers or
our predecessors anywhere.
Did life not evolve elsewhere? Did intelligent life not
evolve elsewhere? If so, then we have no peers.
Did
language
and
writing
not develop elsewhere? Did
industrial civilization
not develop elsewhere? If so then we
presumably have peers but they cannot make themselves
visible across the light years.
Or did something happen to them after they went through
their industrial revolutions? Something that is in their past,
but presumably is lurking in our future?
We thus have ten interwoven stories to tell. Let's get
started:
9
References
Felipe Fernandez-Armesto
:
Millennium: A History of the
Last Thousand Years
http://amzn.to/2gSeYce
Eric Hobsbawm
:
The Age of Capital: 1848-1875
http://
amzn.to/2fyyvOD
Eric Hobsbawm
:
The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848
http://
amzn.to/2gCBKEq
Simon Kuznets
:
Growth, Population, and Income
Distribution
http://amzn.to/2g2lol8
Simon Kuznets
:
Modern Economic Growth: Rate,
Structure and Spread
http://amzn.to/2gSnYhz
Osip Mandelstam
:
Four Poems
https://
tropicsofmeta.wordpress.com/2013/07/18/4-poems-by-
osip-mandelstam/
Branko Milanovic
:
Global Inequality: A New Approach
for the Age of Globalization
http://amzn.to/2gg7C1k
Branko Milanovic
:
The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief
and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality
http://
amzn.to/2gSjkQC
10
