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20th Century Economic History
:
The Grand Narrative
J. Bradford DeLong
U.C. Berkeley, WCEG, and NBER
2013-03-23
key
:
html:
http://www.bradford-delong.com/2013/03/the-grand-narrative-
saturday-twentieth-century-economic-history-weblogging.html
pages:
https://www.icloud.com/pages/
0mFdPap3vFzTPpo6Dm8k0Zvrg#2013-03-23_The_Grand_Narrartive_
.TCEH
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
858 words
1
Every history tells a story of what happened: one damned
thing after another. But which story do you tell?
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. If you are telling a story
of a thousand years ago, you most-likely focus on the rise
of the Song Dynasty in China, on the waning of the golden
age that was Abbasid Baghdad-centered Islamic
civilization, and on, perhaps, the establishment of feudal
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“civilization” in western Europe. Those are the axes of the
history of the 1000s: politics and culture. Other stories of
other centuries would most-likely focus on the
Christianization of the Roman Empire, the shift of China’s
population center of gravity to the rice-growing south and
and so forth. 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. <hr class="at-page-break" />But what will people
500 years in the future see the principal axes of our history,
of the history that set the patterns into which their
civilization grew, of the history of the extended 1870-2010
twentieth century?
The major theme has to be that the history of the twentieth
century was overwhelmingly economic and was—all in all
—glorious. The history has an extremely depressing
middle: a wolf-fanged century, wrote Russian poet Osip
Mandelstam, “but I am not a wolf”. However unlikely it
seemed in his time, our ending today is—so far—much
more happy than tragic. Certainly this is the case when we
use a relative yardstick, and compare the end of the
twentieth century to all previous centuries. 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
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back. Yes, nuclear weapons and global warming pose
dangers for the future of a magnitude that humanity has
never before confronted. Nevertheless, all in all the North
Atlantic today is a (relatively) free and prosperous region,
and the rest of the world is if not free and prosperous at
least closer to being so than at any time in the past.
This is the Grand Narrative.
Of course, that the explosion of material wealth and liberty
we have seen in the twentieth century has not solved our
human problems is obvious. That the likely spread of ample
material plenty and, if we are lucky, increasing democracy
and freedom to much of the rest of the globe that the
twenty-fi rst century may see will not solve our human
problems is obvious as well. We have little confi dence
today that we know how to achieve successful economic
development in the world: the East Asian fi nancial crisis of
the late 1990s and the North Atlantic crisis of the late 2000s
broke confi dence in both the East Asian state-led and the
neoliberal openness-led development models. The twenty-
fi rst century problems of global environmental management
have not yet been addressed. Wars of religion are, if not
back, on the horizon. And modern North Atlantic liberal
democracy is not the end of history. And there is the fact
that the utopia toward which we have seemed to be
progressing—a prosperous, liberal, democratic one—is not
to everyone’s taste, as the terror-bombers who destroyed
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the World Trade Center and killed 3000 people on
September 11, 2001 and subsequent military-political
attempts to spread or contain a new set of wars of religion
have made clear.
A naive individual of a century or two ago would wonder at
the events, patterns, and problems that brought the
twentieth century to its end. The world at the end of the
twentieth century has enough wealth to give everyone on
the globe what they would regard as a rich upper-middle
class style of life. Why does such a rich and powerful world
still have problems? It is not at all clear that we will
recognize our destination when we arrive at it, or that many
of us will like it when we get there.
At best, we are but slouching towards utopia.
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