Slouching Towards Utopia

If you want to grasp why J. Bradford DeLong calls 1870–2010 the long twentieth century, you need to see it as the first era when technological and organizational progress permanently broke free from the Malthusian trap. Before 1870, population growth tended to eat any productivity gains. Afterward, mass innovation and global integration made sustained prosperity possible. This book traces how that economic acceleration reshaped politics, society, war, and ideology across the world.

The Economic Watershed

DeLong argues that three intertwined inventions—global transport networks, the industrial research laboratory, and the modern corporation—mark the watershed. Together they institutionalized technological progress, organized mass production, and enabled global markets. Between 1870 and 2010, the pace of useful knowledge deployment rose roughly fourfold, transforming the world from scarcity to abundance. Humanity became capable of multiplying productive capacity faster than population.

The era introduced what DeLong and Richard Baldwin call the first unbundling: cheap transport and communication separated production from consumption. Steamships, railways, and submarine cables made goods, capital, and people mobile on a global scale. Millions migrated; global trade doubled its share of global output. Yet industrial know‑how stayed clustered in advanced districts, producing both convergence and divergence.

Inventing How to Invent

The industrial research lab and corporate hierarchy created a social technology of innovation itself. Edison and Tesla’s rivalry or Ford’s assembly line illustrate this new model: the laboratory discovers while the corporation translates and distributes at scale. These systems drove exponential technological change while simultaneously disrupting livelihoods through creative destruction (Schumpeter’s phrase).

Empire, Inequality, and Divergence

The prosperity explosion did not spread evenly. Imperialism tethered large parts of Asia, Africa, and Latin America to extractive economies. India, Egypt, and China fell under formal or informal European control that blocked autonomous industrialization. Japan’s Meiji Restoration stands as the successful exception—showing that active state capacity and technical education could enable catch‑up. The lesson is institutional: countries that built learning communities and stable investment regimes could industrialize; those stuck with colonial extractive structures stayed poor.

Market, Society, and Political Experiment

As prosperity and inequality grew, societies wrestled with the balance between market autonomy and social protection. Hayek championed spontaneous market coordination; Polanyi warned that society always mounts a counter‑movement to protect land, labor, and money from pure commodification. Keynes offered the synthesis—markets for efficiency, macro management for stability, and social safety nets for legitimacy. Postwar social democracy embodied this triad until its neoliberal rollback decades later.

Conflict and Reinvention

The book unfolds through recurring crises—wars and depressions that tested institutional frameworks. World War I shattered Europe’s imperial order; the Great Depression exposed monetary and demand failures; totalitarian ideologies—Stalinism and Nazism—revealed what happens when planning or nationalism devour freedom. World War II proved industrial output determines victory; the Cold War rebuilt an institutional order under U.S. hegemony and containment.

Globalization, Technology, and Fragility

After 1945, Bretton Woods institutions revived trade and stability; containerization and microelectronics powered a second wave of globalization. But financial fragility and inequality resurged by the end of the century. The 2007–2009 crash, echoing the 1930s, demonstrated that financial innovation without trusted safeguards breeds systemic collapse. DeLong’s broader message: progress is real but not self‑correcting. Prosperity depends on institutions that can translate technical improvement into inclusive social advancement.

Core Insight

The long twentieth century shows that sustained growth stems from institutionalized innovation and managed globalization—but only societies that balance markets, governance, and inclusion turn that growth into genuine well‑being.

The first globalization after 1870 redefined how goods, ideas, and people moved. Cheap steam transport and telegraph cables allowed production to happen anywhere, consumption everywhere, and coordination almost instantly. You can picture iron‑hulled RMS Oceanic crossing Liverpool–New York in nine days or Brunel’s SS Great Eastern laying the wires that let London talk to India. By 1876 a telegram could reach New Zealand, overturning the isolation of markets.

The Logic of Unbundling

Economist Richard Baldwin calls this the first unbundling: transport and communication costs fell enough to make location flexible. Goods could be made where it was cheaper and sold where purchasing power was greater. Migration mirrored this logic—between 1870 and 1914 one in fourteen people crossed continents. These flows reshaped wages and politics, fueling both opportunity and backlash.

Economic and Social Consequences

Global trade’s frontier pushed specialization: industrial cores produced complex goods while colonies and peripheries exported primary products. Transportation equalized prices but not development. This asymmetry underlay later conflicts over empire and fairness. Still, global connectedness let ideas—from socialism to nationalism—move as freely as cotton and grain, reinforcing DeLong’s theme that economics now drove history itself.

Migration as Cultural Transmission

Migrants carried experience and ideology. Gandhi’s journey to South Africa and Deng Xiaoping’s work study in France symbolize how mobility generated global political ferment. Migration physically moved labor but also transferred knowledge and aspiration, making globalization as much intellectual as economic.

Insight

Globalization’s first wave multiplied wealth and ideas but also built unequal geographies whose legacies echo in today’s North–South divide.

At the heart of the twentieth century lies the struggle between the logic of the market and the claims of society. DeLong frames this through three thinkers: Hayek, Polanyi, and Keynes. Each offered a model for reconciling efficiency, fairness, and stability—and the postwar world depended on a precarious mix of all three.

Hayek’s Liberty and Knowledge

Friedrich Hayek argued that decentralized markets harness dispersed information. Prices are not moral judgments but signals guiding production. Attempts to impose ’social justice’ via redistribution risk destroying the informational order itself—a warning he dramatized in The Road to Serfdom. His vision appealed strongly during neoliberal revivals, emphasizing the self‑correcting powers of free exchange.

Polanyi’s Double Movement

Karl Polanyi saw markets as dis‑embedding economic life from community. Land, labor, and money are not natural commodities; societies rebel when exposed to pure market forces. Thus emerges the double movement: market expansion and social protection in cycle. Labor rights, welfare states, and environmental regulation exemplify this protective counterwave.

Keynesian Synthesis and Social Democracy

John Maynard Keynes provided technical reconciliation—use fiscal and monetary tools to stabilize demand while keeping markets open. Postwar governments built on this logic: full employment policy, social insurance, and regulated finance under the umbrella of liberal democracy. When growth was strong, the mix worked—a social‑democratic settlement delivering prosperity and legitimacy.

But the compromise was contingent on growth. From the 1970s onward, stagflation broke Keynesian confidence, giving rise to neoliberal retrenchment that revived Hayek’s skepticism and weakened Polanyi’s social protections. The tension between freedom and fairness remained unresolved.

Lesson

Societies need both market intelligence and social empathy; history shows neither pure laissez‑faire nor pure planning can sustain prosperity or legitimacy on their own.

The long twentieth century’s midpoint is defined by catastrophe. Industrial warfare, depressions, and ideological mobilization tested how states manage production and trust. DeLong examines these turning points to show that prosperity without political maturity invites collapse.

World War I and Its Discontents

1914–1918 shattered the global order shaped since 1870. Nationalism and militarism turned industrial prowess into mass slaughter. Postwar inflation and reparations exposed the absence of a stabilizing hegemon; Keynes warned in 1919 that punitive peace would breed instability—and it did, feeding the conditions for extremism.

Monetary Collapse and the Great Depression

Fixed to the gold standard, central banks refused to supply liquidity during banking panics. As trust evaporated, deflation set in, turning a recession into a global depression. Keynes argued that governments had 'mismanaged a delicate machine' and called for active reflation. Roosevelt’s New Deal experimented its way forward, from devaluation to social security, proving that confidence and demand must be restored politically, not just technically.

Communism, Fascism, and Totalitarian Alternatives

In the interwar vacuum, ideologies promised salvation through command or myth. Lenin’s war communism hardened into Stalin’s coercive planning and purges—industrial progress at immense human cost. Hitler and Mussolini offered nationalist rebirth through violence, culminating in genocide and global war. Ideology armed with technology created nightmares calculated in millions.

World War II and Its Lessons

World War II demonstrated that industrial power outweighs tactical brilliance: the Allies’ production margin determined victory. The conflict also birthed atomic age anxieties and set foundations for U.S. global leadership. The lesson repeats through DeLong’s narrative—material and institutional capacity decide outcomes more than ideology alone.

Key insight

Economic fragility and ideological absolutism together produce ruin; resilient institutions that maintain trust and flexibility are the true defense against crisis.

After 1945 a new framework replaced chaos. The United States acted as hegemon, underwriting Bretton Woods institutions and containment. In that stability, advanced economies built what DeLong calls social‑democratic prosperity—markets guided by Keynesian tools and sheltered by welfare states.

Building the Liberal Order

Bretton Woods established the IMF, World Bank, and GATT—tools to manage exchange rates, reconstruction, and trade. The Marshall Plan transferred funds that forced European cooperation, planting the seeds of the EU. American credibility anchored the system; Korea’s war cemented a permanent global military posture.

The Social‑Democratic Marriage

Hayek’s market efficiency met Keynes’s macro management and Polanyi’s protections. Full employment, social insurance, housing policy, and strong unions produced the “Thirty Glorious Years.” The UAW’s Treaty of Detroit symbolized labor peace through shared gains—a worker’s wage bought both car and suburban home. Rising productivity supported rising living standards.

Fragility and Unraveling

Growth masked tension. When oil shocks and inflation broke in the 1970s, economics turned political. Stagflation destroyed faith in demand management; Volcker’s painful disinflation restored price stability but at social cost. By the 1980s neoliberalism dethroned social democracy, prioritizing markets and individualism over collective welfare.

Yet the postwar decades remain unique—proof that active policy and inclusive institutions can produce both prosperity and stability. Their erosion later underscores how exceptional that balance was, not how inevitable.

Late twentieth‑century prosperity was powered by two forces: technology and globalization. Containerization and microelectronics combined to make distance and computation cheap, enabling firms to rearrange production worldwide. But the same innovations that created efficiency also magnified fragility through financial complexity and inequality.

Containers and Reglobalization

The humble shipping container—standardized and stackable—cut freight costs from double‑digit shares of retail value to barely one percent. That single invention unlocked mass trade flows, gave rise to supply chains spanning continents, and shifted industrial jobs toward emerging markets. Institutional frameworks—the IMF, World Bank, and GATT—supported this expansion, creating a second unbundling with far greater reach.

Computing and the Digital Revolution

Microelectronics transformed production and life. Silicon transistors multiplied computational capacity according to Moore’s Law. Firms such as Intel and Apple embodied how information became a general‑purpose force—enhancing productivity, coordination, and communication. Yet the digital boom also birthed the attention economy, where engagement replaced welfare as corporate priority, sowing new social tensions.

Financialization and Crisis

Global integration without regulation turned finance into a vulnerability. The 2007–2009 crash—triggered when supposedly safe mortgage assets lost trust—was a modern replay of monetary failures past. Central banks eventually provided liquidity and guarantees, but fiscal timidity produced slow recoveries and resentment. DeLong uses this case to stress that economic management is political: technical remedies work only if governments dare to act boldly.

Central takeaway

Technological and financial sophistication increase both power and peril; inclusive governance and credible safety nets remain essential if globalization is to yield stable prosperity.

The closing chapters return to the moral core: who benefited from the long twentieth century’s cornucopia? Economic growth rarely guaranteed inclusion. Race, gender, and geography continued to define opportunity across advanced economies and the global south.

Race and Representation

In the United States, the promise of democracy contradicted the practice of exclusion. From Reconstruction to Jim Crow, Black Americans were systematically denied political and economic participation. Legislation—the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act—finally enforced formal equality, but structural disparities persisted in wealth, housing, and credit access. Migration and civil‑rights movements reshaped politics but not yet outcomes.

Gender and Work

Women’s entry into paid labor accelerated after mid‑century. Technological household aids, educational gains, and fertility decline widened choices, yet wage and authority gaps endured. Claudia Goldin’s research shows bureaucratic career structures penalized continuous employment breaks and reinforced pay disparities. Legal changes—adding sex discrimination clauses to Title VII—created recourse but not full parity.

Global Divergence

Decolonization did not ensure development. Post‑imperial states in Africa, South Asia, and Latin America inherited extractive institutions and fragmented politics. Only where states limited rent‑seeking or built disciplined developmental regimes—Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Botswana—did catch‑up succeed. Elsewhere, populism or authoritarianism recycled poverty. Growth, DeLong insists, is political capacity made durable, not just technical progress.

The long twentieth century lifted billions from destitution but left persistent inequities. Inclusion demands more than prosperity; it requires institutions that channel economic power into equal citizenship—a challenge still unfinished.