If you had told people 150 years ago how well off the world would become, they would have anticipated paradise. So why do things feel so broken?
A former advisor to President Clinton and a professor of economic history at Berkeley, Brad DeLong’s magnum opus Slouching Towards Utopia is a 150-year history of the creation of the modern world.
It begins in 1870, with the birth of free market capitalism and the industrial research lab, and takes in the rise of globalisation and the multinational corporation before bringing us to the present.
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The year 1870 was when our technological competence started to take off, he tells Kim Hill.
“It took off like a rocket, so that humanity's technological competence then doubled every generation, which meant that for the first time, humanity could actually bake a sufficiently large economic pie for people to have enough.
“And so, it's how we've been grappling with the fact that we will soon be able to produce a large enough economic pie for everyone to have enough.”
Failure to then distribute that pie equitably has driven much 20th century history, he says.
“[It’s] a failure to think that we need to use our wealth wisely and well to create a society in which people can feel safe and secure and be healthy and happy.”
While his book starts in 1870 it ends in 2010, he says. A slightly arbitrary date, he explains.
The return of religious wars, the increasing insularity of US politics, the rise of anti-democratic populism and the global financial crisis all happened prior to his end date and all shifted history, he says.
“And perhaps most of all I could talk about global warming coming to the forefront as a civilization-shaking threat.
“All of these things happen after 2000. And each of them does a little bit to shift history away from we're getting vastly richer, will we figured out how to equitably distribute and properly utilise wealth? but shifts history into other channels that are not as clear.”
He believes the grand narrative of the 21st century will be about whether we use our time wisely to avert climate disaster. It will take the kind of societal change that occurred after 1870, he says.
“Back in 1870, 80 percent of the human race is really living on something like $3 a day. The typical person is going to spend at least two hours a day, back in 1870, thinking about how hungry they are, and how it'd be great to have just a few more calories.
“People saw half their babies die before the age of four. We are very far away from that world now, one in which people are desperately poor.”
We have wealth beyond the imagining of previous generations, he says.
“We have created the situations for a great disaster over the course of the next century should we fail to manage global warming. “
What optimism for humanity’s future he does have stems from a collective intelligence, he says.
“There are 8 billion of us, and even though individually we are barely able to remember where we left our keys last night, collectively and properly organised the 8 billion of us are certainly smart enough to think of a way out of this.”
