Chapter Content
Okay, so, like, are we still slouching towards utopia? That's the big question, right? And, uh, well, back in 1870, something pretty major shifted for humanity. It's like, with the rise of industrial research labs, modern corporations, and, you know, super cheap transportation and communication, we went from this world where poverty was just the norm, this like, awful backdrop, to a world where the economy was constantly changing. Like, it was always revolutionizing itself, you know? And that led to more prosperity thanks to all the new technologies.
This, uh, this process, they call it creative destruction, right? Basically doubled our potential, like, productive power every generation. And, you know, the foundations of society were shaken up again and again. So, these really long periods, like from 1870 to 2010, obviously, are made up of tons of moments. I'm thinking about two moments specifically that are really important. They both happened around the middle of this, like, long, long period.
The first moment was in 1930. John Maynard Keynes, he gave this speech called "Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren." And basically, he said that economic problems weren't our most permanent problem. He thought that once we solved those, the real challenge would be, uh, you know, how to use our freedom from all that economic stress to live, like, wisely and well. It's like, what do you *do* when you don't have to worry about money all the time, you know?
The second moment? Well, it was around the same time. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, FDR, he took over the government. He broke through the political gridlock and started experimenting with ways to solve the Great Depression.
So, the day after he was inaugurated, he banned gold exports and declared a bank holiday, right? And like, within a few days, Congress had passed his first bill. It was a banking reform thing, the Emergency Banking Act. It reopened the banks that were doing okay, reorganized the others, and gave Roosevelt a ton of control over gold. Then, the next bill he sent to Congress? Passed right away, too. It was the Economy Act, cutting federal spending, trying to balance the budget. And then there was the Beer and Wine Revenue Act, which was the beginning of the end of prohibition, right?
Then he called on Congress to regulate financial markets. Congress created the Civilian Conservation Corps, which was a big deal. He took the U.S. off the gold standard. Congress passed the Agricultural Adjustment Act. He signed the Tennessee Valley Authority Act. And then, bam, he submitted the big one, the National Industrial Recovery Act, or NIRA. Everyone got something. Businesses could kinda collude to keep prices high and plan production. Socialist-leaning folks got government approval of those plans. Labor got collective bargaining and minimum wages. And spenders got a ton of money for public works.
So, the First New Deal had this strong, uh, "corporatist" thing going on, joint government-industry planning, lots of regulation, and cooperation. Strong regulation of commodity prices, permanent benefits for farmers. A program for building utilities. Massive public works spending. Financial market regulation. Insurance for bank deposits, mortgage relief, unemployment relief. A promise to lower working hours and raise wages. And a commitment to lowering tariffs.
The NIRA and dollar devaluation, they did break the cycle of expected deflation. Deposit insurance and banking reform made people trust the banks again, started expanding the money supply. Corporatism and farm subsidies spread the pain around. Taking budget balancing off the table helped. Promising unemployment and mortgage relief? Helped. Public works spending? Helped. All those things kept things from getting worse, definitely made things better.
But aside from all that money stuff, what effect did the rest of Roosevelt's first hundred days *really* have? It's kind of hard to say whether it was good or bad overall. Like, some people thought he should have just gone all-in on monetary inflation and huge deficits, which had pulled Hitler's Germany out of the Depression quickly, but he didn't *really* do that. Consumers complained the NIRA raised prices. Workers complained it didn't give them enough say. Businessmen complained about the government bossing them around. Progressives said the NRA created monopolies. And, you know, Hoover and his buddies said that if FDR had just done what *he'd* been doing, everything would have been better sooner.
So, because of all the criticism, FDR just kept trying different things. If business-labor-government "corporatism" didn't work, maybe a safety net would, right? The most lasting thing was the Social Security Act of 1935. It gave federal cash to widows, orphans, kids without dads, and the disabled, and it set up a near-universal system of old-age pensions. If pushing up the price of gold didn't work, maybe strengthening unions would. The Wagner Act strengthened the union movement. Massive public works programs restored some self-esteem to workers and gave money to those without jobs.
Other policies were tried, too. Antitrust stuff, breaking up utility monopolies, a more progressive income tax, deficit spending. But as the decade ended, his focus shifted to the war in Europe and Japan's invasion of China. And honestly, the Second New Deal probably didn't do that much to cure the Depression. But, it *did* turn the U.S. into a kind of European-style social democracy.
And then, everything else followed. Roosevelt being center-left, the Depression being so long, the U.S. being the rising superpower after World War II—all of that made a huge difference. After the war, the U.S. shaped the world, and it did it in a New Deal way, not a reactionary or fascist way.
So, Keynes and Roosevelt, they’re reminders that individuals acting in specific ways at precise moments matters a lot. Even in the big picture, you know?
Now, some people think Lenin's revolution and Stalin's socialism were the most important things of the twentieth century, the main storyline. They see it as a three-way fight between capitalism, fascism, and socialism. Maybe the good guys won. But for some, it's tragic. Socialism was humanity's last best hope, but it failed.
I just don't see it that way.
I'm more optimistic, I guess. I think that technology and better ways to manage economies are more important than the Kremlin's power struggles. But, you know, the fight for human liberty and prosperity isn't over. Not by a long shot.
So, I think the twentieth century was about four things: technology-fueled growth, globalization, America's rise, and this confidence that we could at least *try* to build utopia, even though it wouldn't be perfect, fair, or equal for everyone. And, twice during that long period, from 1870 to 1914 and from 1945 to 1975, we got close to something that earlier generations would have called a near-utopia. But those periods didn't last. Individuals, ideas, and opportunities explain why.
Before 1870, most people didn’t think utopia was possible.
One guy who did was Karl Marx. He saw capitalism as both good and bad. Good because it could create a wealthy society where everyone could live full lives. Bad because it kept most people poor and would eventually force them into a worse state of slavery. For Marx, the path to utopia meant going through an industrial hell, which would then lead to a communist revolution and a total overthrow of the system.
Another optimist, John Stuart Mill, thought that the government should control human fertility through mandatory birth control. He believed that this was the only way to avoid mass poverty.
But back in 1870, those guys were kind of outliers. Most people didn't think things would get much better. The U.S. had just come out of a bloody civil war. Living standards were low. Most people were, you know, short, hungry, and illiterate.
So, did Marx and Mill just see the trends better? Or were they just lucky to see the possibility of material wealth? Well, before 1870, humanity had been struggling. And then, in 1870, some changes unlocked things. The industrial research lab, modern corporations, and globalization created the opportunity to solve our material problems for the first time. Plus, we got lucky and had a global market economy, which incentivized solutions to problems. After 1870, it could solve the problem of giving those with property what they wanted.
So, the path to material abundance, and utopia, became visible. And everything else should have followed. And a lot *did*. By 1914, the pessimism of 1870 seemed old-fashioned. Those years had been extraordinary. We could look forward to a real utopia of abundance. Scientific discoveries would be developed in labs and spread by corporations.
But then World War I happened. And after that, it was clear that things could go wrong. People weren't happy with what the market offered. Governments couldn't manage economies to keep them stable. People threw away democracy for dictators. The rich decided domination was worth it. Technology enabled terrible tyrannies, and economic disparities grew. Population growth put a strain on society.
And, through it all, the global south fell further and further behind. Those that were unlucky enough to be influenced by Lenin, they took the path of socialism and that didn't work.
The global north got lucky and refound the path to utopia after World War II. The economic growth that followed made people expect more. But growth alone didn't satisfy people. The right wing felt that prosperity was unfair. The left wing felt that the market didn't create the utopia they wanted. So the world took a neoliberal turn. But that didn't lead to a faster slouch toward utopia.
From 1870 to 2010 was 140 years. Back in 1870, who would have thought that by 2010 we'd have the resources to give everyone more than they could have imagined? And who would have thought that we'd be unable to use those resources to build a utopia?
Remember how, earlier, we talked about Edward Bellamy thinking that being able to dial up one of four live orchestras would be the height of happiness? In the early 1600s, only King James I could watch a play about witches at home. In 1836, the richest man in the world just wanted antibiotics. Today, we can produce things that couldn't have been produced at any price before. Are we *really* just ten times richer than we were in 1870? It's such a big difference.
And yet, in 2010, we hadn't reached the end of the utopian trail. We couldn't even *see* it anymore.
It was all driven by research labs, corporations, and the market. But in some ways, the market was more of a problem than a solution. It only recognized property rights, and people wanted other things, too. And even with all that progress, material wealth wasn't enough to build utopia. It's necessary, but not sufficient. And that's where Keynes comes in. He said that the most permanent problem is how to live wisely and well. That’s what’s so hard, you know?
Of the four freedoms that FDR talked about, only freedom from want is secured by wealth. The others still need to be secured by other means. And the market can't give you everything you need.
The, like, shotgun marriage of free markets and social programs that we had after World War II was the best we've gotten so far. But it didn't last, partly because we set the bar too high with all that rapid growth, and partly because people wanted things that the market couldn't give them.
Around 2000, four things happened that might have marked the end of our slouch towards utopia. First, in 1990, Germany and Japan challenged the U.S.'s technological edge. Second, in 2001, religious violence flared up again. Third, the Great Recession in 2008 showed that we'd forgotten the lessons of the 1930s. And fourth, we failed to act on global warming. History after those events looks different from history before.
And then, that was confirmed when Donald Trump won the election. It became clear that we couldn't restore the things that defined the long twentieth century. Economic growth had slowed down. Globalization was reversing. The U.S. was no longer seen as exceptional. And during the pandemic, the U.S.-led global governance system proved inept.
Plus, people lost confidence in the future. Global warming was a huge threat. The only place where there was strong confidence was in China, but their model didn't seem likely to lead to utopia, either. It seemed more like a return to the old ways.
The Trump administration, to the extent that they had a vision, they were suspicious of everything. They thought people were taking advantage of America. Their policies consisted of tax cuts for the rich, climate change denial, and random rollbacks of regulations. And, behind everything, cruelty. The pandemic killed more than a million Americans.
So, with the election of Trump, everyone felt like the nation was in big trouble. Depending on who you asked, Trump was either a symptom of this decline or its only potential cure. It felt like a very different America either way. And the U.S. wasn't alone. The world faced new and worsening problems.
Trump didn't just end the long twentieth century. He reminded us that pessimism, fear, and panic can drive things just as much as optimism.
So, what went wrong? Well, those free-market guys, they weren't always right. They thought the market could do everything. But people objected. The market didn't do the job, and what it *did* do was rejected.
Throughout the long twentieth century, many people tried to come up with solutions. They wanted the market to do less or something different. Maybe the closest we got to a good solution was that shotgun marriage of Hayek and Polanyi, blessed by Keynes, in the form of post-World War II social democracy. But that system failed. And neoliberalism didn't lead to utopia either.
So, the world found itself in a position similar to the one that Keynes described in 1924. He said that we lacked a coherent plan for progress. All the political parties were based on old ideas, not new ones.
Economic improvement matters. Having more than enough matters. Once you have it, even pessimists don't want to give it up. And certain ideas are hard to forget.
Humans' ideas of utopia have been really different. But material scarcity kept most of them out of reach. The golden age was always seen as in the past.
Things started to change in 1870. By 1919, Keynes said that we already had the power to produce things beyond what the richest kings of the past had. Aristotle thought that it was impossible to get rid of slavery, because it would require us to have godlike powers. We've surpassed those dreams.
Is there anyone from any previous century who wouldn't be amazed at our technology and organization? And yet, why haven't we done more to build a truly human world?
By 2010, trust in America had been damaged. People were unhappy with income inequality. The Great Recession showed that we hadn't figured out how to manage the economy. Political institutions didn't even begin to address global warming. Productivity growth had stalled. And leaders failed to prioritize restoring full employment and managing the discontents that would bring neofascist politicians to power.
So, yeah, the long twentieth century's story was over.
Maybe it didn't have to end in 2010. Maybe the bright future that some of us envisioned during the Clinton years was always a pipe dream. Or maybe the opportunity could have been seized if things had turned out differently. Maybe if we'd elected an FDR in 2008, he could have worked a miracle. Maybe even in 2016, the things that defined the long twentieth century could have been revived.
But instead, we elected Trump, and Europe didn't do much better, ending the possibilities of revivification.
So, yeah, a new story has begun. It needs a new grand narrative that we don't know yet.