PODCAST: "Hexapodia" is þe Key Insight! XLII: "Slouching Towards Utopia"—Brad's New Book Edition

Key Insights:* Since 1870, we humans have done amazingly astonishingly uniquely and unprecedentedly well at baking a sufficiently large economic pie.* But the problems of slicing and tasting the pie—of equitably distributing it, and then using our technological powers to live lives wisely and well—continue to flummox us. * The big reason we have been unable to build social institutions for equitably slicing and then properly tasting our now more-than-sufficiently-large economic pie is the sheer pace of economic transformation.* Since 1870 humanity's technological competence has doubled every generation* Hence Schumpeterian creative destruction has taken hold.* Our immensely increasing wealth has come at the price of the repeated destruction of industries, occupations, livelihoods, and communities.* And we have been frantically trying to rewrite the sociological code running on top of our rapidly changing forces-of-production hardware* The attempts to cobble together a sorta-running sociological software code have been a scorched-earth war between two factions.* Faction 1: followers of Friedrich von Hayek, who say: "the market giveth, the market taketh away: blessed be the name of the market"* Faction 2: followers of Karl Polanyi, who say: "the market was made for man; not man for the market"* Let the market start destroying "society", and society will react by trying to destroy the market order* Thus the task of governance and politics is to try to manage and perhaps one day supersede this dilemma. * &, of course, HEXAPODIA!!Thank you for reading Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality. This post is public so feel free to share it.References:* J. Bradford DeLong: Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the 20th Century <bit.ly/3pP3Krk>* Robert Gordon: The Rise and Fall of American Growth <https://archive.org/details/risefallofameric0000gord_w5w7>* Gary Gerstle: The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era <https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Rise_and_Fall_of_the_Neoliberal_Orde/3PJbEAAAQBAJ>* Vaclav Smil: Creating the 20th Century: Technical Innovations of 1867-1914 and Their Lasting Impact <https://www.google.com/books/edition/Creating_the_Twentieth_Century/h78TDAAAQBA>* Vaclav Smil: Transforming the 20th Century: Technical Innovations and Their Consequences <https://archive.org/details/transformingtwen0000smil/>* Friedrich von Hayek: The Road to Serfdom <https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.97402>* Karl Polanyi: The Great Transfomation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time <https://archive.org/details/greattransformat0000pola_o9l4>* John Maynard Keynes: The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money <https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.50092>+, of course:* Vernor Vinge: A Fire Upon the Deep <https://archive.org/details/fireupondeep00ving_0/mode/1up> Get full access to Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality at braddelong.substack.com/subscribe