I've read this fascinating and really sort of protean book.
It's really quite a book. Let's set it up first because it's a
history the 20th century. But you don't necessarily define the
20th century as from nineteen hundred to 2000.
You start in 1870 and end up in 2010. Why.
Well the big thing that happens happens in 1870 right before 1870.
The world's poor. And there's no prospect for the world
being anything other than poor after 1870.
Every single generation humanity's technical competence doubles and then
doubles again in the following generation.
And such an enormous pace of technological advance raises the
possibility for the first time of a world in which we can bake a
sufficiently large economic pie for everyone to have enough.
And that was nothing that humanity had ever seen before.
One of the remarkable things Brad that you highlight is that it really wasn't
very different to live in the United Kingdom in the 19th century than it had
been to live in the ancient world. Two thousand years before say something
about the acceleration of growth that you see is happening in the 20th
century. You know I mean it was British economist
John Stuart Mill right. He was writing in 1871 about how all the
industrial revolution had done was it had created a somewhat larger middle
class and it had allowed manufacturers and the rich to earn greater fortunes
but that the overwhelming mass of humanity was still confined to the same
life of drudgery and imprisonment than they had been before that they had been
in before and before all the way back into deep time.
It was very clear by nineteen hundred that things had changed.
You know John Maynard Keynes writing in 1919 looks back and says Starting in
1870 we entered Economic Eldorado and that now our chief task after World War
One was figuring out why we tried to blow it up and try to get desperately
back to what was good was going on after 1870.
Fortunately we eventually did. And so things rolled through.
Up until our day. First of all it gives a sense of what
happened 1870 that brought all this about there were some three driving
forces in your book. Well you know everyone has an idea about
just what it is that's made us as a civilization so wealthy that makes our
economy so productive. And the different people have different
things and they all go back home. Some of them back even to say the year
10 70 when it turns out that the law applies to a German emperors standing in
the snow outside of the castle. That applies.
And his tool. But instead it could be that the law
replies to everybody. But you got three things that fall into
place in 1870 that said technological progress into a much higher gear than
ever before. And they are the industrial research
labs so that you can rationalize and routinized the discovery and development
of technology and then the corporation as we know it which rationalizes the
development and deployment of technology.
You combine that with the globalized economy with the Telegraph and the ISE
Railroad and the iron hold ocean going steamship.
And all of a sudden the incentives to deploy technology worldwide for
production are so overwhelming and people turned their minds to how to do
this that everything explodes in a way it never had before.
Fred much of the academic discussion of your book has centered on this idea of a
pivot point in 1870. But I want to ask about a different
judgment you make which is that there was this major era and that the major
era ended in 2010. I would have thought that the world was
growing. It was becoming more integrated with
technology. There were important political
struggles. That was the stuff of history through
the 20th century much better in the second half of the century than in the
first half of the century. The end of the Cold War was a very
different war than World War One or World War Two.
It was cold. But I would have thought that was a
continuing process with substantial challenges.
And yet you see us as now being in a quite different era.
What's different about the era wearied then.
The era you wrote the history of other than more of the kind of progress and
change that you saw as happening every generation.
Well I'm pleased to disagree here and I'm very pleased to disagree and are a
starry eyed optimist here about our future
because look I've been losing arguments in person with you for 42 years.
Even when I think I'm right afterwards and here I'm genuinely uncertain.
And I actually very much hope you are really right this time.
My thinking was I've been listening to our friend John Fernald about how the
underlying pace of technological progress has more or less have since
2005 compared to what we were used to beforehand.
Saving those years from 1975 to 1990 when technology was crawling toward a
more energy efficient and environmentally friendly
configuration rather than focusing on labor saving.
But after 2000 and after 2000 we seemed to have a substantial loss of.
Social and economic knowledge about how to run things.
Things about financial regulation that I thought were in trend that were known in
the bones turned out to have been completely forgotten in 2008.
Things about the proper tools for macro economic policy that I thought were in
where we're ingrained in the bone were also forgotten after 2010.
And I remember you and I whimpering in 2012 that no.
Furthermore expansionary fiscal policy was not then a thing that ran any risks
whatsoever. Combine that with the fact that from
1870 on to 2010 you know first you had Britain and the United States and then
the United States as the countries that people were looking to for examples as
you always Leon Trotsky like to say as the furnace where the future is being
forged. But now you go to China you go to India
you even go to Indonesia. And
what you find is that people say that the United States has very little to
teach them that we don't have any greater grasp on
how to deploy and use these technologies to create a good society and are in fact
a society or a society that is more trouble
and more trouble than theirs are. Brad if that is right how much of it
because of a running out of ideas and how much is running out of cohesion.
One of the themes in your book is the sort of polls that I can put it that way
between higher. On the one hand the market is king and
Pawlenty and the others. The market has to serve people.
How much of the problems we're in right now are because we're lacking cohesion
because of the dispersion in wealth and income.
I think we are definitely lacking cohesion.
I think dispersion in wealth and income creates work of cohesion.
I am struck by comparing the United States around nineteen hundred with the
United States today right around in nineteen hundred.
Politics was as fierce and mean as it is today.
You know that is Theodore Roosevelt denouncing William Jennings Bryan as the
puppet of a alien European socialist. John John.
Peter Altgeld the governor of Illinois who had not only been born in Europe but
also had dared to pardon anarchists. But there seems to be a very different
flavor right. That is I think it's Ezra Klein talks
about it that somehow that our media and our communications today focuses first
on establishing you know who are your enemies.
Do you share any enemies with me. And if you share enemies with me I will
listen to.