Permanent Stagflation?

• Author: Atkinson, Robert D.

Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century

By J. Bradford DeLong

624 pp.; Basic Books, 2022

Every few years, elites anoint an economics book as a "must read." In 2013 it was Thomas Piketty's Capital. Four years later it was Robert Gordon's The Rise and Fall of American Productivity. Now it's Berkeley economics professor Brad DeLong's Slouching towards Utopia. In The Atlantic, Annie Lowry gushes that the book is "sweeping and detailed, learned and accessible, familiar and strange." (It certainly is sweeping and strange.) Vox calls it a "magnus opus."

Piketty, Gordon, and DeLong all argue that economic growth is no longer an engine of widespread prosperity. This is a big reason for their books' acclaim: rejecting growth and markets is now de rigueur among much of the Western intelligentsia

Slouching is a fundamentally subversive book because it seeks to undercut the core Western values of economic growth and advancement. If enough believe that the West had a good 140-year run but now "it is over," as Lowry apparently does, then the path to rejecting entrepreneurs, firms, and markets is clear. We can transform the economy into a system focused on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, redistributing income, and engendering small-scale localism. We may not, however, have much to redistribute or localize.

A slouch at best? / DeLong dismisses growth and rejects markets for two reasons. First, he believes that market economies are illegitimate. He writes, "Capital is dead labor, which vampire-like lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks." Oops, my mistake; that was Marx. But DeLong seems to channel Marx when he asserts:

Unmanaged, a market economy will strive to its utmost to satisfy the desires of those who hold the valuable property rights. But valuable property owners seek a high standard of living for themselves ... Moreover, ... the market economy sees the profits from establishing plantations. Plantations?

He goes on to claim that "the only conception of 'justice' that the market economy could deliver was what the rich might think was just, for property owners were the only people it cared about." Beside anthropomorphizing the market, this is a strange notion because unless capitalists care about providing value to customers, they will soon go bankrupt. For DeLong, the "creative destruction" that Joseph Schumpeter said powers growth is not creative but is destructive: "Great...