American Economic History: Slides for Wrap-Up Lecture...

Each time I do this I think there must be a way to do it better. But each time I fail to think of one...

Good ideas very welcome...

Here we are https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0AuVq4veo1M_lK-EXXK3kQUwg:

J. Bradford Delong

http://bradford-delong.com

brad.delong@gmail.com

@delong

2018-04-30

https://tinyurl.com/113S2018

https://www.icloud.com/keynote/0AuVq4veo1M_lK-EXXK3kQUwg

Big Ideas: Review

Narrative
Varieties of nationalism
The furnace where the future is being forged
Slavery and its echoes
Large but unequally-distributed liberty
Built on immigrants
Used to deliver high opportunity
Has delivered high prosperity
Growth-oriented industrial policy
Well being-oriented industrial and social welfare policy
The Gilded Ages
The Age of Social Democracy as the apogee
Structural transformation
Regions and cultures

 

Narrative

We tell stories; we learn by listening to stories; we think by means of narrative
Hence historical narratives have extra-special salience in our brains

Easier to remember stories than theories or checklists
And what can theories be but crystallized historical episodes?
Need the history to understand whether the theory is any good���

Opened with a story:

The story of Leon Trotsky
And his view that America was ���the furnace where the future is being forged���
Did this to arrest you

Did it work?

 

Varieties of Nationalism

Threefold:

(Utopian) New England
(Libertarian) Virginia
(Blood-and-soil) Kentucky

These threads we have seen throughout the course over and over again���

For ex., both slavery and abolitionism���
And the failure of socialism to take hold���
Plus ���war to end war" and ���crusade in Europe���

 

The furnace where the future is being forged

The leading nation in terms of technology and prosperity over 1850-2016
Thus the first to try to grapple with its opportunities and dilemmas
Plus: frequently engaged in crusades to make the world better (New England nationalism)

 

Slavery

Plantation-based chattel slavery producing staples for the market not the most evil piece of human history
But it is way up there���
Familial vs. industrial slavery
Jim Crow
Echoes down to today
���Everybody gets to become white, except for Blacks���

Does that still hold?

 

Plus Ten MOAR Big, But Lesser, Ideas...

 

Review: The Making of Our World

The Post-WWII Boom: Thirty Glorious Years���Ending in the 1970s
The Great Depression and World War II together ended the idea of laissez faire: the idea became guilty until proven innocent.
The idea of laissez faire had in fact been dying for a while���
And yet it survived���

 

Survival and Return of the Hard Laissez Faire Right

Continued to argue that government beyond the ���night watchman��� would succumb to iron laws of power that would push it to totalitarianism���

Even argued that the Great Depression showed not the bankruptcy of laissez faire but the bankruptcy of government interference���

The return of the hard laissez faire right in the neoliberal era

 

Causes of the Rise of Neoliberalism

Inflation of the 1970s (Krugman)?
Ethnic (Alesina)?

The Curse of Goldwater (and Nixon)

Natural drift (Piketty)?
Pure chance (Reagan and Thatcher)?
Mont Pelerin (���Astroturf���)
Social democracy overreach?

 

Hard Neoliberalism: Mitt Romney

���47 percent��� with [Obama]��� dependent��� believe that they are victims��� that government has a responsibility to care for them��� that they are entitled��� people who pay no income tax���.
���My job is not to worry about those people���I'll never convince them that they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives������

 

A Nation of Takers?: Ann Romney

���Not easy years��� basement apartment���. didn���t have money to carpet the floor��� remnants, samples, so I glued them together, all different colors���.
���Mitt had enough of an investment from stock that we could sell off a little at a time���.
���Mitt and I walked to class together, shared housekeeping, had a lot of pasta and tuna fish and learned hard lessons������

Demography and Feminism

The Demographic Transition:
In 1820: 7 live births per mother
By 1900: down to 3.5
Then followed: Great Depression, Baby Boom, and baby bust
Now: ZPG
36 mo. pregnant and breastfeeding today as opposed to 240 mo.

 

Female: Employment-to-Population Ratio

Males: 85% in 1948; 66% today

Half of this male fall from retirement���
Women are aging too���

Males 25-54 from 95% to 85%���
Females 25-54 from 38% to 70%���

 

Female vs. Male: Education

In 2011, women held 51.4% of ���managerial and professional jobs���

Up from 26.1% in 1980
Redefinition of ���secretaries���

Seven years of longer life expectancy counts���

You would expect 53%-47% from that alone, but not 62%���

 

Sheryl Sandberg at Barnard

���Women��� like us except for the circumstances into which they were born, [lack] basic human rights���.
���We [here] are lucky.... We are equals under the law. But the promise of equality is not equality....
���We are nowhere close to 50% of the jobs at the top. That means that when the big decisions are made, the decisions that affect all of our worlds, we do not have an equal voice at that table.
���So today, we turn to you.....

 

The Overclass

And the top 0.01%? We pay 5x as great a share of income now as in the 1970s for whatever they do. 15K households. $750B/year. $60M/year each���

 

Are We Back to Normal After the Great Recession? Not Really

Interest rates are still remarkably, insanely, absurdly low���
What will the Federal Reserve do if it next finds the economy in a ���general glut���?
Since late 2014 ���austerity��� has been on hold in the U.S.
But no utilization of ample fiscal space
The idea of ���secular stagnation���������
 

Our Present Through a Polanyian Lens

Stagflation
Dani Rodrik on Karl Polanyi

���The hidden assumptions of economic theory. Behind those market transactions, expressed with mathematical formalism and in Greek letters, was a host of social, political, legal institutions that enabled those transactions���.
���The more I became an economist, the more Polanyi���s insights resonated���. I was simply restating the main themes of the Great Transformation for our current era������

 

The United States a Lucky Country Today��� cf.: Milton and Rose Director Friedman

But Are We Feeling Lucky?
The Three ���Fictitious��� Commodities

Land���your community
Labor���your standard of living
Finance���your occupation/firm
All determined by a sociological logic of ���desert������in the sense of ���deserve���
The rebellion of ���society��� against the ���market���

 

But It���s Not a Rebellion Against the ���Market���, Really���

Polanyi���s error���
Joseph Bailey could have told him better���

Against ���rootless cosmopolites���
For: restricted community

In the U.S.

Mitt Romney (2012)���
Lyndon Johnson (1964)���
Sam Rayburn (1940)���
Joseph Bailey (1914)���
Breaking of the Populists/Populists (1892-96)

 

Your Mission, Should You Choose to Accept It���