Slouching Towards Utopia Quotes

“a vast population of people moved: between 1870 and 1914, one in fourteen humans—one hundred million people—changed their continent of residence.”
― J. Bradford DeLong, Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century

“Before the twentieth century, ideology - as opposed to religion - did not kill people by the millions and tens of millions. The stakes were not thought to be worth it. Such enthusiasm for mass murder awaited the combination of aristocratic militarism, really-existing socialism, and fascism. Thus it was only in the twentieth century that utopian aspirations about how the economy should be organized led nations and global movements to build dystopias to try to bring the utopian future closer. And then they turned around and justified the dystopia: compromises must be made, and this is as good as it is going to get.

My view is that too much mental and historical energy has been spent parsing differences between movements that are justly classified as dystopian, and even totalitarian, in aspiration. Time spent on such a task is time wasted, given their commonalities - if not in formal doctrine, then at least in modes of operation. The guards of Auschwitz, Majdanek, Treblinka, Dachau, and the rest were very like the guards of the Gulag Archipelago.

Rather, mental and historical energy should be focused on where these movements got their energy. Why was the world unable to offer people a society in which they could live good lives? Why was a total reconfiguration necessary? Karl Polanyi saw fascism and socialism as reactions against the market society's inability or unwillingness to satisfy people's Polanyian rights. It could not guarantee them a comfortable community in which to live because the use to which land was put had to pass a profitability test. It could not offer them an income commensurate with what they deserved because the wage paid to their occupation had to pass a profitability test. And it could not offer them stable employment because the financing to support whatever value chain they were embedded in also had to pass a profitability test. These failures all gave energy to the thought that there needed to be a fundamental reconfiguration of economy and society that would respect people's Polanyian rights. And the hope of millions was that fascism and really-existing socialism would do so.

Instead, both turned out to erase, in brutal and absolute ways, people's rights, and people's lives, by the millions. So why were people so gullible? The German socialist Rosa Luxemburg in 1919 could see the path Lenin was embarked upon and called it 'a brutalization of public life: attempted assassinations, shooting of hostages, etc.' The German liberal Max Weber, writing in 1918, could also foresee what would become of Lenin's sociological experiment, saying it would end 'in a laboratory with heaps of human corpses.' Similarly, the British diplomat Eric Phipps wrote in 1935 that if Britain were to take Hitler's Mein Kampf seriously and literally, 'we should logically be bound to adopt the policy of a "preventive" war.'

The dangers of a fascist turn were clear. The unlikelihood of success at even slouching toward a good society of those who took that turn ought to have been obvious.

Utopian faith is a helluva drug.”
― J. Bradford DeLong, Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century

“Those who could afford the resources to maintain bourgeois styles of cleanliness flaunted it. White shirts, white dresses, and white gloves were all powerful indications of wealth in turn-of-the-twentieth-century America. They said, “I don’t have to do my own laundry,” and they said it loudly.”
― Bradford DeLong, Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century

“In 1870 the daily wages of an unskilled male worker in London, the city then at the forefront of world economic growth and development, would buy him and his family about 5,000 calories worth of bread. That was progress: in 1800, his daily wages would have bought him and his family perhaps 4,000 coarser-bread calories, and in 1600, some 3,000 calories, coarser still. (But isn’t coarser, more fiber-heavy bread better for you? For us, yes—but only for those of us who are getting enough calories, and so have the energy to do our daily work and then worry about things like fiber intake. In the old days, you were desperate to absorb as many calories as possible, and for that, whiter and finer bread was better.) Today, the daily wages of an unskilled male worker in London would buy him 2.4 million wheat calories that they could then straightforwardly bake into bread at home: nearly five hundred times as much as in 1870.”
― Bradford DeLong, Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century

“tell anyone from before the long twentieth century about the wealth, productivity, technology, and sophisticated productive organizations of the world today, and their likely response, as noted above, would be that with such enormous power and wealth in our collective hands we must have built a utopia.”
― Bradford DeLong, Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century

“In 1840, when the Illinois and Michigan Canal opened connecting the Mississippi River with the Great Lakes, Chicago had a population of four thousand. In 1871, Mrs. O’Leary’s cow burned down a third, perhaps, of the city. Chicago built the world’s first steel-framed skyscraper in 1885, the city had a population of two million by 1900, and at that point 70 percent of its citizens had been born outside the United States.”
― Bradford DeLong, Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century

“And center-left parties in the North Atlantic remained conflicted: ideas and interests both sang the sirens’ song that left-neoliberalism might work, that market mechanisms might be used to attain social democratic ends, and that a reinvigorated economic growth rate would make the political lift to reverse the coming of the Second Gilded Age easier.”
― J. Bradford DeLong, Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century

“When the House Rules Committee chair during the debates over the bill, Howard Smith (D-VA), proposed the amendment adding “sex” to the list of protected categories, he was at least half-joking, and it was not liberal Democrats but southern Democrats and Republicans who approved it, 168–133. Courts decided that the “sex” part of the prohibition could not have been intended to stand on an equal footing with the others, and did not require that possible discrimination be scrutinized as strictly as in cases where race, color, or religion was at issue.”
― J. Bradford DeLong, Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century

“and an exaltation of the violent assertion of that will as the ultimate argument—indeed, the only kind of argument that mattered. At the core of fascism as an ideology was a critique: semi-liberal industrial capitalism and parliamentary government had had its chance, and had failed. The failures had become manifest in several different ways, but all were linked together. The ideology was secondary, but it was not important. Why should someone choose to submit their will to that of some fascist leader? The ideology had to resonate with them for that to happen. So let us look at the failures that fascism ascribed to the pseudo-classical semi-liberal order that establishment politicians”
― J. Bradford DeLong, Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century