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BIG IDEAS 115: 20th Century Economic History

Ways in Which the Twentieth Century Is Special:

  1. The Astonishing Acceleration in technological and organizational progress
  2. Really Existing Failed Utopias: socialism and fascism
  3. Gross International Divergence
  4. Mismanagement of the Business Cycle and the Income Distribution
  5. Milanovic-Kuznets Inequality Waves in within-country and global-inequality
  6. The Demographic-Feminist Transition
  7. Societal Orders Are Steamed Away--whether established or ascribed...
  8. The Polanyian Perplex: turning land, labor, and finance into commodities is asking for big trouble
  9. Robots and the Overclass
  10. Formal to Informal Empire

Does the Great Filter count as a big idea?

  1. The Astonishing Acceleration in technological and organizational progress in the twentieth century: worldwide http://tinyurl.com/dl20161128a:
    • -8000--1: 0.008%/year
    • 1-1500: 0.024%/year
    • 1500-1800: 0.047%/year
    • 1800-1870: 0.366%/year
    • 1870-present 1.715%/year
    • Today, worldwide, we today get in one year what was before 1500 75 years of technological and organizational invention and diffusion and change...
    • nineteenth-century growth is not enough to get us over the hump of the demographic transition...
  2. Really Existing Failed Utopias: really existing socialism and fascism
    • Adolf Hitler (and also Mussolini, Franco, and many many others)
    • Josef Stalin (and also Mao Zedong, Vladimir Lenin, Pol Pot, Kim Il Sung, Jong Il, Jong Un, Fidel Castro, and many others)
  3. Gross International Inequality in the twentieth century http:/gapminder.org:
    • 1820: Britain 3 times and U.S twice as rich as China and India
    • 1870: Britain 3 and U.S. 4 times as rich as China and India
    • 1975: U.S. 30 times as rich as China, 24 times as rich as India; Britain 19 times as rich as China, 16 times as rich as India
    • Today: U.S. 4 times as rich as China, 9 times as rich as India; Britain 2.5 times as rich as China, 6 times as rich as India
  4. Economic Mismanagement of the Business Cycle and the Income Distribution
    • The Great Depression
    • What we used to call the Great Recession (but should now, I think, call the Longer Depression)'
    • Inflations
  5. Kuznets-Milanovic Inequality Waves in within-country and global-inequality
    • The Kuznets Curve
    • Its post-1980 reversal: Piketty's interpretation of Gilded Age-level inequality as the natural state of the system
  6. The Demographic-Feminist Transition
    • A change on the same order of magnitude as the coming of high patriarchy ca. 4000 BC
  7. "In society all established and ascribed Orders Are Steamed Away..."
    • the vicissitudes of caste, of "meritocracy", of market position, of inheritance, and of place of birth
  8. The Polanyian Perplex: land, labor, and finance as commodities**
  9. Robots and the Overclass
    • Sources of value in human labor: backs and thighs; fingers; brains as cybernetic control devices for machines; brains as routine transaction and accounting system components; smiles for social coordination and personal service; creative thought
    • Which of these will still have value in a robot- and -bot-ridden future?
    • What controls distribution when everyone's marginal product is vastly below their average product?
  10. Formal to Informal Empire
    • Fall of the British, French colonial, Austrian, Ottoman, Russian empires...
    • Persistence of the Han hegemony...
    • Coming of the European Union and of India...
    • "Neoliberal globalization"

Does the Great Filter count as a big idea?

Housekeeping: