Ways in Which the Twentieth Century Is Special:
- The Astonishing Acceleration in technological and organizational progress
- Really Existing Failed Utopias: socialism and fascism
- Gross International Divergence
- Mismanagement of the Business Cycle and the Income Distribution
- Milanovic-Kuznets Inequality Waves in within-country and global-inequality
- The Demographic-Feminist Transition
- Societal Orders Are Steamed Away--whether established or ascribed...
- The Polanyian Perplex: turning land, labor, and finance into commodities is asking for big trouble
- Robots and the Overclass
- Formal to Informal Empire
Does the Great Filter count as a big idea?
- 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...
- 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)
- 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
- 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
- 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
- The Demographic-Feminist Transition
- A change on the same order of magnitude as the coming of high patriarchy ca. 4000 BC
- "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
- The Polanyian Perplex: land, labor, and finance as commodities**
- 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?
- 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:
- Pages: https://www.icloud.com/pages/0kVr__lBUDJd5BIlzob5A_74w#2017-01-13_10_1.2_BIG_IDEAS_for_20th_Century_Economic_History_.TCEH
- This File: http://www.bradford-delong.com/big-ideas-115-twentieth-century-economic-history.html
- Edit This File: http://www.typepad.com/site/blogs/6a00e551f08003883400e551f080068834/page/6a00e551f08003883401b8d23ec375970c/edit?saved_added=n
- Notebook: Twentieth Century Economic History: http://www.bradford-delong.com/twentieth-century-economic-history-1.html
- Economics Teaching Master: http://www.bradford-delong.com/-_housekeeping_-this-page-edit-this-page.html