Slouching Towards Utopia Read online

  But 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.

  That is in fact what they did tell us. Perhaps the third best-selling novel in the United States in the nineteenth century was Looking Backward, 2000–1887, by Edward Bellamy. Bellamy was a populist and—although he rejected the name—a socialist: he dreamed of a utopia created by government ownership of industry, the elimination of destructive competition, and the altruistic mobilization of human energies. Technological and organizational abundance, he believed, would generate a society of abundance. His novel, therefore, was a “literary fantasy, a fairy tale of social felicity,” in which he imagined “hanging in mid-air, far out of reach of the sordid and material world of the present… [a] cloud-palace for an ideal humanity.”15

  He throws his narrator-protagonist forward in time, from 1887 to 2000, to marvel at a rich, well-functioning society. At one point the narrator-protagonist is asked if he would like to hear some music. He expects his hostess to play the piano. This alone would be testament to a vast leap forward. To listen to music on demand in around 1900 you had to have—in your house or nearby—an instrument, and someone trained to play it. It would have cost the average worker some 2,400 hours, roughly a year at a 50-hour workweek, to earn the money to buy a high-quality piano. Then there would be the expense and the time committed to piano lessons.

  But Bellamy’s narrator-protagonist is awed when his hostess does not sit down at the pianoforte to amuse him. Instead, she “merely touched one or two screws,” and immediately the room was “filled with music; filled, not flooded, for, by some means, the volume of melody had been perfectly graduated to the size of the apartment. ‘Grand!’ I cried. ‘Bach must be at the keys of that organ; but where is the organ?’”

  He learns that his host has dialed up, on her telephone landline, a live orchestra, and she has put it on the speakerphone. In Bellamy’s utopia, you see, you can dial up a local orchestra and listen to it play live. But wait. It gets more impressive. He further learns he has a choice. His hostess could dial up one of four orchestras currently playing.

  The narrator’s reaction? “If we [in the 1800s] could have devised an arrangement for providing everybody with music in their homes, perfect in quality, unlimited in quantity, suited to every mood, and beginning and ceasing at will, we should have considered the limit of human felicity already attained.”16 Think of that: the limit of human felicity.

  Utopias are, by definition, the be-all and end-all. “An imagined place or state of things in which everyone is perfect”: so says Oxford Reference.17 Much of human history has been spent in disastrous flirtations with ideals of perfection of many varieties. Utopian imaginings during the long twentieth century were responsible for its most shocking grotesqueries.

  Citing a quotation from the eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant—“Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made”—the philosopher-historian Isaiah Berlin concluded, “And for that reason no perfect solution is, not merely in practice, but in principle, possible in human affairs.”18

  Berlin went on to write, “Any determined attempt to produce it is likely to lead to suffering, disillusionment, and failure.” This observation also points to why I see the long twentieth century as most fundamentally economic. For all its uneven benefits, for all its expanding human felicity without ever reaching its limit, for all its manifest imperfections, economics during the twentieth century has worked just shy of miracles.

  The consequences of the long twentieth century have been enormous: Today, less than 9 percent of humanity lives at or below the roughly $2-a-day living standard we think of as “extreme poverty,” down from approximately 70 percent in 1870. And even among that 9 percent, many have access to public health and mobile phone communication technologies of vast worth and power. Today, the luckier economies of the world have achieved levels of per capita prosperity at least twenty times those of 1870, and at least twenty-five times those of 1770—and there is every reason to believe prosperity will continue to grow at an exponential rate in the centuries to come. Today, the typical citizens of these economies can wield powers—of mobility, of communication, of creation, and of destruction—that approach those attributed to sorcerers and gods in ages past. Even the majority of those living in unlucky economies and in the “global south” confront not the $2- to $3-a-day living standard of those economies in 1800 or 1870, but an average closer to $15 a day.

  Many technological inventions of the past century have transformed experiences that were rare and valued luxuries—available only to a rich few at great expense—into features of modern life that we take so much for granted that they would not make the top twenty or even the top one hundred in an ordered list of what we think our wealth consists of. So many of us have grown so accustomed to our daily level of felicity that we utterly overlook something astounding. We today—even the richest of us—rarely see ourselves as so extraordinarily lucky and fortunate and happy, even though, for the first time in human history, there is more than enough.

  There are more than enough calories produced in the world, so it is not necessary for anybody to be hungry.

  There is more than enough shelter on the globe, so it is not necessary for anybody to be wet.

  There is more than enough clothing in our warehouses, so it is not necessary for anybody to be cold.

  And there is more than enough stuff lying around and being produced daily, so nobody need feel the lack of something necessary.

  In short, we are no longer in anything that we could call “the realm of necessity.” And, as G. W. F. Hegel said, “Seek food and clothing first, and then the Kingdom of God shall be added unto you.”19 So, one would think, we humans ought to be in something recognizably utopian. That we cannot accept this is another consequence of living our lives fully in the stream of economic history. While history fueled by utopian aspirations is an all or nothing proposition, economic history’s successes and failures are most often experienced in the margins.

  Which is partly why no full-throated triumphalism over the long twentieth century can survive even a brief look at the political economy of the 2010s: the stepping back of the United States from its role of good-guy world leader and of Britain from its role as a key piece of Europe; and the rise in North America and Europe of political movements that reject democratic representative consensus politics—movements that former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright has called “fascist” (and who am I to tell her she is wrong?).20 Indeed, any triumphalist narrative would collapse in the face of the conspicuous failures over the previous decade by the stewards of the global economy.

  Yes, during the years between 1870 and 2010, technology and organization repeatedly lapped fecundity. Yes, a newly richer humanity resoundingly triumphed over tendencies for population to expand and so for greater resource scarcity to offset more knowledge and better technology. But material prosperity is unevenly distributed around the globe to a gross, even criminal, extent. And material wealth does not make people happy in a world where politicians and others prosper mightily from finding new ways to make and keep people unhappy. The history of the long twentieth century cannot be told as a triumphal gallop, or a march, or even a walk of progress along the road that brings us closer to utopia. It is, rather, a slouch. At best.

  One reason why human progress toward utopia has been but a slouch is that so much of it has been and still is mediated by the market economy: that Mammon of Unrighteousness. The market economy enables the astonishing coordination and cooperation of by now nearly eight billion humans in a highly productive division of labor. The market economy also recognizes no rights of humans other than the rights that come with the property their governments say they possess. And those property rights are wo
rth something only if they help produce things that the rich want to buy. That cannot be just.

  As I noted above, Friedrich von Hayek always cautioned against listening to the siren song that we should seek justice rather than mere productivity and abundance. We needed to bind ourselves to the mast. Interference in the market, no matter how well-intentioned when it started, would send us into a downward spiral. It would put us on a road to, well, some industrial-age variant of serfdom. But Karl Polanyi responded that such an attitude was inhuman and impossible: People firmly believed, above all else, that they had other rights more important than and prior to the property rights that energized the market economy. They had rights to a community that gave them support, to an income that gave them the resources they deserved, to economic stability that gave them consistent work. And when the market economy tried to dissolve all rights other than property rights? Watch out!21

  Slouching, however, is better than standing still, let alone going backward. That is a truism no generation of humanity has ever disputed. Humans have always been inventive. Technological advance has rarely stopped. The windmills, dikes, fields, crops, and animals of Holland in 1700 made the economy of its countryside very different from the thinly farmed marshes of 700. The ships that docked at the Chinese port of Canton had much greater range, and the commodities loaded on and off of them had much greater value, in 1700 than in 800. And both commerce and agriculture in 800 were far more technologically advanced than they were in the first literate civilizations of 3000 BCE or so.

  But before our age, back in the preindustrial Agrarian Age, technological progress led to little visible change over one or even several lifetimes, and little growth in typical living standards even over centuries or millennia.

  Recall my very crude index that tracks the value of humanity’s useful ideas about manipulating nature and organizing collective efforts—an index of our “technology,” as economists call it. To calculate it, assume that each 1 percent increase in typical human standards of living worldwide tells us that the value of our useful ideas has risen by 1 percent. That is simply a normalization: I want the index to scale with real income, and not with something else, such as the square root of or the square of income. Also assume that each 1 percent increase in the human population at a constant typical living standard tells us that the value of useful ideas has risen by 0.5 percent—for such an increase is necessary to hold living standards constant in the face of resource scarcities that emerge from a higher population. This is a way of taking account of the fact that, since our natural resources are not unlimited, we depend on as much added human ingenuity to support a larger population at the same standard of living as we would depend on to support the same population at a higher standard of living.22

  Set this quantitative index of the global value of useful human knowledge equal to a value of 1 in 1870, at the start of the long twentieth century. Back in the year 8000 BCE, when we discovered agriculture and developed herding, the index stood at 0.04: roughly, and on average across the globe, with the same materials and on the same-size farms, it would take twenty-five workers in 8000 BCE to do what one worker could do in 1870. By the year 1, eight thousand years later, this index was 0.25: with the same resources, better “technologies” meant that the typical worker was now more than six times as productive as the typical worker had been back at the beginning of the Agrarian Age—but only one-quarter as productive as the typical worker of 1870. By the year 1500, the index stood at 0.43, more than 70 percent above the year 1 and a little less than half the value of the year 1870.

  These are impressive changes in an index number. They summarize, from the standpoint of those who lived eight thousand years ago, truly miraculous and impressive enlargements of the human empire. Technologies of the year 1500, the Ming pottery or the Portuguese caravel or the wet cultivation of rice seedlings, would have seemed miraculous. But this growth, and the pace of invention, took place over an enormous span of time: technology crawled ahead at only 0.036 percent per year for the entire period between 1 and 1500—that is only 0.9 percent over an average twenty-five-year lifetime of that age.

  And did greater knowledge about technology and human organization cause the life in 1500 of a typical person to be much sweeter than it had been in 8000 BCE? It turns out not. The human population grew at an average rate of 0.07 percent per year from year 1 to 1500, and this 0.07 percent per year decrease in average farm size and other available natural resources per worker meant that more skillful work produced little, if any, additional net product on average. While the elite lived far better in 1500 than they had in 8000 BCE or the year 1, ordinary people—peasants and craftsmen—lived little or no better than their predecessors.

  Agrarian Age humans were desperately poor: it was a subsistence-level society. On average, 2.03 children per mother survived to reproduce. A typical woman (who was not among the one in seven who died in childbirth, or the additional one in five who died before her children were grown, sometimes from the same contagious diseases to which her children succumbed) would have spent perhaps twenty years eating for two: she would have had perhaps nine pregnancies, six live births, and three or four children surviving to age five, and the life expectancy of her children remained under, and perhaps well under, thirty.23

  Keeping your children from dying is the first and highest goal of every parent. Humanity in the Agrarian Age could not do so at all reliably. That is an index of how much pressure from material want humanity found itself under.

  Over the millennia, 1.5 percent average population growth per generation added up, however. In 1500 there were about three times as many people as there had been in year 1—500 million rather than 170 million. Additional humans did not translate to less individual material want. As of 1500, advances in technological and organizational knowledge went to compensate for fewer natural resources per capita. Thus economic history remained a slowly changing background in front of which cultural, political, and social history took place.

  The ice started to groan and shift after 1500. Or perhaps a better metaphor is crossing a divide and entering a new watershed—you are now going downhill, and things are flowing in a new direction. Call this shift the coming of the age of the “Imperial-Commercial Revolution.” The pace of inventions and innovation sped up. And then, in around 1770, the ice was cracking as we crossed into yet a different watershed, as far as the level of worldwide prosperity and the pace of global economic growth was concerned: call the century after 1770 the coming of the age of the “Industrial Revolution.” By 1870 the index of the value of knowledge stood at 1, more than twice as large as in 1500. It had taken 9,500 years to get the tenfold jump from 0.04 to 0.43—an average time-to-double of some 2,800 years—and then the next doubling took less than 370 years.

  But did this mean a richer, more comfortable humanity in 1870? Not very much. There were then in 1870 1.3 billion people alive, 2.6 times as many as there had been in 1500. Farm sizes were only two-fifths as large, on average, as they had been in 1500, canceling out the overwhelming bulk of technological improvement, as far as typical human living standards were concerned.

  Around 1870 we crossed over another divide into yet another new watershed: the age Simon Kuznets called an era of “modern economic growth.”24 During the period that would follow, the long twentieth century, there came an explosion.

  The approximately seven billion people in 2010 had a global value of knowledge index of 21. Pause to marvel. The value of knowledge about technology and organization had grown at an average rate of 2.1 percent per year. Since 1870, the technological capability and material wealth of humankind had exploded beyond previous imagining. By 2010, the typical human family no longer faced as its most urgent and important problem the task of acquiring enough food, shelter, and clothing for the next year—or the next week.

  From the techno-economic point of view, 1870–2010 was the age of the industrial research lab and the bureaucratic corporation. One gathered communities
of engineering practice to supercharge economic growth, the other organized communities of competence to deploy the fruits of invention. It was only slightly less the age of globalization: cheap ocean and rail transport that destroyed distance as a cost factor and allowed humans in enormous numbers to seek better lives, along with communications links that allowed us to talk across the world in real time.

  The research laboratory, the corporation, and globalization powered the wave of discovery, invention, innovation, deployment, and global economic integration that have so boosted our global useful-economic-knowledge index. Marvel still. 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: nearly five hundred times as much as in 1870.

  From the biosociological point of view, this material progress meant that the typical woman no longer needed to spend twenty years eating for two—pregnant or breastfeeding. By 2010, it was more like four years. And it was also during this century that we became able, for the first time, to prevent more than half our babies from dying in miscarriages, stillbirths, and infancy—and to prevent more than a tenth of mothers from dying in childbirth.25