Slouching Towards Utopia Page 3
From the nation-and-polity point of view, the wealth creation and distribution drove four things, of which the first was by far the most important: 1870–2010 was the century when the United States became a superpower. Second, it was during this period that the world came to be composed primarily of nations rather than empires. Third, the economy’s center of gravity came to consist of large oligopolistic firms ringmastering value chains. Finally, it made a world in which political orders would be primarily legitimated, at least notionally, by elections with universal suffrage—rather than the claims of plutocracy, tradition, “fitness,” leadership charisma, or knowledge of a secret key to historical destiny.
Much that our predecessors would have called “utopian” has been attained step by step, via economic improvements year by year, each of which is marginal, but which compound.
Yet, as of 1870, such an explosion was not foreseen, or not foreseen by many. Yes, 1770–1870 did see, for the first time, productive capability begin to outrun population growth and natural resource scarcity. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the average inhabitant of a leading economy—a Briton, a Belgian, a Dutchman, an American, a Canadian, or an Australian—had perhaps twice the material wealth and standard of living of the typical inhabitant of a preindustrial economy.
Was that enough to be a true watershed?
Back in the early 1870s, John Stuart Mill put the finishing touches on the final edition of the book that people seeking to understand economics then looked to: Principles of Political Economy, with Some of Their Applications to Social Philosophy. His book gave due attention and place to the 1770–1870 era of the British Industrial Revolution. But he looked out on what he saw around him and saw the world still poor and miserable. Far from lightening humanity’s daily toil, the era’s technology merely “enabled a greater population to live the same life of drudgery and imprisonment, and an increased number of manufacturers and others to make fortunes.”26
One word of Mill’s stands out to me: “imprisonment.”
Yes, Mill saw a world with more and richer plutocrats and a larger middle class. But he also saw the world of 1871 as not just a world of drudgery—a world in which humans had to work long and tiring hours. He saw it as not just a world in which most people were close to the edge of being desperately hungry, not just a world of low literacy—where most could only access the collective human store of knowledge, ideas, and entertainments partially and slowly. The world Mill saw was a world in which humanity was imprisoned: in a dungeon, chained and fettered.27 And Mill saw only one way out: if the government were to take control of human fecundity and require child licenses, prohibiting those who could not properly support and educate their children from reproducing, only then—or was he thinking “if”?—would mechanical inventions wreak the “great changes in human destiny, which it is in their nature and in their futurity to accomplish.”28
And there were others who were much more pessimistic than even Mill. In 1865, then thirty-year-old British economist William Stanley Jevons made his reputation by prophesying doom for the British economy: it needed to immediately cut back on industrial production in order to economize on scarce and increasingly valuable coal.29
With so much pessimism circulating, the coming explosion in economic growth was far from expected—but it would also be dangerously misconstrued by some.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had in 1848 already seen science and technology as Promethean forces that would allow humanity to overthrow its (mythical) old gods and give humanity itself the power of a god. Science, technology, and the profit-seeking entrepreneurial business class that deployed them had, they said,
during its rule of scarce one hundred years,… created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together. Subjection of Nature’s forces to man, machinery, application of chemistry to industry and agriculture, steam-navigation, railways, electric telegraphs, clearing of whole continents for cultivation, canalisation of rivers, whole populations conjured out of the ground—what earlier century had even a presentiment that such productive forces slumbered in the lap of social labour?30
ENGELS SNARKED THAT IN overlooking the power of science, technology, and engineering, mere economists (such as Mill) had demonstrated that they were little more than the paid hacks of the rich.31
But Marx and Engels’s promise was not that there would someday be enough to eat, or enough shelter, or enough clothing for the masses, let alone an exponential increase in the value of global knowledge, or even a nearly unlimited choice of music to listen to. Slouching, galloping economic growth was but a necessary paroxysm on the way to utopia. Their promise was utopia. In Marx’s few and thin descriptions of life after the socialist revolution, in works such as his Critique of the Gotha Program, the utopian life he foresaw echoed—deliberately, but with what authorial intent?—the descriptions in the Acts of the Apostles of how people who had attained the Kingdom of Heaven behaved: each contributed “according to his ability” (Acts 11:29), and each drew on the common, abundant store “according to his needs” (4:35).32 Perhaps he kept these descriptions rare and without detail because they differed so little from what Mill envisioned: an end to the imprisonment and drudgery of poverty, a society in which all people could be truly free.
However, economic improvement, attained by slouch or gallop, matters.
How many of us today could usefully find our way around a kitchen of a century ago? Before the coming of the electric current and the automatic washing machine, doing the laundry was not an annoying, minor chore but instead a major part of the household’s—or rather the household’s women’s—week. Today few among us are gatherers, or hunters, or farmers. Hunting, gathering, farming, along with herding, spinning and weaving, cleaning, digging, smelting metal, and shaping wood—indeed, assembling structures by hand—have become the occupations of a small and dwindling proportion of humans. And where we do have farmers, herdsmen, manufacturing workers, construction workers, and miners, they are overwhelmingly controllers of machines and increasingly programmers of robots. They are no longer people who manufacture, who make or shape things with their hands.
What do modern people do instead? Increasingly, we push forward the body of technological and scientific knowledge. We educate each other. We doctor and nurse each other. We care for our young and our old. We entertain each other. We provide other services for each other so that we can all take advantage of the benefits of specialization. And we engage in complicated symbolic interactions that have the emergent effect of distributing status and power and coordinating the division of labor of today’s economy, which encompassed seven billion people in 2010.
Over the course of the long century we have crossed a great divide, between what we used to do in all of previous human history and what we do now. Utopia, it is true, this is not. I imagine Bellamy would be at once impressed and disappointed.
The economic historian Richard Easterlin helps explain why. The history of the ends humans pursue, he suggests, demonstrates that we are ill-suited for utopia. With our increasing wealth, what used to be necessities become matters of little concern—perhaps even beyond our notice. But conveniences turn into necessities. Luxuries turn into conveniences. And we humans envision and then create new luxuries.33
Easterlin, bemused, puzzled over how “material concerns in the wealthiest nations today are as pressing as ever, and the pursuit of material needs as intense.” He saw humanity on a hedonic treadmill: “Generation after generation thinks it needs only another ten or twenty percent more income to be perfectly happy.… In the end, the triumph of economic growth is not a triumph of humanity over material wants; rather, it is the triumph of material wants over humanity.”34 We do not use our wealth to overmaster our wants. Rather, our wants use our wealth to continue to overmaster us. And this hedonic treadmill is one powerful reason why, even when all went very well, we only slouched rather than galloped toward utopia.
Nevertheless, getting off the treadmill looks grim. Only a fool would wittingly or ignorantly slouch or gallop backward to near-universal dire global poverty.
LET ME REMIND YOU, again, that what follows is a grand narrative. Of a necessity, I spend chapters on what others have spent books, indeed multiple volumes, describing. In pursuit of big themes, details necessarily suffer. Moreover, I will, as needed—which will be often—“pull up the roots” and jump far back in time to identify and quickly trace an influential origin story, for we cannot do other than think in narrative terms. What happened in 1500, say, had consequences for what happened in 1900. Details, gray areas, controversies, historical uncertainties—they suffer, they suffer greatly, but they suffer for a purpose. To date, we humans have failed to see the long twentieth century as fundamentally economic in its significance—and consequently we have failed to take from it all the lessons we must. We have drawn lessons aplenty from the myriad political, military, social, cultural, and diplomatic histories of these decades. But the economic lessons are no less pressing, and, in fact, are more pressing.
The source from which all else flows was the explosion of material wealth that surpassed all precedent: the long twentieth century saw those of us who belong to the upper-middle class, and who live in the industrial core of the world economy, become far richer than the theorists of previous centuries’ utopias could imagine. From this explosion flowed five important processes and sets of forces that will constitute the major themes of this book:
History became economic: Because of the explosion of wealth, the long twentieth century was the first century ever in which history was predominantly a matter of economics: the economy was the dominant arena of events and change, and economic changes were the driving force behind other changes, in a way never seen before.
The world globalized: As had never been the case before, things happening on other continents became not just minor fringe factors but among the central determinants of what happened in every single place human beings lived.
The technological cornucopia was the driver: Enabling the enormous increase in material wealth—its essential prerequisite, in fact—was the explosion in human technological knowledge. This required not just a culture and educational system that created large numbers of scientists and engineers, and means of communication and memory, so that they could build on previous discoveries, but also a market economy structured in such a way that it was worth people’s while to funnel resources to scientists and engineers so that they could do their jobs.
Governments mismanaged, creating insecurity and dissatisfaction: The governments of the long twentieth century had little clue as to how to regulate the un-self-regulating market to maintain prosperity, to ensure opportunity, or to produce substantial equality.
Tyrannies intensified: The long twentieth century’s tyrannies were more brutal and more barbaric than those of any previous century—and were, in strange, complicated, and confused ways, closely related to the forces that made the explosion of wealth so great.
I write this book to engrave these lessons on our collective memories. The only way I know how is to tell you the story, and the substories.
The place to start is in the year 1870, with humanity still ensorcelled, so that better technology meant not higher living standards for the typical human but rather more people and more resource scarcity that ate up nearly all, if not all, of the potential for material human betterment. Humanity was then still under the spell of a Devil: the Devil of Thomas Robert Malthus.35
1
Globalizing the World
He was annoyed by the disquisitions in favor of democracy, reason, feminism, enlightenment, and revolution that crossed his desk. So, just before 1800, English scholar and cleric Thomas Robert Malthus wrote a counterblast, his Essay on the Principle of Population. His objective? To demonstrate that his explicit target, William Godwin (the father of Frankenstein author Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)—and all of Godwin’s ilk—were, however good their intentions, shortsighted and deluded enemies of the public welfare. Rather than revolution to bring about democracy, reason, feminism, and enlightenment, what humanity needed was religious orthodoxy, political monarchy, and familial patriarchy.1
Why? Because human sexuality was a nearly irresistible force. Unless it was somehow checked—unless women were kept religious, the world stayed patriarchal, and governmental sanctions were in place to keep people from making love except under certain approved and stringent conditions—the population would always expand until it reached the limit imposed by the “positive check”: that is, population would only stop growing when women became so skinny that ovulation became hit-or-miss, and when children became so malnourished that their immune systems were compromised and ineffective. The good alternative Malthus saw was the “preventative check”: a society in which paternal authority kept women virgins until the age of twenty-eight or so, and in which, even after the age of twenty-eight, government restrictions kept women without the blessing of a current marriage from making love, and in which religion-induced fear of damnation kept women from evading those restrictions. Then, and only then, could a population settle at a stable equilibrium in which people were (relatively) well nourished and prosperous.
What Malthus wrote was, from his point of view, not false, at least for his day and for earlier days as well. The world in the year 6000 BCE was a world with perhaps 7 million people on it and a technological index of 0.051. The standard of living was about what the United Nations and academic development economists might peg at an average of $2.50 per day, or about $900 a year. Fast-forward to the year 1, and we see a world with a great deal of accumulated invention, innovation, and technological development compared to 6000 BCE. Technology had advanced far, with my index having now reached 0.25, but the approximate standard of living was still about $900 per year. Why no change? Because human sexuality was indeed a nearly irresistible force, as Malthus knew, and the world human population had grown from about 7 million in 6000 BCE to perhaps 170 million in the year 1. The economist Greg Clark has estimated English construction-worker real wages over time, and this data tells us that, on an index that sets these wages in 1800 at 100, construction-worker real wages had also been at a value of 100 in 1650, in 1340, in 1260, and in 1230. The highest they had reached was a value of 150 in 1450, after the Black Plague of 1346–1348 had carried off perhaps one-third of the population of Europe, and after subsequent waves of plague, generation by generation, plus peasant revolts, had severely limited the power of aristocrats to maintain serfdom. From 1450 to 1600, real wages fell back to what would be their 1800 level.2
Malthus’s proposed cures—orthodoxy, monarchy, and patriarchy—did not help much to raise this inevitably grim Agrarian Age typical human standard of living. By 1870 there had been some improvement, at least in England. (But remember that England in 1870 was by a substantial margin the richest industrial nation and by far the most industrial economy in the world.) In 1870 Clark’s English construction-worker real-wage series stood at 170. But there were some who were not impressed: Remember John Stuart Mill? Smart money still bet that there had not yet been any decisive watershed boundary crossing in human destiny.
John Stuart Mill and company did have a point. Had the Industrial Revolution of 1770–1870 lightened the toil of the overwhelming majority of humanity—even in Britain, the country at the leading edge? Doubtful. Had it materially raised the living standards of the overwhelming majority—even in Britain? By a little. Compared to how mankind had lived before the revolution, it was unquestionably a big deal: steam power and iron making and power looms and telegraph wires had provided comforts for many and fortunes for a few. But how humans lived had not been transformed. And there were legitimate fears. As late as 1919 British economist John Maynard Keynes wrote that while Malthus’s Devil had been “chained up and out of sight,” with the catastrophe of World War I, “perhaps we have loosed him again.”3
A fixation on food makes compel
ling sense to the hungry. From the year 1000 BCE to 1500 CE, human populations, checked by a shortage of available calories, had grown at a snail’s pace, at a rate of 0.09 percent per year, increasing from perhaps fifty million to perhaps five hundred million. There were lots of children, but they were too malnourished for enough of them to survive long enough to boost the overall population. Over these millennia the typical standards of living of peasants and craftworkers changed little: they consistently spent half or more of their available energy and cash securing the bare minimum of essential calories and nutrients.
It could hardly have been otherwise. Malthus’s Devil made certain of that. Population growth ate the benefits of invention and innovation in technology and organization, leaving only the exploitative upper class noticeably better off. And the average pace of invention and innovation in technology and organization was anemic: perhaps 0.04 percent per year. (Recall, for context, that the average pace starting in around 1870 was 2.1 percent per year.)
That was life up to 1500, when there came a crossing of a watershed boundary: the Industrial-Commercial Revolution. The rate of growth of humanity’s technological and organizational capabilities took a fourfold upward leap: from the 0.04 percent per year rate following year 1 to 0.15 percent per year. The oceangoing caravels, new horse breeds, cattle and sheep breeds (the Merino sheep, especially), invention of printing presses, recognition of the importance of restoring nitrogen to the soil for staple crop growth, canals, carriages, cannons, and clocks that had emerged by 1650 were technological marvels and were—with the exception of cannons, and for some people caravels—great blessings for humanity. But this growth was not fast enough to break the Devil of Malthus’s spell trapping humanity in near-universal poverty. Population expansion, by and large, kept pace with greater knowledge and offset it. Globally, the rich began to live better.4 But the typical person saw little benefit—or perhaps suffered a substantial loss. Better technology and organization brought increases in production of all types—including the production of more effective and brutal forms of killing, conquest, and slavery.