PODCAST: ”Hexapodia” is þe Key Insight! XLII: ”Slouching Towards Utopia”—Brad’s New Book Edition

Key Insights:

* Since 1870, we humans have done amazingly astonishingly uniquely and unprecedentedly well at baking a sufficiently large economic pie.

* But the problems of slicing and tasting the pie—of equitably distributing it, and then using our technological powers to live lives wisely and well—continue to flummox us.

* The big reason we have been unable to build social institutions for equitably slicing and then properly tasting our now more-than-sufficiently-large economic pie is the sheer pace of economic transformation.

* Since 1870 humanity's technological competence has doubled every generation

* Hence Schumpeterian creative destruction has taken hold.

* Our immensely increasing wealth has come at the price of the repeated destruction of industries, occupations, livelihoods, and communities.

* And we have been frantically trying to rewrite the sociological code running on top of our rapidly changing forces-of-production hardware

* The attempts to cobble together a sorta-running sociological software code have been a scorched-earth war between two factions.

* Faction 1: followers of Friedrich von Hayek, who say: "the market giveth, the market taketh away: blessed be the name of the market"

* Faction 2: followers of Karl Polanyi, who say: "the market was made for man; not man for the market"

* Let the market start destroying "society", and society will react by trying to destroy the market order

* Thus the task of governance and politics is to try to manage and perhaps one day supersede this dilemma.

* &, of course, HEXAPODIA!!

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References:

* J. Bradford DeLong: Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the 20th Century

* Robert Gordon: The Rise and Fall of American Growth

* Gary Gerstle: The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era

* Vaclav Smil: Creating the 20th Century: Technical Innovations of 1867-1914 and Their Lasting Impact

* Vaclav Smil: Transforming the 20th Century: Technical Innovations and Their Consequences

* Friedrich von Hayek: The Road to Serfdom

* Karl Polanyi: The Great Transfomation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time

* John Maynard Keynes: The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money

+, of course:

* Vernor Vinge: A Fire Upon the Deep 

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