Summary of Bradford DeLong's Slouching Towards Utopia

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 The author Thomas Robert Malthus wrote a counterblast to the Essay on the Principle of Population, written by the father of Frankenstein author Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. His objective was to demonstrate that his explicit target, William Godwin, and all of Godwin’s ilk were shortsighted and deluded enemies of the public welfare.
#2 The Industrial Revolution of 1770–1870 did not improve the living standards of the majority of people. It did provide comforts for many, but it did not change how humans lived.
#3 The Industrial-Commercial Revolution, which took place from 1770 to 1870, was a crossing of a watershed boundary. The rate of growth of humanity’s technological and organizational capabilities took a fourfold upward leap, from 0. 04 percent per year to 0. 15 percent per year.
#4 The Industrial Revolution was not inevitable, and it was not the only world that could have experienced it. In fact, in most other worlds, there was no British Industrial Revolution at all. The growth of human technological and organizational capabilities would have been eaten up by global population growth of 0. 9 percent per year, or about 25 percent per generation.

Sujets

• History
• World
• Histoire

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 22 septembre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9798350026184
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Bradford DeLong's Slouching Towards Utopia
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3 Insights from Chapter 4 Insights from Chapter 5 Insights from Chapter 6 Insights from Chapter 7 Insights from Chapter 8 Insights from Chapter 9 Insights from Chapter 10 Insights from Chapter 11 Insights from Chapter 12 Insights from Chapter 13 Insights from Chapter 14 Insights from Chapter 15 Insights from Chapter 16 Insights from Chapter 17
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The author Thomas Robert Malthus wrote a counterblast to the Essay on the Principle of Population, written by the father of Frankenstein author Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. His objective was to demonstrate that his explicit target, William Godwin, and all of Godwin’s ilk were shortsighted and deluded enemies of the public welfare.

#2

The Industrial Revolution of 1770–1870 did not improve the living standards of the majority of people. It did provide comforts for many, but it did not change how humans lived.

#3

The Industrial-Commercial Revolution, which took place from 1770 to 1870, was a crossing of a watershed boundary. The rate of growth of humanity’s technological and organizational capabilities took a fourfold upward leap, from 0. 04 percent per year to 0. 15 percent per year.

#4

The Industrial Revolution was not inevitable, and it was not the only world that could have experienced it. In fact, in most other worlds, there was no British Industrial Revolution at all. The growth of human technological and organizational capabilities would have been eaten up by global population growth of 0. 9 percent per year, or about 25 percent per generation.

#5

Without a further acceleration of the underlying drivers of economic growth, today’s world might have been a permanent steampunk world. The period from 1870 to 1914 was, in the eyes of previous eras, economic El Dorado.

#6

The industrial research lab, the large modern corporation, and globalization were the three factors that made the world one global market economy. They then proceeded to solve the problems that the economy set itself, which was to find a way to ratchet up the pace of economic growth.

#7

Before 1700, international trade was a trade of high-valued preciosities for precious-metal cash. It did not affect the majority of people, who lived in isolation from each other. After 1800, cotton and textiles became important additions to the list of key commodities in world trade.

#8

The embrace of openness by world governments meant the absence of legal barriers to trade, investment, and communication. Transportation made a huge difference, as it allowed people to travel far distances very quickly.

#9

The Oceanic was a ship that transported passengers between continents. It cost £3 for first-class passengers, and £15 for second-class passengers to travel between continents. The Oceanic’s crew of 150 supported 1,000 third-class passengers at a cost of £3 each, and 150 first-class passengers at £15 each.

#10

The migrations were not always one way. Some people crossed the Atlantic multiple times. One person who made the reverse journey permanently was Jennie Jerome, born in 1854, the daughter of New York financier Leonard Jerome and Clara Hall. She married Lord Randolph Spencer-Churchill, younger son of the 7th Duke of Marlborough.

#11

The temperate-zone lands settled from Europe were overwhelmingly successful in keeping the United States, Canada, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Australia, and New Zealand European. The flow of migrants out of China and India was directed elsewhere, to the tea plantations of Ceylon or the rubber plantations of Malaya.

#12

Through misfortune and bad government, India and China had failed to escape the shackles of the Malthusian Devil. Their populations had grown too large, and their living standards had not. Thus, the world was an integrated unit, with one story.

#13

The British Empire was the most prominent long-run beneficiary of the global economy. It brought the rubber plant from Brazil to Kew Gardens, and then to Malaya, and it brought the tea shrub directly from China to Ceylon.

#14

Between 1870 and 1914, exports as a percentage of national product doubled in India and Indonesia, and tripled in China. The story of this rise is what Baldwin calls the first unbundling, which was the massive fall in shipping costs that made it possible for producers to move away from use and consumption and towards industrial districts.

#15

The market economy responded to the needs of the copper wires as knowledge sped along them. The industrializing core specialized in the manufactures because of its access to industrial technologies. The periphery specialized in the primary products that its newly improving infrastructure allowed it to export.

#16

The 1870s to 1914 world economy was a high-investment economy. The industrialization of Western Europe and North America provided enough workers to make the industrial products that satisfied global demands, and also to build the railways, ships, ports, and other pieces of transport and communications infrastructure.

#17

The electric telegraph allowed for a rapid communication between points on the globe. However, not everyone was welcoming of this new technology. Henry David Thoreau, for example, groused that we are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas, but Maine and Texas may not have anything important to communicate.

#18

The telegraph, which allowed for the rapid transmission of information, greatly expanded the size of the group that could be affected by telegraphed intelligence. It allowed for the cheap and reliable transmission of information, which allowed for the transfer of technology.

#19

The coming of a single economic world did not bring together the countries and regions that it enabled to jump on an escalator of modern economic growth. Only six countries were fully on the escalator in 1870.

#20

The market economy will strive to satisfy the desires of those who hold the valuable property rights. But valuable property owners seek a high standard of living, and they are not patient people who wish to enable and accelerate long-run growth.

#21

The market economy’s maximum-profitability test would keep that skill and experience from ever being acquired. And so 1870–1950 saw the most profitable and innovation-supporting parts of economic activity becoming more and more concentrated in what we now call the global north.
Insights from Chapter 2

#1

After 1870, the world became globalized in a way that it had never been before. But what exactly did that mean. Globalization was not just the planet-crossing lines of communication and transportation that were beginning to move ideas and people faster than ever before. It was also the application of mining technologies, and Hoover’s mastery of that application.

#2

Before 1870, inventions and innovations were generally singular discoveries and adaptations. They produced new and better ways of doing old things. After 1870, however, the most advanced North Atlantic economies began to invent.

#3

The arrival of these wonders of convenience and consumption is often called a second industrial revolution. But what is most important is never so much the arrival of any particular technology, but a burgeoning understanding that there is a broad and deep range of new technologies to be discovered, developed, and deployed.

#4

The Bessemer-Mushet process, which was developed in 1855, forced air through the molten cast iron to burn off all non-iron impurities. The price of a ton of steel dropped by a factor of seven, from £45 down to £6, at a time when £70 per year was the average wage in Britain.

#5

America was still a very unequal place in the first decade of the 1900s. However, compared to every other place in the world, American jobs were very good ones.

#6

Tesla was a difficult man, and he found other men difficult to work with. He had a difficult time maintaining financial backers or a supporting engineering staff. Yet he beat Thomas Edison in the struggle over whether electricity would be delivered in direct or alternating current.

#7

Tesla’s AC systems required only a few large power plants, placed where they were most convenient, with the power then transmitted via vigorous shaking through long- and short-distance power lines.

#8

Tesla was an inventor who founded Tesla Electric Light and Manufacturing in 1887. In 1891, he began working for George Westinghouse and his Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing Company. His ideas were vastly expanded by others, and they continued to expand even after he moved to Colorado Springs in 1899 to conduct experiments in high-voltage power distribution.

#9

In 1907, the heroic age of electricity was over. It was time to rationalize operations and replace visionary inventors like Tesla with sober, flannel-suited executives. They focused on the bottom line: spend less on blue-sky experiments and pay workers less.

#10

The average professor in the early 1900s could not afford to live within walking distance of campus, and could not afford to keep a horse and carriage. The first large expense he listed was for personal services.

#11

The first component of the welfare state was workmen’s compensation, which was established in many parts of the United States because of the high accident rates at U. S. Steel plants.

#12

The American system was made up of many factors that contributed to its industrial supremacy, such as education, natural resources, and openness. However, these were largely unavailable to both the Indigenous peoples and Blacks, who were then being exposed to diseases and terrorized by white society.

#13

The United States was exceptional compared to the rest of the developed Wes