Скачать или смотреть Brad DeLong on whether politics is holding back technological innovation

It’s tempting to look back on the technological progress we’ve seen in the past few years and marvel at how much things have changed, and they certainly have. But if you zoom out on the historical scale, it’s very arguable that the trends of today were set in motion by processes and ideas of the late 19th century.

Brad DeLong, my guest on today’s episode argues just that in his book “Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century,” making the case that the world of today began through industrial, governmental, and scientific breakthroughs that began in 1870 but began stalling in the 2010s.

Why did progress slow down drastically and how can we get back toward making things better at a faster pace? Some of it appears to be that ideological conservatism in the U.S. seems to have utterly lost its ability to incorporate new information, which has in turn left Republican administrations unable to form any kind of real and coherent policies, let alone good ones.

But there are other reasons things have stalled, and we get into them in the discussion. I hope you’ll enjoy.

00:00 -- Introduction
04:45 -- Modernity and the beginning of the end of scarcity
07:45 -- Bifurcations of liberalism
15:02 -- Conservatism regressed rather than keeping pace with technological innovation
21:28 -- Ronald Reagan versus Donald Trump
28:31 -- Republicans are experiencing significant "brain drain"
39:28 -- Technological change and societal uncertainty
45:07 -- Differences between wealthy Americans and those elsewhere
52:31 -- Neoliberalism and its impact
01:05:27 -- The blogosphere and media integration
01:12:34 -- Final thoughts and recommendations