Two or three thousand years from now history as we know it will have been boiled down to its bare core. History courses-if they even have history courses, if they even have universities -will have at most a single session to spend on the world in the twentieth century. And in that one single session, teachers will try to hastily and cursorily make five points:

… That the history of the twentieth century was overwhelmingly economic history: the economy was the dominant arena of events and change, and economic changes were the driving force behind other changes in a way rarely-if ever-seen before.

… That the twentieth century saw the material wealth of humankind explode beyond all previous imagining: we-at least those of us who belong to the upper middle class and live in the industrial core of the world economy-are now far richer than the writers of previous centuries' utopias could imagine.

… That the twentieth century's tyrannies were more brutal and more barbaric than in any previous century. And-astonishingly-they had their origins in economic discontents and economic ideologies. People killed each other in large numbers over questions of how the economy should be organized, which had not been a major source of massacre in previous centuries.

… That the twentieth century saw the relative economic gulf between different economies grow at an astonishingly rapid pace. Region by region and nation by nation, the world became more unequal in relative material prosperity than ever before.

… That economic policy-the management of economies by governments-in the twentieth century was at best inept. Little was known about how to manage a market economy. Lessons learned from experience were often forgotten quickly. There was an extraordinary disjunction between the power of twentieth-century economies as social-calculating and behavior-conditioning mechanisms and the ineptness with which these economies were managed.

Brad DeLong
delong@econ.berkeley.edu