The Essential & Key Readings Selected from the Required Readings for Econ 115: The World Economy in the 20th Century

There is a demand for a shorter list of things to read than the 42-item reading list. (Hey! That isn’t even three things a week!). So here is a list of 16—less than 40%! (Admittedly, one of them is 600 pages long…

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First, and no surprise to you all, comes my 600-page book, published year before last. I see it as an essential resource for those interested in the economic history of the 20th century and its consequences. Indeed, I see it as potentially a treasure for all time.

Moreover, the book serves as a more complete and well-organized guide to my views on the century’s economic history than do the lectures I have given in this course. The lectures aim to illuminate other perspectives, and to build on the central argument threads presented in the book. They do not simply repeat those threads—given that the book exists, that would have been a waste of time:

Second comes Simon Kuznets’s 1971 Nobel Prize Lecture. It is pivotal in defining what modern economic growth actually is. Kuznets was the first to powerfully articulate that the Industrial Revolution was not the most significant event; instead, the critical development occurred in the 1870s with the advent of steam power, railroads, coal, and steel, which initiated a continuous process of technological change, transforming economies every generation:

Third comes Ronald Lee’s article on the demographic transition. It is crucial. The demographic transition is both understudied and underappreciated. The transition from an agrarian age—where the typical woman underwent eight if not more pregnancies—to our modern era has profoundly changed human experience to a remarkable degree. Yet many of us remain insufficiently aware of its deep impact:

Those are by far the three most important things to reread during RRR week. Be sure you get through those.

Moving on to less central, though still vitally important, works on the reading list:

Patricia Crone and Patrick Wyman provide baseline insights about human economies and societies back in the long Agrarian Age. We need that baseline to serve as a background against which the remarkable nature of the twentieth century stands out in bold relief. Crone’s is the best survey I have found of Agrarian Age economy and society. Wyman’s is a bold and remarkably successful exploration of the growth of the entrepreneurial and experimental spirit that emerged after 1500 in, roughly, a circle around the port of Dover at the southeastern corner of the island of Great Britain. As Crone says, other societies as of 1500 were on a trajectory to become more like themselves—to deepen and cement their operation as relatively stable societies of domination. Only Western Europe was in the process of reaching for alternative modes of human organization via a very unusual degree of institutional plasticity. It was, as of 1500, failing as a stable society of domination. And so it, most strongly inside the Dover Circle, started the process of becoming something else:

Next on my list of key readings come five pieces:

One is Arthur Lewis’s theory on how the extraordinary growth in global inequality in the 20th century was triggered by globalization and racial impediments to migration post–1870. He offers a profound and, I thin, largely correct explanation for how today’s immense wealth disparities between countries came about:

Another is Barry Eichengreen’s article on the Great Depression, the defining moment of 20th-century and, I think, future history as well. That the Great Depression in the United States spurred the creation of FDR’s New Deal Order kept the history of the 20th century from being much more tragic than it in fact was:

Yet another is Robert Bates’s take on the exceptional economic-development retardation of Sub-Saharan Africa in the Post-Colonial—or perhaps the Neocolonial—Age. Due to the semi-stalled fertility transition in much of Sub-Saharan Africa, it is projected to constitute 30% of the human race by the time that you students become old men and women. Getting Sub-Saharan Africa back on track is going to be the principal economic development challenge of your lives. And figuring out how it got off track is essential to figuring out what is to be done:

Two more are our readings looking at inequality within individual nations—Piketty and Saez on disparities of wealth, and Wilson on race-linked disparities in status and opportunity

The next set of the assigned readings that I pick out as truly essential are the readings that focus on our current situation: Gordon on whether the epoch that began in 1870 of humanity’s collective wealth doubling, or more than doubling, every generation might be coming toward an end; Auffhammer on how we need to start assessing how much of the next two generations’ technological dividend will be consumed by dealing with the damage from global warming; Eichengreen on the strength, meaning, and prospects for the contemporary movements that are variously called illiberal democracy, plebiscitarian authoritarianism’s or neofascism; and Brynjolfsson, Rock, and Syverson on the characteristics of the next “mode of production” into which human society is currently moving—the Attention-Info-Bio-Tech economy:

Somewhat of a sidetrack—but included on this list simply because I find the subject of comparative economic systems in the 20th century so fascinating—is Robert Allen’s relatively positive, contrarian, and somewhat troll-ish assessment of the Soviet economic experience 1917–1991:

And last on my list of truly essential readings is the core reading for the alternative version of this course, the one that is taught most years, the version that Barry Eichengreen teaches. That version of the course focuses much more on world monetary affairs as the nervous system of humanity considered as a productive anthology intelligence. And Barry’s book is the best short overview of that take on the economic history of the 20th century that I know of:

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