Thanks for the review, ill have to add this ti my list. Since my background is more on the history/political side, I couldn't help but notice the "long 1860s" (1858 to 1872) also witnessed a series of social/political upheavals that set the stage Delong's "long 20th":
-Taiping & fatal crippling of Qing.
-"Meiji restoraton"
-US Civil War & emancipation
-formation of the British Raj (more of a capstone than a revolution)
-German & Italian unification, Franco-Prussian war
-Emancipation of Russian serfs
I don't have a strong causal theory or am even sure there is a connection, just interesting to me.
Mark, I think from a historical standpoint and in the centuries to come people will look at the period from 1815 (the fall of Bonaparte) to 2015 as the time of the Anglo-Americans. In the same way that the Mongols dominated Eurasia from Genghis Khan in the 1200s to Timur in the 1400s we see the Anglo-Americans dominating most of the world's institutions, and, to be honest, causing and/or winning most of the major wars of this era.
In fact, I think a lot of non-English speakers find Anglo-American influence around the world to be very pronounced. Britain and America were world leaders in both the First (1770s - 1850s) and Second (1850s-1940s) Industrial Revolutions and since then have had a very inordinate impact on world industry, finance, politics and culture.
Perhaps this is good way to characterize this period from a world-historical standpoint.
I don't think the Anglo-Saxon era ends in 2015. I see China now much like late 19th&early 20th century Germany, challenging the Anglo-Saxon hegemon of the time but ultimately falling short. The next global hegemon will also be an English-speaking country (India) but they will take that spot in the late 21st century.
I concur, I think the Anglo-American era is likely to persist for much longer than up to 2015. However, as with all things future, we can only talk in hypotheticals.
I would like to say that the idea of a global hegemon is really a Cold War/Unipolar Moment concept unlikely to be repeated soon--if ever. Even at the high-water point of the British Empire in the 1880s it was much more a regional hegemon in the sense that the other colonial powers had exclusive spheres of influence which the British broadly respected. This included the US with the Monroe Doctrine, other European colonies in Africa and the Middle East as well as South East Asia. Britain had a lot of colonial interests in many regions but they were never THE power in a global sense compared to the USA and USSR in the Cold War or the USA of today.
I think if the American alliance network dissolves the world will become much more like the 19th Century with regional powers. I think India will be the regional hegemon of the Indian Ocean but even so, it is possible that some type of militarized ASEAN could contest this. I concur about China, I think it will be a powerful country in East Asia in a state of rivalry with Japan (as has been the case for the past 100 years).
“ DeLong has a frankly superhuman ability to remember and regurgitate endless fascinating little anecdotes and facts.” Boy, is that true. I’ve rarely come away even from any tweet of his without marveling at the erudition.
And actual question, is the 20th century over everywhere in the world since the wealthiest nations are in a new era? Still lots of industrialization to do and things to figure out as it happens, though the most powerful nations aren't influencing them in the same way.
It seems likely that the nations yet to develop will need to do so in a different way than America/Europe of the 1800s or East Asia of the 1900s. So I’d say that everyone’s out of the 20th century, just different people are in different places.
That sounds right, but I also do think that lots of political-economic challenges in today's poor countries will mimic the ones that rich countries went through. I think you can already see this with e.g. Hindu nationalism.
Thanks for the review. I'm really looking forward to Brad's book. I have had the privilege of reading bits and pieces on his blog. If I were an early career professional, I think modeling yourself on him professionally would be San excellent strategy. But, hey, you know that already.
Looks like it could be an interesting read. I think that if anything, the positive aspects of humanity's condition in 2015 and since have actually been understated. Not only do more people live on more than a $1 a day in 2015 than did in 1800 but also a $1 can buy you more in goods and services than was possible in 1800 (if we use the 2011 dollar as the the benchmark).
Even if you are desperately poor today, you still have the chance to access things like clean water, sewage disposal, public transport, electrified infrastructure, basic medications, etc... which you could never have hoped to have accessed in 1800 (partly because some of these innovations simply did not exist).
Famine is largely an affliction relegated to war zones. Farm work is much more mechanized than in the past as is most forms of manual labor. The global average for years of schooling has risen to approximately 8 years. The amount of information a person can access for free is ridiculous.
All of this converges to the conclusion that if you had to be poor, it is better to be poor today than in 1800.
Indeed. Farmwork was also much more dangerous back then. In general, all of life was. And even people who were alive were afflicted with all sorts of stuff regularly (like worms, lice, random other bacterial/parasitical afflictions).
The folks on this thread who are complaining about life now are almost certainly not one generation removed from a kid who had to clamber up and down a 20 feet moss-covered well (obviously, with no health insurance or even proper modern medical care in case of injury) to get water for his family every day. They have no idea how much worse life could be than now.
Here is something that you don't address, so I am guessing that DeLong may not either: All of this wealth-creating activity begins around 1870 and according to climate science around 1880 is when we begin to see the first episodes of enhanced greenhouse gases that are now threatening everything beneficial from this activity. Our climate destruction may wipeout all of this progress or perhaps really set-off global conflict over diminishing resources. For too long economics just labelled this "negative externalities," without political economy driving us to solve this problem.
So while population growth may not set us back to Malthusian scarcity, making our planet increasingly uninhabitable certainly will. We could conceivably develop technologies to "reset" our greenhouse gas levels by neutralizing the accumulated CO2 and methane we have created but absent that...
And who will do this? Not much profit in it, just survival.
"humans are still deeply unsatisfied with their society, and will doubtless try to create new big political-economic ideas as a result. If history is any guide, this path will be fraught with danger."
Half the population living paycheck to paycheck in the US, the very definition of chronic financial distress , with falling average life expectancy. Comfortable conservatives don';t want to rock the boat, of course... a pity AGW climate change might not be real ; if it is, your market neoliberalism will be dead in the water, in favor of a mostly planned economy. .
"Half the population living paycheck to paycheck in the US, the very definition of chronic financial distress . . ."
I think the definition may be different, given the scope this book apparently addresses. In pre-industrial economies around 1900, well over half the people--sometimes in some regions up to perhaps 90%--lived "paycheck to paycheck," and that "paycheck" was in terms of consumed and marketed small-scale crops that provided enough for them to live in small dwellings without amenities, watching up to a quarter of children die in infancy with adults living generally to ages not exceeding about 50, all punctuated by wars, famines, and plagues that could result in mass deaths.
On the other hand, satisfaction and suffering are experienced relative to the social world as we experience it. Living without savings in, say, a small city apartment with running water, sewer service, and motorized transportation to jobs that guarantee some income may seem a lot better than what billions of peasants lived with until recently, but the psychology may not be.
"satisfaction and suffering are experienced relative to the social world as we experience it."
Exactly. and neoliberal orthodoxy is obviously failing the whole world now. even if comfortable conservatives would rather not face the fact. It's time for the public sector to be authorized to create and spend money on behalf of *collective well-being*, without being forced to tax or borrow from self-interested private sector players.
That might be clearer to me if I knew what "neoliberal orthodoxy" meant. Sometimes it seems to mean "conservative," sometimes "liberal," sometimes "capitalist," sometimes "late capitalist." It seems to me there are different "orthodoxies" for some, and no orthodoxy for others.
The neoliberal NAIRU market orthodoxy, which implies an inverse relationship between unemployment and inflation. Real full employment should be maintained at all times ; see the Job Guarantee of MMT.
Neil, I find MMT very interesting, but I'm not an economist and can't assess it's promise. If MMT is right, then current concerns about the impact of public spending on inflation are unwarranted. However, if MMT is wrong, then models such as the NAIRU are simply valid descriptions of how economic systems work. It seems to me that the public spending of the Covid and infrastructure bills has not helped validate MMT, but that the context is so atypical and poorly understood that it would be wrong to consider that an empirical test.
My understanding of the NAIRU is that the base of the theory is simply that there *is* an inverse relationship, and that different national monetary policies may accept that premise but differ on where the pivot of the relationship is. Since my interest in MMT doesn't extend to accepting it as valid, I can't assume that the causative relationship expressed in the NAIRU isn't valid (I think the correlation is strong). I also regard the rise of unemployment in an inflation-suppression regime as a secondary outcome, rather than as a policy target. In other words, it seems to me that the theory of the NAIRU is not generally taken as a basis to restrain employment by policy, but that restraint is a downstream outcome of inflation-suppression policies.
"Neoliberalism" is often described by other policy characteristics. But I do now understand why you wrote, "It's time for the public sector to be authorized to create and spend money on behalf of *collective well-being*, without being forced to tax or borrow from self-interested private sector players."
I don’t think people are “deeply dissatisfied”. Every human wants stability and a safe margin of error, and it is stressful to lack these (as most humans have since the dawn of time, when famine, disease and violence were more common). People are easily agitated/divided and are naturally envious. Outside actors can make them feel more dissatisfied and hopeless than they would on their own, and seek to blame others and/or claim their good fortune.
"It's the economy, stupid". Quite apart from high unemployment and food insecurity in many nations, what do you think caused the hyperpartisan Capitol riots in the US? Repubs accusing Dems of wanting "free stuff'?
Great piece Noah. Didn't get this point: "final because lower fertility rates will make the human race sustainable even if technological progress peters out)" - can you explain please?
Thanks! That means that in the 20th century, technological progress outpaced population growth. Now, population growth is slowing, so even if technological progress also slows, it will not throw us back into the premodern world of Malthusian scarcity. Does that make sense?
It's definitely clear that wherever women are empowered to control fertility, and child mortality is brought way down to Western standards, you see population roughly stabilize.
I understand Russell's expressed concern about _falling_, or at least graying population, but I think if you look at the stats in the US about how people are having fewer kids than they want specifically for economic reasons, there's solid reason to think we can fix this -- promote housing abundance and other supply-side policies in order to raise real incomes through lowered cost of living, and implement ongoing policies to put a higher floor under standard of living like UBI and a substantial negative income tax for low-end income. (And then fund it with the usual suspects -- Tobin tax and/or wealth tax on the 0.1%, carbon tax, VAT.)
I hope that's the case, though I can't think of a country that has fallen below the replacement fertility rate that has managed to bring fertility up to that level with policy. Am I mistaken?
Offhand, France dipped below, came back up above 2 around 2009-14, but has since dipped again. And while nailing down the causes of that is difficult, there was a shift in the policy regime around then to move benefits away from retirement and towards families with working parents.
But fundamentally I just don’t think any country has been ambitious enough about this yet.
Thanks Noah, makes sense. Although I do think that continuing to have children is the only way to ensure continued creativity and innovation in the future. I work with venture capitalist and author Michael Eisenberg who recently wrote a book called "The Tree of Life and Prosperity." There's a chapter on Noah as the first inventor that touches on this subject. Can I send you a signed copy on us?
How certain can we be that an aging, possibly declining population won’t lead to catastrophe? What major social systems are most negatively effected by this shift, and how likely is it that those effects could lead to a “collapse” of some kind?
Depopulation/graying is a huge concern. Africa will still be growing population throughout the 21st century, but almost nowhere else (besides maybe Pakistan and Afghanistan) will.
This review briefly mentions Robert Gordon's "The Rise and Fall of American Growth." Like Delong, Gordorn also spots 1870 as a key year when progress accelerated. However Gordon argues that progress between 1940 and 2010 has been less than between 1870 and 1940. He makes some good points. And with global warming and a population that will reach 8 billion by year's end, it's quite likey the 20th century will be seen as a by gone golden age by future generations.
1870 to 2010 is near a century and a half. Would his thesis fail if he didn't include an extra 40 years. What is with 1870 as the starting point. Anything significant on ths year?
"But although DeLong is an economic historian, but Slouching Toward Utopia is only partly an economic history book. " (Drop two "but"s.) Noahpinion takes after DeLong's Grasping Reality in one respect -- an apparent urge for quantity over quality. I've already got too much to read (which makes me in no hurry to subscribe to any Substacks). I'm a good proofreader, but I don't think I have time for DeLong or Smith, let alone both. I'd be willing to try, however.
I pre-ordered a copy a while ago and am very much looking forward to reading it, but I do have to confess that I find Noah's summary much more succinct and clear than Brad's recent attempts at his own "elevator pitch" summaries.
Thanks for the review, ill have to add this ti my list. Since my background is more on the history/political side, I couldn't help but notice the "long 1860s" (1858 to 1872) also witnessed a series of social/political upheavals that set the stage Delong's "long 20th":
-Taiping & fatal crippling of Qing.
-"Meiji restoraton"
-US Civil War & emancipation
-formation of the British Raj (more of a capstone than a revolution)
-German & Italian unification, Franco-Prussian war
-Emancipation of Russian serfs
I don't have a strong causal theory or am even sure there is a connection, just interesting to me.
Mark, I think from a historical standpoint and in the centuries to come people will look at the period from 1815 (the fall of Bonaparte) to 2015 as the time of the Anglo-Americans. In the same way that the Mongols dominated Eurasia from Genghis Khan in the 1200s to Timur in the 1400s we see the Anglo-Americans dominating most of the world's institutions, and, to be honest, causing and/or winning most of the major wars of this era.
In fact, I think a lot of non-English speakers find Anglo-American influence around the world to be very pronounced. Britain and America were world leaders in both the First (1770s - 1850s) and Second (1850s-1940s) Industrial Revolutions and since then have had a very inordinate impact on world industry, finance, politics and culture.
Perhaps this is good way to characterize this period from a world-historical standpoint.
I don't think the Anglo-Saxon era ends in 2015. I see China now much like late 19th&early 20th century Germany, challenging the Anglo-Saxon hegemon of the time but ultimately falling short. The next global hegemon will also be an English-speaking country (India) but they will take that spot in the late 21st century.
Richard,
I concur, I think the Anglo-American era is likely to persist for much longer than up to 2015. However, as with all things future, we can only talk in hypotheticals.
I would like to say that the idea of a global hegemon is really a Cold War/Unipolar Moment concept unlikely to be repeated soon--if ever. Even at the high-water point of the British Empire in the 1880s it was much more a regional hegemon in the sense that the other colonial powers had exclusive spheres of influence which the British broadly respected. This included the US with the Monroe Doctrine, other European colonies in Africa and the Middle East as well as South East Asia. Britain had a lot of colonial interests in many regions but they were never THE power in a global sense compared to the USA and USSR in the Cold War or the USA of today.
I think if the American alliance network dissolves the world will become much more like the 19th Century with regional powers. I think India will be the regional hegemon of the Indian Ocean but even so, it is possible that some type of militarized ASEAN could contest this. I concur about China, I think it will be a powerful country in East Asia in a state of rivalry with Japan (as has been the case for the past 100 years).
Nice piece. One problem is that some of the current technology also aims to capture and enlarge our worst animal behaviors, such as tribalism.
And radio amplified totalitarianism in the early 20th century. History rhymes.
“ DeLong has a frankly superhuman ability to remember and regurgitate endless fascinating little anecdotes and facts.” Boy, is that true. I’ve rarely come away even from any tweet of his without marveling at the erudition.
It seems like this somewhat rhymes with Ezra's latest: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/05/opinion/climate-change-should-you-have-kids.html
Did Brad's editor allow him to use þ?
And actual question, is the 20th century over everywhere in the world since the wealthiest nations are in a new era? Still lots of industrialization to do and things to figure out as it happens, though the most powerful nations aren't influencing them in the same way.
It seems likely that the nations yet to develop will need to do so in a different way than America/Europe of the 1800s or East Asia of the 1900s. So I’d say that everyone’s out of the 20th century, just different people are in different places.
That sounds right, but I also do think that lots of political-economic challenges in today's poor countries will mimic the ones that rich countries went through. I think you can already see this with e.g. Hindu nationalism.
Thanks for the review. I'm really looking forward to Brad's book. I have had the privilege of reading bits and pieces on his blog. If I were an early career professional, I think modeling yourself on him professionally would be San excellent strategy. But, hey, you know that already.
But this book, you won’t be disappointed
Looks like it could be an interesting read. I think that if anything, the positive aspects of humanity's condition in 2015 and since have actually been understated. Not only do more people live on more than a $1 a day in 2015 than did in 1800 but also a $1 can buy you more in goods and services than was possible in 1800 (if we use the 2011 dollar as the the benchmark).
Even if you are desperately poor today, you still have the chance to access things like clean water, sewage disposal, public transport, electrified infrastructure, basic medications, etc... which you could never have hoped to have accessed in 1800 (partly because some of these innovations simply did not exist).
Famine is largely an affliction relegated to war zones. Farm work is much more mechanized than in the past as is most forms of manual labor. The global average for years of schooling has risen to approximately 8 years. The amount of information a person can access for free is ridiculous.
All of this converges to the conclusion that if you had to be poor, it is better to be poor today than in 1800.
Indeed. Farmwork was also much more dangerous back then. In general, all of life was. And even people who were alive were afflicted with all sorts of stuff regularly (like worms, lice, random other bacterial/parasitical afflictions).
The folks on this thread who are complaining about life now are almost certainly not one generation removed from a kid who had to clamber up and down a 20 feet moss-covered well (obviously, with no health insurance or even proper modern medical care in case of injury) to get water for his family every day. They have no idea how much worse life could be than now.
"He attributes this acceleration to three key innovations: the industrial research lab, the modern corporation, and steamship-driven globalization."
Not cheap fossil-fuel energy, with an unfortunate greenhouse gas externality?
Fossil fuels existed in equal abundance in 1500. It was innovation that gave us the knowledge of how to exploit them.
Here is something that you don't address, so I am guessing that DeLong may not either: All of this wealth-creating activity begins around 1870 and according to climate science around 1880 is when we begin to see the first episodes of enhanced greenhouse gases that are now threatening everything beneficial from this activity. Our climate destruction may wipeout all of this progress or perhaps really set-off global conflict over diminishing resources. For too long economics just labelled this "negative externalities," without political economy driving us to solve this problem.
So while population growth may not set us back to Malthusian scarcity, making our planet increasingly uninhabitable certainly will. We could conceivably develop technologies to "reset" our greenhouse gas levels by neutralizing the accumulated CO2 and methane we have created but absent that...
And who will do this? Not much profit in it, just survival.
I did mention sustainability at the end!
Began well before 1870. 1870 is when DeLong estimates that potential growth rates exceeded population growth
Survival is rather good for business, so there definitely is profit in that.
Maybe it'll finally be infrastructure week?
"humans are still deeply unsatisfied with their society, and will doubtless try to create new big political-economic ideas as a result. If history is any guide, this path will be fraught with danger."
Half the population living paycheck to paycheck in the US, the very definition of chronic financial distress , with falling average life expectancy. Comfortable conservatives don';t want to rock the boat, of course... a pity AGW climate change might not be real ; if it is, your market neoliberalism will be dead in the water, in favor of a mostly planned economy. .
"Half the population living paycheck to paycheck in the US, the very definition of chronic financial distress . . ."
I think the definition may be different, given the scope this book apparently addresses. In pre-industrial economies around 1900, well over half the people--sometimes in some regions up to perhaps 90%--lived "paycheck to paycheck," and that "paycheck" was in terms of consumed and marketed small-scale crops that provided enough for them to live in small dwellings without amenities, watching up to a quarter of children die in infancy with adults living generally to ages not exceeding about 50, all punctuated by wars, famines, and plagues that could result in mass deaths.
On the other hand, satisfaction and suffering are experienced relative to the social world as we experience it. Living without savings in, say, a small city apartment with running water, sewer service, and motorized transportation to jobs that guarantee some income may seem a lot better than what billions of peasants lived with until recently, but the psychology may not be.
"satisfaction and suffering are experienced relative to the social world as we experience it."
Exactly. and neoliberal orthodoxy is obviously failing the whole world now. even if comfortable conservatives would rather not face the fact. It's time for the public sector to be authorized to create and spend money on behalf of *collective well-being*, without being forced to tax or borrow from self-interested private sector players.
That might be clearer to me if I knew what "neoliberal orthodoxy" meant. Sometimes it seems to mean "conservative," sometimes "liberal," sometimes "capitalist," sometimes "late capitalist." It seems to me there are different "orthodoxies" for some, and no orthodoxy for others.
The neoliberal NAIRU market orthodoxy, which implies an inverse relationship between unemployment and inflation. Real full employment should be maintained at all times ; see the Job Guarantee of MMT.
Neil, I find MMT very interesting, but I'm not an economist and can't assess it's promise. If MMT is right, then current concerns about the impact of public spending on inflation are unwarranted. However, if MMT is wrong, then models such as the NAIRU are simply valid descriptions of how economic systems work. It seems to me that the public spending of the Covid and infrastructure bills has not helped validate MMT, but that the context is so atypical and poorly understood that it would be wrong to consider that an empirical test.
My understanding of the NAIRU is that the base of the theory is simply that there *is* an inverse relationship, and that different national monetary policies may accept that premise but differ on where the pivot of the relationship is. Since my interest in MMT doesn't extend to accepting it as valid, I can't assume that the causative relationship expressed in the NAIRU isn't valid (I think the correlation is strong). I also regard the rise of unemployment in an inflation-suppression regime as a secondary outcome, rather than as a policy target. In other words, it seems to me that the theory of the NAIRU is not generally taken as a basis to restrain employment by policy, but that restraint is a downstream outcome of inflation-suppression policies.
"Neoliberalism" is often described by other policy characteristics. But I do now understand why you wrote, "It's time for the public sector to be authorized to create and spend money on behalf of *collective well-being*, without being forced to tax or borrow from self-interested private sector players."
I don’t think people are “deeply dissatisfied”. Every human wants stability and a safe margin of error, and it is stressful to lack these (as most humans have since the dawn of time, when famine, disease and violence were more common). People are easily agitated/divided and are naturally envious. Outside actors can make them feel more dissatisfied and hopeless than they would on their own, and seek to blame others and/or claim their good fortune.
"It's the economy, stupid". Quite apart from high unemployment and food insecurity in many nations, what do you think caused the hyperpartisan Capitol riots in the US? Repubs accusing Dems of wanting "free stuff'?
Great piece Noah. Didn't get this point: "final because lower fertility rates will make the human race sustainable even if technological progress peters out)" - can you explain please?
Thanks! That means that in the 20th century, technological progress outpaced population growth. Now, population growth is slowing, so even if technological progress also slows, it will not throw us back into the premodern world of Malthusian scarcity. Does that make sense?
It's definitely clear that wherever women are empowered to control fertility, and child mortality is brought way down to Western standards, you see population roughly stabilize.
I understand Russell's expressed concern about _falling_, or at least graying population, but I think if you look at the stats in the US about how people are having fewer kids than they want specifically for economic reasons, there's solid reason to think we can fix this -- promote housing abundance and other supply-side policies in order to raise real incomes through lowered cost of living, and implement ongoing policies to put a higher floor under standard of living like UBI and a substantial negative income tax for low-end income. (And then fund it with the usual suspects -- Tobin tax and/or wealth tax on the 0.1%, carbon tax, VAT.)
I hope that's the case, though I can't think of a country that has fallen below the replacement fertility rate that has managed to bring fertility up to that level with policy. Am I mistaken?
Offhand, France dipped below, came back up above 2 around 2009-14, but has since dipped again. And while nailing down the causes of that is difficult, there was a shift in the policy regime around then to move benefits away from retirement and towards families with working parents.
But fundamentally I just don’t think any country has been ambitious enough about this yet.
Also there are a bunch of cofounders with immigration that muddy the waters further.
Yes, we'll need to attend to falling population eventually if the pattern holds, but barring extreme catastrophe that won't be for a very long time.
Thanks Noah, makes sense. Although I do think that continuing to have children is the only way to ensure continued creativity and innovation in the future. I work with venture capitalist and author Michael Eisenberg who recently wrote a book called "The Tree of Life and Prosperity." There's a chapter on Noah as the first inventor that touches on this subject. Can I send you a signed copy on us?
I certainly hope this is true!
How certain can we be that an aging, possibly declining population won’t lead to catastrophe? What major social systems are most negatively effected by this shift, and how likely is it that those effects could lead to a “collapse” of some kind?
Depopulation/graying is a huge concern. Africa will still be growing population throughout the 21st century, but almost nowhere else (besides maybe Pakistan and Afghanistan) will.
This review briefly mentions Robert Gordon's "The Rise and Fall of American Growth." Like Delong, Gordorn also spots 1870 as a key year when progress accelerated. However Gordon argues that progress between 1940 and 2010 has been less than between 1870 and 1940. He makes some good points. And with global warming and a population that will reach 8 billion by year's end, it's quite likey the 20th century will be seen as a by gone golden age by future generations.
1870 to 2010 is near a century and a half. Would his thesis fail if he didn't include an extra 40 years. What is with 1870 as the starting point. Anything significant on ths year?
Stop that sentence!
"But although DeLong is an economic historian, but Slouching Toward Utopia is only partly an economic history book. " (Drop two "but"s.) Noahpinion takes after DeLong's Grasping Reality in one respect -- an apparent urge for quantity over quality. I've already got too much to read (which makes me in no hurry to subscribe to any Substacks). I'm a good proofreader, but I don't think I have time for DeLong or Smith, let alone both. I'd be willing to try, however.
I pre-ordered a copy a while ago and am very much looking forward to reading it, but I do have to confess that I find Noah's summary much more succinct and clear than Brad's recent attempts at his own "elevator pitch" summaries.