From Brad DeLong:
the twentieth century is unique in that its wars, purges, massacres, and executions have been largely the result of economic ideologies. Before the twentieth century people slaughtered each other for the other reasons. People slaughtered each other over theology: eternal paradise or damnation. People slaughtered each other over power: who gets to be top dog, and to command the material resources of society. But only in the twentieth century have people killed each other on a large scale in disputes over the economic organization of society.
Pointer from Mark Thoma.
I will be seeing Brad and Mark on April 11-12 at this event. It is not a public event, but I will have a bit of time off from the conference. If you are in the Kansas City area and want to try to arrange to meet at some point, leave a comment.
“People slaughtered each other over power: who gets to be top dog, and to command the material resources of society. But only in the twentieth century have people killed each other on a large scale in disputes over the economic organization of society.”
IMHO DeLong self-contradicts. Fights over ‘who gets to be top dog and command the material resources of society’, and fights over the ‘economic organization of society’ are in effect fights over the same exact thing.
Well, to some degree, I think that’s true, but no entirely. In the past, there was little question about how society would be organized: there’d be a monarch of some sort, and he’d have a small group of allies (ie, nobles or aristocrats or whatever you want to call them) who competed with each other for status and for a bigger share of economic resources (ie, greater control of Acemoglu’s extractive institutions).
In the 20th Century, that was not true. Democracy made possible a wider array of political organizations and permutations thereof, as well as giving everyone in society a stake in what model was actually chosen. IE, if you’re a serf, you don’t care if England is run by King Charles or Oliver Cromwell; your lot in life is the same, either way. If you’re a factory worker, it matters a great deal to you whether England is run by the Labour Party or the Tories. The result was some pretty ferocious battles.
Interestingly, though, WWI, one of the bloodiest looks like an old timey 17th century elite vs. elite. What did any middle class British, French or German citizen care what was going on in Belgrade or whatever? What’s one Archduke, or more or less?
Tomato tomahto. I still say this is describing two instances of the same underlying fight, just in different contexts. Difference of degree not kind, that sort of thing.
A dissenter? It’s off to the gulag with you, pal!
DeLong’s passage comes across to me as disingenuous, dumb, or both. Certainly it appears to come from someone who ignores, or is incapable of seeing anything on the freedom-coercion axis. Viewed on that axis, the 20th century bloodbath could as well be explained as a struggle over freedom vs. statism(though, to the point of another commenter, much of it could be viewed as ‘tyrant vs. tyrant)’. A significant sphere of human actions within any society will obviously be characterized as ‘economic’. The model of ‘economic organization’ one gets will largely be determined by how ‘free’ the society is – it is not an ‘independent variable’, so to speak. How convenient for a statist like DeLong to take the view(as I infer is implied from his passage) that it is.
The stated reasons for going to war and slaughtering others isn’t always the reason for why wars are fought.
In the Ascent of Money an argument is put forth that the Crusades were pursued because the Middle East had all of the silver. Religion was just an excuse.
Some other counter arguments – isn’t capitalism/communism just another religious battle? Aren’t the proxy wars (Korea, Vietnam) really about power? We justify conflict around those things that make us different, but the battles are still against others with power.
Have we reversed course by fighting wars over religion in Iraq and Afghanistan? Or the power battle has shifted so we needed a new excuse?
Wars are fought over ideology/worldviews. Is there really any difference between a nanny state progressive and a blood thirsty 17th century Calvinist.
Religious movements have just morphed/evolved into political movements.
I don’t think the premise of DeLong’s comment is true. It seems to me that the U.S. Civil war was a fight over an economic system (slavery), even though much of the opposition to slavery was pitched in religious terms. The Pellopenesian War was about who would be top dog (Sparta or Athens), but the conflict was rooted in the Spartans’ fear of Athenian economic prosperity leading to their dominance. Wasn’t the Boxer Rebellion fought over the opium trade? I’m sure someone with more knowledge of past wars and their causes than I could rattle off a string of pre-20th century wars with an economic basis. Also, plenty of 20th century wars were about things other than economic ideologies. WWI and II were both power and land grabs by Germany, pure and simple. Even some of the wars supposedly about economic ideology were really just land/power grabs, such as the Korean war.