DeLong
had begun working on this story in 1994. He had produced hundreds of
thousands of words, then hundreds of thousands more, updating the text
as academic economics and the world itself changed. He kept writing, for
years, for decades, for so long that he ended up writing for roughly 5
percent of the time capitalism itself has existed. The problem wasn’t
figuring out how the story started. The problem was knowing when it
ended. ...
His friends inquired about the drafts they had read years before. The
project ballooned in its complexity. “I have had editors who were saying
[they were] going to drop me if I couldn’t get it down to 150,000
words,” DeLong told me. (The book ended up at 180,000, plus online notes
and appendices.) ...
As for DeLong, he has a more immediate challenge: figuring out what to do with the hundreds of thousands of words he trimmed out of Slouching Towards Utopia. He thinks he might write a history of the economy, full stop. That story might start in 6,000 B.C.
More.
