The End of the Road to Serfdom

Doctorow argues that the postwar “thirty glorious years” were an abnormal break from the long-run stability of class hierarchy in rich countries. Wars weakened elite power, welfare states expanded mobility, unions strengthened, and many people in rich countries briefly gained access to education, housing, healthcare, and pensions.

He says that neoliberal politics reversed those gains by blaming inflation on social progress, attacking labor rights, opening trade, and loosening credit. Cheap offshore manufacturing and financial deregulation let elites preserve profits while workers lost wages, jobs, housing, and public protections. He also argues that China’s rise exposed the limits of the WTO and TRIPS system, because rich countries could no longer enforce rent extraction once they had dismantled their own manufacturing base.

Reading notes

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• The modern rich world is described as historically structured by hereditary service and very limited mobility.
• The two World Wars weakened the ruling class enough to make wider mobility and egalitarian claims possible.
• Rich countries then built welfare systems, expanded education, and strengthened unions.
• Doctorow treats the postwar period as exceptional, not normal.
• He says the old class order depended on keeping wealth and inheritance concentrated.
• The “cozy catastrophe” imagination reflects elite resentment at losing servants and exclusive spaces.
• Piketty is used to support the claim that large concentrations of wealth turn into political power.
• Once inequality crosses a threshold, policy starts to favor the rich and harm the poor.
• The oil shock is presented as the pretext used to attack unions and the left.
• Thatcher, Reagan, and similar politicians are said to have used that blame to push neoliberal policy.
• Trade deals shifted manufacturing to low-wage places with weak labor protections.
• Financial deregulation made it easier for workers to borrow as wages and jobs weakened.
• Bailouts after repeated financial crises moved more wealth upward.
• China’s entry into the WTO made it central to rich-country supply chains.
• TRIPS is described as a system that turns ideas and inventions into rent-extracting property.
• Doctorow says China was always unlikely to respect that rent-based arrangement.
• He argues that rich countries made themselves dependent on Chinese production and therefore lost leverage.
• The text ends by saying debts and cheap imports cannot replace wages and domestic capacity.
• Rich people are portrayed as blind to the fact that servants do not accept the status quo forever.