Brad DeLong
@braddelong.bsky.social
Author of "Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the 20th Century". Too online since 1995. Sometime Deputy Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. UC Berkeley Professor.
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Brad DeLong
@braddelong.bsky.social
· Dec 2
Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality | Substack
Economic history, economics, political economy, finance, & forecasting. Here to try to make you (and me) smarter in a world with many increasingly deep & complicated troubles... Click to read Brad DeL...
braddelong.substack.com
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[email protected] :: +1-925-708-0467
J. Bradford DeLong
Holgate House
2828 Webster St.
Berkeley, CA 94705
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[email protected] :: +1-925-708-0467
J. Bradford DeLong
Holgate House
2828 Webster St.
Berkeley, CA 94705
Thinking of a very loose coalition as an organism with a single heart, mind, & will makes you stupid. Or, at least, it makes your audience stupid to the extent that they believe you—& for some malevolent actors, that is what they want. If you think “Congress doesn’t care” about ICE murderings... 1/
January 14, 2026 at 2:54 PM
Thinking of a very loose coalition as an organism with a single heart, mind, & will makes you stupid. Or, at least, it makes your audience stupid to the extent that they believe you—& for some malevolent actors, that is what they want. If you think “Congress doesn’t care” about ICE murderings... 1/
Josef Schumpeterian sectoral creative-destruction vs. Karl Marxian economy-wide transformation of base with impacts on superstructure: Marx promised rupture once technology fettered property relations; history delivered sectoral churn and chronic institutional lag; let us try to keep the soft... 1/
January 14, 2026 at 2:47 PM
Josef Schumpeterian sectoral creative-destruction vs. Karl Marxian economy-wide transformation of base with impacts on superstructure: Marx promised rupture once technology fettered property relations; history delivered sectoral churn and chronic institutional lag; let us try to keep the soft... 1/
ORANGE MAN CLINICALLY INSANE. AND VERY BAD. Plus “The New York Times” a mendacious lying enemy of truth and freedom yet again through a to-the-max parody of sanewashing: the “Times” calls “madness” “leadership”, turns a Greenland tantrum into “statesmanship”, and dares not say Trump is... 1/
January 13, 2026 at 7:01 PM
ORANGE MAN CLINICALLY INSANE. AND VERY BAD. Plus “The New York Times” a mendacious lying enemy of truth and freedom yet again through a to-the-max parody of sanewashing: the “Times” calls “madness” “leadership”, turns a Greenland tantrum into “statesmanship”, and dares not say Trump is... 1/
And we are now launched, with a new preparation for a new course: a Royal Road into the millennia of global economic history, hopefully designed for both humanists and quants who want an introduction to learning to model pieces of the world economy throughout its history—from agriculture to... 1/
January 12, 2026 at 9:28 PM
And we are now launched, with a new preparation for a new course: a Royal Road into the millennia of global economic history, hopefully designed for both humanists and quants who want an introduction to learning to model pieces of the world economy throughout its history—from agriculture to... 1/
Bessent, Lutnick, Hassett, Yared, & company should all have resigned last night. Just saying:
**ORANGE MAN, BAD MACRO: Trump’s War on Powell & Economic-Policy Reality**
<https://braddelong.substack.com/p/orange-man-bad-macro-trumps-war-on>
**ORANGE MAN, BAD MACRO: Trump’s War on Powell & Economic-Policy Reality**
<https://braddelong.substack.com/p/orange-man-bad-macro-trumps-war-on>
January 12, 2026 at 3:14 PM
Bessent, Lutnick, Hassett, Yared, & company should all have resigned last night. Just saying:
**ORANGE MAN, BAD MACRO: Trump’s War on Powell & Economic-Policy Reality**
<https://braddelong.substack.com/p/orange-man-bad-macro-trumps-war-on>
**ORANGE MAN, BAD MACRO: Trump’s War on Powell & Economic-Policy Reality**
<https://braddelong.substack.com/p/orange-man-bad-macro-trumps-war-on>
As Noah Smith correctly writes: "ICE's brutality stems partly from unprofessionalism and low recruitment standards. But a lot of it is simply that ICE agents are being recruited from people who sincerely believe that they're engaged in an existential race war". And JD Vance lies outright... 1/
January 11, 2026 at 4:26 PM
As Noah Smith correctly writes: "ICE's brutality stems partly from unprofessionalism and low recruitment standards. But a lot of it is simply that ICE agents are being recruited from people who sincerely believe that they're engaged in an existential race war". And JD Vance lies outright... 1/
From Veldhoven, in the Brainport Eindhoven region of the Netherlands, comes the bleeding-edge point of the spear of human technological capabilities: the manipulation of nature and the organization of the human economic division of labor at a truly insane and unbelievable—and that is not... 1/
January 10, 2026 at 2:57 PM
From Veldhoven, in the Brainport Eindhoven region of the Netherlands, comes the bleeding-edge point of the spear of human technological capabilities: the manipulation of nature and the organization of the human economic division of labor at a truly insane and unbelievable—and that is not... 1/
At the moment, COVID-19 is recorded as the cause of death for about 1/100 of the 0.4% of 19-64 year-olds who die each year—and failing to get your mRNA vaccine quadruples that. But it really looks like unvaccinated 19-64 year-olds have a greater risk of death not 0.016%/year higher than the... 1/
January 10, 2026 at 3:11 AM
At the moment, COVID-19 is recorded as the cause of death for about 1/100 of the 0.4% of 19-64 year-olds who die each year—and failing to get your mRNA vaccine quadruples that. But it really looks like unvaccinated 19-64 year-olds have a greater risk of death not 0.016%/year higher than the... 1/
This made me say: “Huh!?” The Ghent Zeppelin considers Adam Smith’s condemnation of “the man of system” who “imagine[s]… he can arrange… society… as the hand arranges… pieces upon a chess-board… [without] consider[ing] that… every single piece has a principle of motion of its own…”, as aimed... 1/
January 9, 2026 at 2:57 PM
This made me say: “Huh!?” The Ghent Zeppelin considers Adam Smith’s condemnation of “the man of system” who “imagine[s]… he can arrange… society… as the hand arranges… pieces upon a chess-board… [without] consider[ing] that… every single piece has a principle of motion of its own…”, as aimed... 1/
I was going to write this post. But Joseph Heath did it first. As he says: "The purpose... is to explain why there are not many Marxists... in universities, despite... plenty of left-wing academics..." Briefly, as I see it, Marxism had five catastrophic immense intellectual failures: labor... 1/
January 9, 2026 at 12:19 AM
I was going to write this post. But Joseph Heath did it first. As he says: "The purpose... is to explain why there are not many Marxists... in universities, despite... plenty of left-wing academics..." Briefly, as I see it, Marxism had five catastrophic immense intellectual failures: labor... 1/
Why did science emerge—& persist—in early modern Europe? Instruments, math, & print: the bundle that built nullius in verba, the Republic of Science, and then modern science as we know it— why & how Europe’s geographic & élite fractures forged a method that made empirical curiosity about... 1/
January 8, 2026 at 11:46 PM
Why did science emerge—& persist—in early modern Europe? Instruments, math, & print: the bundle that built nullius in verba, the Republic of Science, and then modern science as we know it— why & how Europe’s geographic & élite fractures forged a method that made empirical curiosity about... 1/
Josef Schumpeterian creative-destruction vs. Karl Marxian base-superstructure: What history actually looks like as Marx’s 1859 vision promised imminent revolution followed by utopia, sketching six bold claims about how technologies drive economies drive societies. The evidence since 1870... 1/
January 8, 2026 at 11:39 PM
Josef Schumpeterian creative-destruction vs. Karl Marxian base-superstructure: What history actually looks like as Marx’s 1859 vision promised imminent revolution followed by utopia, sketching six bold claims about how technologies drive economies drive societies. The evidence since 1870... 1/
From 2022-05-06. Hoisted so I can find it easily in the future:
**HOISTED FROM THE ARCHIVES: International Relations Has a "Mearsheimer" Problem**
<https://braddelong.substack.com/p/hoisted-from-the-archives-international>
2025-01-06 Tu
**HOISTED FROM THE ARCHIVES: International Relations Has a "Mearsheimer" Problem**
<https://braddelong.substack.com/p/hoisted-from-the-archives-international>
2025-01-06 Tu
January 7, 2026 at 12:01 AM
From 2022-05-06. Hoisted so I can find it easily in the future:
**HOISTED FROM THE ARCHIVES: International Relations Has a "Mearsheimer" Problem**
<https://braddelong.substack.com/p/hoisted-from-the-archives-international>
2025-01-06 Tu
**HOISTED FROM THE ARCHIVES: International Relations Has a "Mearsheimer" Problem**
<https://braddelong.substack.com/p/hoisted-from-the-archives-international>
2025-01-06 Tu
They found what they had sought above all things, and yet find that it slipped away and left them permanently unsatisfied. & now there they are & we are they. Or so I read it today:
**William Butler Yeats (1914): The Magi**
< braddelong.substack.com/p/william-bu... >
**William Butler Yeats (1914): The Magi**
< braddelong.substack.com/p/william-bu... >
William Butler Yeats (1914): The Magi
They found what they had sought above all things, and yet find that it slipped away and left them permanently unsatisfied. & now there they are & we are they…
braddelong.substack.com
January 6, 2026 at 3:05 PM
They found what they had sought above all things, and yet find that it slipped away and left them permanently unsatisfied. & now there they are & we are they. Or so I read it today:
**William Butler Yeats (1914): The Magi**
< braddelong.substack.com/p/william-bu... >
**William Butler Yeats (1914): The Magi**
< braddelong.substack.com/p/william-bu... >
Trump claimed: “They were waiting.... They knew we were coming.... But they were completely overwhelmed and very quickly incapacitated.... Not a single American service member was killed, and not a single piece of American equipment was lost.... You know, we’ve knocked out 97% of the drugs... 1/
January 4, 2026 at 2:42 PM
Trump claimed: “They were waiting.... They knew we were coming.... But they were completely overwhelmed and very quickly incapacitated.... Not a single American service member was killed, and not a single piece of American equipment was lost.... You know, we’ve knocked out 97% of the drugs... 1/
Hoisted so I can find this easily in the future: From January 2023. With a little bit of reëditing: “West” or “Dover Circle”? A student asked me why, in my lectures earlier this week, I kept on referring to the “North Atlantic” rather than the “Western” economies. Why did I use the first to... 1/
January 3, 2026 at 12:39 PM
Hoisted so I can find this easily in the future: From January 2023. With a little bit of reëditing: “West” or “Dover Circle”? A student asked me why, in my lectures earlier this week, I kept on referring to the “North Atlantic” rather than the “Western” economies. Why did I use the first to... 1/
Newton wasn’t just the architect of modern physics and celestial mechanics; he was also theologian and alchemist. “Voyaging through strange seas of thought” indeed. Even the “Principia” was intuition dressed-up as geometry:
**READING: John Maynard Keynes on Isaac Newton**... 1/
**READING: John Maynard Keynes on Isaac Newton**... 1/
January 3, 2026 at 12:33 PM
Newton wasn’t just the architect of modern physics and celestial mechanics; he was also theologian and alchemist. “Voyaging through strange seas of thought” indeed. Even the “Principia” was intuition dressed-up as geometry:
**READING: John Maynard Keynes on Isaac Newton**... 1/
**READING: John Maynard Keynes on Isaac Newton**... 1/
I woke up in a bad mood this morning. Thus I want to circle around again—like a dog to its vomit—and set out the two things that really piss me off about James Hankins’s excerpt from his The Golden Thread that he chose to publish in First Things: one that is full-blown fascist, and the other... 1/
https://braddelong.substack.com/p/against-hankins-you-cant-use-moral>
January 2, 2026 at 8:49 PM
I woke up in a bad mood this morning. Thus I want to circle around again—like a dog to its vomit—and set out the two things that really piss me off about James Hankins’s excerpt from his The Golden Thread that he chose to publish in First Things: one that is full-blown fascist, and the other... 1/
A pushback from two-and-a-half years ago about one of the weirdest emanations of neofascism I have seen in this past truly weird decade..:
**CROSSPOST: BRET DEVEREAUX: Bret vs. the Hax of Sol III—in This Case, James Hankins & Adrian Vermeulle (with an introduction from me)**... 1/
**CROSSPOST: BRET DEVEREAUX: Bret vs. the Hax of Sol III—in This Case, James Hankins & Adrian Vermeulle (with an introduction from me)**... 1/
January 2, 2026 at 5:06 AM
A pushback from two-and-a-half years ago about one of the weirdest emanations of neofascism I have seen in this past truly weird decade..:
**CROSSPOST: BRET DEVEREAUX: Bret vs. the Hax of Sol III—in This Case, James Hankins & Adrian Vermeulle (with an introduction from me)**... 1/
**CROSSPOST: BRET DEVEREAUX: Bret vs. the Hax of Sol III—in This Case, James Hankins & Adrian Vermeulle (with an introduction from me)**... 1/
Time to fly my left-neoliberal freak flag! For a failure to get the history right may well lead us to inaccurate conclusions about what our government-debt outlook really is, & mistake how resulting economic & political-economic problems should be dealt with:
**Lessons for Debt Control from... 1/
**Lessons for Debt Control from... 1/
January 1, 2026 at 7:56 PM
Time to fly my left-neoliberal freak flag! For a failure to get the history right may well lead us to inaccurate conclusions about what our government-debt outlook really is, & mistake how resulting economic & political-economic problems should be dealt with:
**Lessons for Debt Control from... 1/
**Lessons for Debt Control from... 1/
Reposted by Brad DeLong
I’m glad Ohio State has a robust and popular military history program. The courses are quite popular and offer a perspective to history most undergraduates have not encountered. I wish more departments would invest in the field. Lots of overlap with political, social, economic history as well.
December 24, 2025 at 7:42 PM
I’m glad Ohio State has a robust and popular military history program. The courses are quite popular and offer a perspective to history most undergraduates have not encountered. I wish more departments would invest in the field. Lots of overlap with political, social, economic history as well.
It is going how it is going:
**Two & a Half Hours into "Avatar: Fire & Ash"**
< braddelong.substack.com/p/two-and-a-... >
**Two & a Half Hours into "Avatar: Fire & Ash"**
< braddelong.substack.com/p/two-and-a-... >
Two & a Half Hours into "Avatar: Fire & Ash"
It is going how it is going.,..
braddelong.substack.com
December 31, 2025 at 1:09 AM
It is going how it is going:
**Two & a Half Hours into "Avatar: Fire & Ash"**
< braddelong.substack.com/p/two-and-a-... >
**Two & a Half Hours into "Avatar: Fire & Ash"**
< braddelong.substack.com/p/two-and-a-... >
From Imperial Russia & World War I to Lenin, the antinomies of NEP, & collectivization-terror as the only path to True Communism—but, then, incomprhensibly, with the Great Terror Stalin crashed the plane. Why? Plus a few preliminary notes on MAMLM LLM-assisted “deep” active reading:
**Stephen... 1/
**Stephen... 1/
Stephen Kotkin on Stalinism as (Mostly) Politics & (Lessly) Psychopathology
From Imperial Russia & World War I to Lenin, the antinomies of NEP, & collectivization-terror as the only path to True Communism—but, then, incomprhensibly, with the Great Terror Stalin crashed the...
braddelong.substack.com
December 31, 2025 at 1:06 AM
From Imperial Russia & World War I to Lenin, the antinomies of NEP, & collectivization-terror as the only path to True Communism—but, then, incomprhensibly, with the Great Terror Stalin crashed the plane. Why? Plus a few preliminary notes on MAMLM LLM-assisted “deep” active reading:
**Stephen... 1/
**Stephen... 1/
I think Paul Musgrave has it correct here: face-to-face check-ins are the way to turn MAMLMs from a crutch into an intellectual force multiplier.. Then there is the next, harder step: What is the best way to use our new information-age MAMLM to get our students able to enrich their lives and... 1/
December 31, 2025 at 1:02 AM
I think Paul Musgrave has it correct here: face-to-face check-ins are the way to turn MAMLMs from a crutch into an intellectual force multiplier.. Then there is the next, harder step: What is the best way to use our new information-age MAMLM to get our students able to enrich their lives and... 1/
We need a guide to how to deal with the new rounds of escalating weaponized cancel-culture to the max. But only a fool would trust the New York TImes to help think these things through, as here it is once again dealing from the middle of the deck:
From DEI to DSI: Handling the Neofascist... 1/
From DEI to DSI: Handling the Neofascist... 1/
December 31, 2025 at 12:59 AM
We need a guide to how to deal with the new rounds of escalating weaponized cancel-culture to the max. But only a fool would trust the New York TImes to help think these things through, as here it is once again dealing from the middle of the deck:
From DEI to DSI: Handling the Neofascist... 1/
From DEI to DSI: Handling the Neofascist... 1/