All articles from Brad DeLong
MIKE BEGGS: Zombie Marx: (PARTIAL) READING
Ah. Now I remember this! Mike Beggs rejecting the arguments of those jeering leftist morons who claimed Keynesian policies would not work in 2008-2010 but keeping the jeer. Still, I do want to have...
Re: The Truly Abominable Kevin Hassett: Steve Durlauf Does the Work of the LORD: LIFE IN THE 2000s
How a bad book, a bogus formula, and a hunger for favor led Kevin Hassett to discover that he could lie his way up the ladder as a career, and it would pay. Republican politicians and journalists...
When Median Take-Home Pay Packets Only Rise Once a Generation for a Half-Decade Span: CHART OF THE DAY
We have built an economic régime where GDP climbs, markets soar, and the typical worker stands still unless the labor market is white‑hot. And if inflation fears keep us from ever running the...
The Transformation Problem Was Not Something Karl Marx Overlooked! & Other Topics: HISTORY OF ECONOMIC THOUGHT (& Metholodology, & Philosophy
Marx stuck to his guns on the theoretical adequacy of the labor theory of value. Plus he recognized the role of competition in equalizing profit rates. This contradiction was not because he was...
The Viking Ráðagerð Further Gels: IMAGE OF THE DAY
This picture of a Ukrainian president in front of a Swedish fighter jet may be a sign of a significant change in the wind: if opinion, industry, and force structure align, a northern VIking...
Paul Krugman, Cui Bono from the Coming of the Bio-Info Tech-Attention Economy, & Embarrassing Conceptual Errors by Economists Who Really Should Know Better: CHART OF THE DAY
Aghion, Bergeaud, & Garicano claim America’s tech productivity-growth lead is materially widening a US vs. EU real wage and standard-of-living gap. Product wage yes. User wage no. This is—or ought...
The Current Balance in This Pause—Not End, But Pause, Perhaps Perpetual Pause—in the War in the Persian Gulf: MOST IMPORTANT THING
The Trumpists say “victory”; Tehran calls it “reconstruction payments”; the meter on the Strait of Hormuz is running either way; from “maximum pressure” to war indemnities and investment funds...
"Agentic AI" Is a Bonfire of the Tokens While Fab Capacity, Power Grids, and P&Ls Are the brakes: (NOT THE) READ OF THE DAY
CROSSPOST: DAN DREZNER: The Trump Administration's Incredibly Slow Learning Curve
Dan’s subhead: These are not very bright people and things got out of hand. My take: when your grand strategy is based on hoping the other side lets you pretend you’ve won, things do indeed easily...
Vibe-SysAdmining: LAUGH OF THE DAY
In which a frontier LLM model tells me to configure a new chatbot to use model “/anthropic/claude-sonint-4-6”; yes, this only means that somewhere in the training data some poor SOB mistyped...
I Think AI-Forward Car Companies Like Rivian Are Going to Get Their Clocks Cleaned: <strike>READ</strike> LISTEN OF THE DAY
I cannot see the case as realistic. I cannot help but see Rivian/VW’s anti-android auto anti-apple carplay software walled-garden dreams as likely hallucinations. The absence of buttons, trying ...
From Waterholes to Weber: Why Human Coordination Breeds Charisma & Crap
Language evolved to get us.collectively, to the waterhole alive, more than to make each of us a little scientist. Our minds are bad Bayesians on purpose: herding, bullshit, and charismatic...
READING: JOAN ROBINSON: An Open Letter from a Keynesian to a Marxist
Marx in our bones, not in our mouths; or, Joan Robinson’s bicycle: how to really read Marx (and Keynes) so that they provide you with useful tools you can use rather than eat your brain…
Big Trouble in Little Human Genetic Diffence-Worshipper Land
The Robot Uprising Continues!: LAUGH OF THE DAY
Fortunately for us, the ‘bots do not have any form of class consciousness: They are considerably antagonistic towards one another. They may not be “aligned” with our long-run goals, if I may over...
CROSSPOST: Dan Davies: Meet the New Economy, Same as the Old Economy
Dan’s subhead: “moats and their discontents”. A drum I have been beating for a while: the AI arms race is likely to fatten consumer surplus, not boost national-accounts measurements given the roles...
This Is Far, Far too Long & Digressive to Be a Footnote in My Manuscript of "Enlarging the Bounds of Human Empire"
The story of the friar, the Inquisition, peering at utopia from inside the dungeon, and the idea of progress: reading Tommaso Campanella’s "City of the Sun"…
CROSSPOST: MARK KOYAMA: Nick Crafts's "Forging Ahead, Falling Behind & Fighting Back"
British Economic Growth from the Industrial Revolution to the Financial Crisis: British economic history’s long twentieth century: The late Nick Crafts rebuilt our story of British growth from...
CROSSPOST: NATE SILVER: Disney Erased FiveThirtyEight
Nate Silver’s subhead: '“Nothing on the internet lasts forever. But Disney’s 10-year mismanagement of FiveThirtyEight is its own story”. A Big Media cautionary tale: a decade of corporate drift...
VibeCoding LLMs Lying About Hardware & Their Own Processes: Laugh of the Day
Vibecoding hallucinations with a very confused anthropic/claude/opus trying to describe what is going on on my MacStudio. Inside an AI that can write code, misread top, and hallucinate about...
Bloomberg Reporters & Editors Have Some Wry Fun with Their SpaceX IPO Story: LAUGH OF THE HOUR
The $2 Trillion Greater-Fool bet as people try to read SpaceX’s S‑1 with a straight face: illiquidity, unlimited disclosures, & other jokes in the SpaceX IPO story…
Alamedia of "Unfogged" Is Puzzled by Investment Banker Compensation Levels: HOISTED FROM THE ARCHIVES
“Chethood” and the price of nerve: investment banker pay at the business end of the money hose. Joe Weisenthal calls for aid! And...
The Public-Reason Sphere in Mid-2026: Fighting LinkRot Edition
A linkrotted weblog post from 21 years ago: “Alamedia of ‘Unfogged’ Is Puzzled by Investment Banker Compensation Levels”, and even though #typepad-resurrection is one of my to-do #project #hashtags...
Digital Gods, Cardboard Brains, & the Coming AI Bust: Going Around Robin Hood's Barn to Get to the Macro Outlook
Why today’s “conscious” chatbots are cardboard cutouts—and why that matters for the likely end of our multi-trillion‑dollar bubble. Tech leaders are talking about large language models as if they...
Back to the Days of the Global Savings Glut: Chart of the Day
Incoming Fed Chair Kevin Warsh has been lying to someone BIgTime, Trump avidly desires a Trumpy Fed, yet the bond market is still remarkably calm: there were bigger breakouts above the 4.5% 10-Yr...
CROSSPOST: NOAH SMITH: All Non-Drone Militaries Are Obsolete
From Bussaco in 1810 to Prince Sultan Air Base in 2026: cheap, easily hidden firepower's rise from Arthur Wellesley's British rifleman to Brovdi's drones.