All articles from Brad DeLong
Veering Outside My Lane to Give Political Advice
No, I have no qualifications for doing this. & there is little reason to take me seriously here. Nevertheless…
SubStack's Three-Body Problem: Teaserage, Patronage, & Premiumage Orbiting...
…about & very much hoping not to get sucked into the black hole that is ad-supported ens***ified clickbait eyeball-glueing ad-supported media. What are its prospects?….
Kyiv & Muscovy 'Rus Today
Putin’s theory of victory must be a bet on attrition, not maneuver. IMHO, the right strategy to go for is appeasement with teeth: Appeasement with teeth: acceptance of Russian conquests, EU for...
"All That Is Solid Melts into Air": Since 1870, Roughly One-Fifth of the Economy Is Transformed Every Thirty Years
This time, we experts in the liberal arts—the artes liberales, the skills appropriate to enrich the lives and make productive those of us who are free and must find a way to live by our wits, as we...
Beyond the SmartPhone? Or an Actually Functional Siri without a Screen?: The Altman–Ive Ambition Is Going to Meet Physics, Compute, & Etiquette.
I smell a “welcome to the NFL” moment coming for this piece of OpenAI’s ambitions. But I also know that it is much too early and information is still much too thin for speculation to be worthwhile...
Steady Data, Shaky Narratives: Why Poll Hype Misleads & Slow Drift Rules in Understanding "Public Opinion"
G. Elliott Morris deservedly trashes the once-reliable Harry Enten for feeding the ad-supported eyeball-gluing misinformation beast. & it leads me to harken back to the true Glory Days of Nate Silver…
Might We Replace Our Ten Year-Old Prius with a Chevy Bolt Next Year?
If continued battery-cost savings are passed on to purchasers, fast charging blooms, rules tighten, and EV tax credits emerge that provide preference for EVs over PHEVs, then the Bolt wins; if not...
The Chaos Monkeys: Flying Down to Buenos Aires
Yes. They are going ahead with draining the Exchange Stabilization Fund of its dollar liquidity for purposes that seem to make more sense. &, since this is TrumpWorld, the odds are heavily in favor...
Am I Biting Off More than I Can Chew Here?
À propos of figuring out how to enable students to enrich their lives and provide value to their employers, as they live as free people do, by their wits, in having lives and careers as good front-...
For a Normal U.S. Government to Shoulder "Credit Risk" Can Be Fine. But This Is Not a Normal U.S. Government, Is It?
Chaos monkeys promising unconditional U.S. financial support for unsustainable Argentinian economic policies is a royal road to disaster. Failing to make that transparently clear at the start of...
On Peter Thiel's AntiChrist
“Restrainer” Politics: Billionaire TechBro Peter Thiel, Nazi Political Philosopher-Theologian Carl Schmitt, Pacifist Christians René Girard & Wolfgang Palaver, the AntiChrist & his enemies, & J.D...
What Happened with Elon Musk & the "CyberTruck", Anyway?
EV freedom vs. bunker aesthetics: how the Cybertruck squandered the skateboard, and misfired as its stainless shell met actual materials-science physics. A bold silhouette, a brittle reality: the...
How Many Magics to Human Prosperity & Progress?
Call off the cults and the funerals. “AI”’s real advance is high‑dimensional prediction that generalizes without interpretable laws. That’s operational power, not Turing-Class cognition. Noah Smith...
READING: Henry Luce (1941): The American Century
Luce’s manifesto and the world order that it… signposted...
The Ongoing Trumpist Unmaking of U.S. Network Power: Tariffs, Ambivalence, & the Slow Isolation & Hence Decline
Yes, Henry Luce’s “American Century” is now over. Any further questions? Tariffs tax deterrence; & policy volatility prices U.S. reliability out of potential allies’ long-run planning along both...
Abstraction Layers: In Arithmetic & Elsewhere
Counting to 84 by offshoring much of the real work to your information-technology ASI arabic-numeral symbolic copilot, and other topics about variation in proper education for the kind of...
HOISTED FROM THE ARCHIVES: Why Gillian Tett's Anthropological Take on the World Is Very Useful
Why you should listen to her; a N2PE event from 2021-11-18 Th...
Notes on the Berkeley "The AI Con" Book Launch Event
2025-10-02 16:00 PDT (Th): 470 Stephens Hall: Alex Hanna, Timnit Gebru, Khari Johnson, & Tamara Kneese. 2025. “The AI Con Book Roundtable”...
HOISTED FROM THE ARCHIVES: The Music to the Zombie Dance of Human Society Changes Its Key...
From 2.5 years ago. Time to start thinking about this, again, and about what I would change, and will change as versions of this go into both What Rough Beast & Enlarging the Scope of Human Empire. Al
No. There Are No Even Half-Competent Chaos Monkeys in the Trump Administration. Any Questions?
Bessent needs to go. And quickly. Dan Drezner said last week that one good thing that could be said about Scott Bessent was that he was 10% less crazy than the other Trumpist chaos monkeys...
Lisa Cook Is Not Yet Evicted from the Federal Reserve Board
It was such a huge mistake in 2021 not to expand the Supreme Court. The lawless Republican justices had already said who they were: lawless partisan hypocrites. And yet Manchin and company would...