Brad DeLong

CROSSPOST: SAM BOWLES: The Origin & Future of Economic Inequality

Enduring inequality didn’t “just happen”—we built our societies-of-domination, quite late in human history, with very specific technological & societal-organization tools. The Neolithic coming of...

Query to Self: Is It, This Semester Worth Incorporating in My Classes My Introductory Digression on: "The Liberal Arts, Education, & 'AI'"?

Masters of the Liberal Arts, or servants of the machine? Education as learning how to jack in to the real ASI—the Anthology Super-Intelligence of the collective human mind. The skills needed by...

CROSSPOST: Alan Wolff: Bamboozled: What made anyone think the Trump tariffs were legal?

Thinking of a Very Loose Coalition as an Organism with a Single Heart, Mind, & Will Makes You Stupid

Or at least 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, you’ve alrea

Contra Marx, the Record Since 1870 Is Rotating Upheavals in Leading Sectors, Not Synchronized Economy-Wide Revolutions

Josef Schumpeterian sectoral creative-destruction vs. Karl Marxian economy-wide transformation of base with impacts on superstructure: Marx promised rupture once technology fettered property...

CROSSPOST: MARCY WHEELER: Annals of Sanewashing: NYT Labels Trump’s Confession of Psychological Unfitness as Leadership

ORANGE MAN CLINICALLY INSANE. AND VERY BAD. Plus “The New York Times” an enemy of truth and freedom yet again"

A Snapshot from the Fall of the Roman Republic: Cicero Wrote as Caesar Crossed the Rubicon

Two Months to the collapse of the anti-Caesarean Republican Pompeius-Senatorial Optimates coalition in Italy…

Quantitative Long-Run Global Economic History: Econ 196: Special Topics in Economics (Spring 2026)

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...

ORANGE MAN, BAD MACRO: Trump’s War on Powell & Economic-Policy Reality

Bessent, Lutnick, Hassett, Yared, & company should all have resigned last night. Just saying…

The Spearpoint Right Now of Human Technological Engineering

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...

The Curious Case of Karl Marx's 1859 "Preface"

Engels pitched methodology; but Marx’s A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy delivered very little in the way of actually, you know, critiqueing political economy let alone using that...

Yes, mRNA Vaccines Work—&, It Appears, Work Much Better than I Thought

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...

On the Birth of Science as We Know It: Thinking Out Loud: Thursday Economic History

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 &...

Six Analytical Threads in Search of Useful Empirical Traction: On Karl Marx's 1859 "Preface"

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...

HOISTED FROM THE ARCHIVES: International Relations Has a "Mearsheimer" Problem

From 2022-05-06. Hoisted so I can find it easily in the future…

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…

(Largely) HOISTED FROM THE ARCHIVES: “West”, “North Atlantic”, or “Dover Circle”?

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...

READING: John Maynard Keynes on Isaac Newton

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...