Brad DeLong

Jane Austen Was Born on December 16, 1775

Jane Austen wrote amid a peculiar peace: rents flowed, muskets hung idle, and reputations ruled, and in that context crafted Great Novels with each sentence a step in the moral education of the…

Pivot to Video!

100,000 eyeballs here, & yet less influence than I would want to see; increasingly the sphere of public reason, such as it is, has migrated to video; the question is whether we follow or fade…

CROSSPOST: WILL LOCKETT: Musk’s Pathetic Robot Is Looking More And More Like Bad Vapourware

Is this wrong? It really looks right to me.

On Earning Trust: The Case for the Social Sciences

Notes from the SSRC: 2025 College and University Fund Conference...

And People Had No Problem Saying That Joe Biden Was Cognitively "Challenged"

This is, when you think of it, not something I would ever have had on my pre-2016 BIngo card for a thing that could happen without that president being 25th-Amendmented that very afternoon...

"Affordability" Isn’t Really What You Think

Real Gains, Nominal Prices, Broken Promises, & Disparate Senses of Just Entitlement…

Abundance, Dislocation, & the Fight to Focus Our Attention in the 21st Century

Dropping next Monday 2025-12-15, I think, is me on Sean Illing's "Grey Area" podcast...

HOISTED FROM THE ARCHIVES: I Don't Fully Buy Stiglitz's Argument That Our Macro Problems Have Deep Structural Roots. But I Do See Its Coherence

From 2011-12-16: there is demand for this, so here it is back again...

CROSSPOST: NOAH SMITH: The AI Bust Scenario That No One Is Talking About

Think of airlines: very useful, very high-tech, immense user surplus, next to no profits. Even if AI works, and even if it gets adopted very fast, it might not make much in the way of profits for...

After the Last David Graeber Post; or, Once Again Unto the Breach...

The perils of Speculative Nonfiction, the Grand Narrative trap, the importance of basing yourself in reality, & the recognition that it is not ideas that control social reality, but rather...

HOISTED FROM THE ARCHIVES: Why There Are No Enduring Relevant Attractive Conservatives

From 2008-03-03: & -04: I will notice that my prediction came true that writers like Robert George and John Finnis are hard to get students to give any hearing these days—the gay-bashing and the...

READING: Is Writing → Dialoguing :: Grunt-Programming → Vibe-Coding?

Programming secrets of Hellenic intellectuals from 2500 years ago; an extended passage from "Phaidros" by Platon of the Athenai that I want to park where I can immediately find it...

HOISTED FROM THE ARCHIVES: Cognition & "Active Reading"

From 2025-01-13 "very briefly noted": here so I can quickly put my hands on it in the future...

Muppet Pearl Harbor

Was discussing whether we should have a long-distance family movie watch on December 7, & the elder kid immediately said: "Muppet Pearl Harbor"! So from an alternative part of the multiverse, here...

2025-12-07 Su: Food for Thought

For the file...

December 7, -43: 2067 Years Ago Roman Politics Had a Very Sharp Edge

To J.D. Vance, His Family, & His Staff, Hannukah Is a Subset of Christmas

Jimmy Carter tried to make America’s civil religion “Abrahamic”. Dwight D. Eisenhower did make America’s civil religion “Judeo-Christian”. J.D. Vance, his family, and his staff are in the business...

2025-12-06 Sa: Food for Thought...

For the file, on failure modes of human psychology that arise from our cooperative anthology intelligence nature; something to write about, but only when my thoughts fully settle...

The AI-Bubble's Most Likely Endgame Looks to Be Not Apocalypse, But an Awful Lot of Useful Compost

All the digging will not uncover a Golden ASI Pony. But the digging will spread an awful lot fo very useful fertilizer around, in which very useful and valuable things will grow...

Time for a "Land Acknowledgement"!

The SubStack Attempt to Avoid the ClickBait-Rage Trap Is Failing: The argument against the idea that SubStack needed to develop a social-media #discoverability layer in order to reach appropriate...

A $140,000/Year Poverty Line? I: Stewarding & Utilizing Resources

Four factors making even rich people live poorly and hence feel poor in our immensely rich modern economy: a sense of precarity, a lack of centeredness, failures of stewardship, and an absence of...

How Has U.S. Manufacturing Been Going Over the Past Generation?

Measure what users value in what they actually buy, rather than the numbers of boxes that leave the factory. Fix the deflators and follow things through the input-output tables summarizing the...

Question to Self: Space at Berkeley for a Marx Half-Day Microconference in the Spring?

Critical theory after the passing of Steampower Society: reading Marx’s Capital in the world our students will inherit; & should it be a tentpole or a relic. Will Marx have any business anchoring soci

Genes Tag the Journey; Culture Does the Work: The Yamnaya Shock of 5000 Years Ago

The Indo-European spread as a cultural revolution—mobility, pathogens-by-accident, and male-line dominance—rather than biological transformation. The Yamnaya-expansion story is about institutions...