DeLong's Grasping Reality: Economy in the 2000s & Before | Brad DeLong | Substack

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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…

Jan 14 • Brad DeLong

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…

Jan 13

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"

Jan 13 • Brad DeLong

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…

Jan 12 • Brad DeLong

Quantitative Long-Run Global Economic History: Econ 196: Seminar: 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…

Jan 12 • Brad DeLong

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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…

Dec 4, 2025 • Brad DeLong

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…

Dec 4, 2025 • Brad DeLong

Using GPT LLM MAMLMs as Your Rabbit—Your Pacer

GPT LLM MAMLMs are not oracles, subordinates, or colleagues. They are emulations of TISs—Typical Internet S***posters. If you are at all a good writer…

Nov 22, 2025

Tuesday Economic Growth Blogging: The Pre‑Modern Treadmill Was Real on Necessities, Not on Technology, or Luxuries, or Culture, or Means of…

Greg Clark’s “Farewell to Alms” still tempts with one big, clean story: pre‑modern humanity stuck on a Malthusian treadmill until cultural-bio selection…

Nov 20, 2025 • Brad DeLong

The False Calm Before Steam: The Index H, Malthus, & the Long Slog, for Growth Was Very Real Before It Became Visible in Average Living…

The cliché says nothing happened before 1800. The data say capability rose steadily—only population swallowed the dividends. Replace vibes with an…

Nov 11, 2025 • Brad DeLong

DeLong's Grasping Reality: Economy in the 2000s & Before

One of the best ways to learn to make sense of money, work, communication, production, distribution, and more. Betting that in the course of human things the future must resemble even if it does not reflect the past, people being much the same over time.

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