Brad DeLong+

CROSSPOST: GÉRARD ROLAND: The Berkeley years. Part XXII

Gerard’s subheadline: “Being department chair (2008-2011)”; fundraising through the Great Recession, financing David Card’s Labor center, throwing the Oliver Williamson Nobel party...

The U.S. Federal Fiscal Flow Deficit Problem: CHART OF THE DAY

Republican tax cuts for the rich created the problem; please name and shame; restoring the Clinton-Gore tax rates and tax base is the solution; pass it on...

CROSSPOST: JUSTIN WOLFERS: Good News. There’s Already a U.S.-Canada Trade Deal

Justin’s subheadline: “You’ll never guess who signed it”; and now Trump wants to burn it, and reinforce everyone’s knowledge that his word is simply not good for anything...

NVIDIA Earnings: CHART OF THE DAY

NVIDIA’s $96 billion quarter, and the twelve things it doesn’t settle, one of which is: is NVIDIA meeting demand, or manufacturing it?...

CROSSPOST: DAN DREZNER: Categories of Contempt: A Typology of my Domestic Political Disgust

ShrillPost of the Day: Dan Drezner is installed as the Grand Hieresiarch of the Ancient & Hermetic Order of the Shrill...

(VERY PARTIAL-)CROSSPOST: Samuel Bowles & Herbert Gintis (2002): The Inheritance of Inequality

Every era invents a reason why the powerful deserve their power—noble blood, then enterprise, now inherited IQ. But things are more complicated than inequality justification-mongers think...

NVIDIA Has a Seven-Day Stock Price Slide, But You Should Not Care: CHART/ANNOYANCE OF THE DAY

A magnificent information source is Bloomberg News; yet it keeps pushing its readers to be their worst, month-to-month-trading selves...

The White-Collar Canaries in the AI-Job-Loss Coal Mine Are Wide Awake, Feeding, & Chirping to Themselves: CHART OF THE DAY

And then I go on to make a very large, very sprawling argument indeed...

Going Deeply into the Weeds & Standing Up a New Local LLM: THURSDAY MAMLMS

The LLM Bake-Off Under My Dining-Room Side Table: the launch of openweight alibaba/qwen3.8:27b, and testing four local LLMs on one maxxedoutm5maxmacbookpro...

CROSSPOST: BRET DEVEREAUX: At the Autocratic Court of the Chaos-Monkey Trump, & Near the Rubicon River

King-Archbishop Lord Protector of Republicans, but with Pompey’s dysfunction, the optimates’ talent for turning allies into enemies; not Caesar’s discipline, ambition, speed, or goons...

WAIT!! WHAT?!?!: “Mr Albouy Reaches His Conclusion by Omitting Half the Data from the Original Sample”: ANOTHER CHART OF THE DAY

THAT IS SIMPLY WRONG!!!!

Here in Academia, “AI” Has Arrived for Software Coding, for Summarization & Search, for Writing Prose, & for Assessment: CHART OF THE DAY

Text got cheap. judgment didn’t. How I hope to teach in 2027: AI has arrived for coding, search, prose, & assessment — three opportunities, and one problemtunity...

CROSSPOST: JOE FRANCIS: Running Out of Patience with Economics

Joe’s subheadline: “A Strange Case of Inverted Area Weights”; but I mostly want to praise Joe Francis for spending so much of his time on post-publication peer review...

Bubble Watching: This Is What Happens in the Type of Period Called “Distress”: CHART OF THE DAY

According to Kindleberger, things like the Situational Awareness colllapse of Leopold Aschenbrenner happen near the peak of a bubble; they are a sign of the shape of demand...

More Signs of a Bubble Peak: BREAKING NEWS WATCH OF THE DAY

OpenAI, the company that had been selling vibes, looks like it is starting to husband its cash in the face of the Anthropic challenge: two peer coding agents and yet a 5.5x revenue growth-rate gap...

HOISTED FROM PAUL KRUGMAN’S ARCHIVES: PAUL KRUGMAN (2012): Looking Back With Shrillness

“Shrill” was always the correct setting: Krugman, 2012, on the implications of seeing what normies dare not; when accuracy gets you called uncouth, the problem is the etiquette, not the accuracy...

Can We Sell Equity Financing of the DataCenter Build-Out at a Debt Price?: FINANCIAL OVEREXUBERANCE OF THE DAY

Jensen Huang keeps two books: last year’s says old chips are worthless and obsolete, while this year’s says that old chips are high-quality ten-year bonds; & Elisabeth Lopatto says: “WAIT A MINUTE!!!”

The Global Bond Selloff since 2020: CHART OF THE DAY

Four percentage points of yield rise in six years: the long bond’s profound slow-motion repricing, and warning...

(VERY PARTIAL-)CROSSPOST: GARY MARCUS: Is Anthropic Making Money? How Much Money?

Nobody ought to get superrich selling LLM-services: Anthropic’s IPO & the "airline scenario"; the problem is that back in The Day I was the same bear on Google & FaceBook, & I was very wrong...

Again, More of a Refining Crunch than a Crude Oil-Supply Crunch: CHART OF THE DAY

Lose 7.5 million barrels a day of refining capacity along with crude-oil supply and the shortage shows up more in the refined-product prices than in the crude-oil price...

The Fed Chair Who Whispers: Kevin Warsh’s “Lean Messaging” Is Anything But: LAUGH OF THE DAY

Forward guidance, but outsourced to anonymous sources "familiar with the thinking of..." & "close to..." the new Fed Chair Kevin Warsh. It is funny. One has to laugh. & also cry...

CROSSPOST: PATRICK WYMAN: The Human Sacrifices of the Shang Dynasty

13,000 names we’ll never know: the sacrificed victims of China’s first dynasty... China’s first literate state didn’t just practice human sacrifice. It industrialized it—and wrote down the numbers...

READING: The Duc de Saint-Simon on the Battle of Blenheim

322 years ago today, in 1704, a combined Austrian, Dutch, British, Hanoverian, Hessian, Danish, and Prussian army under the joint command of John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, and Eugen Franz...

CROSSPOST: SCOTT AARONSON (2013): Against John Searle's Analogy of an Apparently Chinese-Understanding Room

Scott Aaronson’s complexity rebuttal to Searle's "machines can mimic but cannot understand"; Searle's intuition pump hides the scale of the computations...

Nate Silver & Eli McKown Dawson: FLIPR: WEBSITE OF THE DAY

Nate & Eli's subheadline: "Silver Bulletin's prediction for every Senate, House, and gubernatorial election in 2026"; 99.9% wishful thinking-free, which is true of nobody else in that line of work...

The Family of Man: CHART OF THE DAY

The Zhang-Moorjani-&-al. map of archaic DNA; the knotty question of when, exactly, we became us; & how we appear to be an evolutionary long-shot...

2026-08-12 0.1% 1-Month 3.4% 12-Month Inflation CPI Release: CHART OF THE DAY

The Consumer Price Index came in in line with expectations: the calm number and the silent Chair: what July’s CPI release says, and what Kevin Warsh won’t say...

OpenAI's Zero-Day Leviathan Breaches Hugging Face's Black-ICE Security Wall: How I Think You Should Think About the Latest "AI Goes Rogue" Story

No Malice In It, No Mind In It Either: What Really Happened When Zero-Day Leviathan Showed Up at the Hugging Face Cyberparty...

CROSSPOST: MICHAEL SELLERS: Trump Thinks Iran Is Ready to Deal. Iran Thinks Trump is. Who's Right?

You Cannot Surrender to a Clown Darth Vader Who Cannot Keep from Altering the Deal: Iran, Trump, & the Strait-of-Hormuz State of Affairs...

The Grave of Karl Polanyi: PICTURE OF THE DAY

On analyzing market, bureaucracy, democracy, ideology, ethnicity, and all the other fictions and systems we East African Plains Apes have imagined into reality to assist us in coordinating our lives.

Trump's Lackies Say He Is Powerless to Increase Affordability Because of Things Biden & Powell Did Five Years Ago: CHARTS OF THE DAY

Yes, that is the message that Trump lackey Kevin Hassett—and why did he get to have a career after his monstrously cynical and behemothly stupid and wrong "Dow 36000"?—is trying to insinuate on TV...

Late Summer for the Internal Combustion-Engine Vehicle Sector: CHART OF THE DAY

But late summer, not yet autumn: internal-combustion engine production is only dying slowly, and its predominance in the global vehicle fleet is dying slower still...

(PARTIAL-)CROSSPOST: PETER CONTI-BROWN: Trump Continues His War Against Fed Independence

Piece behind Peter's pay wall; his subheadline: "After a brief reprieve, Trump is back with his pretextual war against Lisa Cook, which is in fact a war against the Federal Reserve"...

PODCAST: Hexapodia XIII: Cory Doctorow: Mandated Interoperability: We Can't Make It Work, or Can We?: HOISTED FROM THE ARCHIVES

From 2021-05-04: That week with special guest Cory Doctorow; Noah Smith & Brad DeLong's 30:00 < [Length of Weekly Podcast] < 60:00; the key insight: interoperability was a lucky historical accident...

CROSSPOST: SEAN ILLING: You Can't Have Homer, Nietzsche & Jesus

Sean's subheadline: "Thoughts on 'The Odyssey' and the incoherence of the cultural Right"; is the Christian Essence the Golden Rule, or is it the Theomakhy of the Eskhaton?...

CROSSPOST: DAN FROOMKIN: The Reflecting Pool Story Is About Trump's Grip on Reality, But the Press Corps Won’t Go There

Dan's subheadline: "Journalists are treating his ‘vandalism’ claim as if it were a normal, disputable argument. But it’s completely delusional"; Dan has been worth reading since the WaPoWHWatch...

Exploring Truly Useful Use Cases for "AI"?: QUESTION OF THE DAY

Can I get it to teach me things I do not already know?; or, experimenting with "attention" on Bosworth Field on August 22, 1485...

"Any Sufficiently Advanced Technological Problem Is Indistinguishable from a Curse": LAUGH OF THE DAY

Clarke’s Third Law has a dark twin: the corollary Arthur C. Clarke declined to write...

Goddess!: Sing, of the Cataclysmic Wrath of Great Wilson Against Christopher Nolan's "Odyssey" Adaptation!: HUMANITIES

Seems worth a note, for where is all the energy here coming from? It feels like a speed-run through every criticism anyone with an axe to grind might conceivably think of...

Have I Picked the Wrong Week to Ponder Whether to "Relaunch" My SubStack?

To speak in a metaphorical riddle: Has SubStack now arrived at Smolensk, and is it 1812? And thus would there be any wisdom in now attaching myself more firmly to this enterprise?

(PARTIAL-)CROSSPOST: MIKE BROCK: The House of Ellison is on the Brink

Mike Brock's subheadline: "Everything the world’s briefly richest man built is failing at once"; the worry is that Oracle is in a box: heads, no product anyone will buy; tails, no pricing power...

CROSSPOST: DAN DAVIES: The MGM Affair

Dan's subheadline: "non è ben trovato, è vero"; that is inverting Giordano Bruno's “se non è vero, è ben trovato...”—"even if it is not true, it is a good story..."; it is a good story, & true...

HOISTED FROM THE ARCHIVES: Types of Fictions

MOAR people should read the novels of the late Iain Banks, that is what I say. 17 and a quarter years ago during the Golden Age of Weblogging. Some readings and thought on fiction, reader...

(PARTIAL-)CROSSPOST: TAYLOR LORENZ: Model Behavior

The subheadline: "Kicking off an honest series about writers, thinkers, creators, & AI—how a tech journalist works with AI..." Taylor Lorenz has 20 AI tools & fortifies the hill "human-written"...

Time to Write My Negative Review of Nate Silver's New Book "On the Edge"!: HOISTED FROM THE ARCHIVES

From October 20, 2024. This is a core dump of my brain on the subject at the time. For me at least, Nate Silver's gambit to draw direct connections between formal games of chance and large-stakes...

How the Late Former Iowa Republican Congressman Jim Leach Still Lives Rent-Free in the Head of Nate Silver

Leach would have been 84 this year. Former Republican congressman from Iowa who served in the U.S. House from 1977 to 2007. He switched to the Democrats after 1/6—one of few good things he did...

Josh Marshall's Ire Is Activated by Nate Silver: ANNOYANCE OF THE DAY

"Boring and dumb... or kinda funny" ("apart from Iran"). That is Nate Silver's judgment on Donald Trump's actions this summer. Josh Marshall is rightly annoyed. I share that annoyance...

SubStack/Pangram is Scanning the SubStack Corpus for AI-Generated Content, & Labelling It!

Public reason. Or, rather, public non-reason here in 2026, with the rising tide of AI-slop, and attempts to channel it...

CROSSPOST: Lyz Lenz: Who Will You Blame When They [the Haitian Immigrants] Are Gone?

Lyz Lenz "did not intend to come to Springfield, Ohio, the week that temporary protected status (TPS) ended for Haitian immigrants"; Trump is truly an evil, racist monster. And so is JD Vance...

(PARTIAL-)CROSSPOST: WILLIAM DAVIES: Review of "When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists & the Origins of Trumpism" by John Ganz

Davies's original title is a quote from Murray Rothbard his goal was to "Repeal the 20th Century"; how 1992's losers became 2016-2028's winners; or, a neo-Foucauldian genealogy of MAGA, DOGE, & al...

The LLM-Generating Machine Underneath the Dining-Room Side-Table Hallucinates Again: MONDAY MAMLMS

The most revealing move was anthropic/claude-opus4:8's own recommended fix: get the LLM out of the loop entirely...

Things Have Gone too Far!: LAUGH OF THE DAY

Is it time to start writing for Bari Weiss's Free Press Substack and start denouncing the woke oatmilk hegemony here at UC Berkeley?...

CROSSPOST: ALAN WOLFF: Trump's New Tariffs Over Forced Labor Are Unlikely to Survive a Court Challenge

The subheadline: "The Trump administration is again shifting its stated rationale for placing comprehensive tariffs...". 60-country tariffs in search of a human-rights pretextual costume...

Tesla Motors: CHART OF THE DAY

A $50 Billion Company Wearing a $1.2 Trillion Magical Rainbow Unicorn Costume...

The Short Summer of Cross-Nation Convergence in Real GDP Per Capita Levels: CHART OF THE DAY

From 1995 to 2020, relative convergence was very real—and something completely unprecedented in the economic history of the world since the start of the industrial revolution...

The Strait of Hormuz Has Now Been Effectively Closed for 4 1/2 Months: CHART OF THE DAY

Via Torsten Slok of Apollo, drawing on Bloomberg and MacroBond. If we can trust these numbers, then the situation is truly dire. If we can trust these numbers, and if a lot of oil has not snuck out...

Retrodiction & Prediction: History Wednesday

My six reasons why it is very important to study history...

Christopher Nolan's Remix of the Story of Odysseus: Humanities Tuesday

As Bret Devereaux says: a remix, not a cover: As Theo Nash says, fusing the Athenian idea of the Sack of Troy as unholy excess with the historical reality of the Late Bronze Dark Age...

Convergence in LLM Quality & Slowdown in LLM Improvement: CHART OF THE DAY

From two Epoch-Capability points a month back in 2023 to one every six months today, with the spread of assessed model capabilities across frontier labs shrinking by half...

CROSSPOST: NOAH SMITH: Why I Didn't Sign the "We Must Act Now" Statement (Yet)

Noah' subheadline: "I'd like to know exactly what the actions are"...

Automation & Labor & Inclusive AI: HOISTED FROM THE ARCHIVES

From 2018: "The Future of Work: Technology & Policy for a Diverse Human Future". I have always been proud of this, as saying the important things in a very compressed but effective form...

CROSSPOST: PAOLO PERRONE: AI Coding Tools: What Changed in the Last 6 Months

Paolo's own subheadline: "A 10-minute update on what shipped, what broke, and what it costs now". From Autocomplete to loose cannons in this truly New Age of "AI" agentic coding tools...

Can We Call This Anything But Piracy?: TUESDAY CHAOS-MONKEY TRUMPISM

Isn't this piracy? What could make it not piracy, other than a congressional declaration of a war to conquer & annex the Strait of Hormuz to the USA? And isn't piracy not only a bad thing...

(SEMI-)CROSSPOST: KELSEY PIPER: Yes, You Can Trick AI into Exonerating Someone

Kelsey's subheadline: "Francesca Gino, Lawrence Lessig, and the threat of a false AI consensus". Larry Lessig uses "AI" to launch a devastating and successful cognitive attack on your own brain...

CROSSPOST: CLAUDIA SAHM: What Will It Take for the Fed to Hike?

Claudia Sahm's subheadline: "The June FOMC minutes laid out two scenarios, and the committee is split right down the middle on the outlook for inflation". But it is now split in a different way...

CROSSPOST: ART GOLDHAMMER: The Unbearable Vacuity of the Moment

Economy in the 2000s & Before: working, making, apportioning, talking, taking, & more. What I know and can learn about it, & related things.

From 2003: The Wetware of the Digital Divide: HOISTED FROM THE ARCHIVES

A very wrong prediction about how things would go down from a quarter-century ago...

(SEMI-)CROSSPOST: JOEY BROOKHART, CRYSTAL HUANG, & DYLAN PATEL: Anthropic 3Q26 Profit Over $1B: The Anthropic IPO Financials Sneak Peak

The part above the paywall, that is. Their subheading: "Anthropic’s Opportunity is Theirs to Lose..."

CROSSPOST: ARIN DUBE: "Clever Hans" at Speed: Implications for "AI" Workflows & Spread

Or is it Rikki-Tikki-Tavii?: Chained tasks, stomping hooves: how and where AI automation is likely to actually work...

Financial Markets See Core Inflation as the Problem Right Now: CHART OF THE DAY

Markets now see stubborn core inflation—not volatile energy prices—as the binding constraint on Fed rate cuts...

HOISTED FROM THE ARCHIVES: JOHN HOLBO: Dead Right

One of the two greatest weblog posts EVAR. Now succumbed to link rot. Hence resurrected here...

CROSSPOST: NOAH SMITH: JD Vance's War on GDP Is Wrong & Bad

Noah's subhead: "Making Americans poorer won't make our society better..." What JD Vance is really trying to do is to make war on prosperity...

The Inflation of 2021 Through Mid-2022 Is Back, Baby!: Chart of the Day

The return of early-2021 to mid-2022 class inflation: oil shock, sticky core, rate and a Fed on edge as the inflation scare just got real again…

Anthology Super-Intelligence: Thursday Economic History (Hicks Lecture Extended Outtake)

Does each of us have a big enough brain to compensate for our lack of fangs, claws, sprinting speed, & dodging quickness? I say: “Definitely not!”—not individually we don’t. The Scarecrow in “The...

Richard Dawkins Gets Hypnotized by a Stochastic Parrot: Laugh of the Day

Both the millennia past and the new millennium. The economic world: working, making, apportioning, talking, & more. What I learn about it, largely through history, as I bet that humans are such the same that the future resonates if not reflects the past.

One of the Great Hinges of World History: Wednesday History

What would today's post-Nazi Europe and post-Nazi world (if we had been lucky) look like if not for Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill's ascent to the Prime Ministership of the British Empire in May...

The Gonzo Size of the HyperScaler DataCenter Investment Boom: Chart of the Day

The current $1.5T AI arms race: are hyperscalers building utopia, building dystopia, building digital god, or simply lighting trillions of dollars on fire in a dollar auction? When “free cash flow...

Model "Temperature", Stochastic Parrots, & the Pantomime Performance of the Appearance of Intelligence: Monday MAMLMs

Turn it up for what?! Prettying the plumage on your stochastic parrot via the “secret” work of the LLM “creativity” dial. Behind the paywall because I am not at all sure that this is right. But I...

Theories of Economic History I: John Hicks & His Post‑Neoclassical Apostasy—Revised Version, Ms.

J. Bradford DeLong brad.delong@gmail.com :: 2026-05-10 revised from version of 2026-04-28 :: All Souls' College, Oxford :: The 2026 Sir John Hicks Memorial Lecture in Economic History

Standing Up SubTuringBradBot for First-Line Substantive Office Hours: So Close, & Yet so Far!

And I clearly have a lot of work to do, and no idea how to do it. How does one go about vibe-debugging anyway? Clever Hans the horse could not do math, but could successfully report the results of...

Apropos of My Morning Chart of the Day: "Well, I Can Hammer...

This AM I posted: “Well, I Can Hammer the CPUs & the GPUs & the NPUs of an M4Max MacStudio After All!: Chart of the Day” . Now...

HOISTED FROM THE ARCHIVES: Do Birds Do It Much Better? (Intelligence, That Is), & Other Topics Related to the Deep Substrate of Economic History

From a year ago. (I still am not satisfied by it.) Birdbrains & human gains: intelligence, culture, & deep biocultural evolutionary roots of economic history. But I have not managed to find the...

DRAFT: Social Theory for the Mid-21st Century

2024 Philosophy, Politics, & Economics Society Keynote Lecture :: Westin New Orleans Hotel, New Orleans, LA :: J. Bradford DeLong :: U.C. Berkeley :: brad.delong@gmail.com :: as prepared for...

Theories of Economic History VIII: In Place of a Conclusion :: Roughly-Edited Transcript:

J. Bradford DeLong brad.delong@gmail.com :: 2026-04-28 :: All Souls' College, Oxford :: The 2026 Sir John Hicks Memorial Lecture in Economic History