Brad DeLong
Economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley and a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury. Author of Slouching Towards Utopia and writer of the Grasping Reality newsletter.
Brad DeLong did not write this page.
We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.
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Their wordsThere are grave problems with a political system that rests upon the fiction that a country has a single general will that everyone shares, and that individual voters choose based on their noisy perception of that general will in which they participate.
↗The Ghost of Jean-Jacques Rousseau Drives Men Mad: ANNOYANCE OF THE DAYbraddelong.substack.com
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Their wordsThese Rousseauist ideas, or perhaps their ghosts, are leading to an awful lot of fuzzy thinking today. And they may spark a great deal of additional trouble in the future
↗The Ghost of Jean-Jacques Rousseau Drives Men Mad: ANNOYANCE OF THE DAYbraddelong.substack.com
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Their wordsThe country is divided: male-female, white-Black, nonHispanic-Hispanic, rich-poor, uneducated-educated, southernrural-northernurban, and more than those six largely-independent axes.
↗The Ghost of Jean-Jacques Rousseau Drives Men Mad: ANNOYANCE OF THE DAYbraddelong.substack.com
- 3 days earlier
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Their wordsIf the polls are off, they'll likely be off in the same direction everywhere, so seven good Senate polls aren't seven separate pieces of evidence.
↗Not a Good Use of My, or Your, Time, But: CHART OF THE DAYbraddelong.substack.com
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Their wordsYour lemming-like following of the Newt Gingrich principle that you have to work as hard as you can to make the president of your party appear a success (and the president of the other party appear a failure) no matter how much damage you do to the country in the process has not only damned you all to hell, it looks like it has done major, major damage to your political standing as well.
↗Not a Good Use of My, or Your, Time, But: CHART OF THE DAYbraddelong.substack.com
- 1 day earlier
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Their wordsWhat the public spaces of a Great Republic need is stability, continuity, and a shared civic dignity: the sense that the room was there before this president and will be there after him, and that it belongs to all of us rather than to whoever currently holds the lease.
↗The Visual Æsthetics of Cheesecake Factories: (LATE) FRIDAY FOG & FLATLANDSbraddelong.substack.com
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Our reading
The Cheesecake Factory look is inappropriate for the public buildings of a Great Republic.
Their wordsThe Cheesecake Factory look: fine for avocado egg rolls; terrible for the public buildings of a Great Republic.
↗The Visual Æsthetics of Cheesecake Factories: (LATE) FRIDAY FOG & FLATLANDSbraddelong.substack.com
- 2 days earlier
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Their wordsthe public spaces of a Great Republic should not share the over-the-top kitsch-glitz branding of a successfuly carbmaxxxing chain restaurant.
- 1 day earlier
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Their wordsA model’s starting map weights things largely by how often they appear in the corpus, and fine-tuning only partly corrects that. “Popular” and "true” are not the same thing.
↗CROSSPOST: HENRY FARRELL: Agentic AI Is Myth Set in Motionbraddelong.substack.com
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Their wordsYet the capability is uneven, not general: agents can refactor a large codebase and still botch a citation: they are strongest where training data and checkable rewards are dense, weakest in the long tail.
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Their wordsWhenever the answer can be checked (code runs, a URL loads, a proof verifies), these systems now seek truth reliably.
- 1 day earlier
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Their wordsAnthropic as an organization is a bunch of millenarian fanatics chasing the dream of building Digital God.
↗My Guesses with Respect to the True State of Anthropic: WEDNESDAY WEALTHbraddelong.substack.com
- 1 day earlier
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LLMsAI and jobsvibe codingPython
Their words“Here is the number” and “here is the proper context for the number” are things that are doable at a human-scale level of reliability by MAMLMs vibe-coding python scripts and then stitching them together with the appropriate boilerplate words. That is going to change the economics profession profoundly
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Our reading
The future job of the economist will be less about producing analysis and more about curating it.
Their wordsThe economist’s future job is less producing analysis than curating it. When a competent macro briefing costs almost nothing to produce, the scarce resources become attention and trust.
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Their wordsThe FOMC has been reacting to its own forecast of inflation, not to the inflation of the past twelve months.
- 1 day earlier
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Their wordsIt is not that one is “social” and the other “parasocial”. Both are parasocial, profoundly overwhelmingly so.
↗The Ancient Courts & The Infinite Scroll: MONDAY MAMLMSbraddelong.substack.com
- 1 day earlier
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Our reading
Their wordsEngagement, however, is not understanding, and a failure of comprehension is not a failure of memory.
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Their wordsThe real test for the AI-bubble: how much money will start flowing in from the non-tech business world outside...
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Their wordsVery real long-run damage comes from policy chaos in the form of random destructive tariffs, attacks on Fed independence, and an immigration crackdown that shrinks the labor force; all those are choices that they genuinely will take years to undo and neutralize
↗JD Vance: “You Don’t Turn the Titanic Around Overnight”: LAUGH OF THE DAYbraddelong.substack.com
- 1 day earlier
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Their wordsUser surplus and moat-deepening are huge stories and lf first-order importance for understanding the arriving attention info-bio tech mode of production.
↗Torsten Slok Beats the AI-Bear Drum: CHARTS OF THE DAYbraddelong.substack.com
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Their wordsBut they do not produce a hyperboom in measured GDP or an explosion in profits that justifies current market valuations.
↗Torsten Slok Beats the AI-Bear Drum: CHARTS OF THE DAYbraddelong.substack.com
- 3 days earlier
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Their wordsA contested or overturned election would hit America’s “animal spirits” and investment, productivity growth, Treasury yields, and the dollar permanently.
- 1 day earlier
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Our reading
Liberals' avoidance of conflict within academia for the sake of academic comity has been a mistake.
Their wordsAnd if there is a bigger point it is that liberals’ avoidance of conflict within the academia in the interest of academic comity and being left to do your own work has been a mistake.
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Our reading
It is too early to declare AI demand exhausted because of a lack of actual profitable usage cases.
Their wordsIt is way too early to declare AI demand exhausted because of a lack of actual profitable usage cases
↗Spending on “Tokens”: CHART OF THE DAYbraddelong.substack.com
- 1 day earlier
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Their wordsYes: natural-language interfaces are wonderful ways to interface with information-technology systems. Much of the time.
↗When Software ‘Bots Go Feral: MONDAY MAMLMSbraddelong.substack.com
- 4 days earlier
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Their wordsThat a Fed easing move is immediately followed by a sharp jump in long-term rates strongly suggests that the Federal Reserve has lost control over the narrative governing bond-market expectations.
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Their wordsThus for the Fed not to hike interest rates at its next meeting later this October is a highly political decision.
↗An Inflation Report That Is Disappointingly High: CHART OF THE DAYbraddelong.substack.com
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Our reading
Bond traders now treat the Fed as one voice among several, rather than as the best-informed one.
Their wordsBreaking that rule tells you bond traders now treat the Fed as one voice among several, not as the best-informed one.
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Their wordsThat creation and transmission of meaning through the warping of language into new forms is not something an LLM, for which all there is is the text, can do.
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Their wordsThe Fed’s odds of threading the needle and getting inflation back down to target while avoiding a recession get much lower
↗An Inflation Report That Is Disappointingly High: CHART OF THE DAYbraddelong.substack.com