Nick Lichtenberg Interviews Brad DeLong, &

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FIRST: Nick Lichtenberg Interviews Brad DeLong

Brad DeLong & Nick Lichtenberg: Student Debt, NIMBYism, Inflation & His New Book on Our Economy: ‘[DeLong] sat down with Fortune ahead of his book’s release to talk about whether the economy’s best days are behind us, or if we are doomed to live in a dystopia full of killer robots flying through the air, scorching summer temperatures wrought by climate change, and, to paraphrase Allen Ginsberg (DeLong loves economic paraphrases, as the title of his book indicates), the best technical minds of the world turned to selling ads by figuring out how to scare people. But he says he still believes that the United States is the “furnace where the future is being forged”…

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Sometime between 2002 and 2020, the whole complex… that gave us the long 20th century… technologically progressive, globalized[, the] United States [as] the furnace where the future was being forged… dissolves… leaves us in a new world in which China and India are likely superpowers and in which dealing with global warming is likely to become all important….

On inflation, my view was that we were going to have some coming out of the plague. And it was going to be by and large, a good thing…. The plague has given us maybe 15 years of metaverse-style technological development in just over two years…. [Thus] the economy has a new [equilibrium] configuration: fewer in-person workers in retail establishments, a lot more deliverators, substantially more goods production… and information entertainment and production as well…shift[ing] a lot of people into new jobs… raise wages… to pull people into what are the growth sectors of the post-plague economy…. Plus, when you reopen the economy you discover… the supply-chain bottlenecks…. You need the prices of things where there are bottlenecks to go up… get people focused on how do we produce more of this stuff…

We… shouldn’t underestimate… that while three-quarters of the world went to bed seriously hungry in 1870… only about one-fifteenth of the world that does so today. It’s a huge accomplishment…

There are people, my colleague and neighbor Fred Block among them, who think that one of the big things my book misses is [how] the neoliberal turn…pushed corporations toward…maximum short-term profits, which means… the Xerox Parcs and the IBM Labs and the Bell Labs were… dismantled…. The loss… has been a huge minus and [perhaps] a major cause of the slowing down of technological progress. Another huge cause of the slowdown is our failure to keep expanding education. When my father went to Harvard in 1955, it admitted 900 men and 300 women. Now it has 700 men and 900 women. That’s only gone up from 1,200 to 1,600 in total over 65 years, not a huge increase in capacity in a country that’s much more than doubled in size…

People do not like creative destruction…. The idea that your job or your industry, the fabric of your life, might blow away if some rootless cosmopolis decides the business you work for no longer satisfies a maximum profitability test—that gets people very angry. Thus things have been… ever since the days of William Jennings Bryan…

I hope… younger people read my book… I’d like the younger generation to have a stronger sense of how… conflict between property rights and other rights… in an environment of repeated creative destruction… has greatly hobbled our ability to… use our huge technological powers to build a… human world—as opposed to a world in which Beijing’s temperature reaches 120… and… killer robots… fly… above Ukraine…. Back when I was 12 or 13… utopian science fiction novels [had] amazing technolog[ies]… virtual reality and so forth… [while] dystopian science fiction novels… [had] greenhouse effect[s] and killer robots…. We have managed… both…

Christina Romer… [said:] “Wow, this [book] is actually readable.” And the more people who say that, the happier I am…

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Very Briefly Noted:

• Simon Kennedy: How High to Hike?: ‘Chair Jerome Powell’s declaration that the increase had lifted rates into the range of neutral…. Mohamed El-Erian, chief economic adviser to Allianz SE and a Bloomberg Opinion contributor, said “the zip code for neutral is above where we are now,” and at least 50 basis points higher…

• Robin Wigglesworth: How Passive Are Markets, Actually?: ‘As a percentage of the overall $42tn open-ended investment fund market tracked by Morningstar, the passive share has more than doubled from 16.8 per cent in 2012 to about 35 per cent today…. Open-ended investment funds only hold a slice of markets, and [people] conflate passive’s mutual fund industry market share with its overall market ownership…

• Lawrence Freedman: The Economic War: 'Cutting off Europe's gas supply is Putin's last throw of the dice…

• The Browser: Mother Utopia: 'Book Of The Week: 'Slouching Towards Utopia J. Brad DeLong | Basic Books | 2022…

• Ben Thompson: AI Chips and China, Geopolitical Considerations, Nvidia Considerations: ‘A long-time reader remarked to me last week about the amount of time that has been spent on chips over the last couple of years—including an update last week about Nvidia—but it’s a topic that is difficult to escape right now. Look no further than this seismic announcement from last week; from the Wall Street Journal…

• Economic & Business History Podcast: New Books Network: ‘Interviews with scholars of the economic and business history about their new books: J. Bradford DeLong, Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century…

• Emily Linder/Friendly City Books: Book Talk: Brad DeLong, Slouching Towards Utopia: ‘Mon, Sep 12, 2022, 9:00 AM PDT…

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John Quiggin: “Republican” as an Identity: ‘Throughout his career… Douthat’s central theme has been the need for the Republican party to do something, anything, that would justify his unshakeable support… “family-friendly tax reform… improving the stock of affordable housing… progressive [health care] cost-sharing… a reduction in payroll taxes for lower-income workers… wage subsidies for low-income workers…” To say that the Republican Party has done nothing of the kind, while the Democrats have pushed many policies on this list, is to state the obvious. Yet Douthat continues to come up with ways the Repubs could be kinder and gentler, while playing down the insurrection, attempted election theft and more…. The original cause of his Republican attachment was opposition to abortion. But even as it’s become obvious there will be no grand resolution of this issue, there’s no likelihood he will change. And the same is true of Collins, who is supposedly a moderate on the question…. being a Republican (or maybe, not a Democrat) is a central part of personal identity…. No matter what Trump or other MAGA leaders do, they will follow…. Even as Trump is installed as President for Life, Douthat will still be looking for silver linings, and Collins will be sure that this time, he has really changed for the better…