BOOK PROJECT: History of Economic Thought

One project I might spend a solid month on this fall is to try turn my history of economic thought lecture notes into a ms. for a relevant “history of…

Jul 31 • 

Brad DeLong

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LECTURE: Roots of How Ownership & Trade Have Made Us Truly Weird: "Property" & "Exchange" as a Coördination Mechanism at Societal Scale

My “roots of property, exchange, and the division of labor” lecture. It tries to make novel and strange the idea people think that they "own" things: to…

Jul 13 • 

Brad DeLong

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June 2025

LECTURE NOTES: Lash, Cash, & Cotton in the Imperial-Commercial & Early SteamPower Age

& the racialization of slavery. A ten-mintue taste of what my lectures have to say about post-1500 slavery. This then becomes the lecture introduction…

Jun 21 • 

Brad DeLong

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DRAFT: Prosperity & "Utopia": The Moving Target :: History of Economic Growth Lecture Notes 1.5

DRAFT: Why the best-laid plans of philosophers and poets never quite survive contact with history—or the marketplace. From Arkadian simplicity to…

Jun 17 • 

Brad DeLong

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May 2025

Looking Back at This Semester of American Economic History...

Thirteen ways from cotton to code of looking at america’s economic story, & none a Grand Narrative: priming our historical past to serve as an analogy…

May 2 • 

Brad DeLong

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April 2025

HOISTED From My Archives: "My Reading Difficult Books" Lecture

From the time I taught the "Smith, Marx, & Keynes" History of Economic Thought course designed by Ravi Bhandari...

Apr 15 • 

Brad DeLong

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March 2025

LECTURE NOTES: A Feminist Angle on American Economic History

It is, of course, something substantially wrong with the way I am teaching this that feminist concerns are only about a tenth—rather than at least a…

Mar 17 • 

Brad DeLong

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Immigration & the American Psyche :: American Economic History

mmigration has always been at the heart of America’s story & self-definition. It has also one of the if not the major source of America’s power …

Mar 10 • 

Brad DeLong

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Pre-Lecture Notes: Immigration :: American Economic History

I am now officially behind! For the first time this semester, I have to give a lecture & I did not have a rough draft of it in hand before the semester…

Mar 9 • 

Brad DeLong

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DRAFT: I Get to Talk About the 2nd Industrial Revolution in American Economic History on Monday!

Behind the paywall because I am not yet fully happy with it. Lecture: Innovation, Immigration, & Industry: The 2nd Industrial-Revolution Era Making of…

Mar 1 • 

Brad DeLong

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February 2025

American Economic History: American Exceptionalism Calculations

2025-02-26 We Econ 113: Some quick-and-dirty back-of-the-envelope Python-calculated numbers on the "Great Traverse" that was the long-run knock-on…

Feb 26 • 

Brad DeLong

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Slides for Tomorrow's (2025-02-24 Mo) "American Exceptionalism" American Economic History Lecture

Why isn't the United States of America one Giant Australia (or New Zealand)? Why the u.s. didn’t stay a land of farmers & miners. How infrastructure…

Feb 23 • 

Brad DeLong

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