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

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

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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…
 • 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…
 • 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…
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…
 • 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…
 • Brad DeLong
Bubbles, Productive & Unproductive; Builders; & Bots: Why the AI Boom Isn’t One Story, But Rather the Vector Driving the AI Economy Is at…
Six dimensions are entrepreneurial-technological-industrial aspects of bubble dynamics that are at least somewhat familiar from history; six dimensions…
 • Brad DeLong
Affordability, Inflation, & the Misinformation Machine: How Prosperity Lost the Plot
Thanks to Bidenomics, full employment returned fast after the plague depression; but voters heard “affordability crisis” amid broken information…
 • Brad DeLong
On the MCM6 Milk Consumption Switch & Lactase Persistence; & the Nonexistence of Any Such Switches in IQ Genetics "Race Science"
This is too close to the “let’s get out the skull-measuring calipers” discourse. I shouldn’t have to do this. Any genetic variants that made us…
 • Brad DeLong
"All That Is Solid Melts into Air": Since 1870, Roughly One-Fifth of the Economy Is Transformed Every Thirty Years
This time, we experts in the liberal arts—the artes liberales, the skills appropriate to enrich the lives and make productive those of us who are free…
 • Brad DeLong
Does Each of Us Have a Big Enough Brain to Compensate for Our Lack of Fangs, Claws, Sprinting Speed, & Dodging Quickness?
I say: “No”. Not individually we don’t. The Scarecrow in “The Wizard of Oz” had a greatly exaggerated view of what he would have been able to do if he…
 • Brad DeLong
Five Lies in Scott Bessent's Attacks on the Fed, & Three Delusions in His Failures to Understand All That NATO Has Done for Us
No. Scott Bessent is not an “adult in the room”. Shame on all who are calling him such…
 • Brad DeLong
Jacking-in to an ASI Across a Half-Millennium
& implications for AI-alignment, AI-safety, feral library card catalogs, the Volga as "Germany's Mississippi", Machiavelli's scrittoio…
 • Brad DeLong
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