Brad DeLong

and one super envious super greedy super arrogant super misanthopic super asshole then. In some ways, the mold was made with Newton, Hooke, and Leibnitz...

So, basically, what you are saying is that the structure of the human social practice of science enables a bunch of envious and greedy misanthropic assholes to do remarkably good work?

Is Abigail Spanberger Seeking to Escalate or to De-Escalate Youngkin & Trump's Culture War? Trustees of a university exist to be a buffer between the university as an academic body and the pressures upon it from politicians and other outsiders who do not well-understand the mission of a...

...constitute a set of UVA trustees who will be effective as the exact opposite of transmission belts. Will she?…

**Is Abigail Spanberger Seeking to Escalate or to De-Escalate Youngkin & Trump's Culture War?**
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Trustees of a university exist to be a buffer between the university as an academic body and the pressures upon it from politicians and other outsiders who do not well-understand the mission of a university. They do not exist to be transmission belts. My two cents are that Spanberger needs to... 1/

Query to Self: Is It, This Semester Worth Incorporating in My Classes My Introductory Digression on: "The Liberal Arts, Education, & 'AI'"? Masters of the Liberal Arts, or servants of the machine? Education as learning how to jack in to the real ASI—the Anthology Super-Intelligence of the collective human mind. The skills needed by...

...AI” to deepen our connection to humanity’s knowledge stack—or let it quietly hollow us out:

**Query to Self: Is It, This Semester Worth Incorporating in My Classes My Introductory Digression on: "The Liberal Arts, Education, & ‘AI’"?**
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Masters of the Liberal Arts, or servants of the machine? Education as learning how to jack in to the real ASI—the Anthology Super-Intelligence of the collective human mind. The skills needed by free people living by their wits just got more, not less, important with the coming of “AI”: use... 1/

CROSSPOST: SAM BOWLES: The Origin & Future of Economic Inequality Enduring inequality didn’t “just happen”—we built our societies-of-domination, quite late in human history, with very specific technological & societal-organization tools. The Neolithic coming of...

...could keep a knowledge‑ & care‑intensive economy from reproducing Bronze‑Age inequality levels with digital means:

**CROSSPOST: SAM BOWLES: The Origin & Future of Economic Inequality**
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...material‑capital‑intensive regime. & doubling down on enclosure via intellectual property is the slavery move all over again: trying to transform a non‑excludable human capacity into tradable, dynastic material wealth. Democracy, social insurance, unions, & redistributive fiscal policy... 5/

...conscript, and reliably back property claims, stabilizing elite positions; & slavery, which turns labor itself into heritable material capital & allows even labor‑intensive technologies to behave like capital‑limited regimes.
In this very long run view, modern capitalism is just another... 4/

...lived “aggrandizer” episodes, not as durable structure.
Then about the year -3000 come the technological shifts to land‑limited production (ox‑drawn plow, etc.) that makes land the binding factor and raises the payoff to holding material capital; the rise of an archaic protostate to tax... 3/

...but egalitarian norms & institutions (“aggressive egalitarianism”) actively sit on them for millennia: public eating, communal storage, burial practices that block dynastic display, even deliberate destruction of productive capital to prevent bequests. Inequality shows up, but as short‑... 2/

Enduring inequality didn’t “just happen”—we built our societies-of-domination, quite late in human history, with very specific technological & societal-organization tools. The Neolithic coming of agriculture supplied the raw materials for inequality—storable surplus, ownable productive assets—... 1/

Well, Alan Wolff is the real wise man here. I am simply piggybacking... Be well, Brad

CROSSPOST: Alan Wolff: Bamboozled: What made anyone think the Trump tariffs were legal? One of the best ways to learn to make sense of money, work, communication, production, distribution, and more. Betting that in the course of human things the future must resemble even if it does not r...

...something contrary to its plain text, original intention, original public meaning, or pattern as a living document nevertheless ruled:

**CROSSPOST: Alan Wolff: Bamboozled: What made anyone think the Trump tariffs were legal?**
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...guardrails. The only way to pretend it was legal was to lean on a botched folk memory of Nixon’s 1971 surcharge and to assume that neither Congress nor the courts would seriously push back. They didn’t. What failed here was the non-Democrats in office sworn to uphold the Constitution, as... 3/

...late—to the party: but the six neofascist justices have rendered decisions with none of statutory, constitutional, logical, or philosophic underpinnings before, whenever they wanted to, or were scared not to. It was bad history and cowardly politics that broke this particular set of... 2/

A phantom emergency power allowed Trump to blow up the constitution with respect to tariff and revenue: the first separation-of-powers victory ever won over England’s Plantagenet kings by the House of Commons thus falls without a whimper. Now the Supreme Court come very late—deliberately very... 1/

No! I should! What should I read first?

Thanks much. Be as well as one can be in a world in which while one may well be, personally, quite comfortable, we live in a world in which no man is an island. Yours,

J. Bradford DeLong

thx much... -B

Thinking of a Very Loose Coalition as an Organism with a Single Heart, Mind, & Will Makes You Stupid Or at least makes your audience stupid to the extent that they believe you—& for some malevolent actors, that is what they want. If you think “Congress doesn’t care” about ICE murderings, you’ve alrea

...Organism with a Single Heart, Mind, & Will Makes You Stupid**
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...the difference between Democratic professional economists who are economists first, and Republican professional economists who are Republicans first. But right now we see it at work all across the entire American spectrum of American governance:

**Thinking of a Very Loose Coalition as an... 3/

...you’ve already lost the plot. The story that matters is about specific legislators, specific incentives, and a Republican Party that (largely) has a Party Line and punishes Line Wobbles far more effectively than its Democratic rival. This is of broad applicability—I see this most often in... 2/

Thinking of a very loose coalition as an organism with a single heart, mind, & will makes you stupid. Or, at least, it makes your audience stupid to the extent that they believe you—& for some malevolent actors, that is what they want. If you think “Congress doesn’t care” about ICE murderings... 1/

Contra Marx, the Record Since 1870 Is Rotating Upheavals in Leading Sectors, Not Synchronized Economy-Wide Revolutions Josef Schumpeterian sectoral creative-destruction vs. Karl Marxian economy-wide transformation of base with impacts on superstructure: Marx promised rupture once technology fettered property...

...true elements & discard the millenarian theological stagecraft in Marx:

**Contra Marx, the Record Since 1870 Is Rotating Upheavals in Leading Sectors, Not Synchronized Economy-Wide Revolutions**
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Josef Schumpeterian sectoral creative-destruction vs. Karl Marxian economy-wide transformation of base with impacts on superstructure: Marx promised rupture once technology fettered property relations; history delivered sectoral churn and chronic institutional lag; let us try to keep the soft... 1/

CROSSPOST: MARCY WHEELER: Annals of Sanewashing: NYT Labels Trump’s Confession of Psychological Unfitness as Leadership ORANGE MAN CLINICALLY INSANE. AND VERY BAD. Plus “The New York Times” an enemy of truth and freedom yet again"

...**CROSSPOST: MARCY WHEELER: Annals of Sanewashing: NYT Labels Trump’s Confession of Psychological Unfitness as Leadership**
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...unhinged. Access journalism keeps translating blatant narcissism into respectable foreign policy, NSD as Trump confesses his psyche comes first; the paper of record dutifully calls it “protecting the West.”, and “real estate mogul’s eye” stands in for “has no business near nuclear codes... 2/

ORANGE MAN CLINICALLY INSANE. AND VERY BAD. Plus “The New York Times” a mendacious lying enemy of truth and freedom yet again through a to-the-max parody of sanewashing: the “Times” calls “madness” “leadership”, turns a Greenland tantrum into “statesmanship”, and dares not say Trump is... 1/

Quantitative Long-Run Global Economic History: Econ 196: Special Topics in Economics (Spring 2026) And we are now launched, with a new preparation for a new course: a Royal Road into the millennia of global economic history, hopefully designed for both humanists and quants who want an...

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...attention economies—without needing to already have learned to be a coder first. (Why am I doing a new preparation the last semester before I go emeritus? Because I am a moron…)

**Quantitative Long-Run Global Economic History: Econ 196: Special Topics in Economics (Spring 2026)**
And we... 2/