Speaker

Brad DeLong

Brad DeLong

American economist and economic historian, professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley. He served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury for Economic Policy during the Clinton administration in the early 1990s, and was one of the first academic economists to take up blogging — a habit he has carried, via Substack, to the present. His long-awaited Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century (2022) became a New York Times bestseller.

DeLong’s scholarly range runs across macroeconomics, economic growth, and the long-run history of technology and institutions. He did his graduate work at Harvard alongside Tyler Cowen. His public writing — once a high-volume blog, now a Substack newsletter — mixes economic history, policy commentary, and intellectual genealogy, and he describes his own temperament as that of a squirrel happiest darting between ideas.

Core positions

The ‘long 20th century’, roughly 1870 to 2010, is the one stretch of human history in which technology and material wealth compounded fast enough to break the Malthusian trap — about 2 per cent a year in income and productivity, a rate with no precedent in any earlier age. DeLong credits the acceleration to three institutions that arrived together after 1870: the industrial research laboratory, the large modern corporation, and a globalised economy that matched capital to ideas through universal banks and investment intermediaries. He is ‘70 per cent sure’ the pre-1870 growth that preceded this was a one-off, fuelled by cheap surface coal and a single wave of globalisation that were both spent by 1870 — without the post-1870 leap, he argues, the world would have settled into a ‘steampunk’ economy still recognisably Malthusian.

Material abundance, in his reckoning, did not deliver the utopia it promised. The first leap out of hunger and child death mattered most because it was visceral; everything since means less because human needs are ‘biologically much less urgent’. He frames the unresolved tension as Hayek versus Polanyi: the market is the only mechanism that can harness the dispersed knowledge of billions, yet it answers only to property rights, and society rightly demands that the economy serve human values it cannot price. He rejects Paul Romer’s view that growth rises monotonically — progress collapses (after 150 CE) and resumes (after 1500) in discrete institutional steps — and is candid that he has ‘run out of excuses’ for why middle-income traps persist.

In the wiki