@delong

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Brad DeLong.

Author of “Slouching Towards Utopia: The Economic History of the 20th Century” <bit.ly/3pP3Krk>

Author of “Grasping Reality Substack” <http://braddelong.substack.com>

Economic Historian.

Professor of the University of California at Berkeley.

Sometime Deputy Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury

Too oline since 1995

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SubStackhttp://braddelong.substack.com

Vermouth, covfefe, & ‘vermin’: What LLMs potentially have to teach Us About the American Right’s Id from Scott Bessent’s “Straits of Vermouth” to Trump’s “oranges of the investigation”. Our parapraxes are noisy but telling windows into the system prompts running our mental autocompletes:

**Scott Bessent's LLM System Prompt Has a High Weight on the Word "Vermouth": Thing Worth Noting, for 2026-04-16 Thu**

<https://braddelong.substack.com/p/scott-bessents-llm-system-prompt>

2026-04-16 Thu

...Washington: 3/END

Dear Prof. Evans—

Suppose I were to add a "High Patriarchy & The History of Underdevelopment" unit to my courses for next semester...

Which of your things do you think would go best added to this reading list for the week that I am contemplating? Or do you think this approach I am thinking of taking is simply barking up the wrong tree entirely?

@cstross

Is this where I say that the "courgette" did not exist in the Regency Period? That it was selectively bred in Lombardy in the late 1800s?

@danhon how does one throw a credit card at OpenAI?

<https://braddelong.substack.com/p/utopia-and-its-enemies-thomas-robert>

Utopia & Its Enemies: Thomas Robert Malthus

In which I digress to answer a question from Matthew Yglesias...

Now if only I can find a place for this in my book ms….

The question is about how original Thomas Robert Malthus’s argument is—that humanity is doomed by fecundity to poverty, with patriarchy, monarchy, and orthodoxy being the only path to build not a good but a not-totally-horrible society:

Utopia & Its Enemies: Thomas Robert Malthus

In which I digress to answer a question from Matthew Yglesias… Now if only I can find a place for this in my book ms…. The question is about how original Thomas Robert Malthus’s argument is—that humanity is doomed by fecundity to poverty, with patriarchy, monarchy, and orthodoxy being the only path to build not a good but a not-totally-horrible society...

Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality
8. We need multiple measures of economic activity: never draw strong conclusions from only one.
9. Xi Jinping’s plan to shut down social media and have more people building semiconductors to put inside missiles and killer robots does not appear, so far, a great success.
10. The ratio of Google’s user value to its real factor cost is on the order of 20-to-1.
11. Google’s huge market power and profit rate powers the greatest AI-innovation engine in teh world today.
12. Hexapodia!

https://braddelong.substack.com/p/podcast-hexapodia-is-e-key-insight-f4b

PODCAST: “Hexapodia” is þe Key Insight! XLV: Information Goods & þe Measurement of Economic Growth, wiþ Special Guest John Quiggin

Noah Smith & Brad DeLong Record the Podcast We, at Least, Would Like to Listen to!; Aspirationally Semi-Weekly; Aspirationally an hour or less.

====

PODCAST: “Hexapodia” is þe Key Insight! XLV: Information Goods & þe Measurement of Economic Growth, wiþ Special Guest John Quiggin

Listen now (49 min) | Noah Smith & Brad DeLong Record the Podcast We, at Least, Would Like to Listen to!; Aspirationally Semi-Weekly; Aspirationally an hour or less.

Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality
My favorite picture of @JohnMastodon so far:
@JohnMastodon advises @ElonMusk
on what he should do with Twitter: