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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Hyperscalers are slamming on the brakes, metering “intelligence,” and discovering that someone still has to pay the datacenter bill. Anthropic chases profits, OpenAI fights for its life, Microsoft...
Hyperscalers are slamming on the brakes, metering “intelligence,” and discovering that someone still has to pay the datacenter bill. Anthropic chases profits, OpenAI fights for its life, Microsoft sells shovels, and everyone tries to figure out what—if anything—could justify an agentic-pace GPU burn. The datacenters are running flat‑out, the subsidies are ending, and the secret sauce may lie less in magic model weights than in the harness wrapped around them:
**Notes on the End of the $5... 1/
Myrdal’s missed apocalypse: affluence, technology, & the dual economy: do a wrong short-run forecast by a Swedish social democrat 75 years ago register the right long‑run anxiety for us today? And might post‑apartheid South Africa prefigure America’s technostructural info-bio tech-attention economy structural trap??
**READING: Gunnar Myrdal: "Challenge to Affluence" (1963)**
<https://braddelong.substack.com/p/reading-gunnar-myrdal-challenge-to>
2026-06-15
n the bullseye of history: Why we literate intellectuals feel that this wave of technological change is so much more momentous than, say, the coming of mass production or of electric power. The sense of unprecedented rupture is itself an old story—what’s new is how often it happens and to whom it is happening this time:
**Ask Not for Whom the Schumpeterian Creative-Destruction Bell Tolls This Time: KEY INSIGHT**
<https://braddelong.substack.com/p/ask-not-for-whom-the-schumpeterian>
2026-06-15
In the bullseye of history: Why we literate intellectuals feel that this wave of technological change is so much more momentous than, say, the coming of mass production or of electric power. The...
Dave Deek says: Synthesis, Not Triangulation…. The Cybernetic Approach…. This Publication…. Why This Matters…. I say: State Capacity Sanity. Costco, Safeway, the cybernetics of getting housing built—& infill, market incentives, & crowdsourcing:
**(SEMI-)CROSSPOST: DAVE DEEK: GOVERNANCE CYBERNETICS**
<https://braddelong.substack.com/p/semi-crosspost-dave-deek-governance>
2206-06-15
Dave Deek says: Synthesis, Not Triangulation…. The Cybernetic Approach…. This Publication…. Why This Matters…. I say: State Capacity Sanity. Costco, Safeway, the cybernetics of getting housing...
Medicaid expansion is the easiest albeit very, very partial fix on offer. And it is something that the people whom red states elect to rule them could implement immediately and very, very cheaply if America’s Republican politicians did not hate the people who vote for them so much:
**The Health Gap Between Conservative & Liberal America Is Written in the Mortality Data**
<https://braddelong.substack.com/p/the-health-gap-between-conservative>
2026-06-15
Medicaid expansion is the easiest albeit very, very partial fix on offer. And it is something that the people whom red states elect to rule them could implement immediately and very, very cheaply if t
...great apes, who are a not very successful edge branch of the monkey lineage, who are a mammal group pretty much restricted to tropical forests—unable to survive even up in the trees once you move far enough from the equator for there to be a winter:
**Would You Have Bet on the East African Plains Ape 75000 Years Ago?: Most Important Thing**
<https://braddelong.substack.com/p/would-you-have-bet-on-the-east-african>
2026-06-14 2/END
Really big brains, imitation‑driven culture, and ultrasociality look to me as initially evolutionary gambles with very serious downsides, whose eventual success depended on a narrow, contingent...
Wall Street sell-side analysts are now unmoored from reality. Next four-year S&P500 nominal earnings growth totalling exp(0.23 x 4) - 1 = 150%? The technical term is “nuts”:
Earnings Sentiment; or, This Is Nuts!! When's the Crash?!: CHART OF THE DAY**
<https://braddelong.substack.com/p/earnings-sentiment-or-this-is-nuts>
2026-06-11
Wall Street sell-side analysts are now unmoored from reality. Next four-year S&P500 nominal earnings growth totalling exp(0.23 x 4) - 1 = 150%? The technical term is “nuts”...
