Brad DeLong

2 weeks ago | braddelong.substack.com | Brad DeLong

How global capital still bets on America, and what could break the spell. Private capital, not central banks, have caused and bankrolled America’s current-account deficits over the past decade, and promise to continue to do so—until trust or returns falter. The dollar’s dominance is less a birthright than a daily wager on American institutions, markets, and myth.

2 weeks ago | braddelong.substack.com | Brad DeLong

Leif Weatherby’s “Our Spreadsheet Overlords” argues that the fascination with LLMs like ChatGPT as harbingers of human-level intelligence obscures their actual use: reinforcing administrative digital control. These systems function as “digital bureaucracy”—attempts to automate the management of complexity that, among other things, create accountability sinks. But these data-processing complexes—like all abstraction layers—leak, concealing fallibility beneath apparent objectivity.

2 weeks ago | braddelong.substack.com | Brad DeLong

Natural-language interfaces as quite possibly the most important thing about the current wave of MAMLMs. Our frontier MAMLMs are tools that “understand” our goals without understanding our minds, or indeed having minds themelves. LLMs aren’t smart, but they are useful—and that’s enough. What are the implications of conversing with machines that simulate and mimic conversation so that natural language becomes our information-technology interface of choice.

2 weeks ago | braddelong.substack.com | Brad DeLong

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Power, paradox, & prejudice in President Jackson’s Washington, DC, as its social-political theatre was seen through Harriet Martineau’s British eyes…What happens when a sharp-minded British abolitionist lands in the unfinished, bustling capital of the United States?

1 month ago | braddelong.substack.com | Brad DeLong

Thirteen ways from cotton to code of looking at America’s economic story, & none a Grand Narrative: priming our historical past to serve as an analogy generating machine…It was not much like the course I wanted to teach, but it is the course that it turn out I have taught. It wound up not really telling a Grand Narrative about but rather examined a number of episodes and facets of American economic history. There is no possible Grand Narrative, after all.