Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

There is no point in including entire John Holbo posts in Weekend Reading--Crooked Timber (unlike most of the rest of the online world) is highly unlikely to suffer from linkrot, and those who want to read his posts at their Holbonian length can do so over there. But there is a need for a Shorter John Holbo.

Me? I see five political dimensions as one tries to maneuver through the weeds:

1. pacifist-militarist,
2. cosmopolitan-nationalist,
3. egalitarian-hierarchical,
4. liberal-authoritarian, and
5. invidualistic-communitarian

(with none of any of the poles being entirely bad--or entirely good, for that matter). The Nazis thus tended to be: militarist nationalist hierarchical authoritarian communicatarian, except for the Strasser-Roehm bunch who tended to be militarist nationalist egalitarian authoritarian communitarian. (And someone like Jonah Goldberg would tend to be militarist nationalist hierarchical authoritarian individualistic.)

Shorter John Holbo:

John Holbo: Were The Nazis Right-Wing?--or--Weimar Culture: The Insider As Outsider — Crooked Timber: "The reason the Nazis are regarded by historians as right-wing...

Download: http://tinyurl.com/dl20080906f

Download: http://tinyurl.com/dl20080906f

It looks as though we are done:

Download: http://tinyurl.com/dl20080906

J. Bradford DeLong (2008), "Capital and Its Complements: International Capital Mobility and Economic Growth in the Twenty-First Century" http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/2008_pdf/20080521_capital.pdf

The old "write a paper to figure out what you think about an issue" trick has gone wrong: I still don't know what I think about the issues at hand...

J. Bradford DeLong and Konstanin Magin (2008), "The U.S. Equity Premium: Past, Present, and Future" http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/2008_pdf/20080228_jep_submit.pdf

ABSTRACT: For more than a century, diversified long-horizon investors in America’s stock market have invariably received much higher returns than investors in bonds: a return gap averaging some six percent per year that Rajnish Mehra and Edward Prescott (1985) labeled the “equity premium puzzle.” The existence of this equity return premium has been known for generations: more than eighty years ago financial analyst Edgar L. Smith (1924) publicized the fact that long-horizon investors in diversified equities got a very good deal relative to investors in debt: consistently higher long-run average returns with less risk. As of this writing the annual earnings yield on the value-weighted S&P composite index is 5.53%. This is a wedge of 3.22% per year when compared to the annual yield on 10-year Treasury inflation-protected bonds of 2.31%. The existence of the equity return premium in the past offered long-horizon investors a chance to make very large returns in return for bearing little risk. It appears likely that the current configuration of market prices offers a similar opportunity to long-horizon investors today.

Courtesy of Eric Rauchway and the U.C. Davis History Department:

Historical Scholarship and the New Media: A History Colloquium event sponsored by the UC Davis Department of History, the Institute of Governmental Affairs, and the Center for History, Society and Culture, with Brad DeLong, Scott Eric Kaufman, Tedra Osell, and Ari Kelman, held May 23, 2007, at 12:10 in the Andrews Room of the Social Sciences and Humanities Building.

Downloadable .mp4 podcast (82.2M, slightly over 50 minutes of video): http://history.ucdavis.edu/podd.php

J. Bradford DeLong: Academic CV

Professor of Economics
601 Evans Hall
University of California at Berkeley
Berkeley, CA 94720-3880

phone: (510) 643-4027
fax: (510) 642-6615
delong@econ.berkeley.edu http://www.j-bradford-delong.net

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A. Education

Ph. D., Department of Economics, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA (June 1987).

M. A., Department of Economics, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA (June 1985).

B. A. summa cum laude, Committee on Degrees in Social Studies, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA (June 1982).

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B. Positions

Co-Editor, The Economists' Voice (2005-present).

Member, U.C. Berkeley College of Letters and Science Executive Committee (2003-present).

Chair, Political Economy of Industrial Societies Major, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA (July 2001-present).

Professor, Department of Economics, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA (July 1997-present).

Visiting Scholar, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, San Francisco, CA (July 1996-present).

Research Associate, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA (October 1995-present).

Co-Editor, Journal of Economic Perspectives (1996-2004).

Associate Professor, Department of Economics, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA (July 1993-June 1997).

Deputy Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy, United States Department of the Treasury, Washington, DC (April 1993-May 1995).

Faculty Research Fellow, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA (November 1987-September 1995).

Frederick S. Danziger Associate Professor, Department of Economics, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA (July 1991-June 1993).

Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow, Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, New York, NY (July 1990-April 1993).

John M. Olin Fellow, National Bureau of Economic Research, Cambridge, MA (July 1991-June 1992).

Visiting Lecturer, European University Institute, Florence, Italy (March 1992-April 1992).

Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA (July 1988-June 1991).

Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, Boston University, Boston, MA (July 1987-June 1988).

Instructor, Department of Economics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA (September 1986-June 1987).

Alfred P. Sloan Dissertation Fellow, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA (July 1985-June 1986).

National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA (September 1982-June 1985).

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C. Principal Refereed Academic Publications

J. Bradford DeLong and Konstantin Magin (fall 2007, forthcoming), "The U.S. Stock Market Equity Return Premium: Past, Present, and Future," Journal of Economic Perspectives http://delong.typepad.com/pdf/20070412_JEP_EP.pdf

J. Bradford DeLong and Konstantin Magin (2006) "Contrary to Robert Shiller's Predictions, Stock Market Investors Made Much Money in the Past Decade: What Does This Tell Us?," The Economists' Voice: Vol. 3 : Iss. 7, Article 2 http://www.bepress.com/ev/vol3/iss7/art2

J. Bradford DeLong (2005) "Divergent Views on the Coming Dollar Crisis," The Economists' Voice: Vol. 2 : Iss. 5, Article 1 http://www.bepress.com/ev/vol2/iss5/art1

Dean Baker, J. Bradford DeLong, and Paul Krugman (2005), "Asset Returns and Economic Growth," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 2005:1 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/BDK-BPEA.pdf

J. Bradford DeLong (2004) "Should We Still Support Untrammelled International Capital Mobility? Or are Capital Controls Less Evil than We Once Believed?," The Economists' Voice: Vol. 1 : Iss. 1, Article 1 http://www.bepress.com/ev/vol1/iss1/art1

J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "Productivity Growth in the 2000s," NBER Macroeconomics Annual 2003 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/Econ_Articles/macro_online/delong_macro_annual_2002_fi.pdf.

J. Bradford DeLong and Barry J. Eichengreen (2002), "Between Meltdown and Moral Hazard: Clinton Administration International Monetary and Financial Policy," in Jeffrey Frankel and Peter Orszag, eds., American Economic Policy in the 1990s (Cambridge: MIT Press) http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/Econ_Articles/CIEP/CIEP_revision06102001.PDF http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/Econ_Articles/CIEP/clintonfigures.pdf

J. Bradford DeLong and Lawrence H. Summers (2002), "The New Economy: Background, Questions, Speculations," in Economic Policies for the Information Age (Kansas City: Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City) http://www.kansascityfed.org/PUBLICAT/SYMPOS/2001/papers/S02delo.pdf

J. Bradford DeLong (2002), "Review of Robert Skidelsky (2000), John Maynard Keynes, volume 3, Fighting for Britain," Journal of Economic Literature http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000757.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2001), "America's Historical Experience with Low Inflation," Journal of Monetary Economics http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/econ_articles/woodstock/woodstock4.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2001), "Introduction to the North America Symposium," Journal of Economic Perspectives (Winter), pp. 81-83.

J. Bradford DeLong, Alan Krueger, and Timothy Taylor (2000), "Introduction to the Millennial Issue," Journal of Economic Perspectives (Winter) http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0895-3309%28200024%2914%3A1%3C3%3AROEATT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-7

J. Bradford DeLong (2000), "The Triumph [?] of Monetarism," Journal of Economic Perspectives (Winter) http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0895-3309%28200024%2914%3A1%3C83%3ATTOM%3E2.0.CO%3B2-G

J. Bradford DeLong (1999), "Seeing One's Intellectual Roots: A Review Essay on James Scott's Seeing Like a State," Review of Austrian Economics 12:2, pp. 257-64 http://econ161.berkeley.edu/Econ_Articles/reviews/seeing_like_a_state.html

J. Bradford DeLong (1999), "Financial Crises in the 1890s and 1990s: Must History Repeat?" Brookings Papers on Economic Activity Fall http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0007-2303%281999%291999%3A2%3C253%3AFCIT1A%3E2.0.CO%3B2-8

J. Bradford DeLong (1999), "Why We Should Fear Deflation," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity Spring http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0007-2303%281999%291999%3A1%3C225%3ASWFD%3E2.0.CO%3B2-P

J. Bradford DeLong (1999), "Introduction to the Symposium on Business Cycles," Journal of Economic Perspectives http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0895-3309%28199921%2913%3A2%3C19%3AITTSOB%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Y

J. Bradford DeLong (1996), "Keynesianism, Pennsylvania-Avenue Style: Some Economic Consequences of the 1946 Employment Act," Journal of Economic Perspectives 10:3 (Summer), pp. 41-53 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000661.html

J. Bradford DeLong, Christopher L. DeLong, and Sherman Robinson (1996), "In Defense of Mexico's Rescue", Foreign Affairs 75:3 (May/June), pp. 8-14 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000658.html

J. Bradford DeLong and Lawrence H. Summers (1994), "How Strongly Do Developing Countries Benefit from Equipment Investment?" Journal of Monetary Economics http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000646.html

Robert B. Barsky and J. Bradford DeLong (1993), "Why Does the Stock Market Fluctuate?" Quarterly Journal of Economics 108: 2 (May), pp. 291-312 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000635.html

J. Bradford DeLong and Lawrence H. Summers (1993), "Macroeconomic Policy and Long-Run Growth," Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City Quarterly Review http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000633.html

J. Bradford DeLong and Andrei Shleifer (1993), "Princes and Merchants: City Growth Before the Industrial Revolution," Journal of Law and Economics 36 (October), pp. 671-702 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000638.html

J. Bradford DeLong and Lawrence H. Summers (1992), "Equipment Investment and Economic Growth: How Robust Is the Nexus?" Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (Fall) http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000628.html

J. Bradford DeLong and Kevin Lang (1992), "Are All Economic Hypotheses False?" Journal of Political Economy 100:6 (December), pp. 1257-72 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000620.html

J. Bradford DeLong (1992), "Productivity and Machinery Investment: A Long Run Look 1870-1980," Journal of Economic History 53: 2 (June), 307-24 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000619.html

J. Bradford DeLong and Andrei Shleifer (1992), "Closed End Fund Discounts: A Yardstick of Small-Investor Sentiment," Journal of Portfolio Management 18:2 (Winter), pp. 46-53 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000618.html

J. Bradford DeLong and Andrei Shleifer (1991), "The Stock Market Bubble of 1929: Evidence from Closed-End Funds," Journal of Economic History 52: 3 (September), pp. 675-700 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000609.html

Robert B. Barsky and J. Bradford DeLong (1991), "Forecasting Pre-World War I Inflation: The Fisher Effect and the Gold Standard," Quarterly Journal of Economics 106: 3 (August) , pp. 815-36 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000608.html

J. Bradford DeLong and Lawrence H. Summers (1991), "Equipment Investment and Economic Growth," Quarterly Journal of Economics 106: 2 (May), pp. 445-502 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000606.html

J. Bradford DeLong, Andrei Shleifer, Lawrence H. Summers, and Robert J. Waldmann (1991), "The Survival of Noise Traders in Financial Markets," Journal of Business 64: 1 (January), pp. 1-20 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000604.html

J. Bradford DeLong, Andrei Shleifer, Lawrence H. Summers, and Robert J. Waldmann (1990), "Noise Trader Risk in Financial Markets," Journal of Political Economy 98: 4 (August 1990), pp. 703-738 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000603.html

J. Bradford DeLong, Andrei Shleifer, Lawrence H. Summers, and Robert J. Waldmann (1990), "Positive-Feedback Investment Strategies and Destabilizing Rational Speculation," Journal of Finance 45: 2 (June), pp. 374-397 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000601.html.

Robert B. Barsky and J. Bradford DeLong (1990), "Bull and Bear Markets in the Twentieth Century," Journal of Economic History 50: 2 (June), pp. 1-17 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000600.html

J. Bradford DeLong (1990), "In Defense of Henry Simons' Credentials as a Classical Liberal," Cato Journal 9: 1 (Winter), pp. 105-122 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000599.html

J. Bradford DeLong (1989), "Facets of Interwar Unemployment," Journal of Monetary Economics 49:3 (September), pp. 800-802 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000596.html

J. Bradford DeLong, Andrei Shleifer, Lawrence H. Summers, and Robert J. Waldmann (1989), "The Size and Incidence of Losses from Noise Trading," Journal of Finance 44: 3 (July), pp. 681-696 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000592.html

J. Bradford DeLong (1988), "Productivity Growth, Convergence, and Welfare: Comment," American Economic Review 78: 5 (December), pp. 1138-1154 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000591.html

J. Bradford DeLong and Lawrence H. Summers (1988), "How Does Macroeconomic Policy Matter?" Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 1988: 2 (Fall), pp. 433-480 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000590.html

J. Bradford DeLong and Lawrence H. Summers (1986), "Is Increased Price Flexibility Stabilizing?" American Economic Review 76: 5 (December), pp. 1031-1044 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000586.html

J. Bradford DeLong (1986), "Senior's `Last Hour': A Suggested Resolution of a Famous Blunder," History of Political Economy 18: 2 (Summer), pp. 325-333 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000585.html

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D. Principal Non-Refereed and Academic Publications

J. Bradford DeLong (forthcoming 2008), "Two Months Before the Mast of Post-Modernism," in John Holbo, ed., Framing Theory's Empire (West Lafayette, IN: Parlor Press for Glassbead Books) http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/07/two_months_befo.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2007), "What Should We Think About When Refounding the International Monetary System?" in Richard Samans et al., eds., _The International Monetary System, the IMF, and the G-20" (London: Palgrave Macmillan) http://www.weforum.org/pdf/initiatives/IMCP_Berkeley_deLong_NBER.pdf

J. Bradford DeLong (2007), "Right from the Start?: What Milton Friedman Can Teach Progressives," Democracy: A Journal of Ideas 4 Spring http://www.democracyjournal.org/article.php?ID=6514

J. Bradford DeLong (2007), "A Graduate Teaching Note on Rietz (1988) 'The Equity Premium: A Solution' and Barro (2005) 'Rare Events and the Equity Premium' http://delong.typepad.com/print/20070213_note_barro_rietz.pdf

J. Bradford DeLong (2006), "Aftathoughts on NAFTA," Berkeley Review of Latin American Studies (Fall) http://delong.typepad.com/pdf/20061223_DeLong_Aftathoughts_on_NAFTA.pdf

J. Bradford DeLong and Susan Rasky (2006), "Twelve Things Journalists Need to Remember to Be Good Economics Reporters," Nieman Watchdog June 13 http://www.niemanwatchdog.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=background.view&backgroundid=0093

J. Bradford DeLong and Susan Rasky (2006), "Twelve Things Economists Need to Remember to Be Helpful Journalistic Sources" Nieman Watchdog June 13 http://www.niemanwatchdog.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=background.view&backgroundid=0094.

J. Bradford DeLong (2006), "How Not to Cover the Economy," Nieman Watchdog January 23 http://www.niemanwatchdog.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=showcase.view&showcaseid=32

J. Bradford DeLong and Martha Olney (2005), Macroeconomics 2nd ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill)

J. Bradford DeLong (2005), "Sisyphus as Social Democrat: A Review of Richard Parker, John Kenneth Galbraith," Foreign Affairs (May/June) http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20050501fareviewessay84312/j-bradford-delong/sisyphus-as-social-democrat.html?mode=print

Marco Becht and J. Bradford DeLong (2005), "Why Has There Been so Little Blockholding in America?" in Randall Morck, ed., A History of Corporate Governance Around the World (Chicago: University of Chicago) http://delong.typepad.com/pdf/Blockholding.pdf http://delong.typepad.com/pdf/Blockholding_figures.pdf

Stephen S. Cohen and J. Bradford DeLong (2005), "Shaken and Stirred," Atlantic Monthly January/February http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200501/cohen

J. Bradford DeLong (2004), "India Since Independence: An Analytic Growth Narrative," in Dani Rodrik, ed., Modern Economic Growth: Analytical Country Studies http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/Econ_Articles/India/India_Rodrik_DeLong.PDF.

J. Bradford DeLong (2004), "Rubin's Remarkable Achievement," American Prospect 15:2 February 1 http://www.prospect.org/print-friendly/print/V15/2/delong-b.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "Comment on James Stock and Mark Watson, 'Has the Business Cycle Changed?'" August 29 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/002087.html

Steven Dowrick and J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "Globalisation and Convergence," in Michael Bordo et al., ed., Globalization in Historical Perspective (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/Econ_Articles/Dowrick/GandC.PDF

J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "Bequests: An Historical Perspective," in Alicia Munnell and Annika Sunden, eds., Death and Dollars: The Role and Impact of Gifts and Estates (Washington: Brookings Institution) http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/Econ_Articles/Estates/DeLongEstatesMunnell.pdf

J. Bradford DeLong (2002), "Do We Have a 'New' Macroeconomy?" Innovation Policy and the Econony http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/Econ_Articles/Jaffe/new_macroeconomy.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2001), "International Financial Crises in the 1990s: The Analytics: November http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/macro_online/ifc.pdf

J. Bradford DeLong (2001), Macroeconomics (New York: McGraw-Hill)

J. Bradford DeLong (2001), "What Are Australia's Economic Prospects?" Reserve Bank of Australia http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/Econ_Articles/Australia_docs/Australia_prospects.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2000), "Sources of American and Prospects for World Economic Growth," in David Gruen, ed., The Australian Economy in the 1990s (Sydney: Reserve Bank of Australia) http://www.rba.gov.au/PublicationsAndResearch/Conferences/2000/DeLong.pdf

J. Bradford DeLong and A. Michael Froomkin (2000), "Speculative Microeconomics for Tomorrow's Economy," First Monday; also in Brian Kahin and Hal Varian, eds., Internet Publishing and Beyond: The Economics of Digital Information and Intellectual Property (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press) http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue5_2/delong/

J. Bradford DeLong (2000), "Overstrong Against Thyself: War, the State, and Growth in Europe on the Eve of the Industrial Revolution" , in Mancur Olson and Satu Kahkohnen, eds., A Not-So-Dismal Science: Development and the Political Economy of Institutions (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 138-167 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/pdf_files/Overstrong_(complete_draft).pdf

J. Bradford DeLong and A. Michael Froomkin (2000), "Review of Charles Ferguson, High Stakes: No Prisoners," Harvard Business Review January http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/econ_articles/reviews/ferguson.html

J. Bradford DeLong (1997), "American Fiscal Policy in the Shadow of the Great Depression", in Michael Bordo, Claudia Goldin, and Eugene White, eds., The Defining Moment: The Great Depression and the American Economy in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press) http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/000121.html

J. Bradford DeLong (1997), "America's Peacetime Inflation: The 1970s," in Christina Romer and David Romer. eds., Reducing Inflation: Motivation and Strategy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press) http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/pdf_files/Peacetime_Inflation.pdf

J. Bradford DeLong and Robert J. Waldmann (1997), "Interpreting Procyclical Productivity Movements: Evidence from a Cross-Nation Cross-Industry Panel," Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco Economic Review 1997:1 (Spring), pp. 33-52 http://econ161.berkeley.edu/pdf_files/Procylical_Productivity.pdf

J. Bradford DeLong (1996), "A Positive Program for Better Economic Growth," Parliamentary Brief (June) http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000659.htm

Carlos Ramirez and J. Bradford DeLong (1996), "Banker Influence and Business Economic Performance: Assessing the Impact of Depression-Era Financial Reforms," in Michael Bordo and Richard Sylla, eds., Anglo-American Financial Systems: Institution and Markets in the Twentieth Century (New York: Irwin), pp. 161-178 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000657.html

J. Bradford DeLong (1995), "Low Marx: Eric Hobsbawm's Age of Extremes" (Berkeley, CA, 1995) http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000651.html

J. Bradford DeLong and Lawrence H. Summers (1994), "Equipment Investment and Economic Growth: Reply," Quarterly Journal of Economics 109:3 (August), pp. 803-807 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000644.html

J. Bradford DeLong and Lawrence H. Summers (1994), "How Robust Is the Growth-Machinery Nexus?" in Mario Baldassari, Luigi Paganetto, and Edmund Phelps, eds., International Differences in Growth Rates: Market Globalization and Economic Areas (New York: St. Martin's Press) http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000641.html

J. Bradford DeLong and Barry Eichengreen (1993), "The Marshall Plan: History's Most Successful Structural Adjustment Programme," in Rüdiger Dornbusch, Wilhelm Nölling, and Richard Layard, eds., Postwar Economic Reconstruction and Lessons for the East Today (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press), pp. 189-230 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000640.html

J. Bradford DeLong (1993), "Very Long-Run Economic Growth, ca. 1870-1990," in Horst Siebert, ed., Economic Growth in the World Economy (Kiel: Institute for World Economics) http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000639.html

J. Bradford DeLong (1992), "J. P. Morgan and His Money Trust," Wilson Quarterly 16:4 (Fall), pp. 16-30 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000627.html

J. Bradford DeLong (1992), "Growth, Industrialization, and Finance," NBER Reporter (Fall), pp. 5-11 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000622.html

J. Bradford DeLong (1992), "Machinery Investment as a Key to American Economic Growth," in Mark Bloomfield, Margo Thorning, and Charls Walker, eds., Tools for American Workers (Washington, DC: American Council for Capital Formation) http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000626.html

J. Bradford DeLong and Richard Grossman (1992), "Excess Volatility on the London Stock Market, 1870-1990" (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Department of Economics) http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000625.html

J. Bradford DeLong (1991), "Did J. P. Morgan's Men Add Value?: An Economist's Perspective on Financial Capitalism," in Peter Temin, ed., Inside the Business Enterprise: Historical Perspectives on the Use of Information (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press for NBER), pp. 205-36 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000612.html

J. Bradford DeLong and Marco Becht (1991), "'Excess Volatility' in the German Stock Market, 1876-1990" (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Department of Economics) http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000610.html

J. Bradford DeLong (1989), "The 'Protestant Ethic' Revisited: A Twentieth-Century Look," Fletcher Forum 13: 2 (Summer), pp. 229-242 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000595.html

J. Bradford DeLong (1989), "Nassau Senior's 'Last Hour' and the 'Advances' Conception of Capital Revisited," History of Political Economy 21: 2 (Summer), pp. 309-310 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000593.html

J. Bradford DeLong (1987), "Review of N.F.R. Crafts, British Economic Growth during the Industrial Revolution," Journal of Economic History 47:3 (September), pp. 790-792 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000588.html

J. Bradford DeLong (1987), "Review of Bernard Elbaum and William Lazonick, The Decline of the British Economy," Journal of Economic History 47:3 (September), pp. 792-795 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000587.html

J. Bradford DeLong and Lawrence H. Summers (1986), "The Changing Cyclical Variability of Economic Activity in the United States," in Robert J. Gordon, ed., The American Business Cycle: Continuity and Change (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press for the National Bureau of Economic Research), pp. 679-719 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000584.html

J. Bradford DeLong and Lawrence H. Summers (1986), "A Comment on John Taylor's `Improvements in Macroeconomic Stability: The Role of Wages and Prices'," in Robert J. Gordon, ed., The American Business Cycle: Continuity and Change (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press for the National Bureau of Economic Research), pp. 667-675 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000583.html

J. Bradford DeLong and Lawrence H. Summers (1986), "Are Business Cycles Symmetrical?" in Robert J. Gordon, ed., The American Business Cycle: Continuity and Change (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press for the National Bureau of Economic Research), pp. 166-178 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000582.html

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E. Other Works Worth a Note

1. Weblog Posts

J. Bradford DeLong (2007), "Adagia, at the Corner of College and Bancroft, April 30 2007 12:00 Noon" April 30 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/04/adagia_at_the_c.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2007), "Is It Really Harder to Make the Case for Free Trade These Days?" April 30 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/04/is_it_really_ha.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2007), "Hedge Funds: Two-and-Twenty" April 25 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/04/hedge_funds_two.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2007), "Anti-Speech Situations" April 25 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/04/antispeech_situ.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2007), "Hedge Funds: Two-and-Twenty" April 25 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/04/hedge_funds_two.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2007), "On the Berkeley Energy Biosciences Institute" April 19 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/04/on_the_berkeley.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2007), "Journamalism Watch: Robert Kuttner Unfairly Trashes Robert Rubin" April 16 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/04/journamalism_wa_1.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2007), "How Supply-Side Economics Trickled Down..." April 10 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/04/how_supplyside_.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2007), "Journamalism Watch: Michael Gordon, Max Frankel, Fred Hiatt" April 8 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/04/journamalism_wa.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2007), "The Monetary Economics of China" March 22 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/03/the_monetary_ec.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2007), "Jacob Levy Hates People Who Are Intolerant!" March 11 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/03/jacob_levy_hate.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2007), "Un-Discourse Situations" March 11 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/03/undiscourse_sit.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2007), "Talking Past Each Other" March 1 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/03/talking_past_ea.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2007), "A Short Dialogue on Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company" February 22 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/02/a_short_dialogu.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2007), "Special Super Journamalism Barack-Atah-Adonai-Elohenu-Melech-Ha-Olam Shabbat Candle-Lighting Blogging!" February 9 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/02/special_super_j.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2007), "Applied Utilitarianism: The Price of Oranges in Berkeley" February 2 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/02/applied_utilita.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2007), "A Small Matter of Calculating the Value Function" January 28 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/01/a_small_matter_.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2007), "Long-Run Health-Care Cost Drivers" January 25 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/01/longrun_healh_c.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2007), "Keynes, Marx, Trotsky, Yglesias" January 16 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/01/keynes_marx_tro.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2007), "More Dred Scott v. Sanford Blogging for Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday Weekend!" January 12 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/01/more_dred_scott.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2006), "What Do We Owe Our Great-Great Grandchildren?: The Stern Review on Global Climate Change Once Again" December 30 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/12/the_stern_revie.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2006), "What Should We Be Doing About Global Climate Change?" December 20 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/12/what_should_we_.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2006), "Intellectual Garbage Collection: The Unreliability of Alan Reynolds" December 16 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/12/intellectual_ga.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2006), "Kelly Risk Analysis" December 13 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/12/kelly_risk_anal.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2006), "Partha Dasgupta Makes a Mistake in His Critique of the Stern Review on Global Climate Change" November 30 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/11/partha_dasgaptu.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2006), "32,100,000 vs 25,524,000: The Senate Vote" November 8 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/11/32100000_vs_245.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2006), "Were Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling Innocent?" October 2 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/10/were_ken_lay_an.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2006), "In the Matter of ENRON CFO Andrew Fastow: Some Stupid Questions from White Collar Crime Prof Blog, and Answers" September 24 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/09/some_stupid_que.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2006), "The Education of Wiliam Grieder (Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corpos?)" September 9 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/09/the_education_o.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2006), "Department of 'Huh?': George Bush Has Shifted Taxes, Not Reduced Them" September 8 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/09/department_of_h_2.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2006), "Introducing Serious, Permanent Bugs into Your Wetware" August 26 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/08/introducing_ser.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2006), "Payroll Employment and Household-Survey Unemployment" August 26 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/08/payroll_employm.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2006), "The Blue Car Is the Red Car: A Review of Feldman's _From Molecule to Metaphor" August 22 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/08/the_blue_car_is.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2006), "Discontinuities in Human History" August 9 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/08/discontinuities.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2006), "Today's History Lesson: The Middle East: History Doesn't Repeat Itself, But It Rhymes" July 30 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/07/todays_history_.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2006), "Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? (Michael Abramowitz of the Washington Post Edition)" July 30 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/07/why_oh_why_cant_16.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2006), "The History of the Shrill" July 27 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/07/the_history_of_.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2006), "Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? (Thomas Ricks of the Washington Post, This Is Your Clippings File Edition)" July 26 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/07/why_oh_why_cant_13.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2006), "Where Are the Heirs of Walter Lippman?" July 17 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/07/where_are_the_h.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2006), "Outsourcing: Time to Talk Back to the Media" June 27 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/06/outsourcing_tim.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2006), "I Am Concerned: Samuel Tanenhaus and Whittaker Chambers" May 27 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/05/i_am_concerned.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2006), "The Progressivity of the Tax Code Once Again" May 26 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/05/pwogwessivity_o.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2006), "Greg Mankiw Criticizes Lieberman, Bush, and Krugman" May 22 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/05/greg_mankiw_cri.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2006), "Recurrence: The Revolt of the Netherlands and the Insurgency in Iraq" March 9, 2006 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/03/recurrence.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2006), "Dark Matter: Global Imbalances" February 26, 2006 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/02/dark_matter.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2005), "A Platonic Dialogue on Journalistic Fairness, the Internet, Judy Miller Sourcing Ethics, Cross-Potomac White-Collar Outsourcing, and Other Topics" December 21 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/12/a_platonic_dial.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2005), "A Lost Teachable Moment: James Ferguson on Zambia" October 25 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/10/a_lost_teachabl.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2005), "Dingbat Kabuki! (Yet Another Why-Oh-Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps Edition)" October 17 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/10/dingbat_kabuki_.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2005), "Grading the Greenspan Fed" October 4 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/10/grading_the_gre.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2005), "A Meditation on Twentieth-Century Political-Military History: The Causualties of the Red Army During World War II" October 2 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/10/a_meditation_on.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2005), "Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps?" September 27 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/09/why_oh_why_cant_10.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2005), "The Coming Dollar Crisis?" September 15 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/09/the_coming_doll.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2005), "History, Politics, and Moral Philosophy: Explanation and Justification" August 24 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/08/history_politic.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2005), "John McGowan Seeks a Guide for the Perplexed" August 2 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/08/john_mcgowan_se.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2005), "Tim Burke Critiques Jared Diamond" July 29 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/07/tim_burke_criti.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2005), "Two Months Before the Mast of Post-Modernism" July 15 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/07/two_months_befo.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2005), "Justifications for the Long-Run Productivity Growth Forecasts in the Trustees' Reports" March 25 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/03/justifications_.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2005), "A Positive Program for Social Security" March 17 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/03/a_positive_prog.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2005), "Dogs vs. Cats, State vs. Treasury, Diplomats vs. Economists" February 28 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2005-3_archives/000447.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2005), "Thanks, Guys, About Twenty-Two Years Late" February 13 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2005-3_archives/000345.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2005), "Shame on the Washington Post" February 11 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2005-3_archives/000328.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2005), "Outline of a Social Security Deal?" January 30 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2005-3_archives/000256.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2004), "In Defense of the 1st and 4th Infantry Divisions" December 29 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2005-3_archives/000072.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2004), "A Letter to a Noble Friend on the U.S. Budget" December 29 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2005-3_archives/000070.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2004), "The Best of the Achaeans" December 6 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2005_archives/000031.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2004), "Academic Administrators" November 29 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2004-2_archives/000599.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2004), "Seth Stevenson Urges Us to Be Worse than Debbie" September 28 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2004-2_archives/000262.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2004), "The United States as a Developing Country during the Cold War" August 26 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2004-2_archives/000049.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2004), "On the Maximization of Social Welfare" June 30 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2004_archives/001114.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2004), "Harry Dexter White Was a Security Risk" June 7 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2004_archives/000967.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2004), "No Libertarians in the Seventeenth-Century Highlands" March 6 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2004_archives/000423.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2004), "What's Going on with the Economy?" February 23 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2004_archives/000353.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2004), "Administration 2004 Employment Projections One Last Time" February 18 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2004_archives/000320.html

J Bradford DeLong (2004), "What's the Antonym of 'White House Aide'?" February 16 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2004_archives/000303.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2004), "Department of Productivity Growth" February 10 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2004_archives/000267.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2004), "The Future of the Economy--The Next Year and the Next Decade" January 15 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2004_archives/000320.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2004), "Getting Robert Rubin's Job" January 14 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2004_archives/000021.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "Thoughts on Rubinomics" December 20 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/002921.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "A Shiver in My Spine: Chevauchee" December 3 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/002881.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "How Rich Is Fitzwilliam Darcy?" November 15 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/002730.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "The Grand Strategy of the United States of America" October 21 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/002543.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? Katie Hafner Covers George Gilder" October 19 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/002521.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "Eliot Abrams Identifies Himself with Joe McCarthy" October 17 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/002512.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "The 'Embedded Economy' Thesis" October 15 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/002483.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "A Non-Socratic Dialogue on Social Welfare Functions" October 9 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/002425.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "Where Are the Grownups in the Republican Party?" September 27 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/002336.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "More Thoughts on Jackson Hole" September 4 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/002132.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "The Erosion of Okun's Law" September 3 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/002121.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "Outsourcing Our Future?" August 19 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/002014.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "Exorbitant Privilege, or, How Worrisome Is the U.S. Trade Deficit?" August 16 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/001993.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "Output and Hours since 1960" August 15 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/001987.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "More Good GDP (and Productivity) News About the Second Quarter" August 15 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/001986.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "David Brooks Gets Burned by Trusting Charles Murray" August 14 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/001975.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "In the Shadow of Malthus" July 26 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/001849.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "Crude Life Expectancy Estimates" July 25 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/001846.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "Germany on the Eve of the Great Depression" July 24 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/001832.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "Utility, Stacking the Deck, and 'Original Appropriation'" July 17 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/001778.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "The Wetware of the Digital Divide" July 8 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/001723.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "A Platonic Dialogue on the Practice of Monetary Policy" July 7 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/001712.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "The Long, Dark Night of the Soul of the Monetary Economist: A Platonic Dialogue" July 7 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/001711.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "Better Futures that Might Have Been" July 7 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/001710.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "What Should College Professors Be Paid?" July 6 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/001699.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "Inequality by Race" June 27 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/001657.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "On Affirmative Action: Andrew Sullivan Is Wrong Again" June 27 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/001655.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "Equality of Opportunity" June 24 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/001635.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "'The Weaknesses and Foibles of Modernity': What Leo Strauss Means" June 7 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/001601.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "Notes: The Character of the Absolutist State in Western Europe" May 12 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/001453.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "Elementary Statistics and William Bennett" May 6 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/001415.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "No More Circulation of Elites! Brad DeLong Abandons the Bipartisan Center" May 3 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/001390.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "Uncle Milton: Notes" April 17 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/001309.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "Measuring Business Cycles" April 15 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/001302.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "Why Can't Reporters Do a Better Job?" March 26 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/001236.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "The Impact on Web Quality of Positive Feedback Linking Practices" March 16 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/001185.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "Ontological Breakdown" March 14 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/001178.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "Thoughts on the Republican Economists' Letter" February 25 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/000811.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "On Machiavelli's 'Letter to Vettori'" February 11 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/000006.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "Deficits and Interest Rates Once Again" February 5 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/001543.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "A (Very Short) Guide for the Perplexed: Understanding the Budget Deficit Debate" January 21 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/001453.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "It's Time for Glenn Hubbard to Quit as CEA Chair: He's Burned Out" January 7 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/001351.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2002), "Why Does the New York Times Publish This Dreck?: Abigail Thernstrom" December 18 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/001289.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2002), "Glenn Reynolds: Ideological Hack" September 18 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000879.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2002), "Greenspan 5, DeLong 2" September 14 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000860.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2002), "Strangeness Squared: Berkeley's New Media Center Starts Off on the Wrong Foot" September 10 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000839.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2002), "A Platonic Dialogue on Eldred v. Ashcroft" September 9 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000835.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2002), "Glenn Hubbard Keeps Pitching" August 22 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000557.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2002), "The Two Decade-Long Fall in America's Private Savings Rate" July 3 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000297.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2002), "Red Eyes" June 26 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000257.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2002), "William Grieder: Hoping that the Flaws in the U.S. Economy Throw a Lot of People Out of Work" June 22 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000187.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2002), "My Very, Very Allergic Reaction to Noam Chomsky: Khmer Rouge, Faurisson, Milosevic" June 17 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000155.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2002), "The Repeal of the Estate Tax" June 11 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000118.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2002), "World Population Distribution 2000" May 31 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000007.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2001), "The Advent of the American Recession" December 15 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/TotW/g39.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2001), "The Islamic Reformation" October 15 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/TotW/Islamic_reformation.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2001), "The Industrial Revolution in Cotton Spinning" September 15 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/TotW/g33.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2001), "Consumer Harm and the Microsoft Case:" September 15 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/TotW/microsoft.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2001), "Trade with Mexico" March 15 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/TotW/g46.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2001), "Unemployment in the 1990s" March 1 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/TotW/g45.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2001), "New Estimates of CPI Bias from Dora Costa" February 20 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/TotW/g20.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2001), "The World's Income Distribution: Turning the Corner?" February 15 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/TotW/world_income_dist.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2001), "Output Growth in the Late 1990s" February 10 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/TotW/g42.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2001), "Inflation in the Late 1990s" February 1 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/TotW/g40.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2001), "Investment and the Recession of 2001" February 1 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/TotW/g41.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2000), "To Tallahassee and Back" December 28 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/TotW/tallahassee.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2000), "Global Warming" August 15 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/TotW/g3.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2000), "Forecasting Inflation" July 15 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/TotW/g2.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2000), "NAFTA's (Qualified) Success" July 10 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/TotW/nafta.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2000), "East Asia's Recovery: Where Did All the Financial Crises Go>" June 21 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/TotW/ea_20006.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2000), "The End of the Inheritance Tax?" June 20 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/TotW/estatetax.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2000), "My Despair at American Land-Use Planning" May 15 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/TotW/land_use.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2000), "You're Working to Change It, Right Dad? Karl Marx, Modern Feminism, and the Bohemian Club" February 21 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/TotW/bohemia.html

J. Bradford DeLong (1999), "Dialing for Dollars: The Politics of Getting Funding for California Schools" October 15 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/Politics/dialing.html

---

2. Working Papers, Comments, and Notes

J. Bradford DeLong (2007), "The Domestic Macroeconomic Outlook" February 28 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/02/the_domestic_ma.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2006), "Comment on Christina Wang, 'Financial Innovations, Idiosyncratic Risk, and the Joint Evolution of Real and Financial Volatilities'" November 17 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/11/comment_on_chri.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2006), "Lecture Notes on the Equity Premium I" March 2, 2006 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/03/20060302_stocks.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2005), "External Imbalances and Adjustment in the Pacific Basin" September 22 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/09/external_imbala.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2005), "Statement on Social Security Reform" May 12 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/05/statement_on_so.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2005), "Some Simple Analytics for a 'Hard Landing'" April 20 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/pdf/hard_landing.pdf

J. Bradford DeLong (2005), "Asset Returns and Economic Growth: The Econ 1 Version" April 15 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/pdf/AREG-Econ1.pdf

J. Bradford DeLong (2005), "Returns, Growth, and the Funding of Social Insurance: A Note" April 14 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/pdf/note_rgsi.pdf

J. Bradford DeLong (2004), "Discussion of N. Gregory Mankiw and Matthew Weinzerl, 'Dynamic Scoring: A Back-of-the-Envelope Guide'" November 4 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2004-2_archives/000503.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2004), "The Ghost of Andrew Mellon" July 24 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2004_archives/001233.html

J. Bradford DeLong, Robert Greenstein, and Peter Orszag (2004), "Cleaning Up After the Elephants: Correcting Robert Samuelson's Review of Robert Rubin's Memoirs" June 3 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2004_archives/000931.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2004), "Comment on Montek Ahluwalia, 'Lessons from Indian Development'" March 10 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2004_archives/000457.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2004), "The Monetarist Counterrevolution" March 1 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2004_archives/000393.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "A Framework for the Economic Analysis of Technological Revolutions" December 3, 2003 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/002838.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "The Tasks of Economic Historians" September 20 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/002271.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "Notes: More Demand Curves that Slope the Wrong Way: Shleifer and Vishny on the Limits to Arbitrage" April 10 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/001289.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "Notes: Risk Aversion" April 10 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/001288.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "Teaching Shleifer's 'Implementation Cycles'" February 14 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/000033.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2002), "Financial Systems and Growth Prospects in Asia" September 27 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000923.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2002), "Vulgar Monetarism" July 24 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000419.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2002), "Macroeconomic Vulnerabilities in the Twenty-First Century" July 9 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000331.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2002), "Sustaining American Economic Growth: The Key Role of Education" July 8 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000324.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2002), "PEIS: Notes on Reform" June 6 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000087.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2002), "911--Can There Be an Economist's View?" McKenna Lecture at Claremont-McKenna College April 30 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/TotW/mckenna.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2002), "Simple Economic Animations Library" January 12 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/macro_online/simple_animations_library/sa_library.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2001), "The Next Industrial Revolutions: CITRIS Kickoff Speech" September 3 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/TotW/citris_kickoff.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2001), "Notes: Kennedy School Conference on Economic Policy in the 1990s" June 24 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/Econ_Articles/CIEP/comments_and_presentations.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2001), "A Historical Perspective on the 'New Economy'" June 15 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/TotW/Montreal_June_2001.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2001), "The Monetarist Counterrevolution" April 15 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/TotW/counterrev.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2001), "The New Economy: What Kind of a Historical Turning Point?" January 11 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/oped/virtual/phoenix.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2000), "Gore-Bush Debate vs. Michael Boskin" October 25 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/TotW/bush_gore/boskin_debate.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2000), "Main Themes of Twentieth Century Economic History" October 23 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/TotW/berk_fac_lunch/lunch_Berkeley.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2000), "How Fast Is Modern Economic Growth?" June 11 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/Comments/FRBSF_June11.html

J. Bradford DeLong and A. Michael Froomkin (1999), "Speculative Microeconomics for Tomorrow's Economy" November 14 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/OpEd/virtual/technet/spmicro.html

J. Bradford DeLong and Carlos Ramirez (1996), "Understanding America's Hesitant Steps Toward Financial Capitalism" http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000656.html

J. Bradford DeLong and Richard Grossman (1996), "The British Stock Market and British Economic Growth, 1870-1914" (Berkeley, CA) http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000655.html

J. Bradford DeLong (1995), "Farewell to Treasury" (as prepared for delivery, May 24) http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000647.html

J. Bradford DeLong (1994), "The Equipment Investment Boom" May 18 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000275.html

J. Bradford DeLong (1994), "Economic Consequences of the Balanced-Budget Amendment" (Washington, DC, April) http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000642.html

J. Bradford DeLong (1993), "Globalization and Wage Stagnation" (Washington, DC, August) http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000637.html

J. Bradford DeLong (1993), "The Macroeconomics of War and Peace: Comment," NBER Macroeconomics Annual, pp. 247-50 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000636.html

J. Bradford DeLong (1993), "The Deficits of the 1980s" June 17 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000432.html

J. Bradford DeLong (1993), "The Investment Tax Credit and Economic Growth" (Washington, D.C.: American Council for Capital Formation) http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000632.html

J. Bradford DeLong (1992), "Deficit Reduction and the Short-Run Macroeconomic Outlook" (as of December 1992) (Cambridge, MA, December) http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000631.html

J. Bradford DeLong (1990), "'Liquidation' Cycles: Old-Fashioned Real Business Cycle Theory and the Great Depression" (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Department of Economics) http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000602.html

J. Bradford DeLong and Lawrence H. Summers (1990), "Price Level 'Flexibility' and the Coming of the New Deal: A Response to Sumner," Cato Journal 9: 1 (Winter), pp. 729-735 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000598.html

J. Bradford DeLong and Lawrence H. Summers, "On the Existence and Interpretation of a 'Unit Root' in U.S. Real GDP" (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Department of Economics, 1989) http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000594.html

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3. Op-Eds

J. Bradford DeLong (2007), "The Secret Language of Central Bankers," Project Syndicate April 2 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/04/brad_delong_the.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2007), "Sailing into Harm's Way vs. the Dangerously Eloquent Jeff Faux," TPM Cafe February 27 http://www.tpmcafe.com/blog/coffeehouse/2007/feb/27/sailing_into_harms_way_versus_the_dangerously_eloquent_jeff_faux

J. Bradford DeLong (2007), "Wall Street Journal Econoblog: Arnold Kling vs. Brad DeLong on the New Deal" February 7 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/02/arnold_kling_vs.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2007), "Fearless Financial Markets," Project Syndicate February http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/delong56

J. Bradford DeLong (2007), "Inequality on the March," Project Syndicate January http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/delong55

J. Bradford DeLong (2006), "Saved by Taxes," Project Syndicate December http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/delong54

J. Bradford DeLong (2006), "Friedman Completed Keynes," Project Syndicate November 29 http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2006/11/29/story_29-11-2006_pg3_5

J. Bradford DeLong (2006), "A Man Who Hated Government: An Obituary for Milton Friedman" November 17 http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/11/17/milton_friedman/

J. Bradford DeLong (2006), "Has Neoliberalism Failed Mexico?" Project Syndicate September http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/delong51

J. Bradford DeLong (2006), "The Odds of Economic Meltdown," Salon August 3 http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2006/08/03/recession/

J. Bradford DeLong (2006), "Man's Fate/Man's Hope," Project Syndicate August http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/delong18

J. Bradford DeLong (2006), "The Invisible College," Chronicle of Higher Education Review 52:47 (July 28, 2006) http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/07/the_invisible_c.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2006), "The Box that Changed the World," Project Syndicate July http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/delong50

J. Bradford DeLong (2006), "The Tabloid Syndrome," Project Syndicate June http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/delong49

J. Bradford DeLong (2006), "The Myth of the Ownership Society," Project Syndicate May http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/delong48

J. Bradford DeLong (2006), "Bottom Dollar," Project Syndicate April http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/delong47

J. Bradford DeLong (2006), "Fiscal Apocalypse Now," Project Syndicate March http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/delong46

J. Bradford DeLong (2006), "Growth Is Good," Harvard Magazine February/March http://www.harvardmagazine.com/on-line/010678.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2006), "Europe's Free Riders," Project Syndicate February http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/delong45

J. Bradford DeLong (2006), "The False Promise of Private Pensions," Project Syndicate January http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/delong44

J. Bradford DeLong (2005), "Semi-Rational Exuberance," Project Syndicate December http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/delong43

J. Bradford DeLong (2005), "Eyes Wide Shut on Global Warming," Project Syndicate November http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/delong42

J. Bradford DeLong (2005), "For Whom America's Bell Tolls," Project Syndicate October http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/delong41

J. Bradford DeLong (2005), "America's Opposing Futures," Project Syndicate September http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/delong40

J. Bradford DeLong (2005), "Houses in the Air," Project Syndicate August http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/delong39

J. Bradford DeLong (2005), "Inviting the Avoidable," Project Syndicate July http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/delong38

J. Bradford DeLong (2005), "Europe's Neo-Liberal Challenge," Project Syndicate June http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/delong37

J. Bradford DeLong (2005), "Economists' New World Order," Project Syndicate May http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/delong36

J. Bradford DeLong (2005), "America's Interest-Rate Puzzle," Project Syndicate April http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/delong35

J. Bradford DeLong (2005), "In Search of Global Demand," Project Syndicate March http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/delong34

J. Bradford DeLong (2005), "Fiscal Follies in America and Beyond," Project Syndicate February http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/delong33

J. Bradford DeLong (2005), "Bush's Crash Test Economics," Project Syndicate January http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/delong32

J. Bradford DeLong (2004), "America's Coming Social Democracy?," Project Syndicate December http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/delong31

J. Bradford DeLong (2004), "Taming Voodoo Economics," Project Syndicate November http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/delong30

J. Bradford DeLong (2004), "Can High Oil Prices Be Good?," Project Syndicate October http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/delong29

J. Bradford DeLong (2004), "Doomsday for the Dollar?," Project Syndicate September http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/delong28

J. Bradford DeLong (2004), "What Sort of Ownership Society?" Nieman Watchdog August 30 http://niemanwatchdog.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=ask_this.view&AskThisid=49

J. Bradford DeLong (2004), "The End of Want?," Project Syndicate August http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/delong27

J. Bradford DeLong (2004), "Welcome to the Era of Incompetence," Project Syndicate July http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/delong26

J. Bradford DeLong (2004), "The European Economic Model Lives," Project Syndicate June http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/delong25

J. Bradford DeLong (2004), "Missing the Story of Structural Change," Nieman Watchdog May 21 http://niemanwatchdog.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=ask_this.view&askthisid=22

J. Bradford DeLong (2004), "The Great Illusion," Project Syndicate May http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/delong24

J. Bradford DeLong (2004), "The Coming Age of Interest," Project Syndicate April http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/delong23

J. Bradford DeLong (2004), "America's Schizophrenic Economy," Project Syndicate March http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/delong22

J. Bradford DeLong (2004), "Protectionism Rides Again," Project Syndicate February http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/delong21

J. Bradford DeLong (2004), "The Richest Get Richer," Project Syndicate January http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/delong20

J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "The American Mirror," Project Syndicate December http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/delong19

J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "Robert Rubin Revisited," Project Syndicate November http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/delong17

J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "Bush's Pseudo-Conservative Revolution," Project Syndicate October http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/delong16

J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "The Weak Dollar's Impossible Strength," Project Syndicate September http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/delong15

J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "The Fragile Roots of Productivity Growth," Project Syndicate August http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/delong14

J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "Blithe Unconcern," Financial Times July 29 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/001883.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "Herbert Hoover and the Stability Pact," Project Syndicate July http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/delong13

J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "The New New Thing in Economics," Project Syndicate June http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/delong12

J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "The Roots of Islamic Backwardness," Project Syndicate May http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/delong11

J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "Is the US Economy Still in Recession?," Project Syndicate April http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/delong10

J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "The Final Defeat of Thomas Malthus?," Project Syndicate March http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/delong9

J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "Lula in the Shadow of Chavez," Project Syndicate February http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/delong8

J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "Any Text. Any Time. Any Where," Wired January 30 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/001512.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "The View from 2023," European Wall Street Journal January 27 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/001488.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "America's Second Gilded Age," Project Syndicate January 25 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/001477.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "The Customizer Is Always Right," Wired January 20 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/001486.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "Atlas Slumps," Project Syndicate January http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/delong7

J. Bradford DeLong (2002), "(One Piece of) the Real Headline News: A 5-lb. Bag of Flour for $0.69" December 13 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/001260.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2002), "The Ghosts of Economics Past," Project Syndicate December http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/delong6

J. Bradford DeLong (2002), "America's Second Gilded Age," Project Syndicate November http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/delong5

J. Bradford DeLong (2002), "Neo-liberalism's Argentine Failure," Project Syndicate October http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/delong4

J. Bradford DeLong (2002), "Nobody Knows Anything: The Pace of Technological Change," Wired September 17 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000868.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2002), "The New German Problem," Project Syndicate September http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/delong3

J. Bradford DeLong (2002), "A Double-Dip Recession for the US?," Project Syndicate August http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/delong2

J. Bradford DeLong (2002), "Boomtime in Europe," Financial Times July 24 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000418.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2002), "Down and Out in the United States?," Project Syndicate July http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/delong1

Marco Becht and J. Bradford DeLong (2002) "Boardroom Truth and Beauty," Foreign Policy June 12 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000130.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2002), "Comparative Advantage," Chronicle of Higher Education Review June 12 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000129.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2002), "Profits and Productivity" June 5 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000084.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2002), "The Boom of the 1990s" March 30 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/TotW/pdty_2000s.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2002), "America's Rebound from Recession" March 27 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/macro_online/timely/weekly_handouts/handout20020327.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2002), "The Partnership Dance Between Business and Government" February 15 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/TotW/business_government_worldl.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2001), "George W. Bush's Tax Cut: The Economic Policy World Turned Topsy-Turvy," Fortune January 15 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/TotW/Bush_taxes.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2000), "Has the Federal Reserve Overdone It?" Fortune December 15 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/TotW/overdone.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2000), "How Much Credit Does Clinton Deserve for the Economy?" October 15 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/TotW/clinton.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2000), "The Impact of E-Business: A Historical Perspective" September 26 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/TotW/commerce2000.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2000), "The Two New Economies" Fortune August 12 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/TotW/two_new_economies.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2000), "What Have We Learned from the International Financial Crises of the 1990s?" August 1 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/TotW/learned.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2000), "The Meltzer Report," Worldlink May 10 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/TotW/meltzer.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2000), "The EITC and the Decade of 'Welfare Reform'," New York Times May 2 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/TotW/EITC.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2000), "The Coming End of American Triumphalism" April 11 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/TotW/end.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2000), "Is Big Bad?" Los Angeles Times April 9 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/TotW/microsoft_history.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2000), "What Is Truly 'New' About Our 'New Economy?' Fortune, April 4 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/TotW/fortune_parc.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2000), "Where Did Reagan's Tax Cut Go?" March 21 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/TotW/Reagan_taxes.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2000), "What Happened to the Phillips Curve?" New York Times March 9 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/TotW/phillips.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2000), "Marking My Beliefs to Market" March 3 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/TotW/mark_to_market.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2000), "Looking into the Encyclopedia," Fortune February 26 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/TotW/encyclopedia.html

Brad DeLong (1996), "A Wired Child," Harpers 292:1750 (March), p. 30 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000664.html

J. Bradford DeLong (1995), "Können Finanzmärkte zu liquide sein?: Gefahr der Verstärkung von Kurseinbrüchen," Neue Zuercher Zeitung: Elektronische Borse Schweiz December 5, p. B 14. (English version: "Can a Financial Market Be Too Liquid and Too Efficient?" (Berkeley, CA).) http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000654.html

J. Bradford DeLong and David Levine (1995), "Not a Capital Idea," San Francisco Chronicle December 5 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000653.html

J. Bradford DeLong (1995), "Ontological Breakdown, or, Pretending to Be a Help System", in Adam Engst et al., eds., TidBITS #291, August 21 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000648.html

J. Bradford DeLong and David Levine (1995), "Welfare Reform that Makes Poor Kids Poorer Will Never Pay Off," The Los Angeles Times October 15 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000652.html

[Ghostwritten] Lloyd M. Bentsen (1994), "Where Does the Deficit Come From?" Wall Street Journal (November 3 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000645.html

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4. Reviews

J. Bradford DeLong (2006), "The Childish Babbling of a Say: A Review of Foley's Adam Smith's Fallacy" September 22 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/09/the_childish_ba.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2004), "Doug Irwin on Free Trade, and on Baumol and Gomory" August 10 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2004_archives/001315.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2004), "Robert Skidelsky's Biography of John Maynard Keynes" August 6 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2004_archives/001297.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2004), "History as Tragedy: Kagan's vs. Thucydides's Peloponnesian War" January 6 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/002995.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "Review of Alan Furst, Dark Star" July 7 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/001715.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "Review of Brink Lindsey, Against the Dead Hand" March 22 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/001218.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "Review of Harry Turtledove, Over the Wine-Dark Sea" February 19 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/000380.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2002), "Review of Alan Blinder, _The Quiet Revolution: Central Banking Goes Modern" September 16 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000866.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2002), "Skepticism Toward Bjorn Lomborg, the Skeptical Environmentalist" August 27 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000778.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2002), "Review of Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed" August 13 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000486.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2002), "Dow 36000 Once Again" August 1 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000451.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2002), "More Thoughts on Stiglitz's _Globalization and Its Discontents" July 7 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000322.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2002), "Phillip Habib and Ariel Sharon: A Review of John Boykin's Cursed Is the Peacemaker"June 4 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000001.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2002), "Response to Skidelsky on His Biography of John Maynard Keynes" April 15 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/TotW/skidelsky-response.html

Marco Becht and J. Bradford DeLong (2002), "Review of Sanford Jacoby, Corporate Governance in Comparative Perspective: Prospects for Convergence" February 17 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/TotW/jacoby_cc_review.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2001), "The Last Development Crusade: Review of Bill Easterly's The Elusive Quest for Growth" August 15 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/TotW/Easterly_neoliberal.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2001), "Review of Richard Evans, Lying About Hitler May 15 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/Econ_Articles/Reviews/evans.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2000), "Review of Robert Wright, Non-Zero" May 20 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/Econ_Articles/Reviews/nonzero.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2000), "Review of Eric Tarloff's Face-Time" April 12 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/TotW/facetime.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2000), "China's Advocate: A Review of Ken Pomeranz's The Great Divergence" March 16 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/TotW/pomeranz.html

J. Bradford DeLong (1999), "Review of Joseph Williams, Style: Toward Clarity and Grace" December 15 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/econ_articles/reviews/williams.html

J. Bradford DeLong (1999), "Review of Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel" November 20 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/Econ_Articles/Reviews/diamond_guns.html

J. Bradford DeLong (1999), "Review of Charles Petzold, Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software" November 15 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/Econ_Articles/Reviews/Petzold.html

J. Bradford DeLong (1999), "Review of Haynes and Broder, The System" August 12 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/TotW/system.html

J. Bradford DeLong (1997), "Review of LaFeber, The Clash: U.S.-Japanese Relations Throughout History" November 17 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/Econ_Articles/Reviews/clash.html

J. Bradford DeLong (1994), "Notes on John Maynard Keynes, A Tract on Monetary Reform (London: Macmillan, 1924)" http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000643.html

J. Bradford DeLong (1989), "Review of Nicholas Spulber, Managing the American Economy from Roosevelt to Reagan," Journal of Economic History 49:3 (December), pp. 1058-1059 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000597.html

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5. Video and Audio

J. Bradford DeLong (2007), "The Federal Reserve and the Great Depression (Video)" March 16 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/03/the_federal_res.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2007), "In Praise of Keynes's Tract on Monetary Reform (Video)" March 14 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/03/in_praise_of_ke.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2007), "Forecasting Recessions Is a Fool's Game (Video) March 8 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/03/forecasting_rec.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2007), "How Rich Is Fitzwilliam Darcy? (Video)" March 9 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/03/how_rich_is_fit_1.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2007), "KQED Forum: The Federal Budget" February 7 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2007/02/just_crawling_o.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2006), "KQED Forum: Interest Rate/Federal Reserve Update" December 13 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/12/kqed_forum_9_am_1.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2006), "Aftathoughts on NAFTA: Video, Fifteen Minute Edited Version" October 20 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/10/aftathoughts_on_1.html

J Bradford DeLong (2006), "The Very Long Run (Video)" October 17 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/10/brad_delongs_mo_1.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2006), "The Pace of Technological Change: Nightly Business Report" October 27 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/10/tv_nightly_busi.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2006), "Supply-Side Follies (Video)" July 14 http://delong.vox.com/library/video/6a00c2251c6466f21900c2251d01f5f219.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2006), "Feckless Republican Leaders on the Budget Deficit (Video)" July 4 http://delong.vox.com/library/video/6a00c2251c6466f21900c2251c7cc5604a.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2006), "The Estate Tax Once Again (Video)" July 3 http://delong.vox.com/library/video/6a00c2251c6466f21900c2251c7823549d.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2006), "PAYGO (Video)" July 3 http://delong.vox.com/library/video/6a00c2251c6466f21900c2251c77b8604a.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2006), "A Primer on the Federal Reserve (Video)" July 3 http://delong.vox.com/library/video/6a00c2251c6466f21900c2251c74de8fdb.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2006), "Ben Bernanke and Inflation (Video)" June 8 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/06/morning_coffee__1.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2006), "Why Social Security Is a Good Thing (Video)" May 17 http://delong.vox.com/library/video/6a00c2251c6466f21900c2251c7d63f219.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2006), "Time for a Fiscal Stabilization Board to Deal with the Deficit? (Video)" May 13 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/05/morning_coffee__1.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2006), "The Latest Bush Tax 'Cut'" May 11 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/05/radio_marketpla_1.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2006), "Crossing the Rhine with Fire and Sword (Video)" April 30 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/04/morning_coffee__8.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2006), "The Great Illusion (Video)" April 28 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/04/morning_coffee__7.html

J. Bradford DeLong and Richard Schmalensee (2004), "Economics Roundtable: Presidential Economics" October 4 http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2004/10/index.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "Nightly Business Report: Chimera" December 18 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/002911.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "Nightly Business Report: Read Your Script!" October 21 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/002542.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2003), "Productivity Growth: Nightly Business Report" August 15 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/001984.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2002), "The Seasonal Pattern of Economic Activity: Nightly Business Report" December 30 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/001490.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2002), "The U.S. Is Lucky in Its Central Bank: Nightly Business Report" November 25 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/001131.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2002), "Go to College!: Nightly Business Report" August 21 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000551.html

J. Bradford DeLong (2002), "The Mysterious Incident of the High-Tech Boom Confined to the United States in the Nighttime: Nightly Business Report" June 24 http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000248.html

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6. Reading Lists

J. Bradford DeLong: Business Administration 130: Introductory Finance http://econ161.berkeley.edu/Teaching_Folder/BA_130_F96/BAonethirty.html

J. Bradford DeLong: Economics 101b: Intermediate Macroeconomics http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/08/syllabus_econ_1.html

J. Bradford DeLong: Economics 113: American Economic History http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2005-3_archives/000185.html

J. Bradford DeLong: Economics 115: Twentieth Century Economic History http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/TCEH/TCEH.html

J. Bradford DeLong: Economics 202b: Core Macroeconomics I http://econ161.berkeley.edu/Teaching_Folder/Econ_202a/1999_version/Econ_202a.html

J. Bradford DeLong: Economics 202b: Core Macroeconomics II http://econ161.berkeley.edu/Teaching_Folder/Econ_202b_F2000/Econ_202b_syllabus.html

J. Bradford DeLong: Economics 202c: Economic Growth http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/teaching_Folder/Econ_202c/Econ202c.html

J. Bradford DeLong: Economics 210a: Introduction to Economic History http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2006/10/introduction_ec.html

J. Bradford DeLong: Economics 210b: Topics in Economic History http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/teaching_Folder/Econ_210b/Econ_210bS2000.html

J. Bradford DeLong: Economics 236: Your Last Course in Macroeconomics: http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2003/01/economics_236_y.html

J. Bradford DeLong: European Economic History Reading Course: http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2002/01/european_econom.html

We have a new draft of J. Bradford DeLong and Konstantin Magin (forthcoming), "The U.S. Equity Return Premium: Past, Present, and Future," Journal of Economic Perspectives: http://delong.typepad.com/pdf/20070412_JEP_EP.pdf

It's good. It's not great yet. But we hope to make it great...

J. Bradford DeLong (2007), "Right from the Start? What Milton Friedman Can Teach Progressives," Democracy: A Journal of Ideas 4 (Spring). (A review of Lanny Ebenstein (2007) Milton Friedman: A Biography (Palgrave Macmillan • 272 pages • $27.95

http://delong.typepad.com/pdf/20070308_108-115.delong.FINAL.pdf

Comment on Stock and Watson: Hoisted from the Archives:

J. Bradford DeLong (2004) "Comment on James Stock and Mark Watson (2003), 'Has the Business Cycle Changed?' in Monetary Policy and Uncertainty: Adapting to a Changing Economy (Kansas City: Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City):

James Stock and Mark Watson's paper challenges things that I thought I knew, and tells me that I am going to have to rethink a bunch of issues--going to have to mark my beliefs to market once again.

To the extent that there has been a conventional wisdom among economic historians, the extraordinary moderation of the business cycle--the reduction in the size of swings in the unemployment rate, and in the variance of annual output growth--has been due to very important learning about how to better conduct monetary policy. Christina Romer has been the most powerful advocate of this line of narrative. And this has been what I have taught my students over the past several years.

The founding of the Federal Reserve brought the possibility of an elastic currency, and of avoiding the great liquidity catastrophes that afflicted the U.S. in the late nineteenth century. The silver-agitation crises of the 1890s, the great crash of 1873 when British investors grew nervous about the "crony capitalism" of America (a crisis with remarkable similarities to the 1997-1998 East Asian crisis), the Panic of 1907 (mitigated by J.P. Morgan's getting the New York Clearing House to expand the effective money supply via printing Clearing House Loan Certificates, and then cramming them down the throats by telling banks that they would incur his permanent displeasure if they did not accept them as valid and liquid instruments).

But the Fed's performance in its first two decades was not impressive. The disaster of the Great Depression brought further institutional changes. The coming of deposit insurance to avoid the radical instability of the money multiplier that was such a powerful features of the Great Depression in America. Keen awareness of the dangers of, as Milton Friedman's teachers put it, "unbalanced deflation." The role of fiscal policy when short-term safe interest rates are near their zero nominal bound floor and yet risk, default, and term premiums remain high. Before World War II an economic disaster of the magnitude of the Great Depression was always a live possibility. With the institutional and organizational changes, since World War II a macroeconomic disaster of the magnitude of the Great Depression is--well, before the recent Japanese experience, I would have said impossible.

Nevertheless, when you compare the pre-Great Depression to the post-World War II period there is less of a reduction in the size of the business cycle than economists hoped or, in the case of Arthur Burns and many others, confidently expected. Improved credit markets allowed households to smooth their spending. Automatic stabilizers meant that incomes varied less than production. In his 1959 presidential address to the American Economic Association, Arthur Burns went as far as to say that deep recession--large spikes in the unemployment rate--were no longer a problem.

He was wrong. Look at 1975. Look at 1982-1983. In Christina Romer's interpretation, Arthur Burns was wrong because he did not recognize the developing stop-go nature of Federal Reserve policy. Most of the time the Fed worried about achieving maximum purchasing power. Some of the time the Fed worried about achieving price stability. While it was worried about achieving maximum purchasing power it successfully stabilized production, but at too high a level that allowed inflation to rise. As the late Rudi Dornbusch used to say, expansions in the U.S. before 1985 did not die of natural causes: they were killed by a Federal Reserve that had shifted to a mindset in which reducing inflation was job #1. Thus the first four post-World War II decades saw longer expansions, fewer recessions, but still substantial output variance driven by large inflation-control recessions. And the conventional wisdom has been that the remarkably good performance of the last two decades has been due to the Federal Reserve's greater success at maintaining its balance: at acting pre-emptively and maintaining an appropriate balance between price stability and maximum purchasing power, rather than careening from one objective to the other.

Now come James Stock and Mark Watson to challenge this belief. The reduction in output volatility is there, is real, is very large. (Although, as Larry Summers was saying in the shadow of Mt. Moran an hour ago, the fact that Stock and Watson's index of the size of the business cycle has fallen by 3/4 over a time period in which the average German unemployment rate rose from 2% to 8% makes one wonder whether the variance of output is what belongs on the left-hand side.)

But Mark Watson and Jim Stock look hard and find little sign that reduction in output volatility is due to changes in how the Federal Reserve reacts to economic circumstances. By process of elimination, they conclude that the reduction in the output business cycle is primarily due to luck and not to skill: primarily to smaller shocks hitting the American (and the other OECD economies) and only secondarily to better monetary policy.

This surprises me. This is a shock. I would have bet serious money that Stock and Watson's calculations would have come out the other way. I need to mark my beliefs about this to market. Clearly I have some serious rethinking to do before I give my "macroeconomic stability" lecture to my graduate students at the end of the semester.

But humans are, as cognitive psychology teaches us, really bad at changing their minds. We are really good at finding ways to explain away and ignore new information.

So let me now try to explain away and ignore Stock and Watson's results:

First, their idea of "policy" is limited to "systematic reactions by the Fed that change interest rates now and in the future in response to past changes in inflation and in economic growth rates." This is a very limited definition of "policy." For one thing, it leaves out much of what Christina Romer sees as harmful in pre-1984 policy: the fact that the Fed reacted in one way when it was worried about price stability, and reacted in another very different way to a similar economic situation when it was worried about maximum purchasing power. Stock and Watson's Taylor Rule framework can't see this at all. (Now it is true when Stock looks for evidence that such stop-go policy he fails to find it, but our econometric techniques are not very good at picking up such non-linearities.)

Second, it is not at all clear that the actual shocks to the economy have been smaller since 1984. Before 1984 we have the Vietnam War, the oil shocks of 1973 and 1979, et cetera. Since 1984 we have the stock market crash of 1987, the dot-com bubble and then the NASDAQ crash, the extraordinary near-panic of 1998 (which one low-ranking LTCM employee is supposed to have characterized as a nine-sigma shock: the universe will not last long enough for there to be an even chance of even one nine-sigma shock happening ever), 911, presidential warnings that all Americans are at risk of attack by Iraqi drone aircraft carrying weapons of mass destruction. These shocks are smaller than the earlier shocks in Stock and Watson's framework, but are they really smaller in reality?

Doesn't the swift reaction of the Fed to 1987, to 1998, to 2001--swift reactions that find no place in Stock and Watson's measures of "policy"--play a role in reducing the size of the business cycle? Doesn't the emergence of more private-sector willingness to speculate on stability as a result of confidence in the Fed reduce the magnitude of what Stock and Watson call "shocks"?

So my rationalization is that a lot of what Stock and Watson's framework calls "shock" is actually "policy". This is not a criticism, really: they have done a very good job. But it is a product of the limitations of our analytical tools.

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Responses to Comments:

First, let me thank everyone--Alice Rivlin and Anne Krueger, Bill Poole and Allen Sinai, Marty Feldstein and Larry Summers, John Berry and Chairman Greenspan--who has tried in the discussion to stiffen my backbone and restore my full and unblemished confidence in the conventional wisdom. But it is worth remembering that ex ante I would have bet serious money that Stock and Watson's calculations would have come out the other way. And it is still a shock to me that it did not.

Second, let me underscore Antonio Fraga's point. Any interpretation of recent events that points to a smaller magnitude of shocks to the world economy has to explain why things have looked so different--look like the shocks are bigger--from a developing-country standpoint.

Looking back at my career, I see many local analytical low points. But my personal global analytical nadir came in early 1994, when I wrote a memo for my Treasury boss saying that yes, the Bank of Mexico's policy was inappropriate and overstimulative, but that the magnitude of the policy mistake was small and there was no reason to expect it to generate a serious problem. Now I still think the Bank of Mexico's sins against the Gods of Monetarism in 1994 were small, were venial, not mortal. But the punishment was swift and awful. And that is hard to reconcile with the view of a placid, low-shock world economy.

Hoisted from the Archives. I wrote this back in 1995: Low Marx: A Review of Eric Hobsbawm's Age of Extremes:

Eric Hobsbawm (1994), The Age of Extremes (New York: Vintage: 0679730052) http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/asin/0679730052/braddelong00

Planet Hobsbawm

In the beginning was Karl Marx, with his vision of how the Industrial Revolution would transform everything and wash us up on the shores of Utopia. Marx saw the economy as the key to history: every forecast and historical interpretation must be based on the economy's logic of development. Sometimes--as in much of Eric Hobsbawm's previous work on the history of the nineteenth century--this functioned relatively well.

But sometimes it led to very bad results indeed. And when Marx and Engels's writings became sacred texts for a world religion called Communism, things passed beyond the absurd: the belief that the logic of development of the economy was the most important thing about society became entangled in the belief that Joe Stalin was our benevolent master and ever-wise guide.

Now it is over. The red stars of the Soviet Union no longer shine from the tops of the Kremlin towers at night. Radicals still seek Utopia, but they no longer think the road leads through the economy. Instead, they study culture--as if to change the world just by understanding it. It is difficult to see a future in which authors with the intelligence, industriousness, and audience of Eric Hobsbawm are disciples of Karl Marx in anything like the sense that Eric Hobsbawm is a disciple of Marx.

Now Eric Hobsbawm has written a history of the twentieth century, The Age of Extremes. It has by and large received good reviews: Stanley Hoffman in the New York Times Book Review; Eugene Genovese in the New Republic; Edward Said in the London Review of Books. But my reaction to The Age of Extremes was different. It struck me as history gone awry: a sketch of the twentieth century not as it has been lived here on earth but as it might have been lived somewhere else, on some "planet Hobsbawm" that might be found in one of those parallel universes often visited in Star Trek episodes, where what looks familiar at first glance turns out on close examination to be alien indeed.

Let me give an example: the last word of the book is darkness: it ends "one thing is plain. If humanity is to have a recognizable future, it cannot be by prolonging the past or the present. If we try to build the third millennium on that basis, we shall fail. And the price of failure, that is to say, the alternative to a changed society, is darkness." But a decade ago, when Hobsbawm finished an earlier book, Hobsbawm was optimistic: looking forward to a twenty-first century much better than the twentieth if nuclear war were successfully avoided.

What has happened in the past decade that has so darkened his vision of our human future?

The past decade has seen good news along a number of important dimensions: The environment is in better shape: the clean-up of the first world continues; the clean-up of the ex-Communist world has begun; and the third world is more aware of environmental degradation. Progress has been made in creating the international climate to guard against ozone depletion and global warming. Nuclear war is much less likely. China and India, more than one-third the human race, had their best economic growth decades in the 1980s.

In addition, many of the Communist régimes that ruled more than half the human race have fallen. Awful tyrannies have passed into history. Hundreds of millions have a chance for a more normal life--not spending six hours a day waiting in some commodity distribution line, not being spied on by one out of every ten of their eighbors, not seeing one out of every fifteen neighbors killed by the state's bullet, labor camp, or political famine.

Good news on the environment, on the danger of nuclear war, on Asian and Latin American (albeit not African) development, on the spread of democracy, and on the end of tyrannies have been the major developments of the past decade. If you were optimistic about the human future before the mid-1980s, you should be ecstatic today.

Yet Eric Hobsbawm is much gloomier than he was a decade ago.

There is no doubt that his gloominess is due to the end of European Communism. This is not to say that Hobsbawm still worships the post-1917 pre-1991 Soviet Union. The days are gone when he saw directives from Moscow as the logos of History speaking through the Party. He no longer judges "heroic" communists' obedience to Stalin's instructions to undermine Britain's World War II effort against Hitler (before June 22, 1941, that is), or claims "my International right or wrong."

Yet traces remain of the Eric Hobsbawm who was once a fanatic acolyte of the despotically-governed world religion of Communism. Judgments made then remain unexamined, or unsuccessfully reexamined, parts of the structure of his thought. It is as if a star--belief in the world religion of Communism--died, but light emitted before its death continues to reflect off planets and moons. The remains of Hobsbawm's commitment to the religion of World Communism get in the way of his judgment, and twist his vision.

On planet Hobsbawm, for example, the fall of the Soviet Union was a disaster, and the Revolutions of 1989 a defeat for humanity. On planet Hobsbawm, Stalin planned multi-party democracies and mixed economies for Eastern Europe after World War II, and reconsidered only after the United States launched the Cold War. On planet Hobsbawm, Hungarian--collectivized--agriculture is more productive than modern French agriculture.

Perhaps worst of all, on planet Hobsbawm modern democracy is not a good thing: elections are "contests in fiscal perjury" among voters with "no qualifications to express an opinion," that create governments that work only when they "did not have to do much governing." If there is a good word about really existing democracy--as a check upon official paranoia, as way of ensuring that people can lead a quiet life, or as a way of ascertaining the public interest--I missed it.

Cold-War Polemics

Let me briefly note one more belief that is false, but that was once part of the worldview of Stalin's acolytes:

The book has one single substantive sentence about the Korean War: "Shaken by the communist victory in China, the U.S. and its allies (disguised as the United Nations) intervened in Korea in 1950 to prevent the communist régime in the North of that divided country from spreading to the South." (p. 237). Now this simply will not do. It is not fair to tuck Kim Il Sung's army and Stalin's tanks into that little word, "spreading." The only other mention of Kim Il Sung's rule--264 pages later, in a discussion of the arts--calls it a "megalomaniac tyranny."

I find it odd that Hobsbawm chooses to describe North Korea's government by the colorless word "régime" in the context of the Korean War: If Kim Il Sung is a megalomaniac tyrant when talking about the arts, he should also be a megalomaniac tyrant when talking about the Korean War.

And it matters: a war undertaken to stop military conquest by a megalomaniac tyranny is a different thing from a war undertaken to oppose the "spread of a régime."

Hobsbawm's Cold-War polemics would not, by themselves, necessarily greatly harm the book: Readers could speculate whether the change in description of Kim Il Sung's government is Hobsbawm's delieberate and conscious avoidance of any hint that the Cold War might have been a struggle between bad guys and less-bad guys. They would argue over whether the change of Kim Il Sung's government from a "megalomaniac tyranny" to a "régime" as it enters the context of the Cold War is the result of unbreakable habits of doublethink created by decades of Communist Party membership.

But Hobsbawm's past as a Communist acolyte does much more additional damage to his book. It warps its themes. Hobsbawm's history has one major theme that takes up nearly forty percent of available space: Communism as the Tragic Hero of the twentieth century. Too many other aspects of the century are crammed into the corners left over, with the positive aspects of the terrible and glorious twentieth century--the rise of political democracy, the technologically-driven explosion of material wealth, and the creation of social democracy with its mixed economies and welfare states--allowed less than one-tenth of available space.

And this is the wrong focus for anyone's history. The proportions should be reversed.

The fundamental source of the distortion is that, for Eric Hobsbawm, World Communism was the Tragic Hero of the twentieth century. It was born in unfavorable circumstances in a backward agricultural country. Lagging behind historians' judgments, Hobsbawm believes that it by and large succeeded in its historical task of industrialization. And before its death, according to Hobsbawm Communism saved the west and what little there is of good in the twentieth century twice:

The victory of the Soviet Union over Hitler was the achievement of the regime... [of] the October Revolution.... Without [Communism] the Western world today would probably consist (outside the USA) of a set of variations on authoritarian and fascist themes.... It is one of the ironies of this strange century that the most lasting result of the October Revolution... was to save its antagonist, both in war and in peace--that is to say, by providing it with the incentive, fear, to reform itself after the Second World War.

There is some here that is true, but much here that is false. There is an enormous and eternal debt for the defeats of Hitler's armies at Stalingrad (1942), Kursk (1943), 2nd Kiev (1944), the Beresina (1944), the Vistula (1945), and Berlin (1945) that collectively broke the back of the Nazi war machine. But this debt owed to Stalin and Stalin's régime? No. It is owed to the people of the Soviet Union.

Before Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, Stalin decimated his army through purges, attacked Finland and adding it to Hitler's allies, and fed the Nazi war machine with raw materials it could not get through the British naval blockade. Had Stalin joined the allies in September 1939, he would have had three allied armies--Polish, French, and British--fighting on the continent of Europe, and a neutral Italy. Add in the role played by the Comintern in gleefully helping to destroy the democratic center that lay between Hitler and Weimar Communists in Germany, add in what Hobsbawm calls "Stalin's... extraordinarily inept interventions into military strategy," and conclude that Stalin made the Soviet people's task in 1941-1945 more difficult.

One of the major themes of twentieth century history must be barbarism and mass murder. This is a century in which perhaps 160 million civilians have been killed by governments--through execution, overwork in prison camps, terror-bombing with no proportional military effect, and mass famine induced as an aim of policy. Perhaps three quarters of these civilians have been killed by their own governments. Thomas Hobbes wrote that people pledged allegiance to governments to protect them from the fear of violent death. In the context of the twentieth century Hobbes was a utopian optimist: governments--Communist governments above all--have been the principal source of violent death.

Hobsbawm's book contains some eloquent passages describing the tyrannies of Stalin and Mao. But they are oddly disconnected from the narrative of the "Age of Catastrophe" that was the first half of this century. For Hobsbawm, this disconnectedness serves a purpose: it allows him to write as if Stalin's Soviet Union was part of the solution in the struggle against tyranny in the twentieth century, rather than a large part of the problem.

As odd--and indefensible--is Hobsbawm's attempt to find roots of what he calls the post-World War II "Golden Age" in the October Revolution. It is even harder to see post-war success--prosperity, democracy, the welfare state, and greater economic equality--as due to World Communism. Hobsbawm wants the October Revolution to have provided "[Capitalism] with the incentive, fear, to reform itself after the Second World War." But "capitalism" is not a live, breathing, intelligent creature that feels fear and thus undertakes to reform itself. Concepts like "capitalism" do not make history. Humans make history--even if not just as they please, but under circumstances dictated by the past.

The post-World War II order in the industrial west was made by the voters who chose the Trumans, the Adenauers, and the Attlees, and who set the parameters of the politically possible within which politicians seeking to maintain public support and provide for the general welfare could operate. A secondary role in making the post-World War II order belongs to the politicians themseles, who drafted, negotiated, and enforced the laws that created the mixed economies, welfare states, and social democracies of the post-World War II industrial and democratic west.

They did a good job.

In the United States, they would have done a better job had Communism not existed; Stalin's presence brooding offstage was not helpful. In western Europe as well, the subservience of national Communists to Stalin meant that social democracy could only assemble majorities by taking several steps to the right, and thus limiting the coverage and scope of the welfare state. In the developing world, countries that adopted the Soviet model did so at an enormous price.

Hobsbawm half-recognizes that he has misused his space. He muses on "the changes in human life... brought about [by economic growth in the twentieth century] all over the globe" and calls them "as profound as they were irreversible." He notes that the twentieth "century marked the end of the seven or eight millennia of human history that began with the invention of agriculture." He concludes that "[c]ompared to this, the history of the confrontation between 'capitalism' and 'socialism'"--the major theme of his book--"will probably seem of more limited historical interest."

Yet he has only eleven pages--257 to 268--for the century's economic revolution, and only two chapters--10 and 11--for the consequences of the end of the ten thousand year era in which most humans worked growing or making things with their bare hands.

Hobsbawm would have served himself and his readers infinitely better if he had cut by three-quarters the space devoted to Communism and its struggles, and devoted it to the central theme of twentieth century history. Call it the "elevator to modernity," the explosion in productivity seen in the economies of the industrial core. A first corollary is the "escalator to modernity": the third world today is far from levels of prosperity found in the industrial core, but for more than three billion people this century has seen the beginnings of the industrial, urban, educational, and communications revolutions. And a second corollary is the triumph of social democracy: the combination of political democracy, the mixed economy, and the welfare state.

The Elevator to Modernity

This year--1995--the U.S. Commerce Department will report that the gross value produced in the United States by the average employed worker is about $56,970. A century ago--1895--historical statistics tell us that the gross value produced, divided by the number of workers, is some $14,150 measured at 1995 prices (and $408 when measured at 1895 prices). The average American worker produces some four times as much as a century ago according to this set of numbers, which roughly answer the question: "What would 1895's production be worth if we had it to sell today?"

But we are most interested in a different question: roughly, how much better is today's economy than that of a century ago in making what humans need and want? And simply valuing last century's goods at today's prices leaves out the important fact that we, today, produce a much wider range and quality of goods than a century ago. Anyone taken back in time to 1895 would feel cramped and harassed by the absence of so many of the goods and services we take for granted: no airplanes, limited telephones, no communications media or compact-disk players, limited prepared foods, no automobiles and no asphalt or concrete roads, no electrically-powered consumer durables.

How much does the expanded range of choice made possible by the inventions--new goods and new categories of goods--of the past century matter? If you try to duplicate in the past the capabilities we have today in the past, you fail. The capability of your compact-disk player--that of listening to, say, Don Giovanni in the evening in your home at whim--could not have been provided two centuries ago at any price.

Let me use Alan Greenspan's guess that the invention of new goods, new kinds of goods, and new features for old goods boosts our true standard of living by one-half to one and one-half percent per year: combining the fourfold multiplication in measured output per worker with the one-fifth decline in hours and the increase in the scope and range of goods and products, America as a society today is at least eight and perhaps as much as twenty-three times as wealthy as America a century ago. The average American today has a "real standard of living" higher than 999 out of every thousand Americans alive in 1895.

Perhaps the nineteenth century saw a doubling of real standards of living in the industrial core. Perhaps there was some progress not just in technology but in standards of living in the previous eighteen centuries of the Christian era--although I would not place high odds that the median Frenchman in the age of Louis XIV had a higher standard of living than the median Athenian at the birth of Christ.

Nevertheless, the difference between economic growth in any previous century and economic growth in the twentieth century is a large enough quantitative to invoke not just one, but several qualitative transformations. It is like the difference between climbing a ramp, and riding up the World Trade Center in an elevator.

Why has the twentieth century been so different from all previous centuries? Market economies have the standard advantages of giving manufacturers and traders every incentive to use resources most efficiently, and which have the additional advantage of providing that "sunset" for relatively inefficient organizations. Enterprises that are relatively inefficient cannot pay their bills, and vanish. This automatic weeding-out of inefficient organizations that fail the test of the market is so lacking where state enterprises draw on the general taxation or money-printing power of the state.

But markets alone do not generate the tenfold multiplication of human productive potential that the twentieth century has seen. Previous mercantile capitalisms, like Classical Athens, Sung dynasty China, Mediterranean Islam circa 1000, northern Italy in the late middle ages, or Augustan Britain have been relatively bright spots in human history. But they are only pale shadows of what we have seen this century.

If I had to lay odds on the necessary additional factors, I would bet on two: first, democracy; second, technological density.

Before our century, a productive mercantile economy was a goose that laid golden eggs--but there was always the temptation to squeeze the goose a little tighter to pay for a slightly greater degree of courtly splendor or a slightly higher military effort on whatever was the current active conquest frontier. History is littered with the corpses of golden geese. The loss of control by a mercantile aristocracy to a military one, or to a despot, meant that the best days of the local mercantile economy were past.

Successful democracy changes the calculus. Courtly splendor and an overmighty military become of less interest and less urgency than keeping real wages, employment, and profits rising--for political parties that are either unlucky to catch an unfavorable wave of the business cycle or unskillful enough to disrupt economic growth vanish rapidly. Economic growth and market institutions certainly coexist with political despotism for a while, but there is good reason to doubt their long-term compatibility.

But we need "technological density" as well: research and development has to become an industry in itself, rather than an avocation of a few learned gentlemen reading papers before a Royal Society, to maintain the pace of invention and innovation that we now take for granted. Only the confluence of all three, market institutions, political democracy, and high technological density, could generate the economic revolutions of the twentieth century.

This is the proper central theme of twentieth century history: the pace of economic transformation--its causes, its implications for productivity, for the structure of employment, for the use of education, for the value of capital, for society and social order, for cultural events, for politics. This is where a truly Marxist analysis could have been extremely powerful. For if there was ever an age in which changes in the material conditions by which humans produce and reproduce the necessities and conveniences of their life dominate every other sphere of human activity, it is the twentieth century.

The upward jump of productivity and wealth is not confined to the core of the world economy. In 1987, 97 percent of households in Greece, not usually considered one of the world's industrial leaders, owned a television set. In Mexico there was one automobile for every sixteen people, one television for every eight, one telephone for every ten.

On our low estimate of the pace of growth in the twentieth century, some 44 countries today--from South Africa and Estonia to Botswana and Brazil, from Slovenia and South Korea to Japan and Switzerland--are as rich as or richer than the United States was a century ago. And the United States a century ago was a society with a level of wealth previously unseen in world history. On our high estimate of growth, not 44 but 76 countries are wealthier today than the U.S. was at the turn of the cneuty.

The world's distribution of wealth, today, is probably more unequal than at any time in the past: the explosion of wealth in the industrial core carried them far above the four-plus billion below. But when future historians look back at the third world in the second half of the twentieth century, they will say that this was a period in which three billion humans climbed onto the escalator to modernity.

Social Democracy

A second theme of any history of the twentieth century should be the triumph of democracy over a large chunk of the globe, and the consequent arrival of the developed welfare state with its web of support services and social insurance programs.

A look back at human history can be read to suggest that, unless the extraordinary wealth generated by the twentieth century has had some subtle impact on political dynamics, that our current democracies may not survive for even half a millenium. Those writing history four or five centuries from now might live under imperial régimes: emperors whose dynastic titles are based on keeping relative peace, ruling through aristocracies that negotiate semi-consent with the ruled. Imperial aristocracy may be in the future, as it has been in the past, the canonical form of human government.

Nevertheless, just as the Classical experience with semi-democractic and republican forms of government has always been of great interest to Europe's historians and politicians, so our experience with democracy in the industrial west--even if it ultimately ends--will be of as great interest to historians and politicians in the future. As Thucydides, Plutarch, Livy, and Sallust spoke to Niccolo Machiavelli as he tried to preserve the Florentine and to James Madison as he tried to establish the American Republic, so we should try to speak to our possible successors perhaps a millennium hence.

The rise of stable democratic governments has transformed not only how governments work but what they do. The industrial, democratic west has for the past half century been the realm of the social insurance state. Whether called "mixed economy," "social democracy," or "social market economy," the major business of government has become social insurance: progressive tax systems, income support, and benefit provision programs to partially counterbalance the extremes of economic inequality produced by the market distribution of income, and to create countries that are more middle-class societies.

Thus the past fifty years in the industrial, democratic west marks one of the few eras in history in which the distribution of wealth and economic power is to a degree the result of political choice, instead of the distribution of economic power largely determining political organization. Opposing pressures have balanced: populist calls for taking "unearned increment" from the rich balanced by an admiration for entrepreneurs and savers, and a realization that economic life is a positive sum game; compassion toward the poor balanced by resentment of those seen as trying to get something for nothing--even if the something is pitifully small by middle-class standards.

But the political and economic balancing act of social democracy appears possible only if economic growth continues. And the record of the twentieth century is that modern mixed economies are not stable, and require the most delicate management to avoid economic chaos.

Go to Wall Street. Look around. Wall Street is, in a very real sense, the investment planning department of the human race. Power to purchase commodities that owners of property have earmarked for savings flow into Wall Street and, in a complicated social and economic dance, are distributed to enterprisers and bureaucracies seeking permission to invest, develop new enterprises, or expand old ones.

The future becomes visible only slowly: one day at a time. Our technological capabilities, individuals' preferences for spending and saving, and natural resources change very slowly. Thus Wall Street should be a quiet place. Financial prices are the shorthand that Wall Street-considered-as-investment-planning-department uses to assess the desirability of investment projects. They should move glacially, as an extra day's information causes forecasters to revise so very slightly their image of the economy's bottlenecks twenty years down the road.

But this is not how Wall Street works. Today Mexico is fifty percent off--the valuation of all things Mexican, whether the cost of employing a worker, the value of a house, the worth of Mexico's currency, or the long-term profits to be gained from investment in a Mexican enterprise, is today fifty percent less than what it was in the late summer of 1994. If you had wanted to buy insurance against a fall in the peso in the late summer of 1994, you could have done so extremely cheaply. Few saw a peso collapse of the magnitude seen in the winter of 1994-1995 as possible; no one saw it as likely.

What has caused such a change? In part, financiers now believe that they were overoptimistic about the economic future of. In large part, however, financiers concluded that other financiers' downgrading of Mexico meant that Mexico would be starved of capital and short of international means of payment, and that as a result of this shift in mood the Mexican economy would perform more poorly.

This is an old story: a régime that bet a large chunk of its chips on rapid industrial development financed by capital inflow from world financial markets finds itself suddenly subject to a panic. In the United States, 1873 saw British investors lose confidence that American railroads and infrastructure were that day's equivalent of investments in the Pacific Rim. The largest investment house in the United States--that of Jay Cooke, politically well-connected industrial visionary who financed Abraham Lincoln's armies, and whose picture the Treasury Department's antique custodians will not release for me to hang in my office--went bankrupt.

Then there was no International Monetary Fund, no Bank for International Settlements, no Exchange Stabilization Fund, no one willing to guarantee the liquidity of the financial system that had funneled capital to America from Europe. As a result of the collapse of Jay Cooke and Company the City of London sneezed. The U.S. economy caught pneumonia. The share of America's non-agricultural labor force building railroads fell from perhaps one in ten in 1872 to perhaps one in forty by 1877--a seven percentage point boost to non-agricultural sector unemployment from this source alone.

Now we have a keen awareness of what is lost when a crisis of confidence is allowed to lead to the unraveling of a financial network. We have governments and institutions willing to take action. Unlike the United States in the 1870s, Mexico in the 1990s will not undergo anything near to a great depression.

Nevertheless, for at least three centuries capitalist financial markets have been working their erratic will. No one has a preferable alternative to allowing financial markets to do our collective investment planning: Wall Street's vision of where investment capital should be directed is infinitely better than the vision any group of planners. All would agree that financial markets require the most delicate political regulation and management. But it is rare that you find any two agreeing on exactly what form that political regulation and management should take.

There are a number of rules-of-thumb for economic management: Run a government surplus to keep the government's hunger for resources from draining the pool of resources for society's non-governmental investments. Use "automatic stabilizers"--decreases in tax collections and increases in social welfare spending in recessions--to cushion declines in employment and increases in poverty that occur when financial market shifts trigger depressions. Guarantee the safety and soundness of the credit system as a whole in emergencies, even though it rescues many who made overrash bets and provides some encouragement for future overrash. Guarantee not just the domestic but the international credit system.

Governments balance conflicting goals: high investment to boost productivity growth, stable prices so that private economic planning decisions focus on productivity rather than on exploiting quirks in the price-adjustment process, and high employment. The terms of the tradeoff are lousy. Election cycles tend to emphasize short-term as opposed to long-term performance.

And even good macroeconomic management is no guarantee that the average over the business cycle will produce the levels of employment or of income distribution that you want. Structural policies to level out the income distribution and maintain a high average level of employment face their own tradeoffs. Structural labor market policies are expensive; if you try to do them on the cheap you wind up with an unfavorable distribution of income, or a high level of employment; if you commit the appropriate level of resources to education and training, to job search assistance and employment subsidies, you will surely hear complaints--sometimes justified--that taxes are too high to sustain growth and investment.

Moreover, the entire system can lose forward motion completely. It is possible to mismanage a capitalist economy so badly as to bring a halt to essentially all economic growth. Consider Argentina, on a par with France and ahead of Italy in GDP per worker, agricultural productivity, and some areas of industry in 1950. Yet Argentina today may have no higher a standard of living than it had in the aftermath of World War II.

Given the importance of the issue, for the world economic system is more fragile than anyone would wish and has gone completely off its rails once in this century, government management of the business cycle and the economy would seem worth an extended and thoughtful treatment. It should, say, receive more space than a discussion of the policy dilemmas facing Soviet planners trying to build authoritarian socialism-in-one-country in the 1920s and 1930s.

But Hobsbawm is not equipped to provide such a treatment, and shows no sign of wishing to equip himself. Perhaps I feel the flatness and ineptness of his narrative more because of my own particular training. But I would have expected at least a little curiosity about, say, why the Great Depression was so much larger than any previous or subsequent depression. It was more than three times as deep and more than twice as long as any other. Yet all Hobsbawm has to say to account for the Greatness of the Depression is to chant words--speculation, over-production, credit boom--that have equal force applied to earlier and later recessions and depressions, of one-tenth the size of the Great Depression.

Conclusion

Eric Hobsbawm might complain that I have been unfair: that my real gripe is that I wish that he had written another, different book. He might say that I want a Book Written for the Ages, that reflects what historians in future centuries will find of greatest interest. And he is right, I do. By contrast, he might say, his book is "written by a twentieth-century writer for late-twentieth-century readers," to whom "the history of the confrontation between capitalism' andsocialism'...[s]ocial revolutions, the Cold War, the nature, limits, and fatal flaws of `really existing socialism' and its breakdown" are worth discussing at length. He is writing for readers who take the central theme of twentieth century history to be the tragical-heroic course of World Communism.

But the tragical-heroic course of World Communism is simply not the central theme of twentieth century history. For what audience is Hobsbawm writing his book? To what "late twentieth century readers" can we recommend The Age of Extremes as covering the pieces of twentieth century history they want and need to learn?

For new students seeking a genuine overview, the flaws, euphemisms, and silences arising from Hobsbawm's past political commitments are too mischievous. Hobsbawm's past political commitments lead him to believe both that (a) Kim Il Sung was a megalomaniac tyrant, and that (b) U.S. intervention to stop his extending his empire by conquest was a backward step for humanity. You cannot understand the twentieth century without finding an answer to the question of how as keen-eyed an analyst as Eric Hobsbawm can have held both these beliefs--without apparent strain--for more than forty years.

Yet Hobsbawm's book is constructed as if he wants to make it as hard as possible for a new student to figure out that this is an important question to ask.

For informed and experienced students seeking an overview of how the twentieth century changed the world, its focus is awry. Forty percent of space on the world religion of Communism and ten percent on the triple successes of social democracy--material prosperity, political democracy, and successful creation of middle-class societies--is the wrong balance. Ten percent on the world religion of Communism and forty percent on social democracy would be infinitely preferable

For students of Communism who believe that on balance it--a social movement that has, after all, contributed two of the twentieth century's three members of the I-killed-thirty-million club (Hitler, Mao, and Stalin), and at least four members of the I-killed-one-million club (Kim Il Sung, Pol Pot, Vladimir Lenin, Mengistu)--was not one of the brighter lights on humanity's tree of good ideas, the book will be profitable. But it will be profitable as an index of the impact decades of doublethink can leave on a good mind, as well as as an interpretation of history.

How many potential readers are left?

Time to start compiling a list of what I think is my best work...

Academic Papers:

• http://www.nber.org/papers/W1686 "Is Increased Price Flexibility Stabilizing?"
• http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/pdf_files/Baumol_Convergence.pdf "Productivity Growth, Convergence, and Welfare".
• http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/pdf_files/Noise_Traders_Main.pdf "Noise Trader Risk in Financial Markets".
• http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/pdf_files/QJE_Equipment.pdf "Equipment Investment and Economic Growth".
• http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/pdf_files/Princes.pdf "Princes and Merchants: European City Growth Before the Industrial Revolution".
• http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000635.html "Why Does the Stock Market Fluctuate?"
• http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/pdf_files/Keynesianism_Pennsylvania.pdf "Keynesianism, Pennsylvania-Avenue Style".
• http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/pdf_files/Peacetime_Inflation.pdf "America's Peacetime Inflation: The 1970s".
• http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/2003_archives/000121.html "American Fiscal Policy in the Shadow of the Great Depression".
• http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/archives/000757.html "Review of Robert Skidelsky (2000), John Maynard Keynes, volume 3, Fighting for Britain".
• http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/Econ_Articles/CIEP/CIEP_revision06102001.PDF "Between Meltdown and Moral Hazard: Clinton Administration International Monetary and Financial Policy".
• http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/Econ_Articles/macro_annual/delong_macro_annual_05.pdf "Productivity Growth in the 2000s".
• http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/BDK-BPEA.pdf "Asset Returns and Economic Growth."

J. Bradford Delong (2006), "Aftathoughts on NAFTA," Berkeley Review of Latin American Studies (Fall), pp. 16-21.

http://delong.typepad.com/pdf/20061223_DeLong_Aftathoughts_on_NAFTA.pdf

http://socrates.berkeley.edu:7001/Publications/newsletters/Fall2006/index.html

Dean Baker, J. Bradford DeLong, and Paul Krugman (2005), "Asset Returns and Economic Growth," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 2005:1.

Abstract:

We in America are probably facing a demographic transition—a slowdown in the rate of natural population increase—and possibly facing a slowdown in productivity growth as well. If these two factors do in fact push down the rate of economic growth in the future, is it still prudent to assume that the past performance of assets is an indication of future results? We argue “no.” Simple standard closed-economy growth models predict that growth slowdowns are likely to lower the marginal product of capital, and thus the long-run rate of return. Moreover, if you assume that current asset valuations represent rational expectations, simple arithmetic tells us that it is next to impossible for past rates of return to continue through a forthcoming growth slowdown. Only a large shift in the distribution of income toward capital or current account surpluses larger than those of nineteenth century Britain sustained for generations give promise for reconciling a slowdown in future economic growth with a continuation of historical asset returns.

• http://delong.typepad.com/files/bdk-bpea_20050629.pdf

J. Bradford DeLong (2002), "Review of Robert Skidelsky (2000), John Maynard Keynes, volume 3, Fighting for Britain," Journal of Economic Literature.

http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/Econ_Articles/Reviews/skidelsky_jel.html

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J. Bradford DeLong (2000), "The Triumph [?] of Monetarism," Journal of Economic Perspectives (Winter).

http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/Econ_Articles/monetarism.html

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J. Bradford DeLong (1999), "Introduction to the Symposium on Business Cycles," Journal of Economic Perspectives.

http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/Comments/bcsymposium_intro.html

http://delong.typepad.com/files/introduction-to-the-symposium-on-business-cycles.pdf

J. Bradford DeLong (1999), "Trying to Deal with Globalization," in D. Baker, R. Pollin, eds., Globalization and Progressive Economic Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/Comments/global_keynes.html

http://delong.typepad.com/files/dealing-with-globalization.pdf

J. Bradford DeLong (1999), "Seeing One's Intellectual Roots: A Review Essay on James Scott's Seeing Like a State," Review of Austrian Economics 12:2, pp. 257-64.

http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/Econ_Articles/reviews/seeing_like_a_state.html

http://delong.typepad.com/files/review-of-seeing-like-a-state.pdf

J. Bradford DeLong (1999), "Why We Should Fear Deflation," Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (Spring).

http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/Econ_Articles/deflation.html

http://delong.typepad.com/files/2014-12-16-why-we-should-fear-deflation.pdf

J. Bradford DeLong (1997), "Cross-Country Variations in National Economic Growth Rates: The Role of 'Technology'", in Jeffrey Fuhrer and Jane Sneddon Little, eds., Technology and Growth (Boston: Federal Reserve Bank of Boston), pp. 127-49.

http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/Econ_Articles/Growth_and_Technology/growthandtechnology.html

J. Bradford DeLong (1997), "America's Peacetime Inflation: The 1970s," in Christina Romer and David Romer. eds., Reducing Inflation: Motivation and Strategy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/pdf_files/Peacetime_Inflation.pdf

J. Bradford DeLong (1997), "American Fiscal Policy in the Shadow of the Great Depression", in Michael Bordo, Claudia Goldin, and Eugene White, eds., The Defining Moment: The Great Depression and the American Economy in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/pdf_files/Defining_Moment_Draft.pdf

J. Bradford DeLong (1997), "Review of Daniel Cohen's The Misfortunes of Prosperity," in the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston Regional Review 7:1 (Winter), pp. 25-6: http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/Econ_Articles/Reviews/misfortunes.html

Brad DeLong: The Misfortunes of Prosperity (12/21/1996): New England Economic Review (1997):

Cohen, Daniel. The Misfortunes of Prosperity: An Introduction to Modern Political Economy. Trans. Jacqueline Lindenfeld (from French). An expanded and revised edition of Les Infortunes de la Prospérité (Julliard, 1994). Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1995.

Daniel Cohen has written two very good books. He has managed to stuff them both into a very small space: the 134 8' x 5' text pages that make up his The Misfortunes of Prosperity: An Introduction to Modern Political Economy.

J. Bradford DeLong and Andrei Shleifer (1994), "Princes and Merchants: European City Growth Before the Industrial Revolution," Journal of Law and Economics.

http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/pdf_files/Princes.pdf

Robert B. Barsky and J. Bradford DeLong (1993), "Why Does the Stock Market Fluctuate?" Quarterly Journal of Economics 108: 2 (May), pp. 291-312.: Archive Entry From Brad DeLong's Webjournal

http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/pdf_files/Fluctuate.pdf

J. Bradford DeLong and Kevin Lang (1992), "Are All Economic Hypotheses False?" Journal of Political Economy 100:6 (December), pp. 1257-72.

http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/pdf_files/False.pdf

J. Bradford DeLong and Richard Grossman (1992), "Excess Volatility on the London Stock Market, 1870-1990" (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Department of Economics).

http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/pdf_files/London_Volatility.pdf

J. Bradford DeLong and Lawrence H. Summers (1992), "Equipment Investment and Economic Growth: How Robust Is the Nexus?" Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (Fall).

http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/pdf_files/Brookings_Equipment.pdf

J. Bradford DeLong (1992), "Productivity and Machinery Investment: A Long Run Look 1870-1980," Journal of Economic History 53: 2 (June), 307-24.

http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/pdf_files/JEH_Machinery.pdf

J. Bradford DeLong and Barry J. Eichengreen (1992), "Der Marshall-Plan--ein Strukturhilfeprogramm," in Rüdiger Dornbusch, Wilhelm Nölling, and Richard Layard, eds., Der Wiederaufbau Deutschlands nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg--Lehren für Osteuropa, no. 10 of Hamburger Beiträge zur Wirtschafts- und Währungspolitik in Europa (Hamburg).

J. Bradford DeLong and Andrei Shleifer (1992), "Closed End Fund Discounts: A Yardstick of Small-Investor Sentiment," Journal of Portfolio Management 18:2 (Winter), pp. 46-53.

J. Bradford DeLong and Marco Becht (1991), "'Excess Volatility' in the German Stock Market, 1876-1990" (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Department of Economics).

http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/pdf_files/German_Volatility.pdf http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/pdf_files/German_Volatility_Appendix.pdf

J. Bradford DeLong and Andrei Shleifer (1991), "The Stock Market Bubble of 1929: Evidence from Closed-End Funds," Journal of Economic History 52: 3 (September), pp. 675-700.

http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/pdf_files/Bubble_1929.pdf

Robert B. Barsky and J. Bradford DeLong (1991), "Forecasting Pre-World War I Inflation: The Fisher Effect and the Gold Standard," Quarterly Journal of Economics 106: 3 (August) , pp. 815-36.

http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/pdf_files/Pre-World_War_I.pdf

J. Bradford DeLong (1991), "Did J. P. Morgan's Men Add Value?: An Economist's Perspective on Financial Capitalism," in Peter Temin, ed., Inside the Business Enterprise: Historical Perspectives on the Use of Information (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press for NBER), pp. 205-36.

a href="http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/pdf_files/Morgan_Temin.pdf">http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/pdf_files/Morgan_Temin.pdf

J. Bradford DeLong and Lawrence H. Summers (1991), "Equipment Investment and Economic Growth," Quarterly Journal of Economics 106: 2 (May), pp. 445-502.

http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/pdf_files/QJE_Equipment.pdf

J. Bradford DeLong, Andrei Shleifer, Lawrence H. Summers, and Robert J. Waldmann (1991), "The Survival of Noise Traders in Financial Markets," Journal of Business 64: 1 (January), pp. 1-20.: Archive Entry From Brad DeLong's Webjournal

http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/pdf_files/Survival_Noise_Traders.pdf

J. Bradford DeLong, Andrei Shleifer, Lawrence H. Summers, and Robert J. Waldmann (1990), "Noise Trader Risk in Financial Markets," Journal of Political Economy 98: 4 (August 1990), pp. 703-738.

http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/pdf_files/Noise_Traders_Main.pdf

J. Bradford DeLong (1990), "'Liquidation' Cycles: Old-Fashioned Real Business Cycle Theory and the Great Depression."

http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/pdf_files/Liquidation_Cycles.pdf

Robert B. Barsky and J. Bradford DeLong (1990), "Bull and Bear Markets in the Twentieth Century," Journal of Economic History 50: 2 (June), pp. 1-17.

http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/pdf_files/Bull_and_Bear.pdf

J. Bradford DeLong, Andrei Shleifer, Lawrence H. Summers, and Robert J. Waldmann (1990), "Positive-Feedback Investment Strategies and Destabilizing Rational Speculation," Journal of Finance 45: 2 (June), pp. 374-397.

J. Bradford DeLong and Lawrence H. Summers (1990), "Price Level `Flexibility' and the Coming of the New Deal: A Response to Sumner," Cato Journal 9: 1 (Winter), pp. 729-735.

J. Bradford DeLong (1990), "In Defense of Henry Simons' Credentials as a Classical Liberal," Cato Journal 9: 1 (Winter), pp. 105-122.

http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/pdf_files/Henry_Simons.pdf

J. Bradford DeLong (1989), "Facets of Interwar Unemployment," Journal of Monetary Economics 49:3 (September), pp. 800-802.

http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/pdf_files/Eichengreen_Hatton_Review.pdf

J. Bradford DeLong, Andrei Shleifer, Lawrence H. Summers, and Robert J. Waldmann (1989), "The Size and Incidence of Losses from Noise Trading," Journal of Finance 44: 3 (July), pp. 681-696.

http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/pdf_files/Noise_Traders_Incidence.pdf

J. Bradford DeLong (1989), "The `Protestant Ethic' Revisited: A Twentieth-Century Look," Fletcher Forum 13: 2 (Summer), pp. 229-242.

http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/pdf_files/Protestant_Ethic.pdf

J. Bradford DeLong (1989), "Nassau Senior's `Last Hour' and the `Advances' Conception of Capital Revisited," History of Political Economy 21: 2 (Summer), pp. 309-310.

J. Bradford DeLong and Lawrence H. Summers, "On the Existence and Interpretation of a `Unit Root' in U.S. Real GDP" (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Department of Economics, 1989).

http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/pdf_files/Unit_Root.pdf