James Bradford DeLong

Based on Wikipedia: James Bradford DeLong

The Economist Who Changed His Mind

In 2019, Brad DeLong made a confession that stunned the economics world. After decades as one of America's most prominent neoliberal economists—someone who had literally helped write the policies that shaped global trade in the 1990s—he announced that he had been wrong. Not wrong about some obscure technical matter. Wrong about the fundamental political assumptions underlying his entire career.

"The world appears to be more like what lefties thought it was than what I thought it was for the last ten or fifteen years," he admitted.

This is not the sort of thing economists typically say out loud.

From Boston to Berkeley by Way of the Treasury

James Bradford DeLong was born in Boston on June 24, 1960. He came of age intellectually at Harvard, earning both his undergraduate degree in social studies in 1982 and his doctorate in economics in 1987. These were heady years for economic thinking in America. Ronald Reagan occupied the White House, Milton Friedman's free-market ideas dominated policy debates, and a generation of young economists was being trained to believe that markets, when left alone, generally produced optimal outcomes.

DeLong was brilliant. He taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, then Harvard, then Boston University. In 1991 and 1992, he held a fellowship at the National Bureau of Economic Research—the organization that officially determines when American recessions begin and end. By 1993, he had landed at the University of California, Berkeley, where he would spend the rest of his academic career.

But something happened almost immediately after he arrived in Berkeley that would change his trajectory. The Clinton administration came calling.

Inside the Clinton Treasury

From April 1993 to May 1995, DeLong served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy at the Treasury Department in Washington. This was not some honorary advisory position. He was in the room where it happened, working on some of the most consequential economic policies of the era.

The 1993 federal budget. The ill-fated healthcare reform effort that would eventually be revived, in different form, as Obamacare more than fifteen years later. The North American Free Trade Agreement, commonly known as NAFTA, which eliminated most tariffs between the United States, Canada, and Mexico. The Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which created the World Trade Organization.

These were the building blocks of what we now call globalization.

Working alongside DeLong was Lawrence Summers, who would later become Treasury Secretary under Clinton and a central figure in economic policymaking for decades. In 1990 and 1991, the two men had co-authored theoretical papers that provided intellectual justification for financial deregulation—the loosening of rules that had governed banks and investment firms since the Great Depression.

At the time, this seemed like progress. Markets were efficient. Regulation created unnecessary friction. Let capital flow freely, and prosperity would follow.

The Scholar's Life

After his Treasury stint, DeLong returned to Berkeley and became a full professor in 1997. But he was never the type of economist content to stay cloistered in academic journals.

He became one of the earliest and most prolific economics bloggers, writing about everything from monetary policy to media criticism on his site "Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality." He co-edited The Economists' Voice alongside Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz. He served on the editorial board of the Journal of Economic Perspectives, one of the most widely read publications in his field.

His academic work ranged across economic history. He studied noise traders—investors who make decisions based on irrelevant information rather than fundamental value—and how they create risks in financial markets. He examined how equipment investment drives economic growth. He wrote about European cities before the Industrial Revolution, about the Marshall Plan that rebuilt Europe after World War Two, about the stock market bubble of 1929.

In 2017, he co-edited a book called After Piketty, a collection of essays responding to Thomas Piketty's landmark work Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Piketty, a French economist, had argued that capitalism naturally produces ever-increasing inequality unless governments actively intervene. The book DeLong helped create was an attempt to integrate inequality into mainstream economic thinking—something the field had largely ignored for decades.

Slouching Towards Utopia

In 2022, DeLong published his magnum opus: Slouching Towards Utopia, a sprawling economic history of the period from 1870 to 2010.

The title comes from William Butler Yeats, but DeLong inverts the meaning. Where Yeats saw civilization collapsing toward some rough beast, DeLong sees humanity making painfully slow, unsteady progress toward a world of material abundance that previous generations could scarcely imagine.

And the numbers are staggering. In 1870, the vast majority of humans lived in conditions of grinding poverty that had changed little since the agricultural revolution thousands of years earlier. By 2010, the average human being had access to material resources that would have seemed magical to their great-great-grandparents. Global economic output increased by a factor of more than twenty. Life expectancy nearly doubled. Infant mortality plummeted.

Yet DeLong's book is not triumphalist. Its 605 pages document both the phenomenal growth in wealth and the persistent failure to achieve social justice. The subtitle might as well have been: "We got rich, so why are so many people still miserable?"

DeLong writes from a Keynesian perspective—that is, following the intellectual tradition of John Maynard Keynes, the British economist who argued during the Great Depression that governments must actively manage economies, spending money during downturns even when budgets are tight. This puts DeLong in a different camp from free-market purists who believe government intervention typically makes things worse.

The Great Reconsideration

Which brings us back to that remarkable 2019 confession.

DeLong had spent his career believing in what might be called "good incremental policies." Tweak the tax code here. Adjust a regulation there. Work across the aisle with reasonable Republicans to make marginal improvements. This was the Clinton-era playbook, and DeLong had helped write it.

But by 2019, he concluded that this approach was politically impossible. There were no longer Republicans willing to engage in good-faith negotiations over incremental reforms. The political system had become so polarized, so captured by ideological extremism, that the kind of technocratic problem-solving DeLong had believed in simply could not happen.

So what did he propose instead?

Medicare for all—a single government health insurance program covering every American, replacing the patchwork of private insurance, employer plans, and public programs. Funded by a carbon tax—a fee on greenhouse gas emissions that would simultaneously fight climate change and raise revenue. Combined with universal basic income rebates for poor Americans and massive public investment in green technologies.

This is not a moderate platform. It is, by American standards, radically progressive.

What makes DeLong's conversion so striking is his intellectual honesty about it. He did not claim he had always secretly believed these things. He did not pretend the evidence had suddenly changed. He simply said: I was wrong about the politics. The world works differently than I thought it did.

The Personal

DeLong lives in Berkeley with his wife, Ann Marie Marciarille, a law professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City who specializes in healthcare law. Given DeLong's late-career turn toward Medicare for all, one imagines some interesting dinner table conversations.

He remains prolific, writing his blog, contributing to Project Syndicate—a publication that distributes commentary to newspapers worldwide—and engaging in the endless debates that consume economics Twitter.

Why This Matters

Brad DeLong's intellectual journey mirrors a larger transformation in economic thinking.

For roughly forty years, from the late 1970s through the 2010s, a certain consensus dominated economic policy in wealthy democracies. Markets are generally efficient. Free trade benefits everyone in the long run. Financial deregulation promotes growth. Government intervention should be limited and targeted.

DeLong helped build this consensus. He provided theoretical foundations for financial deregulation. He worked to pass NAFTA and expand global trade. He believed, sincerely and with substantial evidence, that these policies would make the world better.

And in many ways, they did. Global poverty fell dramatically. Billions of people gained access to goods and opportunities their parents never had. The world economy grew at unprecedented rates.

But something else happened too. Inequality within wealthy countries exploded. Manufacturing communities were hollowed out. The financial deregulation DeLong had championed contributed to the 2008 financial crisis, which destroyed trillions of dollars in wealth and left millions unemployed. And the political systems of Western democracies began to fracture under the strain.

DeLong looked at this wreckage and concluded that his side had lost the argument—not because the technical economics were wrong, but because the political assumptions were naive. You cannot build good policy in a democracy without functioning politics. And the policies he had championed had helped create the dysfunctional politics that made future good policy impossible.

This is a hard thing for anyone to admit. It is especially hard for an economist, a member of a profession notorious for its confidence and its resistance to admitting error.

DeLong admitted it anyway.

The Continuing Argument

Not everyone agrees with DeLong's conversion, of course. Many economists continue to believe in incremental, market-friendly reforms. They argue that the policies DeLong championed were fundamentally sound and that the problems we now face have other causes—technological change, perhaps, or failures of education policy, or simple bad luck.

Others think DeLong did not go far enough. If capitalism naturally produces inequality, as Piketty argues, then perhaps no amount of policy tinkering can fix it. Perhaps more fundamental changes are needed.

But what makes DeLong worth listening to is precisely his willingness to follow evidence wherever it leads, even when it leads to uncomfortable conclusions about his own past work. In a world of tribal certainties and motivated reasoning, intellectual honesty of this kind is vanishingly rare.

He is still writing, still arguing, still trying to figure out what went wrong and what might yet go right. The blog continues. The books keep coming. And somewhere in Berkeley, one of America's most influential economists is still thinking about how we might, eventually, stop slouching and finally arrive at something like utopia.