The Gray Area with Sean Illing – “What counts as progress?”

Date: December 1, 2025
Host: Sean Illing
Guest: Brad DeLong, Economic Historian (UC Berkeley), Author of Slouching Towards Utopia

Overview

In this intellectually rich episode, Sean Illing invites economic historian Brad DeLong to grapple with one of the thorniest and most important questions of our time: What does “progress” actually mean in the 21st century, and are we still making it? They explore how our definitions of growth, prosperity, and freedom have shifted since the industrial revolution, the paradoxes of abundance and anxiety in contemporary societies, and the challenges facing political and technological systems in an age awash with information but short on shared purpose.

Defining Progress: Means vs. Ends

Philosophical Foundations

• DeLong begins by referencing his mentor Judith Shklar and her “liberalism of fear”:

  “We take other ideologies and social systems and ask what we fear about them, and then the question is, can liberalism be the answer to that, to what we're scared of?”
  [03:26, Brad DeLong]

• The primary fear, historically, was desperate poverty—diseases, high infant mortality, and misery due to material scarcity.
• Now, much of humanity has left “the realm of absolutely dire scarcity,” though not completely or universally.
• Once scarcity recedes, DeLong asks:

  “How much do we want to devote our time and our energy to making more stuff for us? And what kind of stuff do we want to make? …When do we get …satiated and turn …to living, figuring out how to live wisely and well, because we have enough material resources?”
  [05:38, Brad DeLong]

Happiness & Spiritual Health

• Illing challenges whether more wealth leads to more happiness or freedom:

  “We have a society that is full of people who have enough material goods to survive just fine, but also full of people who do not seem very happy. But I guess maybe now we're talking about spiritual health, which is not really the business of economics.”
  [06:45, Sean Illing]

• DeLong distinguishes between “spiritual health” and “living wisely and well.”

Does Material Progress = Human Progress?

Anxiety & Limitations of Choice

• Illing argues:

  “People have more choices… We have never been more entertained, that's for damn sure. But are we getting more free in any meaningful sense? …I think we are accumulating more stuff and accumulating deeper and deeper psychological dependencies, but I don't think we're getting more free.”
  [08:10, Sean Illing]

• DeLong notes modern unfreedom is less about “individual bosses who are being nasty” and more about “huge social systems—bureaucracies, markets, governments, militaries—all…keeping us from having the freedom to live our lives as we would wish to, because they're pushing us …to conform.”
  [09:04, Brad DeLong]

Historical Patterns in Growth and Disruption

• DeLong outlines a central paradox of recent history:

  “Every generation, our productivity, our ability to manipulate nature and cooperatively organize ourselves has doubled or more since 1870…in one fifth of the economy, a whole bunch of things are completely transformed. If you were in that one fifth…you are in real, real trouble.”
  [11:27, Brad DeLong]

• Each cycle of disruption creates political and social friction—sometimes resolved well (post-WWII), sometimes disastrously (early 20th century wars).

The Global Picture: Winners, Losers & Tailwinds

Global Growth Shift

• DeLong is “overwhelmingly” bullish for global progress since 1975:

  “The real hinge of history came with the death of Mao Zedong…China, India and then the rest of the developing world truly got on the industrial...escalator.”
  [14:41, Brad DeLong]

  • Billions moved from “truly dire poverty” toward prosperity, though authoritarian politics remain a concern.

Politics as the (Un)mastered Variable

• Illing warns that without “a stable political order, nothing else matters.”
• DeLong is not optimistic about America’s political capacity:

  “It would be hard to be bullish on the capacity of the American system to do reasonable things. …We need an active and working functional politics in order to deal with the fact that rapidly increasing technology is overturning the …structures that had been constructed…”
  [22:03, Brad DeLong]

Pace of Change & Political Lag

• Technological change now collapses centuries of transformation into a generation, amplifying both creative destruction and voter anger:

  “It is going to be producing bigger relative losers in the short term…they are going to be quite pissed…”
  [24:10, Brad DeLong]

Technology, AI, and the Future of Progress

AI: Savior or Siren?

• DeLong describes how AI has already transformed his own scholarly life, vastly amplifying his ability to process information:

  “My ability to actually keep track of all the literatures that I would like to keep track of is immeasurably better now than it was three and a half years ago…”
  [26:15, Brad DeLong]

• He’s wry about its effect on creative professions:

  “Maybe 80% of it is AI, slop. My ability to filter out the ideas that I would like to consider...it's absolutely miraculous.”
  [27:13, Brad DeLong]

AI’s Social Impact

• Will most people benefit—or just a “handful of people” getting even richer?

  “A huge number of people are going to get access to a huge amount of capabilities.... We are going to be able to examine things and classify them and then take action ...to a degree we can barely imagine.”
  [29:18, Brad DeLong]

• But there are real risks, especially the “hacking of our brains” for profit (“keeping you doom scrolling…” [30:55]).

Are We Overinvesting in AI?

• DeLong is skeptical about the huge financial and intellectual resources flooding into AI, especially by monopolistic tech giants:

  “Clearly there are overinvesting in a particular kind of AI that I confess I do not …understand why for… platform monopoly profits…”
  [31:02, Brad DeLong]

• He compares this to earlier bubbles like railroad overbuilding and dot-com excess: we will be left with “an awful lot of data centers with very nice chips...” [33:00]

What Should We Focus On?

Navigating Disruption with Justice

• DeLong argues for paying attention to:
  • Those who try to block technological advance for bad reasons (protecting monopolies) and those with legitimate grievances (whose ways of life are upended).

  “Figuring out how to successfully…repair them and …also moderate and satisfy their legitimate demands that the political system respond to them...has been a steady drumbeat since 1870 or 1770.”
  [37:09, Brad DeLong]

The New Crisis: Information & Attention

• The information environment is now a core site of crisis:

  “We are experiencing one [disruption] that strikes at the core of how we as a society make decisions and assess what is true and what is false…figuring out how to potentially fix that, both at the level of representation and at the level of information, should be the thing that smart people are thinking about hardest right now.”
  [39:00, Brad DeLong]

Outlook: Can We Solve This?

Skeptical Hope

• Illing asks if DeLong is “reasonably hopeful” of solving these challenges:

  “No, no. I think that Madison and Hamilton…were mostly talking their book… I'm confident Alexander Hamilton certainly did not [really believe in the 1787 Constitution].”
  [42:01, Brad DeLong]

The Defining Word(s) of the Century

• For the 20th century: “growth.”
• For the 21st century, DeLong offers:

  “One is growth only in what we used to call the third World rather than the first…The second would indeed be information…or not say information, say attention, that...the key to human history is not how the economy grew, but rather how humans learned to give attention to the things they needed to give attention to or to the things that bad actors wanted them to give attention to.”
  [43:07, Brad DeLong]

Notable Quotes Recap & Memorable Moments

• “Once we get out of that [world of scarcity], then the question is…how to live wisely and well, because we have enough material resources.”
  [05:38, Brad DeLong]

• “We are accumulating more stuff and accumulating deeper and deeper psychological dependencies, but I don't think we're getting more free.”
  [08:10, Sean Illing]

• “A huge number of people are going to get access to a huge amount of capabilities…We are going to be able to…take action based on those classifications to a degree we can barely imagine.”
  [29:18, Brad DeLong]

• “The key to human history [in the 21st century] is how humans learned to give attention to the things they needed to give attention to—or to the things that bad actors wanted them to give attention to.”
  [43:07, Brad DeLong]

Suggested Focus for Listeners

• Pay attention to those displaced by technological change—both their grievances and the political risk they represent.
• Demand policymakers address not only economic equity and disruption but also the underlying information crisis threatening democratic legitimacy.
• Beware of attention capture (“brain hacking”) as the new competitive battleground for well-being and autonomy.

Segment Timestamps

• [03:04] – Defining Progress & Escaping Scarcity
• [06:37] – Means vs. Ends: Are We any Happier?
• [11:27] – Technologies’ Disruptive Pattern Across Generations
• [14:41] – Global Growth’s New Geography
• [22:03] – Tech Change vs. Political Dysfunction
• [26:15] – AI’s Transformative Potential (and Perils)
• [31:02] – The Dangers of AI Investment Bubbles
• [37:09] – What Policymakers Should Really Be Focusing On
• [39:00] – Democracy, Truth, and the Attention Crisis
• [43:07] – The 21st Century: Growth, Information, or Attention?

Conclusion

This episode distills the deep uncertainties and transitions of our time. While the world has made almost unimaginable material progress, the questions of “progress for what,” the fate of freedom, the perils of distraction, and the future of democracy loom larger than ever. DeLong and Illing ultimately suggest that the next era will be defined not by material growth, but by who shapes the ever-shifting landscape of attention and truth.