What counts as progress?

Summary

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

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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.

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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.”

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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]

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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).

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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.

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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]

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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]

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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]

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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]

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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]

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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]

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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.

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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?

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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.

Transcript

[Sean Elley]

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[Sean Elley]

The 20th century is often referred to as the age of growth. We all know what that's supposed to mean wealth creation, innovation, better living standards for everyone, or nearly everyone. But now we're in the 21st century, the age of inequality and finance, capitalism and digital technology. We're still growing in some ways, but has all that growth made us happier? More free? Are we living more fulfilling lives? People seem more anxious, more divided, more distracted, more isolated, and less sure about what we're building toward as a society. So what do we make of all that angst? Are we still making progress, or is it just the wrong kind of progress? I'm Sean Elley, and this is the Gray Area. My guest today is Brad DeLong, an economic historian at UC Berkeley and the author of one of my favorite books, Slouching Towards Utopia. It tells the story of what he calls the long 20th century, the period from 1870 to 2010 when humanity broke free of scarcity and started believing that growth, and therefore progress, was destiny. But that era, Brad argues, is over. So what comes next? What can we still build? And what might progress look like now that the old story no longer fits? Brad DeLong, welcome to the show.

[Brad DeLong]

Thank you very, very much for inviting me.

[Sean Elley]

I think we need to start with a little bit of philosophical grounding, so I wanted to start with a big foundational question that I wouldn't ask anybody, but I know you can handle it. So here goes. What do you think progress is for? What are the goals we're pursuing, or should be pursuing as a society.

[Brad DeLong]

I had a political philosophy teacher, Judith Schlar, whose big shtick was the liberalism of fear, which was all about, we take other ideologies and social systems and we ask what we fear about them, and then the question is liberalism, or can liberalism be the answer to that, to what we're scared of? And so I think the first thing to start with progress and economic growth and so forth is the same thing. It's what do we fear about other systems? And the first thing we fear is the old Malthusian world in which two out of every five babies died before the age of five because they were sufficiently malnourished that their immune systems were compromised, and no drugs and no doctors. The world in which 1 in 10 or more of women bled out in childbed. The world in which you spend a lot of time every day thinking about how hungry you are or how cold you are or how wet you are. That simply poverty as making human lives quite miserable for very understandable reasons and quite short. And, you know, once we get out of that, then the question is, you know, really how, if we're no longer in a realm of absolutely dire scarcity pushing down on us, 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? And when do we get something like satiated and turn more or less completely, you know, to living, Figuring out how to live wisely and well, because we have enough material resources, enough control over nature, enough ability to organize ourselves, you know, productively and cooperatively, that all of a sudden pushing yourselves further into the world of he who dies with the most toys wins is not really a productive or a good thing for human beings to do. And so we're moving forward into that realm, and we see signs of that realm emerging that you want to ask, what am I principally lacking in my life? I don't see getting a lot more wealth as being a terribly high priority, but I live an exceptional life. I'm an exceptionally lucky person. Most other people, even most other people at my income level, would really, to some sense, wish that they either had more stuff or they had to work less hard in order to get it. So I think the answer is that as far as getting away from the realm of scarcity, we're not yet there. And we're not yet there for reasons that strike us as very good ones. And so it's premature to ask what this question is for, because a world in which we had more abundance would be a better world, clearly right now.

[Sean Elley]

Not to go full Aristotle here.

[Brad DeLong]

No reason not to go full Aristotle. This is a philosophically grounded podcast, right?

[Sean Elley]

But it does seem that maybe as a culture we've confused means for ends, money, status, owning stuff. This is how we measure success and progress, and it often is certainly at the individual level. I don't really know how much progress we've made. I also realize that that's an easy thing to say when you sit at a well fed table in a privileged society. So there's that. But you know what I mean. We have a society that is for the most part 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, but you know, I throw it out there nevertheless, and.

[Brad DeLong]

That there is spiritual health, there's somewhat different, is living wisely and well with the resources that you have and the question of whether in fact you are happy in your life. And actually for this, I would like to throw that question back to you as the Camus scholar who wrestles with these questions deeply and profoundly.

[Sean Elley]

Any political system worth its salt should at the very least create the conditions in which people can become more free and more fulfilled, whatever that happens to mean for them as individuals. Right. And I don't think we have a system now that's doing that effectively. I think we have a system now that is for sure. People have more choices, they have more things to consume. We have more things occupying our attention. We have never been more entertained, that's for damn sure. But are we getting more free in any meaningful sense? I don't think we are. I think we are accumulating more stuff and accumulating deeper and deeper psychological dependencies, but I don't think we're getting more free. But the illusion of freedom is certainly.

[Brad DeLong]

Very strong, that we're choosing not to be free or we're choosing to sacrifice our freedom for other things that regard us as good in the moment. Right. That to, you know, I suppose one of the first order problems is the brain hacking of our attention. Figuring out how to recover our brains and our attention is one big piece of current unhappiness. A second big piece of current unhappiness, as I understand it, is our feeling that even though we have substantial amounts of wealth and even though we have a society that offers a substantial amount of choice, still somehow we are dominated. Right? We are under the thumbs of things, we are being bossed around, although we're being bossed around not by individual bosses who are being nasty to us, but rather by huge social systems, you know, by bureaucracies, by markets, by governments, by militaries, all of which are keeping us from having the freedom to live our lives as we would wish to, because they're pushing us via positive and negative incentives in various ways to conform to them. And to some degree, this is a mere illusion, because this is simply a result of our having to live together with other people and all give each other elbow room, that what we regard as bureaucracies and markets that are oppressing us are to some degree simply making us conform and behave so we. We don't make other people miserable to other degrees. It is indeed a system. It is indeed systems that keep us a lot less free than we should be.

[Sean Elley]

I agree with that. You know what? And I promise I will pivot out of the philosophy seminar.

[Brad DeLong]

Oh, no, no. I don't think enough about philosophy over the course of.

[Sean Elley]

I should. I said a whole bunch of words in these last 10, 12 minutes or so. Let me just ask you very simply and very concretely before we do sort of move along here. When you look at the last 200 years, 100 years, 50 years, 20 years, 10 years, do you feel like we are building and progressing in a way that makes sense and is sustainable?

[Brad DeLong]

One way to look at the past century and a half is that every generation, our productivity, our ability to manipulate nature and cooperatively organize ourselves has doubled or more than doubled every single generation since 1870. And this has always taken the form of, you know, in 4/5 of the economy, things get maybe 25% better over the course of a generation, but things stay largely the same. In one fifth of the economy, a whole bunch of things are completely transformed. And that means that if you were in that one fifth of the economy, and if you were expecting to have a reasonable life doing the same old things in the same old way, you are in real, real trouble. And figuring out each generation how to deal with the 1/5 of people whose occupations are being completely upended in this current generation, as all existing structures, orders, and patterns are steamed away, as all that is solid melts into air, that figuring out how to deal with that has been the principal political, economic problem of humanity in each of the five generations since 1870. And we resolve it either very badly, moderately badly, orally, somewhat badly. I think right now we're resolving it moderately badly. We have done much better in The North Atlantic and the Post World War II generation, we have done it much worse during the great period from 1914 to 1945 in which we killed 80 million people. The process. But that dealing with that is what makes the road feel very, very rough. And then at the third level, there is the kind of the ennui, the existential angst, the what is it all for? You know, what indeed is a good life for a human being in a. In the age where you no longer can say that doing the will of God is what you're for. And we know what that is because the priests tell us what it is.

[Sean Elley]

All right, I am tempted to, to continue down this rabbit hole, but I want to get into your bread and butter, okay? Which is politics and economics and technology and history. And one of the things that makes you so interesting as a thinker is how macro you are. So I want to be macro for a minute here. When you look at the world right now, we are moving into an era of clean, cheap energy. There is a lot of tech innovation, but at the same time, trade is wobbly, politics feels unstable, democracies are backsliding. When you look at all that, what stands out to you? The headwinds or the tailwinds? And do you think that we, the US can, can start building again after years, years of stagnation?

[Brad DeLong]

I would say for the world as a whole, it's overwhelmingly tailwinds. You know that my friend Ying Yi Chian, you know, say that, did coffee with him three years ago, and he said that come 2100, when people are writing world histories, they may well say that the real hinge of history came with the death of Mao Zedong. That, you know, before then humanity had been. That at least the North Atlantic had been becoming prosperous and had been dinking around, but that the overwhelming bulk of humanity in Asia and Africa and in a good deal of Latin America was still very much stuck in dire, truly dire poverty. Truly, you're not sure where your 2000 calories a day are going to coming from next year poverty. And that starting in 1975, China, India and then the rest of the developing world truly got on the industrial and post industrial escalator. And that the successful management of that process, unsatisfactory as the political systems that Xi Jinping is now trying to construct in China, you call it Wilhelmine China, a rapidly industrializing authoritarian superpower, but that one, like Pre World War I Germany, is not making the transition to anything we might call as democracy, but instead rather the reverse. That as much as we dislike that politics, huge numbers of people are now being able to think about what it is to live wisely and well and are being given the material resources in terms of control over nature and access to the human division of labor for them to do that. And so they're reduced to kind of only having to worry about existential dread. What is my life really for? For. And that that is such an enormous achievement right now.

[Sean Elley]

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[Brad DeLong]

It would be hard to be bullish on the capacity of the American system to do reasonable things. We need an active and a working functional politics in order to deal with the fact that rapidly increasing technology is overturning the whatever economic, political, cultural arrangements and structures had been constructed during the previous generation are now going to change, are now going to be transformed. Right. That the steam power economy was not the same thing as the commercial imperial economy. And then the second industrial revolution applied science economy was not the steam power economy, the mass production economy was not the applied science economy, the globalized value chain economy was not the mass production economy. And now lo and behold, here we are heading into the attention info biotech economy at bottom blazing speed and we need to rework and rethink a hell of a lot of things. We need to use politics to do it.

[Sean Elley]

Brad, is the problem that. Well, there are lots of problems, but is maybe the problem or certainly one of the problems that are the technology on which our culture and economy and now politics really runs, that the technology is developing at a rate too quick for our politics to keep up, for our institutions to keep up. And the result of that is a lot of chaos and disruption that we, we can't navigate.

[Brad DeLong]

You know. Yeah, you play around with this and you say, well, gee, it took. We see as much change in underlying technology and thus an economy in 30 years as say Western Europe saw between 1000 and 1700, between the transition from feudal to imperial commercial economy. And yet politics from 3000-1700 in Western Europe was kind of no bowl of cherries.

[Sean Elley]

Right.

[Brad DeLong]

You have the 30 years war during which Germany gets depopulated by a factor of a third. And my sister tells the story about how she had to inform her Irish Catholic husband that the reason that they couldn't find any stained glass windows in all these cathedrals in England was because her and my Puritan ancestors had shot out the windows as target practice during the English Civil War and before, you know, it wasn't a bowl of cherries back then. But there does seem to be a feeling that as technological change is much more rapid, it is going to be producing bigger loser, bigger, bigger relative losers in the short term, in a relatively short period of time, you know, and they are going to be quite pissed, right, that the losers from the move from the mass production to the globalized value chain economy in the industrial north were quite pissed and still are quite pissed. And right now we are seeing an awful lot of white collar workers who live by their wits through their Words, all of a sudden suddenly finding that this generation, it is the turn of their economic sectors to be in the bullseye of creative destruction. And we can watch all of them, all of us reacting in various ways in real time right now.

[Sean Elley]

But is there a flip side to that? That, yeah, there's a lot of disruption and chaos on the front end, but maybe, but maybe on the back end everything will be better. I mean, as you know, there are a lot of, A lot of people who believe that that technology, especially AI, will save us, that it will somehow rescue growth and it's going to help us innovate our way out of all of these problems. If you listen to the show, and I know you do, you know, I'm not a techno optimist, but, but, but where do you land in this debate? I mean, do you have any faith at all that maybe our tech will save us?

[Brad DeLong]

For me personally, it's already a hell of a lot better, right? That is that 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, simply because. Although. Although, say it has become five times as easy to produce words as it used to be. And even though that madman Steven Johnson over at Google lm seems to be trying at the moment to use his programmers to produce AI replacements for podcasters.

[Sean Elley]

No, sir.

[Brad DeLong]

Yeah, he is doing it. Notebook LM does amazingly bizarre things with the entire. I know, I know, Getting remarkably close.

[Sean Elley]

It's coming for us all, I guess.

[Brad DeLong]

Well, it's not coming for us all, it's coming for fractions of what we do, you know, that even though there's five times as much stuff coming down the pike, and there used to be, and maybe 80% of it is AI, slop my ability to filter out the ideas that I would like to consider, the things that I think I ought to learn about these days as I pursue my kind of intellectual hunter gatherer lifestyle. Instead of gathering mushrooms and deciding which ones are poisonous now I spend my life gathering ideas, which is an interesting repurpose of my evolutionary heritage history. But that's another conversation completely. It's absolutely wonderful. It's absolutely miraculous. And moreover, when I try to get into deep reading mode these days, having an LLM with direct access to the entire Internet at my elbow right as I read on my screen is such a huge boon.

[Sean Elley]

I realize AI is, is, can do a lot of cool shit in a lot of ways. It's a, It's a mesmerizing tech. But tying this back to sort of where we started, right? Talking about the purpose of progress and what a good life actually consists of. We seem to be all in on AI right now. Is that going to lead to a kind of productivity or a kind of economy that is actually going to help create the goods and build the things that actually help most people live better lives? Or is it just going to make a handful of people super rich and just continue speeding us along this unsustainable path of inequality and disruption?

[Brad DeLong]

It's not just going to make a handful of people super rich. That. I mean, if a huge number of people are going to get access to a huge amount of capabilities to use information processing systems to do very large scale, very high dimension, very flexible functional form classification analyses at a scale almost unbelievable. We are going to be able to examine things and classify them and then take action based on those classifications to a degree we can barely, barely imagine. And that's going to be a huge addition to our ability to take in information and figure out what to do with it and figure out how to use the information we have to actually act in the world.

[Sean Elley]

Well, what would that mean for the firefighter or the school teacher or for the everyday person? Right. How's that going to create a better, happier for your world?

[Brad DeLong]

Well, the first thing it means is that we are going to have genual natural language interface to structured and unstructured databases. The drawback of course is people using it to hack your brain further to find easier and better ways of terrorizing you so that they can glue your eyeballs to the screen in order that they can then keep you doom scrolling and they can become a little bit richer by selling you ads.

[Sean Elley]

Do you think we're over investing in AI at the expense of, of of other potentially other things?

[Brad DeLong]

Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Clearly, you know, clearly there are an overinvesting in a particular kind of AI that I confess I do not. I understand why for we have to defend our platform reason for our platform monopoly profits, our profit monopoly flow. I understand why Google and Amazon and Facebook are spending the AI money. They are. And I understand how Microsoft is so tempted to take a run at them and spending on it. And I understand why a bunch of other people are saying maybe we can do something very interesting in this space by building on top of the foundation models. But above and beyond that, you know, an awful lot of people have moved over from cryptographs into AI grifts.

[Sean Elley]

Oh well, great. That, that seems great. Yeah.

[Brad DeLong]

Have. And so a huge amount of money and resources are going to be spent exploring this particular technological space in the same way that a lot of money and so forth was spent exploring earlier technological spaces and earlier bubbles. And in the sense that we wound up with three railroads from New York to Chicago when we only needed one, and so on and so forth. And at the end of it, we'll have an awful lot of data centers with very nice chips that can do lots of calculations in them, just as we ended the first Internet boom after 2000 with an awful lot of dark fiber that we then use to bring broadband.

[Sean Elley]

Support for the show comes from the podcast Democracy Works. The world certainly seems a bit alarming at the moment, and that's putting it lightly, and sometimes it can feel as if no one is really doing anything to fix it. Now a lot of podcasts focus on that, the doom and gloom of it all, and how democracy can feel like it's failing. But the people over at the Democracy Works podcast take a different approach. They're turning their mics to those who are working to make democracy stronger. From scholars to journalists to activists, they examine a different aspect of democratic life each week, from elections to the rule of law to the free press and everything in between. They interview experts who study democracy, as well as people who are out there on the ground doing the hard work to keep our democracy functioning day in and day out. Listen to Democracy Works wherever you listen to podcasts and check out their website democracyworkspodcast.com to learn more. The Democracy Works podcast is a Production of the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State.

[Commercial Announcer]

Sometimes the difference between success and failure comes down to one chance encounter, or following a counterintuitive instinct, or ignoring conventional wisdom to make a bold decision. Like when the founders at Palo Alto Networks wanted to redefine cybersecurity for the modern age.

[Brad DeLong]

Everybody thought we were crazy. Nobody would use the cloud for cybersecurity.

[Commercial Announcer]

Or when mobile gaming giant supercell could only rewrite the rules of the industry after failure in the company's formative stages.

[Sean Elley]

Many of the best things we've learned have actually come through failures.

[Commercial Announcer]

These are all examples of Crucible Moments, turning points in a company's journey that made them what they are today. Hosted by Sequoia Capital's Roelof ot, Crucible Moments is back for a new season with stories from Zipline, Stripe, Palo Alto Networks, supercell and more. Subscribe to season three of Crucible Moments. New episodes are out now, and you can catch up on seasons one and two at cruciblemoments.com on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to Crucible Moments.

[Brad DeLong]

Oh hey. Welcome to gift wrapping. Whoa.

[Zoey Saldana]

Zoe Saldana hey, can you wrap these please?

[Brad DeLong]

Wow. IPhone 17s.

[Zoey Saldana]

You splurged at T Mobile. You can get four iPhone 17s on them. It's the perfect gift for everyone.

[Brad DeLong]

I'm the worst. I only got my mom a robe.

[Zoey Saldana]

Well, it's better than socks.

[Brad DeLong]

So I have to trade in my old phone, right?

[Zoey Saldana]

No AT T Mobile there's no trade ins needed when you switch. Keep your old phone or give it as a gift.

[Brad DeLong]

Incredible.

[Zoey Saldana]

In fact, wrap up my old phone too for my Aunt Rosa.

[Commercial Announcer]

Forget that.

[Zoey Saldana]

Aunt Liz will be jealous.

[Brad DeLong]

Sounds like my family drama.

[Commercial Announcer]

Oh, I got it.

[Zoey Saldana]

I'll give it to my abuela. I'll take reindeer paper with hey, where are you going?

[Brad DeLong]

To T Mobile. Thanks Zoey the holidays are better. AT t mobile get four iPhone 17s on us. No trade in needed when you switch plus four lines for just 25 bucks a line with 24 monthly bill credits and four eligible port ins on essentials for well qualified customers. Auto pay + taxes fees and $35 device connection charge credits and impalance due if you pay off earlier. Cancel contact US Finance Agreement 256GB $830 required. Visit t mobile.com.

[Sean Elley]

If people are thinking about growth, if they're thinking about the future, if they're thinking about progress and technology and all the things we've been discussing here, if they're thinking about how we're going to navigate the next few decades of certain upheaval and change, what do you think they should be focusing on? What do you think are the questions we should be asking? What do you think are the answers we should be demanding from from policymakers and thought leaders and so on.

[Brad DeLong]

Well, as always since 1870, paying very particular attention to the people who would block the advance of technology and its use for human betterment and those who do it for both good and bad reasons. For bad reasons being to preserve whatever monopoly or current we're on top power and money flows they have for good reasons being that their lifestyles are becoming under immense and unfair pressure as technology puts them in the particular bullseye and figuring out how to successfully kind of compensate and repair them and their possibilities for life and opportunity and also moderate and satisfy their legitimate demands that the political system respond to them and respond to them properly. So on the one hand, there's just what is the playbook? Who has a justified beef against the way the system is currently evolving? And how do we validate and vindicate that justified beef, While do we not keep unjustified beefs from pretending to be justified? And that's been a steady drumbeat since 1870 or 1770. And we deal with that more or less badly, but we should focus on dealing with it. But the second is we are indeed not just experiencing another round of Shumpeterian technological disruption. We are experiencing one that strikes at the core of how we as a society make decisions and assess what is true and what is false. And that requires extra, extra special attention that back in the day, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison wrote about how people in Britain and elsewhere were very, very suspicious of a democratic republic on the grounds that they read their ancient. And they read about how it was portrayed, at least in our sources, as perpetual vibration between tyranny and anarchy, and that even a moderately bad oligarchy was better than what had emerged from experiments in high and radical democracy. But Madison and Hamilton said the science of politics, like all sciences, has seen very much and great improvement, you know, since those days. And they would talk about separation of powers, limited government, rights under law, judges appointed, dumb for, you know, during good behavior for life, all these representation, all these constitutional and institutional changes that made it possible to grab for all the benefits of democratic republican government in terms that it's not too friendly to oligarchy and inequality and very friendly to innovation and prosperity and freedom without getting the bad parts. The vibration between tyranny and anarchy, the sense in which, right now these do not seem to be holding as well as they've held in the United States over the past 250 years? And the question is, why not? How do we, once again, representatives who are regarded as genuinely representing the people, how do we get a public sphere that successfully manages to make people sufficiently informed as to what is actually going on with respect to what the government is and how what the government is doing is affecting them. There was a book called Spin, Precisely how an information environment that is more democratic in the small descents is also more prone to manipulation by someone who can figure out how to flood the zone. I think 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.

[Sean Elley]

Are you reasonably hopeful that we'll manage to do that?

[Brad DeLong]

No, no. I think that Madison and HAMILTON, Back in 1787, when they wrote the Federalist, were mostly talking their book and were mostly talking their book because they were Washington's people and Washington thought a democratic republic was worth trying to I don't think they really believed it. I'm confident Alexander Hamilton certainly did not. That Alexander Hamilton thought that we would likely to regret after the fact that we tried the Constitution, rather than making George Washington constitutional monarch and then probably having George Washington adopt Alexander Hamilton as his son and successor, much as Trajan adopted Hadrian. That's what I think Alexander Hamilton thought. But that's another conversation.

[Sean Elley]

If you had to pick one word to define the 20th century, you could certainly pick a lot. But certainly one word you could pick would be growth. A lot of growth. What word do you think will define the 21st century?

[Brad DeLong]

Let me give two one is growth only in what we used to call the third World rather than the first that it will still be a century of growth. The second would indeed be information that our shift from a world in which information that even claims to be reliable is relatively scarce to one in which information that claims to be reliable is so completely overwhelming that a great or not say information, say attention, that it is a century in which 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.

[Sean Elley]

I'm going to leave it right there. Brad, it is so much fun to talk to you. I always learn a lot. You are one of the smartest people that I read. And speaking of which, if people want to read your excellent stuff on Substack, where can they go?

[Brad DeLong]

Brad delong.substack.com Brad DeLong thank you.

[Sean Elley]

You're welcome. Foreign. I hope you enjoyed this episode. I love Brad. I hope you love Brad too. He is and has been for a long time one of my favorite people to talk to. You just never quite know where he's going to go and it's always an adventure. But as always, we want to know what you think of the episode. So drop us a line at the gray [e-mail] or you can you can leave us a message on our new voicemail line at 1-800-214-5749 and if you can spare a second, go ahead, rate review and subscribe to the podcast that helps us grow our show. This episode was produced by Beth Morrissey, edited by Jorge Just, engineered by Christian Ayala. Fact Checked by Melissa Hirsch and Alex Overington wrote our theme music. New episodes of the Gray Area drop on Mondays. Listen and subscribe. The show is part of Vox. Support Vox's journalism by joining our membership program today. Go to Vox.commembers to sign up, and if you decide to sign up because of this show, let us know. This episode was supported by a grant from Arnold Ventures. Vox had full discretion over the content of this reporting.

[Commercial Announcer]

We all have moments where we could have done better. Like cutting your own hair.

[Brad DeLong]

Yikes.

[Commercial Announcer]

Or forgetting sunscreen so now you look like a tomato.

[Sean Elley]

Ouch.

[Commercial Announcer]

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