Sean Elley (6:37)

Not to go full Aristotle here.

Brad DeLong (6:39)

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

Sean Elley (6:45)

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 (7:36)

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 (8:10)

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 (9:04)

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 (10:51)

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

Brad DeLong (10:56)

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

Sean Elley (11:00)

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 (11:27)

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 (13:48)

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 (14:41)

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 (17:06)

Support for the show comes from Shopify. When you're starting a new business, it can feel like you're expected to do it all. Marketing, design and everything in between, even if you've never done half of it before. What you really need is a tool that helps you reach your goals without having to master every skill yourself. For millions of businesses, that tool is Shopify. Their design studio lets you build a beautiful online store that matches your brand style, letting you choose from hundreds of ready to use templates. You can also set up your content creation by using their helpful host of AI tools. And you can even create email and social media campaigns with ease and meet your customers wherever they're scrolling or strolling. Cy Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world. If you're ready to sell, you can be ready. With Shopify, you can turn your big business idea into a reality. With Shopify on your side, you can sign up for your $1 per month trial period and start selling today. @shopify.com Vox Go to shopify.com Vox shopify.com Vox. Support for the gray area comes from Bombas. The kids are back in school, vacations are over, and we're entering into the fourth fiscal quarter, the cozy quarter, which means it's time to slide into some bombas. They have all the comfy socks, slippers, T shirts and underwear you're going to need this fall. It's always underwear season for me, so I tried Bombas myself and I'm just telling you the truth. I have been on the Bombas sock and underwear train for a long time now. They hooked me up. I tried them. They're my favorites because they're more comfortable than the other brands I've tried and I'm just going to keep rocking them until I get out of the sock and underwear business. Anyway, for every item you purchase, Bombas donates one to someone in need. Plus they're available for international shipping to more than 200 countries. Even Wallace and Futuna. In case you're already thinking about holiday gifts for that cousin in Matau Utu, you can go to bombus.comgrayarea and use code grayarea for 20% off your first purchase. That's B O M b-s.com grayarea code gray area at checkout. Support for the gray area comes from Masterclass. We all have that someone in our lives that's hard to shop for. But everyone can benefit from learning something new this holiday season. You can give the gift of education with Masterclass. With Masterclass, you can learn from the best to become your best. Masterclass gives you unlimited access. Access to over 200 classes taught by the world's top business leaders, writers, chefs and more. With plans starting at $10 a month and billed annually, you get thousands of bite sized lessons across 13 categories that can fit into even the busiest of schedules. With Masterclass you could learn how to tell a great story with the Big Short and Moneyball author Michael Lewis, or apply the principles of improv with Amy Poehler. Or even design your dream home on a budget with Joanna Gaines. I just got my link to Masterclass. I have not tried it yet, but I cannot wait. And the first thing I saw was a class by Armin Van Buren, a world famous dj. You may not know this about me, but I am super into trance music and I'm all about it. I can't wait to try it and there's so many other ones that I'm looking forward to trying as well. Masterclass always has great offers during the holidays, sometimes up to as much as 50% off. You can head over to masterclass.com grayarea for the current offer. That's up to 50% off at masterclass.com grayarea masterclass.com grayarea. I am a million miles away from being an economist. You know, I, I do my best to understand what people like you are saying about these things, but you know, I'm, I'm always thinking about politics as the master variable because if you don't have a stable political order, nothing else matters, right? You can't do anything. You can't solve any collective action problems if your political system is broken. You write a lot about the 20th century, right? We certainly had a lot of political bumps in that century, but on the whole there was an amazing amount of progress given where we are now, given all the dysfunction. I mean, are you, are you bullish on the ability of the American political system to respond to the various crises we're facing and all the uncertainty we're facing and act in ways that do create stability and prosperity and something like a sustainable path Forward, as you say.

Brad DeLong (22:03)

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 (23:12)

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 (23:42)

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 (24:10)

Right.

Brad DeLong (24:10)

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 (25:40)

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 (26:15)

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 (27:03)

No, sir.

Brad DeLong (27:04)

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

Sean Elley (27:11)

It's coming for us all, I guess.

Brad DeLong (27:13)

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 (28:25)

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 (29:18)

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 (30:21)

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 (30:30)

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 (30:55)

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

Brad DeLong (31:02)

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 (32:01)

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

Brad DeLong (32:03)

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 (33:00)

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 (34:08)

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Brad DeLong (34:27)

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

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Sean Elley (34:39)

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Brad DeLong (35:19)

Oh hey. Welcome to gift wrapping. Whoa.

Zoey Saldana (35:21)

Zoe Saldana hey, can you wrap these please?

Brad DeLong (35:24)

Wow. IPhone 17s.

Zoey Saldana (35:26)

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

Brad DeLong (35:31)

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

Zoey Saldana (35:33)

Well, it's better than socks.

Brad DeLong (35:35)

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

Zoey Saldana (35:37)

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Brad DeLong (35:43)

Incredible.

Zoey Saldana (35:44)

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

Commercial Announcer (35:47)

Forget that.

Zoey Saldana (35:47)

Aunt Liz will be jealous.

Brad DeLong (35:48)

Sounds like my family drama.

Commercial Announcer (35:50)

Oh, I got it.

Zoey Saldana (35:51)

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

Brad DeLong (35:54)

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Sean Elley (36:31)

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 (37:09)

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 (41:56)

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

Brad DeLong (42:01)

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 (42:49)

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 (43:07)

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 (44:10)

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 (44:23)

Brad delong.substack.com Brad DeLong thank you.

Sean Elley (44:27)

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 area@vox.com 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 (45:58)

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Brad DeLong (46:03)

Yikes.

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Sean Elley (46:09)

Ouch.

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