Brad DeLong Interview

The Politics Guys

Michael Baranowski

Politics, News

4.5 • 772 Ratings

🗓️ 29 March 2017

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Mike talks to UC Berkeley economist Brad DeLong. Professor DeLong, who served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Clinton administration, blogs at 'Grasping Reality with All Tentacles' - one of the best economics blogs around. Topics they discuss include economic inequality, economic growth, why this is the best time ever to be poor (in the United States, at least), grifters and suckers, alien sinister forces, McDonalds, restaurant gift cards, how the best con artists are those who can con themselves, and lots more.Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/the-politics-guys/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening, wherever you are. And welcome to the politics guys with your host, Jay Carson and Michael Baranowski.
0:17.3	Welcome to the politics guys. I'm Michael Baranowski, a political scientist at Northern Kentucky University.
0:23.5	My guest today is UC Berkeley economist Brad DeLong, who served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury and the Clinton administration.
0:31.3	Now, in addition to authoring many highly regarded academic articles, Professor DeLong is an extremely active and engaging blogger.
0:38.8	His grasping reality with all tentacles blog is an amazing source of must-read articles
0:44.3	and trenchant analysis, and I highly recommend it.
0:47.7	Professor DeLong, welcome to the show.
0:49.7	Thank you very much for having you.
0:51.7	You know, I'd like to start by talking a little bit about your background and your work.
0:56.1	And I'm wondering, what drew you to economics as a profession and what issues or problems in economics do you find particularly interesting?
1:05.7	Well, I suppose first, my best friend from second grade on through high school, his father was an economist, and my father wasn't a lawyer.
1:16.9	And so he became a lawyer and I became an economist.
1:20.5	I suppose each of us seeing the other one's father as someone who was doing an excellent and interesting job and yet neither of us being
1:29.9	close up enough to see the warts and the scenes and so that switch has always struck me as
1:39.5	interesting there was also an American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in the early 1970s
1:50.7	where they had a computer on which they had I think Forrester's world dynamics
1:59.3	global ecological macro model up and running, and you could play with it.
2:06.9	And so I played with it, trying out various scenarios for like 14 hours over two days.
2:13.8	And then I was kind of hooked.
2:17.3	There were questions about whether I'd wind up being, you know, whether one wants to go for the natural sciences or the social sciences.
2:26.1	And I found both absolutely fascinating and simply somehow wound up, say, in economics,
2:36.6	because I also found I really liked history a huge amount,
	...

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