 Hello everyone and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today I am speaking with Brad DeLong on his book known as J. Bradford DeLong, on scholar.google known as J. Bradford DeLong, but to most of us known as Brad DeLong, he is professor of economics at UC Berkeley. He and I went to grad school together at Harvard. He was one of the very first, if not the first, economics blogger, and he this year has out a long-awaited New York Times best-selling book, Slouching Towards Utopia, an economic history of the 20th century. Brad, welcome. Thank you. Thank you very much for having me and giving me an opportunity to sell books, as well as to talk to one of the most smart people and wide-ranging people I know about the economy, political economy and similar things. Thank you for that. Now if I look at the productivity and growth statistics for the late 19th century, they're highly fragmentary, they're imperfect. What do you think the numbers are showing us because they don't look that good? Is it that we don't trust the numbers or is it the numbers like that are what big progress meant back then? I think the numbers then are what big progress meant back then. And that, you know, I mean, John Stuart Mill in the 1870s could think and had some reason on his side that there actually had not been an increase in working-class real wages across the years from 1800 to his day. And a bunch of that is distribution, but a bunch of that is simply slow growth. You know, that things like the 2% per year income and productivity growth that we have grown used to, you know, since the coming of the Second Industrial Revolution, since the start of Bob Gordon's One Big Wave, that really is completely unprecedented. You know, there was nothing like that before. Not in the biggest efflorescences, not in the classic British Industrial Revolution. If we're trying to think about the period, say 1870 through to the 1920s, when you have some kind of modern consumer society, what's the best number for reflecting how big that change was? I would say that you got to look worldwide and that if you look worldwide and if you take account of the fact that world population has now hit, growth has now hit kind of more than 1% per year after 1870, that you had something like 1.3% per year for average world real income growth from 1870 on up to the eve of World War I worldwide. And you do what I do, which is say, let's take real income growth and add half of population growth and call that technology growth. Do that and you get something like 1.7% per year for the global rate of increase of quote, technology unquote from 1870 to 1913. You know, which is four times what the worldwide average was back in the century before 1870. It's a huge shift and it's one of the things that makes the modern world, as we know, even vaguely possible to imagine. If I'm trying to understand economic statistics and if I believe the 50 years starting in 1870, it's changed everything. But if I also believe the last 50 years in the West did not change everything. It gave us computers and internet, but it's had growth rates that are not probably too far from the earlier rates. Like what accounts for that difference? Should we then say it did change everything or it changed if didn't change everything, but it changed a lot of things. There is there is a difference between the growth rate of wealth and what that growth rate of wealth means. Right. You only go from having no indoor plumbing and no public health and so having half your babies die before the age of five to one in which infant mortality is extremely low and a genuine, you know, astonishing tragedy once. You only go from spending two hours a day at least thinking about how hungry you are and how it really would be nice to have more calories right now to not having to think about that, you know, kind of once. You know, you only go from having your children so malnourished that the adult heights of the boys are five foot three to the adult heights five foot nine or so on average you only do that once. You know, and we did that and we did that mostly in the 50 years after 1870 at least for the global north. We're doing equal things in terms of how much we're making sense, but with possible exceptions after 2006 slow down. But in some sense it means a great deal less because it doesn't impact our thinking and our family tragedies and our children so malnourished that they're badly stunted. That's such an obvious, you know, and this real way. You know, but there have been big changes right you want you want to talk about modes of production you want to be an orthodox Marxist and following not so much Marx but Friedrich Engels. And you say there's a huge jump between feudal society and the commercial societies of the gunpowder empires between 1000 and 1650 or so. And there's another equal jump between the gunpowder empire commercial societies and the steam power societies of 1870. But the second industrial revolution beasts of 1910 or so are a different animal to you as are the mass production societies of 1960 as was the global value chain society of 2000. And right now we're well into an info biotech economic revolution. The underlying technology driven forces of production are continuing to change and are continuing to change a lot. But in some sense we think it means less simply because our needs are much less or biologically much less urgent. Why did German universities so blossom in the 19th century. It seems like quite astonishing record. You're thinking for mathematics taken alone is hard to believe right. It is an absolutely astonishing thing. Not something that I would have expected back. You know, before 1800, not something I really have a great deal of understanding now. It is a wonderful and marvelous thing. From the perspective of what a society just beginning to kind of crawl out of the Malthusian agrarian age, it decides to do with its wealth with its time with its focus. And not parallel not equal to anywhere else you're not even the land grant colleges and the private universities of the US could do it. Nor there are reasons that my great great grandfathers and great great great great uncles went to Germany for graduate school. What do you think of the common view that England in some way fell behind Germany in the late 19th century. You know the fact that in 1913 the largest British electrical manufacturing firm is the English subsidiary of the German Zeniths. You know that speaks a lot. The fact that Britain is still richer in any kind of least in any comprehensive GDP kind of accounting is I think in large part because Germany is dragged down because when we, when we speak of Germany in this sense we're meeting the rur and the problem largely, and some of Salicia and some of Saxony as well. That I mean it is it is absolutely marvelous that you would expect the country that is the most industrialized, and that has the at least the most advanced universities in 1800 to have an enormous comparative advantage in driving forward technology. And that's not painting its place as the kind of industrial technological leader. And yet not. What was Britain doing wrong those years then. Oh, there are arguments that you too much. Standard arguments that were applied to Holland before and that are applied to the US today, you know, financialization rent seeking an over mighty state taxing the economy in order to accomplish your geopolitical goals. You know, that for Britain that does seem to have been a unwillingness to focus the attention of society on pushing engineering forward. And, you know, once you start to lose the concentrations of the, you know, of the communities of engineering practice, you know it's quite easy to lose more and it's quite easy to get yourself back into a vicious event who a vicious spiral. I would always talk about how Americans and Germans would be much more willing to invest in enterprise. In Britain, you really did not have the growth of the large intermediaries you're like the Deutsche Bank on the one hand to the JP Morgan partnership on the other, you know that saw themselves as being in the business of intermediating information. Intermediating information between people who had money that they needed to whether they wanted to save and invest and people had ideas that they needed to deploy. You know, you did the rationalization and rootinization of that through investment banking, you know universal banking in the years after 1870 played a substantial role. I was never really able to nail that down to my full satisfaction. But that was always my guess. I don't have to say we really do not know but that it does tell you how quickly within one or two generations, what we think of as technological leadership and technological supremacy can ever way. There are position and leading sectors of the sheer mass of engineers engaged in communities of engineering practice, and the also the educational system, certainly played a big role that Germans were being trained to manipulate molecules and organic chemistry while the Romans were being trained to write versus in the style of Macaulay, which would be the poems that the Romans would have written if they had been Scots as a focus of their educational system. What do you take to be the best understanding of the 17th century scientific revolution. If indeed you view it as a 17th century revolution. Yeah, I mean, my God, that's, you know, I mean, I always think Joel Mokir is absolutely magnificent on this. I think he understates the role that having printing by movable type blade in kind of creating a, you know, the community of scientific practice and knowledge seeking. There's one thing there's one thing that happens that is extremely unusual. Okay, back before 1870. Back before 1870, there's no possibility at all that humanity is going to be able to bake good economic pie sufficiently large that everyone can have enough. Which means that principally politics and governance are going to be some elite constituting itself and elbowing other elites out of the way. And then finding a way to run a force and fraud domination and exploitation scheme on society, you know, so that they at least can have enough that when Proudhon wrote in 1840s that property is theft. It was not metaphor. It was really fact. And what does this elite consist of well you know it's a bunch of thugs with spears. The people who have convinced the thugs with spears that they're their bosses and their tame accountant spirit crafts and propagandists, you know, which means most of the time. If you have when you have a kind of powerfully moving forward set of people thinking about ideas. Whether the idea is true is likely to be secondary to whether the idea is useful to helping me keep my place is a tame propagandist in the force and fraud domination and exploitation elite machine. At one point I've stolen from Ernst Gellner, and I think it is very true, and yet somehow the Royal Society decides no the Royal Society decides nothing except through experiment. You know that we are going to demand that nature, tell us or tell one of us or at least someone writes us a letter saying they've done the experiment about what is true. It is a miraculous and completely unexpected transformation. And one to which I think we owe a huge amount. And where does that impulse come from of the Royal Society. It seems not an accident that it's in England the same area when you're developing rule of law constitutional thought, some theory of the rights of man, other stranger movements. Right, right, that, you know, I mean, kind of. When I was like, oh, looking back, I, you said starting around 1600 the intellectual air starts to smell different. You know, you have a muscle to camp a solo writing in the city of the sun about how there has been more technological progress in the past century then in millennia before. He then ruins the effect by saying and this is a result of the astrological influence of the moon and Scorpio. And as the purity of a technological progress, we would find rather lacking in many ways. And you have Francis Bacon saying that the world has been utterly transformed by you know the compass by movable type printing. And, you know, gunpowder. So utopia he goes on to paint is one in which there is indeed your Solomon's house, you know, a bunch of scientists devoted to uncovering the secrets of nature. To the enlargement of the human empire and to the effecting of all things possible. And this that utopia or cornucopia at least is on our future and is going to be because we figured out how to use our minds to understand things. Rather than because we've managed to recover a golden age or because some theological being has come to our rescue, or because we finally figured out the right static social order. And that's kind of unusual. And I got to trace it to what happened between 1500 and 1600, which was the discovery of the new world the subsequent Colombian exchange, the great reduction of the prices of carrying goods across the world as a result of the first globalization. And the tinkering culture of Western Europe meant that in 1600 you could look back and for the first time in history, really say wow things are a lot different than they were even 100 years ago. You know, in fact, we know more than anyone in the past, you know, ever did that in earlier ages you look back and you see monuments of at least some ancient civilization that look pretty impressive to you. And so in by 1600, the idea that knowledge was a possible thing that humanity could grab for, you know, was in the air. And as you say it all concentrates in England. Or maybe better to say it all concentrates in a circle. Yeah, a circle 300 miles around the Port of Dover because human Smith and the other Scottish enlightenment people kind of head for London. And then really quickly in order to get inside the circle and get inside the discourse on that is a wonderful and marvelous thing to have happened. And I think it is a systematic change from the House of Wisdom in Baghdad in 900, or from the empirical and do metaphysical and do you know alchemical researchers researchers of the researchers of the song dynasty. And as I say we're very lucky it happened. What do you think of the original Paul Romer view that across the very long run growth rates simply rise. Well, you know, depending on this something bad seems to happen after the year 150. Right, right, that up until the year 150 I think you can say yes, although whether you can actually back that up with numbers you can semi believe in really depends on what you see of the population evolution of your humanity toward the end of the Bronze Age. You know that there's a fight between the high people who think that Bronze Age empires were much more populace than others did who think that the kind of that the big increase in human settlement population and technology before the year zero. You came in the late bronze with the, the hit height and the, you know, Babylonian and the Egyptian empires of the time. And the rest of us who tend to think that we see an acceleration with the other classic coming of classical civilization as a whole, you know in the axial age, you know and I'm on the axial age side but it's disputed. After 150 though after 150 things really do fall off a cliff, both in terms of the sophistication of high society and also in terms of the rate of increase of human population at least Eurasia wide. You know and it's not just that the Romans vanish from the from Britain. And it's not just that the Latin language frontier gets pushed back so that it's out of Britain completely and has moved 200 miles into France. As one elite succeeds another, you know, it's that there's a enormous destruction of the mechanisms that we're pushing ideas forward, you know, in the western but also in the eastern Roman Empire. In, you know, Persia and in India, which are subject to repeated fairly disastrous barbarian invasions and the successor states never kind of get back to the level of social of investment of infrastructure and other investment and your ideas, putting forward ideas about manipulating nature. Yeah, and in the fall of the Han dynasty in China, and the warring states period and in the subsequent time dynasty that you look at the sun arrive and people start once again, doing serious selective reading with rice, that it looks like the rate of technology advance gets back in gear. You know, I can't convince myself that between 800 and 1500 the rate of growth of world technology was any greater than in the age of classical Persia and Greece and the coming of Han China. The population in 800, you know, it was kind of three times what it had been when classical Greece started. So there's a big interruption of the Romer story from 150 to 1500. And afterwards it seems to me it's not so much two heads are better than one, but rather we find and make much better institutions, you know, in fairly discrete steps. I'll take your answer which I which I largely agree with. It seems to me strikingly non Malthusian in the book you see much more a Malthusian that the problem over the very long run is simply the ebbs and flows of population. So, you know, say, you know, say you have technological progress of 5% per century worldwide before 1500, which supports maybe an average century in which human population grows at 10%. Yeah, and, you know, but then, you know, then after 1500 you can say that that triples, you know, and say one third from the fact that you actually now get globalization, because you now have ships that can actually sail rather than having to kind of break bulk at eight different spots along the way. And one third from the Colombian exchange itself and one third from, you know, the tinkering and innovative and Royal society culture in Western Europe. So that after 1500 worldwide it's not 5% per century per technology it's more like 15% and so you see population growth rates of maybe 30% per century worldwide. So 30% per century is still a Malthusian economy. It's got to be a somewhat richer one you have to be somewhat richer, so that your population can grow at 30% rather than 10% per century. Still half your babies die, still life expectancy is 30, still you wouldn't expect, you'd expect living standards to increase on average by just enough to support the 30% per century population growth rate, rather than the 10%. But still a Malthusian economy. And the question is what happens between 1770 and 1870. When we looks like we get our global rate of technological progress up to almost half a percent per year, which means that, you know, a 1% per year population growth rate, you could kind of eat all that up in terms of smaller farm sizes offsetting better technology. You do have an upper class whose living standards are being transformed by new inventions, and you do have a doubling of humanities technological capacity every 70 years. Is that thing. Even though it is still the Charles Dickens John Stuart Mill. We're not going to get anywhere unless get a handle on our population growth problem. Is that 1770 to 1870 global economy still a Malthusian. Moving ahead to the 20th century. As you well know, Keynes predicted a kind of leisure society would come to the West reasonably soon. And people still work quite a bit. Yes, now earlier than now. What exactly did Keynes get wrong in your opinion. Obviously a very smart man. Yes, I really do not know, right that I'm tempted to follow, you know, Richard Easterland and say that modern economic growth is not a triumph of, you know, humanity over material humanity and technology over material want. But of material want over humanity and technology. You know that I now have an 18 year old laptop or an 18 month old laptop. I find myself annoyed that it's not as fast as another laptop I could get, using a slightly, not a slightly improved using a much significantly improved process of, you know, turning sand into something that can be very close to think with parts for nanometers on a side in the most complicated human manufacturing and division of labor process ever accomplished. So complicated that in fact there are only two productive organizations that eat that each of which is absolutely essential for it one of which is the one in the Netherlands that makes the extreme ultra violet machines. And the other one is the one in Taiwan that knows how to actually use the extreme ultra violet machines to carve paths for electrons to flow in stone and stone made of sand. I should be. And most of the time I should be aware that materially I'm very quite stated that when I do spend a lot of money on a dinner out and on our bottle of wine I have a nagging worry that you know, suppose I were to take this money and buy you know 20 McDonald's gift certificates and go down to a local childcare center and hand them out to harass single mothers who are having difficulty making ends meet you wouldn't the smiles on their faces be better be make me happier than actually drinking this stuff. And, you know, it's a quiz a question. And yet as you say I work pretty damn hard. And I work pretty damn hard in large part because I like my work. Also, because I am somewhat of a status seeking individual. And it's something like, you know, Lea quite a hamid's review of snouching towards utopia in foreign affairs this morning. The idea that someone as smart and accomplished and as knowledgeable as him thinks I actually belong in his company. That really does send me over the moon. I think that a bad thing is that me living my best life. Would Cain say that I am no longer in the kingdom of necessity that in fact I have outgrown the kind of community of those hag written by by the vices of averse usury and precaution, which we pretend our virtues because they're socially useful and I'm living my best life wisely and well. Or I'd be better off simply taking things off and going down and hanging out at my cousin's place in Malibu. What should pay to correct about the bureaucratization of the large business firm. I would say in the very long run. No. I mean, you're definitely yes. That there's an organization you look at the. You look at the Apple TSMC. I was not yet a do a man and do a do a monopoly it's not yet the combination of wind tail but it's kind of getting there. And it's an extremely taught and low bureaucracy organization when you look at the entire value chain. You take a look at, you know, Google. And it also is looks to be an extremely taught on bureaucratic value chain. Yeah, you look at the old Twitter. Yes, the old Twitter apparently was highly bureaucratized because nobody could get approval to ship anything. And whatever you think of Elon Musk will do of Twitter, which my view is he's most likely to simply light it on fire and burn it down. It is going to be an experiment in which he takes the organization that had become extraordinarily bureaucratic and seriously shakes it up. Possibly to the long run, possibly to the long run public good. You know, about a decade ago, you and I did a symposium with Greg Clark. I think it was the UC Davis and we talked about his book Farewell to Alms. Since then he's had other books. The Sun Also Rises for whom the bell curve calls. What do you think of his approach to economic growth after all these years now that you've thought about it written your own book. Well, his approach is the huge kind of approach is the hard largest scale. I'm looking at the 20th century, which is a considerably smaller scale thing. And so what I'm most interested in is that, you know, all the things that Joe amok here talks about all the things that Greg talks about, you know, all the other stuff that gets you up to 1870. And then you wave your hands and say the story continues. Well, you know, and in this book I've taken the position and I'm about 70% sure I'm right. You know that really know the story doesn't continue right that say from 1770 to 1870 you have the half a percent per year on average of steady technological progress. You know, but one third of that comes because the last set of glaciers served as bulldozers. scraped all the post Permian rock off of a good chunk of Northwest Europe leaving all the stored sunlight in the form of coal, right there on the surface for you to pick up and then use to power steam engines. You know, and about one third of that comes from, you know, the second globalization, I'm allowing you to pull all the manufacturing of the world into the districts in which manufacturing was most productive and efficient. You know, and by 1870, the other the really cheap coal was pretty much gone and you'd already pulled in all the manufacturing. And that leaves you with the underlying rate of invention and innovation, which was about one sixth of a percent per year, the things discovered developed deployed and diffused in the world. And you know that one sixth. That that only supports population growth that the rate of one third percent per year of his best farm sizes grow smaller with higher population. You know one third of a percent per year that's just 10% a generation. And that's still an economy that the that the steampunk economy in which you ran out of the coal and you'd already globalized the manufacturing and you just had invention that kind of the 19th century steam engine pace the early 19th century steam engine pace. You know that produces a steampunk economy that looks pretty Dan Malthusian to me. But instead we had the one big wave as Gordon calls it we had the sudden jump up. So that we get our 2% per year productivity and real income growth after 1870. You know, and it's that 2% together with your shampaterian creative destruction revolutionizing the economy to double human technological competence every generation. You know that wild ride from 1870 to today. That's a story I want to tell. And you know that's a story that Greg misses because Greg is simply viewing it from too high from too high an altitude. When I read Hayek's Constitution of Liberty, I see a thinker who favored a social welfare state, single payer health insurance and vigorous application of antitrust law. And you paint Hayek is for laissez faire. So what gives. So there's a Hayek and there's Hayek and there's Hayek, right. And there's a difference between things that Von Hayek wrote and things that you know Von Hayek is supposed to have written, and in some sense that people wished that he had written. So I'm really using Hayek in my book as a hook on which I can hang a set of ideas. And you'll pull on me as a hook on which I'm hanging another set of ideas. You know, and yes, you know, Hayek had moods in which he said of course we're not barbarians of course we have single payer universal health care. He also had moods in which he said that, you know, fishermen who only have jobs because they can sell their fish into the world market, who want to complain about how the market is not rewarding them justly should simply shut up and soldier. And there's the Hayek who very much values the western traditions of your liberty. And there's the Hayek who rails against your permissiveness as the chief enemy of human civilization. No, there isn't it the collectivist impulse. No, it depends from place to place you know there's the Hayek who actually likes your democracy and discussion and sees freedom of thought. And there's the Hayek who thinks that you need a light kurgan moment in order to destroy socialism and reestablish the Constitution of Liberty, which is primarily economic liberty on its own foundation on solid foundations, and his hopes that Augusto Pinochet would be that kind of guy from Chile. But he was right about that right Chile is today a democracy, they did make the transition that Hayek had predicted. So, I'm with Maggie Thatcher on this that definitely other roads in keeping with British constitutional traditions I believe she wrote can achieve all that is good about such goals. That he's a complex guy who got crankier and crankier with age. And, you know, he was a genius with respect to seeing the, you know, when I want to annoy my left wing friends I want to say that if they want to learn how to truly crowdsource anything they need to look at Hayek. That what they're pushing for is a central plan system in which someone at the top orders everyone around as if they were robots and does so at no information. Or a bureaucracy unit a bunch of people have written the rule book that requires everyone else to be a software bot when the rule book only covers one third of the possible cases, you know, or a market with private property. And contract an individual initiative so that all of the decision making is pushed out to the periphery of society where the information and the brains really are. And how you automatically solve the problem of incentivization as long as you manage to successfully align market prices with social values. If there is no better way for harnessing the eight billion brain anthology intelligence of humanity to achieving the social goals we all want other than to organize a well functioning market system. And do know that is a basic and serious truth. The problem though is the kind of aligned prices with social values, you know, and the fact that in a real market, the only rights that matter our property rights. So unless you are very, very good at making the distribution of property rights in accord. So that the people who control those property rights are issuing orders to the market that accord with what you believe utopia requires. Then you get yourself into huge trouble. Plus you have to take care of all the externalities, you know, the, the information externalities the direct externalities the macroeconomic externalities and so forth. If today we were to rerun a new Julian Simon versus Paul Ehrlich bet, which side would you take. I would definitely take Simon Simon. Why Simon. We are extremely inventive. We are eight billion of us. We can talk. We're very, very smart collectively. And so if the problem is to figure out how we can use resources in order to support productivity, we are highly, highly likely to find a way that problems of environmental catastrophe and pollution and so forth. There are problems of externalities and the proper management of commons. They aren't problems that natural resources that are physical objects are suddenly somehow going to become scarce. You know the only example I seriously know about this is the extinction of the spice Silphium in the Roman Empire. I still do not understand how it could have possibly happened because as Silphium got scarce for one of the many latter fundistas of Imperial Roman Italy to have established a Silphium plantation would have seemed to be a very obvious thing to do. What is your current view of the middle income trap. Um, So you're on an optimistic note, are you China looks like it's falling into it. We've, we've long known about, you know, the resource trap, right. You mean too much oil. Yeah that you get a society you get a society where the returns to engaging in positive some kind of let's win win figure out how to cooperate productively. If you're a young man or woman on the make are less than the returns from figuring out how to join some force and fraud exploitation and domination machine, which, you know, in the modern age is usually powered by foreign demand from someone elsewhere who is richer. Right. You know the drug lords in Latin America and the United States the oil lords in the Middle East and the European Union and so forth. The middle income trap looks to me a lot. Like that thing expanding, you know, expanding its reach that you know governmental technology of appropriation improves. You know, with other technologies and so there comes a point where it's better and easier and more comfortable for yourself to try to join the other government regimentation machine than to be out there in the kind of entrepreneurial and positive some machine. And so my understanding of the middle income trap is that that's where it comes from. Yeah, and it's, it seems scarily persistent. But I know that I used to that I used to argue that divergence worldwide was largely the result of, you know, internal and external colonialism. So plus Lenin, right, that if you were externally colonized your colonizer really didn't care about your economic development. And if you were internally colonized by say an elite that regarded the rest of society as its prey and thought it was separate because they were descended from the conquistador base of Castile. You regarded the rest of the country as not just their prey but the acquisition of knowledge and social power by the rest of the country is absolutely dangerous. And you combine that with, you know, Lenin's extraordinary success that organization and his pupils and their theological belief that the market must be damned to hell forever. And you get almost all of the divergence that we've seen since 1877. And then in the generation after World War two, I could say well, you know, failure to converge after the end of colonialism. That's because they've kind of destroyed state institutions and building a state is a complicated thing and you have to reward your friends to maintain control and established like Henry VIII stole the monasteries and you know stealing entrepreneurial wealth is a good thing to do if you're trying to maintain a stable state and things will settle down. And then I could say well African retardation there are special problems of sub-Saharan Africa related to long run destruction of social trust and so forth. But now I've kind of run out of excuses for why middle income and other traps persist. And, you know, maybe the fact that I've run out of excuses as type is, is combined with the fact that we've actually seen substantial convergence in the world since 2000. But, you know, on the other hand, the coming of Xi Jinping's new Imperial China. And the coming of Nehand Ramodi and what looks a lot to me like National Hinduist India to India. It makes me think that, you know, perhaps the middle income trap will be will continue to be much stronger than I would wish, or then I had hoped five years ago when I was in the mood of have run out of excuses. Now you served in Treasury under the Clinton administration. Let's say you're called into the UK and maybe you have been. So the trust regime tries a mix of spending hikes and tax cuts and markets don't like it. If you're asked for advice, there's probably a recession coming. Is it that you actually recommend austerity. What is it you tell them to do right now. Oh, boy. That's a good question. That's a hard question. That is, I confess I was surprised by the fact that the fiscal theory of the price level suddenly showed up outside of Whitehall and tamped out and set up its tent. I understand such an impressive what and you know it's the problem of is the fiscal theory price level really true. Or have we have the wrong group of people in charge of money in financial markets. And they're dead to the ratio it's only at 80%. Right. That is the people that the people who have, you know, I mean Milton Friedman hoped that noise traders would lose money and go away. Right, simply because they were being irrational. You know, it was Larry Summers who pointed out that rational people don't maximize expected wealth they maximize utility. And, you know, as a result of that insight of his I actually have had a good career in economics which I might well not have had otherwise being a scatterbrained as I am. But I think that insight is much deeper it's not just that there'll be a lot of noise noise trading will be persistent. It will be that the largest and most influential financial players will be people who have not only taken your positions that are overly risky in a beta sense they will be overwhelmingly people who have massively failed to diversify and who have been very lucky three times in a row. And as a result, think that they're absolute geniuses that we're selecting for a market in which the celebrity participants at least are people with positively bad financial judgment prone to bubbles and enthusiasm. And relatively right wing in their politics because you know the right wing will offer them low taxes. The great and good financially of Britain have been told for 15 years that austerity is an important thing to have. And so that's why you need to have us rather than the Labor Party in control. I can see the result has been a Britain that's 10% poorer as a result of a failure to make public and private investments over the past decade and a half, and another 10% poor because of the disaster of Brexit that was never supposed to happen that was just supposed to demonstrate that Boris Johnson was on the side of the little people of England. And maybe the fiscal theory of the price level was only there because they believed what Cameron had told them. And that maybe you could actually pull through this. If I were advising Liz trust I would say go back and tell the European Union it was all some horrible mistake we've come to our senses. They wouldn't take them back at this point right. They can't credibly commit to staying in all the time. They can't credibly commit to staying in but still they can, you know, and you know, it is the only obvious thing to do to massively raise British total factor productivity is to get back into the European, quickly. Otherwise, I do think you need. You need a substantial boost of public investment. It would be very nice to take advantage of the forthcoming recession to actually get it done, you know when private spending sits down public spending should stand up. There needs to be a long run plan to definitely finance it. Given that as you know, John Maynard pain said the animal spirits of investors that the animal spirits of investors depend very much on investors attitude tour and confidence in the soundness of the government. The future of investors for Leon Blum or the Labor Party is a powerful factor that must be taken into account. You know, I would indeed say that a conservative government that promises, you know, a few that makes incredibly promise substantial future wealth taxes to keep the deficit under control in the future is the right road forward to Britain. See how the conservative party as it's currently constituted can make such long run promises. And I certainly do not think that, you know, those who's those whose credibility is needed for Britain to avoid a very nasty inflationary spiral over the next 10 or 15 years would trust the Labor Party at all. We're likely to find, we're likely to find that. You know, well, you know what happened to Leon Blum, or it happened to Francois meter. You know, attempt to move left and find yourself having to pack right very very quickly. I would still say it would still say it's Thomas moms the magic mountain. But I'm not sure whether that is actually my favorite novel or whether that is a novel that reminds me of one of my favorite time some. Or is there a real difference between them. Yes. What is your favorite movie. I'd have to say I'm a sat then I still have to say that I admire Casablanca extraordinarily much. You know, I wish my favorite movie with a seven Samara that when I'm sitting down, even when I'm not exhausted and actually want to watch a favorite movie I do find myself turning the Casablanca so by revealed records. Do you think there's any novel or movie that is really quite good for understanding economics. Or is the scene versus unseen distinction too much of a distortion that in novels and movies there's too much intent and not enough invisible hand. Oh, I would actually say Red Plenty. I would say Red Plenty by Francis Buffard is a wonderful novel about economics. What's your favorite video or computer game right now. Oh, I don't have a computer computer game. Civilization gone. I don't dare. Yes, yes, yes, I mean the as I say the fact that in late 1993, I had to decide between being a civilization addict and a deputy assistant secretary of the Treasury. And do you know, at least if I'd managed to figure out how to win consistently at God level in civilization I might, I might feel I had accomplished more than I did at the Treasury I might not. Yeah, but I microwave the disk and have not gotten it played a video game since it's not something I trust myself with. Does UC Berkeley have the right amount of intellectual diversity. Because UC Berkeley. If it were the only Berkeley, I would say yes. I would say that a American educational system that has even 20 places. If I'm as far right on the faculty as I am at UC Berkeley would not be a terribly healthy situation. And I think we're in that situation. How much has religion influenced your political and economic views if at all. I would say formally and consciously. But the problem is that I know too much about the genealogy of a great many ideas I hold to be very dear. So I would say consciously, absolutely enormously. And what from Christianity or elsewhere, do you think you've drawn upon the most. I might say you should ask Rabbi Hillel to teach you the entire poor awful standing on one foot. You know that that what is hateful to others do not do to them. That, you know, or maybe Bill and Ted, you know, be excellent to each other and party on dudes. Contianism but filtered through religion. Well, except I would say religion is filtered through content emerges as Contians. I would say that it comes from elsewhere. He had his own peatistic background, right? That's probably not a coincidence. Yes. The history of this book, if I understand it correctly, there's a director's cut of this book hidden away somewhere. Is that correct? I have not yet managed to assemble the director's cut. There's a cutting room floor that it has 600 pages including index and so forth. There are another 400 pages that exist in draft that exist that exist in disorganized form. And then there are the notes and quotations and outlines for another 500 pages. Will we ever see that manage. The Lord willing and the creek don't rise. Yes. You know, the question is which part should I which part should I add to and come out next. And should it be the one that's really about industrial research labs and modes of production since 1870. Should it be the history of the Malthusian world. You know, should it be the parallel to the unbound Prometheus. Or should it be very much the shampateria and industrial creative destruction. People can vote send me emails with your votes. And last question, what else might you be planning in addition to possible sequels. Oh, to write, I would say that some possible sequels is pretty much all that I'm planning right now. But substack you're going to stay on substack go back to blogging do more on Twitter there's other choices right substacking is blogging except that substacking is blogging where you have explicit permission. To send things to people's email inboxes. And also to have a rather large tip char. And is such stack or blogging better such stack the post seems longer to me blogging it seems shorter and more about scrolling, which do you prefer. I thought blogging was more fun. I like being a squirrel. I think, if, you know, if you believe as recline that we need to be more Gutenberg ish, because the social media audio visual world is really one in which you have to declare who are your enemies in order to get listened to. And that that really is not a healthy foundation for a public sphere. It's a moral obligation to help Hamish and company push substack forward in the future, and it would be nice if they succeed in their long run project for world domination. Brad DeLong thank you very much and again everyone the new book is slouching towards utopia and economic history of the 20th century. And thank you very much Tyler for inviting me and please read and think about and you know criticize the book and criticize the book please harshly and mercilessly. Because that's about one of the few ways I'm going to learn things and what's left of my life is to read incisive and merciless critiques of my book. And I definitely do want not to stop learning things. I think you're you're too hard on Hayek. That's my critique for today. But Brad, thank you very much and look forward to seeing you next.