J. Bradford DeLong
James Bradford "Brad" DeLong (born June 24, 1960) is an American economic historian who has been a professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley since 1993.[1]
J. Bradford DeLong
Harvard University (BA, MA, PhD)
Education[edit]
DeLong received a BA in social studies from Harvard University in 1982, and a PhD in economics from Harvard in 1987.[2] From 1986 to 1987, he was an instructor at MIT, and he taught economics at Harvard and Boston University from 1987 to 1993. In 1991–92 he was a John M. Olin Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, where he has also been a research associate since 1995.[2]
Career[edit]
DeLong joined U.C. Berkeley as an associate professor in 1993.[3] From April 1993 to May 1995, he served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy at the Treasury Department in Washington, DC.[2] As an official in the Treasury Department in the Clinton administration, he worked on the 1993 federal budget, the unsuccessful health care reform effort, and other policies, and on several trade issues, including the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and the North American Free Trade Agreement.[1] He became a full professor at Berkeley in 1997 and has been there ever since.[1]
DeLong has been a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a visiting scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, and an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow.[4]
Along with Joseph Stiglitz and Aaron Edlin, DeLong is co-editor of The Economists' Voice,[5] and has been co-editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives. He is also the author of a textbook, Macroeconomics, the second edition of which he coauthored with Martha Olney. He co-edited (with Heather Boushey and Marshall Steinbaum) the book After Piketty: The Agenda for Economics and Inequality (2017), a volume of 22 essays about how to integrate inequality into economic thinking. He also contributes to Project Syndicate.[6]
In 1990 and 1991, DeLong and Lawrence Summers co-wrote two theoretical papers that became critical theoretical underpinnings for the financial deregulation put in place when Summers was Secretary of the Treasury under Bill Clinton.
In 2019, DeLong said that he and other neoliberals had been "certainly wrong, 100 percent, on the politics" of economic policies. While he continued to believe that "good incremental policies" might be superior, he concluded that they were politically unattainable because of the lack of Republicans willing to work toward such goals. Instead, DeLong said, he favored "Medicare for all, funded by a carbon tax, with a whole bunch of Universal Basic Income rebates for the poor and public investment in green technologies." He concluded, "The world appears to be more like what lefties thought it was than what I thought it was for the last 10 or 15 years."[7]
DeLong is an active blogger on political and economic issues and media criticism.[8] In 2022, he published Slouching Towards Utopia, an economic history of the 20th century from a Keynesian perspective.[9][10]