Brad DeLong

Brad DeLong is a professor of economics at U.C. Berkeley, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a weblogger at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. He spent 1993-1995 working for the (Bill) Clinton administration as a Deputy Assistant Secretary, in Lloyd Bentsen’s and then Robert Rubin’s Treasury Department. He is still trying to come to grips with the fact that he is by now far, far better known as a weblogger than as a economics teacher or an economics researcher. Perhaps therapy is called for and could help?

The five things he has done in his work life that he is proudest of are: (a) his starting the ball rolling in getting the world and economists to recognize how roughly global economic growth had gone and was gone with his comment on William Baumol’s study of “Productivity, Convergence, and Welfare”; (b) his contribution to the literature on efficient markets and financial market “rationality,” “Noise Trader Risk in Financial Markets” (written with Andrei Shleifer, Larry Summers and Robert Waldmann); (c) his documenting that Bush 43 administration claims that its Social Security privatization proposal was a really good deal were… overstated, in “Asset Returns and Economics Growth” (written with Dean Baker and Paul Krugman); (d) his pointing out that in our current situation -- and for the foreseeable future -- here in the North Atlantic both employment would be higher and our long-run debt problems would be less serious if governments simply bought more stuff now in “Fiscal Policy in a Depressed Economy” (written with Larry Summers); and (e) his work on the benefits of expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit as part of the design of, analysis of, and lobbying Congress to pass the 1993 (Bill) Clinton Budget Reconciliation Bill.