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Conversations with Tyler / episode intelligence

Brad DeLong on Intellectual and Technical Progress

22 Feb 2023 20 published claims 2 attributable people
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Speakers in the public record

Brad DeLongTyler Cowen

Claim mix

evaluation 7belief 7prediction 3observation 1recommendation 1preference 1

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Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.

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The useful parts, with receipts.

20 published records

01 / prediction

” Well, in this book, I’ve taken the position — and I’m about 70 percent sure I’m right — that really, no, the story doesn’t continue. That, say, from 1770 to 1870, you have about half of a percent per year, on average, of steady technological progress, but one-third of that comes because the last set of glaciers served as bulldozers and 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.

“” Well, in this book, I’ve taken the position — and I’m about 70 percent sure I’m right — that really, no, the story doesn’t continue. That, say, from 1770 to 1870, you have about half of a percent per year, on average, of steady technological progress, but one-third of that comes because the last set of glaciers served as bulldozers and 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.”
Speaker
Brad DeLong
Publisher
Conversations with Tyler

02 / evaluation

Then after 1500, you can say that that triples, 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 break-bulk at eight different spots along the way, and one-third from the Columbian exchange itself, and one-third from the tinkering and innovative and Royal Society culture in Western Europe.

“Then after 1500, you can say that that triples, 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 break-bulk at eight different spots along the way, and one-third from the Columbian exchange itself, and one-third from the tinkering and innovative and Royal Society culture in Western Europe.”
Speaker
Brad DeLong
Publisher
Conversations with Tyler

03 / belief

I would say that an American educational system that has even 20 places in which 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.

“I would say that an American educational system that has even 20 places in which 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.”
Speaker
Brad DeLong
Publisher
Conversations with Tyler

05 / belief

I think the numbers then are what big progress meant back then. 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.

“I think the numbers then are what big progress meant back then. 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.”
Speaker
Brad DeLong
Publisher
Conversations with Tyler

07 / belief

I would say that you’ve got to look worldwide, and that if you look worldwide, and if you take account of the fact that world population growth has now hit more than 1 percent per year after 1870, then you had something like 1.

“I would say that you’ve got to look worldwide, and that if you look worldwide, and if you take account of the fact that world population growth has now hit more than 1 percent per year after 1870, then you had something like 1.”
Speaker
Brad DeLong
Publisher
Conversations with Tyler

09 / belief

I would 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 ebb away as a matter of position in leading sectors, of the sheer mass of engineers engaged in communities of engineering practice, and also the educational system certainly played a big role.

“I would 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 ebb away as a matter of position in leading sectors, of the sheer mass of engineers engaged in communities of engineering practice, and also the educational system certainly played a big role.”
Speaker
Brad DeLong
Publisher
Conversations with Tyler

10 / belief

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 humanity toward the end of the Bronze Age.

“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 humanity toward the end of the Bronze Age.”
Speaker
Brad DeLong
Publisher
Conversations with Tyler

13 / prediction

Whatever you think Elon Musk will do of Twitter — which in 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 public good.

“Whatever you think Elon Musk will do of Twitter — which in 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 public good.”
Speaker
Brad DeLong
Publisher
Conversations with Tyler

14 / evaluation

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 conquistadors of Castile, they 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.

“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 conquistadors of Castile, they 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.”
Speaker
Brad DeLong
Publisher
Conversations with Tyler

15 / evaluation

Which means, most of the time, when you have a 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 as a tame propagandist in the force-and-fraud domination and exploitation elite machine.

“Which means, most of the time, when you have a 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 as a tame propagandist in the force-and-fraud domination and exploitation elite machine.”
Speaker
Brad DeLong
Publisher
Conversations with Tyler

16 / evaluation

The fact that Britain is still richer, at least in any comprehensive GDP accounting, is, I think, in large part because Germany is dragged down, because when we speak of Germany in this sense, we’re meaning the Ruhr and the Rhineland largely, and some of Silesia and some of Saxony as well.

“The fact that Britain is still richer, at least in any comprehensive GDP accounting, is, I think, in large part because Germany is dragged down, because when we speak of Germany in this sense, we’re meaning the Ruhr and the Rhineland largely, and some of Silesia and some of Saxony as well.”
Speaker
Brad DeLong
Publisher
Conversations with Tyler

17 / evaluation

” As near as I can see, the result has been a Britain that’s 10 percent poorer as a result of a failure to make public and private investments over the past decade and a half, and another 10 percent poorer because of the disaster of Brexit that was never supposed to happen.

“” As near as I can see, the result has been a Britain that’s 10 percent poorer as a result of a failure to make public and private investments over the past decade and a half, and another 10 percent poorer because of the disaster of Brexit that was never supposed to happen.”
Speaker
Brad DeLong
Publisher
Conversations with Tyler

18 / prediction

The utopia he goes on to paint is one in which there is indeed Salomon’s House, 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. That utopia, or cornucopia at least, is on our future and is going to be because we’ve 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’ve finally figured out the right static social order.

“The utopia he goes on to paint is one in which there is indeed Salomon’s House, 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. That utopia, or cornucopia at least, is on our future and is going to be because we’ve 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’ve finally figured out the right static social order.”
Speaker
Brad DeLong
Publisher
Conversations with Tyler

19 / evaluation

I think if you believe Ezra Klein 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.

“I think if you believe Ezra Klein 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.”
Speaker
Brad DeLong
Publisher
Conversations with Tyler

20 / preference

Yet, as you say, I work pretty damned hard, and I work pretty damned hard in large part because I like my work, but also because I am somewhat of a status-seeking individual.

“Yet, as you say, I work pretty damned hard, and I work pretty damned hard in large part because I like my work, but also because I am somewhat of a status-seeking individual.”
Speaker
Brad DeLong
Publisher
Conversations with Tyler
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