J. Bradford DeLong

James Bradford "Brad" DeLong (born June 24, 1960) is an economic historian who is professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. DeLong served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Department of the Treasury in the Clinton Administration under Lawrence Summers.

He is an active blogger whose "Grasping Reality with Both Invisible Hands" covers political and economic issues as well as criticism of their media coverage. According to the 2016 ranking of economists by Research Papers in Economics, DeLong is the 740th most influential economist alive.

He graduated summa cum laude from Harvard University in 1982, followed by an M.A. and PhD in economics in 1985 and 1987, respectively, also from Harvard.

After earning his PhD, he taught economics at universities in the Boston area, including MIT, Boston University, and Harvard University, from 1987 to 1993. He was a John M. Olin Fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research in 1991–1992.

He joined UC Berkeley as an associate professor in 1993. From April 1993 to May 1995, he served as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Economic Policy at the U.S. Department of the Treasury in Washington, D.C. 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 on 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. He became a full professor at Berkeley in 1997 and has been there ever since.

He 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 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow.

Along with Joseph Stiglitz and Aaron Edlin, DeLong is co-editor of The Economists' Voice, and has been co-editor of the widely read Journal of Economic Perspectives. He is also the author of a textbook, Macroeconomics, the second edition of which he coauthored with Martha Olney. He writes a monthly syndicated op-ed column for Project Syndicate.

DeLong lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife Ann Marie Marciarille, a professor of law at the University of Missouri at Kansas City.

DeLong considers himself a free trade neo-liberal. He has cited Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes, Andrei Shleifer, Milton Friedman, and Lawrence Summers (with whom he has co-authored numerous papers) as the economists who have had the greatest influence on his views.

In 1990 and 1991 DeLong and Lawrence Summers cowrote two theoretical papers that were to become critical theoretical underpinnings for the financial deregulation put in place when Summers was Secretary of the Treasure under Bill Clinton.

In March 2008, DeLong endorsed Barack Obama as the Democratic Party candidate for President.

DeLong has been a critic of his Berkeley colleague, John Yoo, a law professor who worked in the Office of Legal Counsel under President George W. Bush. Yoo authored the torture memos authorizing the Bush administration to use torture during the war on terror, and crafting the unitary executive theory. DeLong wrote a letter to the Berkeley Chancellor Robert Birgeneau calling for Yoo's dismissal in February 2009.

DeLong maintains a political commentary site, "Brad DeLong's Egregious Moderation", and contributed to Shrillblog, a blog critical of the Republican Party and the Bush administration. The blog originated in a conversation among DeLong, Tyler Cowen, and Andrew Northrup regarding the use of the term "shrill" as a criticism of New York Times columnist and fellow academic economist Paul Krugman.

According to his faculty webpage, his research interests include "comparative technological and industrial revolutions; finance and corporate control; economic growth; the rise and fall of social democracy; the long-term shape of economic history; the political economy of monetary and fiscal policy; financial crises and 20th century macroeconomics; behavioral finance; history of economic thought; the rise of the west; causes of the Great Depression".

• "Noise Trader Risk in Financial Markets" (Journal of Political Economy, 1990; co-authored with Andrei Shleifer, Lawrence Summers, and Robert Waldmann)
• "Equipment Investment and Economic Growth" (Quarterly Journal of Economics, May 1991; co-authored with Lawrence Summers)
• "In Defense of Mexico's Rescue" (Foreign Affairs, 1996; co-authored with Christopher DeLong and Sherman Robinson)
• "Princes and Merchants: European City Growth before the Industrial Revolution" (Journal of Law and Economics 1993; co-authored with Andrei Shleifer)
• "The Marshall Plan: History's Most Successful Structural Adjustment Programme" (in R. Dornbusch et al., eds., Postwar Economic Reconstruction and Lessons for the East, Cambridge: M.I.T., 1993; co-authored with Barry Eichengreen)
• "Between Meltdown and Moral Hazard: The International Monetary and Financial Policy of the Clinton Administration" (co-authored with Barry J. Eichengreen)
• "Review of Robert Skidelsky (2000), John Maynard Keynes, volume 3, Fighting for Britain" (Journal of Economic Literature, 2002)
• "The Triumph of Monetarism?" (Journal of Economic Perspectives, 2000)
• "Asset Returns and Economic Growth" (Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 2005; co-authored with Dean Baker and Paul Krugman)
• "Productivity Growth in the 2000s" (NBER Macroeconomics Annual 2003)
• "The New Economy: Background, Questions, Speculations" (Economic Policies for the Information Age, 2002; co-authored with Lawrence Summers)
• "Speculative Microeconomics for Tomorrow's Economy" (First Monday, 2000; co-authored with Michael Froomkin)
• "America's Peacetime Inflation" (in Reducing Inflation, 1998)
• "Keynesianism Pennsylvania-Avenue Style" (Journal of Economic Perspectives, 1996)
• "Productivity and Machinery Investment: A Long-Run Look, 1870-1980" (Journal of Economic History, June 1992)
• "The Stock Market Bubble of 1929: Evidence from Closed-End Funds" (Journal of Economic History, September 1991; co-authored with Andrei Shleifer)