DeLong's Grasping Reality Weblog
Economy in the 2000s & Before: working, making, apportioning, talking, taking, & more. What I know and can learn about it, & related things.
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What they write about
An economist's weblog mixing economic history with current commentary. Recurring features include a chart of the day and crossposts of other writers, alongside essays on fiscal and monetary expectations, technology valuations, defence and naval affairs, and the state of universities.
- economics
- economic history
- monetary policy
- technology
- academia
- charts
Recent examples: When Software ‘Bots Go Feral: MONDAY MAMLMS · CROSSPOST: Ben Moll & Alex Imas: Will AI Soon Lead to Double-Digit [Annual Economic] Growth?
Written from DeLong's Grasping Reality Weblog’s own published post titles and openings in Sep 11, 2026. It describes the subjects the newsletter covers, not its views, and is not investment advice.
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Read from 2 post headlines in the last 30 days. A newsletter that names a company only in the body of a post will not appear here, and a mention is not a recommendation — it only means the symbol came up.
Growth history
Subscribers (thousands, nightly)
48K on Sep 10, 2026 → 48K on Oct 20, 2026
Followers (thousands, nightly)
Rank in Substack’s finance leaderboard: #44 today · #44 a week ago · #44 a month ago
Stats worth sharing
Tracked since Sep 10, 2026 — 41 daily snapshots so far. The card below is built from what we track and refreshes nightly.
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- Best rank seen
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- Followers added
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- Posts
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- 32
- Reactions tracked
- 2.3K
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of 525 ranked finance newsletters
on Sep 25, 2026
since tracking began
last 30 days
average, recent posts
across 72 posts
in tracked posts
Most-reacted post we have seen: CROSSPOST: JOHN QUIGGIN: US Navy Defeated Again — 78 reactions on Sep 8, 2026.
Recent posts
- When Software ‘Bots Go Feral: MONDAY MAMLMS
I set up my email ‘bot to honor #handcarry: the one tag meaning "don't file this, bring it to me NOW!" But it drifted. One time it typoed it as #hancarry, and then wrote that into its own memory file. It then built a new directory …/hancarry/, and for about a week diligently filed urgent emails there, buried deep in the directory tree structure. No refusal, no sulking: a model bureaucrat whose output reached no one. Unlike loud, surly agents, this failure was silent and obedient, which made it harder to catch: It had seemed quieter than usual around here. Share Somehow, the flow of emails…
- CROSSPOST: Ben Moll & Alex Imas: Will AI Soon Lead to Double-Digit [Annual Economic] Growth?
Past waves of automation have followed a script. Agriculture mechanized, got cheap, and shrank as a share of GDP, and value moved to manufacturing. Manufacturing automated and shrank, and value moved to services. Ben Moll and Alex Imas argue AI will follow that script rather than break it. Cheap cognition will push spending toward what stays scarce: nurses, teachers, waiters, local knowledge, power plants, Zeiss mirrors: Ben and Alex see a 4–5% rate of real GDP growth—a doubling of productivity—from “AI” over the next fifteen years as the current thing grows exponentially before (probably?…
- In Which a Pedagogical Decision to Keep People from Majoring in Economics Has Massive Consequences: CHART/ANNOYANCE OF THE DAY
Freddie deBoer says everyone ignores high-quality evidence that pedagogy and policy make little difference. Test-score gains fade. And, indeed, I could not come close today to the scores I got long ago on my linear algebra exams without a lot of boning-up on the subject. But look at the labor-market evidence. California’s top-4% from each high school’s admissions rule raised early-career wages of compliers by $20,000 a year or more. Proposition 209’s affirmative-action ban cost complying underrepresented-minority students about 5% a year. Papers on the other side suffer from weak instruments…
- CROSSPOST: LARRY MacDONALD: How Karl Marx Achieved Financial Independence
It was Engels who paid both his and Marx’s bills: Summarizing (with a few compressions and thus errors) from Tristram Hunt’s biography of Friedrich Engels. Share Thus here we have Larry MacDonald on portfolio strategy secrets of the original Marxists: Investing Journey By Larry MacDonald CROSSPOST: LARRY MacDONALD: How Karl Marx Achieved Financial Independence < https://larrymacdon.substack.com/p/how-karl-marx-achieved-financial-1c4 > < https://larrymacdon.substack.com > Investing Journey How Karl Marx achieved financial independence Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were the authors of The…
- What LLMs Can & Do Do for Me, & What They Cannot & Don’t: THURSDAY THAUMATURGY
Thaumaturgy: from the Hellenic θαυματουργία ( thaumatourgía ), “wonder-working,” built from: itself built from θαῦμα ( thaûma ), “wonder, marvel” (the stem is thaumat- , from the genitive thaúmatos , which is where the t comes from); and ἔργον ( érgon ), “work” (it’s the same root as energy , liturgy and metallurgy ). English took the word from the French thaumaturge from the Latin thaumaturgus, a straightforward borrowing. It’s first use in English comes from Queen Elizabeth I Tudor’s mathematician-sorcerer wannabe John Dee. He defines it as one of the mathematical arts: “which giveth…
- The First Time a Fed Easing Move Has Triggered a Sharp Jump in Long-Term Nominal Treasury Bond Rates: CHART OF THE DAY
That a Fed easing move is immediately followed by a sharp jump in long-term rates strongly suggests that the Federal Reserve has lost control over the narrative governing bond-market expectations. This has not happened before, at least not in the United States since World War II: Back in January 2025, when this cross-move first began, I wondered at what was going on: Share Brad DeLong : THE MACRO-FINANCE SITCH: The Streams (of Falling Short-Term & Rising Long-Term U.S. Treasury Rates) Cross < https://braddelong.substack.com/p/the-macro-finance-sitch-the-streams >: ‘Since September [2024] the…
- An Inflation Report That Is Disappointingly High: CHART OF THE DAY
Whatever number of rate hikes you wanted this year before this morning, you should now want one more. The Fed had made an 0.3% core CPI report its trigger for a rate hike in September. Now we see another such. Skipping an October hike would now be a very political choice: If before this morning’s CPI inflation data point you wanted 0.50%-points of interest-rate hikes by the Fed in the rest of 2026, you now want 0.75%-points. Share If before this morning’s CPI inflation data point you wanted 0.25%-points of interest-rate hikes by the Fed in the rest of 2026, you now want 0.50%-points: that is…
- CROSSPOST: SEVA GUNITSKY: Trump’s “Near Abroad”
Muscovy ‘Rus’s coercion and attempted coercion of its “Near Abroad” is legible: it targets neighbors already trying to escape from its control, like Georgia, Ukraine and Moldova. Trump is, however, a chaos monkey. Trump is thus creating resentful neighbors. And that resentment will cause material harm to U.S. citizens and will hobble the U.S. considered as a global strategic actor: Countries had not previously imagined that the United States might attempt to exert destructive coercion, in large part because the destruction harms the interests of the U.S. as a strategic polity and the material…
- CROSSPOST: JOHN GRUBER & BEN THOMPSON: Meanness & Claude
I am on Ben and John’s side here: These are stochastic-parrot clever-hans software tools, potentially very useful when properly harnessed, but a source of madness to people who fall into the same trap that the gullible fell into when interacting with Weizenbaum’s ELIZA back in the day: Why does a company—Anthropic—that sells software tools say it worries about whether those tools are conscious in the sense of haveing subjective experiences that belong in a utilitarian calculus? Gruber and Thompson have a somewhat cynical answer: (a) their belief system is unhinged, and (b) that belief system…
- What Jón Steinsson Learned from Mike Woodford in Econ 420: ENCOMIUM OF THE DAY
The Woodford framework: The interest rate, not the money stock, is the instrument. Expectations are the dominant channel, so credible commitment to a rule is everything. Price stability minimizes relative-price distortions. And rules must move rates more than one-for-one with inflation to rule out self-fulfilling spirals: Jón Steinsson calls this toolkit his personal intellectual-cognitive superpower. Share He got it from this guy: Give a gift subscription And so this was especially nice to see: Jón Steinsson: < https://x.com/JonSteinsson/status/2109810749422084265 >: ‘Just a personal…
- A Second-Rate Philosopher I Cannot Read in His Original Greek: REGRET OF THE DAY
Epictetus provide a better guide to stoicism. Seneca writes better prose. So Why is it that Marcus Aurelius’s private, repetitive, nagging-himself notebook endures and influences more than all the other stoics put together? “Don’t turn into just another Caesar,” Marcus warned himself. But how could he stop that? He already was the Caesar. Thus the Meditations reads less like a philosophy lesson than like a man arguing with himself, losing, and then picking himself back up off the floor and trying to man-up to argue with himself again": This AM, from across 1850 years of time, history now…
- CROSSPOST: CLAUDIA SAHM: Hand the Pen to the Committee
Warsh’s press conference and the FOMC committee statements he is letting through are pointlessly opaque. Pointlessly, that is, if the idea is to make good monetary economy and have a stabilized high-growth sustainable-employment low-inflation economy. Warsh’s opaqueness, however, does have a point if you think that Warsh’s principal objective is to delay the day of reckoning when he has to choose between having Trump conclude that he has been betrayed and having the bond market conclude that it is being betrayed by Warsh. He will ultimately have to choose between one or the other, but each…
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