This is Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality—my attempt to make myself, and all of you out there in SubStackLand, smarter by writing where I have Value Above Replacement and shutting up where I do not… Am I Biting Off More than I Can Chew Here?À propos of figuring out how to enable students to enrich their lives and provide value to their employers, as they live as free people do, by their wits, in having lives and careers as good front-...À propos of figuring out how to enable students to enrich their lives and provide value to their employers, as they live as free people do, by their wits, in having lives and careers as good front-end nodes to and in the real rather than the fake ASI—the Anthology Super-Intelligence that is the collective human Mind we have been building for the last five thousand years—in the attention info-bio tech age that is now at hand. That is the hidden curriculum. The visible curriculum will be: Quantifying the long arc: from chimp ancestors to attention-tech economies as data science meets economic history with counterfactuals covering growth, institutions, inequality and much MOAR…You think I am going to be biting off more than I can chew here?: Econ 196 :: Spring 2026Time: TuTh 1-3pm TITLE: Quantitative Long-Run Global Economic History DESCRIPTION: What, quantitatively, do we actually know about the long-run shape of global economic history? And what can we say about how reasonable counterfactual simulations of alternatives can add to our knowledge? In our modern information-technology age, we can do many more kinds of analysis much more quickly and deeply and broadly than we ever could before. We ought to be able to use these tools beyond simple counting—the tools of sampling, estimation, forecasting, simulation, classification, and so on that make up what is now “Data Science” as the coming-together and then expansion of statistics with operations research and economics—to know more and to know in new ways. This course will cover the standard long-run picture, as set out by Melissa Dell in her “History of Economic Growth” Harvard Econ 1342 and Robert Allen in his “Global Economic, Political & Social Development” NYU-Abu Dhabi SOCSC-UH 1011. It will cover:
It will cover:
But it will cover it from a pedagogical-experimental angle that attempts to use “Data Science” estimation and counterfactual simulation tools to the max, to the extent that that can be done with a student body that has had little or no exposure to those tools beforehand. And the hope is that in the process the course will generate teaching materials that will allow the course’s subsequent scaling-up to 150 people, or more—with enough of a Royal Road that students coming from the humanities-literary side of C.P. Snow’s “Two Cultures” will find it friendly and approachable and leaern stuff, and enough analytical and intellectual depth that students coming from the STEM-numeroliteracy side of C.P. Snow’s “Two Cultures” will not find it trivial, and not be bored. If reading this gets you Value Above Replacement, then become a free subscriber to this newsletter. And forward it! And if your VAR from this newsletter is in the three digits or more each year, please become a paid subscriber! I am trying to make you readers—and myself—smarter. Please tell me if I succeed, or how I fail…#am-i-biting-off-more-than-i-can-chew-herePlease forward the email & otherwise share it to everyone you think would appreciate it… |
Am I Biting Off More than I Can Chew Here?
Thursday, 9 October 2025
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