J. Bradford DeLong

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 2019 ranking of economists by Research Papers in Economics, DeLong is the 746th most influential economist.

In 2019, DeLong said that he and other neoliberals had been “certainly wrong, 100 percent, on the politics” of economic policies. While he continued to believe that “good incremental policies” might be superior, he concluded that they were unattainable politically, because of the absence of Republicans willing to work toward such goals. Instead, DeLong said, he favored "Medicare-for-all, funded by a carbon tax, with a whole bunch of [Universal Basic Income] rebates for the poor and public investment in green technologies." He concluded, "The world appears to be more like what lefties thought it was than what I thought it was for the last 10 or 15 years."

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.

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

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. He served under 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.

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

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 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. His PhD advisor was Lawrence Summers.

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.