Media Dinner with Brad DeLong

In April, we did the impossible: We gathered a bunch of tech founders and reporters in San Francisco to talk about something other than AI.

Huge thanks to Brad DeLong, our remarkably big-brained guest speaker, for joining us for our second Tech / Media Dinner of the year. He was kind enough to talk through the themes of his book “Slouching Towards Utopia” and how humanity can continue to achieve the health and lifestyle gains of the last century. Here’s what we learned:

• We forget that life for the average person in 1870 was bleak, even in Europe and North America. Finding enough to eat was rarely a given and most children never made it to adulthood.
• How did humanity get so wealthy, so quickly after 1870? In short, globalization, corporations, and industrial research labs.
• Depressions used to be worse and much more frequent. Central banks, in spite of their flaws, have helped enormously.

I want to give special thanks to my co-organizers, the amazing Laurel Touby & Jon Fine, and to our fantastic guests, including Elaine Moore, Erin Griffith, Ariel Poler, Sarah McBride, Kenrick Cai, Adam Rogers, Matthew Klein, Gerrit De Vynck, Kia Kokalitcheva, Jordan Novet, Anna Tong, Parth Bhakta, Paroma Varma, Valerie Combs, Jyoti Bansal, Scott Rosenberg, Paresh Dave, Akilesh Bapu, Alex Yancher, and Harikrishna N. We hope to see everyone again soon!