Andrew Prokop

So I think to understand what changed here, we have to go back to how economists gained this special status in the first place.

They rise to prominence and politicians view them as useful and important when it seems that their ideas and their knowledge is useful at solving political and policy problems.

So back in the 1930s, the Keynesians, they managed to help guide us out of the Great Depression and then to basically shape the post-war world.

The Keynesian economists...

advocated increased government spending and intervention as a way to get the country out of that recession.

And they helped President Roosevelt, in his view, solve the problem that the country was facing.

Decades later, in the 1970s, the Keynesians' ideas were struggling with the challenges the country was facing then.

High inflation, high unemployment.

So we got a new class of economic economist advisors who rose, the neoliberals.

They argued that it was often the case that government was getting in the way of economic growth and prosperity and that the solution was often for government to do less, to deregulate, to cut taxes.

So the neoliberals seem to really have cracked the code for a while.

Politicians in both parties really did kind of gravitate towards this analysis, which seemed to be effective to many in producing economic prosperity throughout, you know, the Reagan administration.

The Clinton administration.

The beginning of George W. Bush's administration.

And really the core idea of neoliberalism was that markets know best, that the state, when it tries to interfere with markets, is highly likely to screw things up.

The Great Recession then happens at the end of George W. Bush's administration, leading into Barack Obama's.

Barack Obama continues to rely to a great extent on the economist establishment in crafting his response to the Great Recession.

He very much believed this worldview that

Economists did have special knowledge of some kind that he wanted to have considered in policymaking.

And so it was really the post-Obama years when economists were gradually and in some cases suddenly pushed from the lofty perch that they held.