Andrew Prokop

Eventually, Joe Biden wins, and he is similar to Donald Trump in some ways in that he also has very little use for high-minded academic debates playing out in front of him.

I interviewed Jason Furman, a Harvard economist who worked in the Obama administration, and he told me that

President Obama would typically start meetings by having the policy people talk, and then the political people would then weigh in after, and it would become more of a free-form discussion after that.

But in his experience, then-Vice President Biden didn't do anything similar to that.

Often, politics or the demands of interest groups kind of came first, and there wasn't really the same elevation of...

wonky economic debates among economists.

Yeah, it's really interesting.

In the 2010s, there was the left critics and the right critics of economists.

But now people are positively nostalgic for the economy of the late 2010s.

Of course, what then happened was the pandemic, inflation, war in Ukraine, producing a new series of problems in the 2020s.

And the economists argue that, you know, if...

if people had listened to us a little more, if Joe Biden had listened to us when we were warning about inflation in early 2021, then perhaps we wouldn't have sunk to this pretty bad place where the public is just absolutely furious about affordability and high prices that wrecked Biden's popularity, wrecked Democrats' 2024 chances, and now are imperiling Trump's own popularity as well.

The problem is that now that we are in 2025 and facing the problems of 2025, economists don't really have a consensus quick fix to the mess that we're in.

You know, they don't really have a superior quick fix alternative they're proposing.

And if they don't, then the political system is going to turn to the people who are offering those quick fixes.

You've got 100 votes here in the Senate.

Won't mean anything because the House is not going to take it up.

And the president of the United States certainly will not sign it.

A decades-old study that said vaccines cause autism is now being called an elaborate fraud.

A decades-old study that said vaccines cause autism is now being called an elaborate fraud.