Andrew Prokop
speaker
268 appearances
9 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 15 Sep
Andrew Prokop’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
On the Democratic side, there is a bit of a different story there.
The Democratic side's confidence in the economic neoliberal establishment was increasingly shaken by this progressive challenge from the left that we saw with Bernie Sanders, that we saw with the rise of Elizabeth Warren, but also by Trump's 2016 win in and of itself.
That really shook the party's confidence that their economic policy was on the right track.
There was a lot of focus on who had been left behind from trade.
Why had Democrats lost the Rust Belt?
And some people argued that this was really about culture and about immigration and that it didn't really have that much to do with economics at all.
But others argued that Democrats' economic policies had gotten out of touch with the working class and too kind of beholden to
this kind of neoliberal view of the world.
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.
Showing 101–120 of 268 · page 6 of 14
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