Jason Furman joins Allison Schrager and Jordan McGillis to discuss trade-offs in economic policy decision-making.
Audio Transcript
Jordan McGillis: Welcome back to 10 Blocks. I’m Jordan McGillis, economics editor of City Journal.
Allison Schrager: And I’m Allison Schrager. I’m a senior fellow at Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor at City Journal and a columnist at Bloomberg Opinion.
Jordan McGillis: Allison, I don’t think of myself as much of a partisan, but I must admit I took distinct pleasure in some recent center-left on left economic criticism. It came in the form of a recent essay in the journal of Foreign Affairs by Jason Furman, who chaired President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors, and it was directed at the now electorally defeated Biden Administration’s embrace of what Furman calls the post-neoliberal delusion. You and I both flagged this piece as something worth talking about and we noted that it covered some of the same themes as your work. What particularly struck you here?
Allison Schrager: I would say it took a lot of pleasure in this, not because I like to see inter-party warfare. I’ve been following Jason’s work for years as like most economists and noticed he was critical of the administration throughout. I was surprised to see this, but one thing I didn’t enjoy about it, I mean I don’t enjoy any policy failing. I would’ve liked Biden’s policies to have worked even if I wasn’t sympathetic to the administration, was that Jason was really calling out economic orthodoxy and how we need to return to those values. And that’s true for both parties. I mean, there was a time where we both were kind of in the center and even Democrats were enthusiastic for markets and understood the trade-offs that markets pose. His brave thing for him to do was doing it to bring Democrats back to more sensible economic policies that still might not be always things I agree with because they put a higher weight on having the government have a bigger presence than I personally would like. But the policies used to be at least somewhere in the neighborhood of sensible and understood there were trade-offs and costs and benefits to the different economic policies they pursued, and it really felt like the Biden economic policy was really divorced from that.
Jordan McGillis: What are some of the key focal points that you think can bring together a center right-center left coalition that would be sensible on some basic economic points?
Allison Schrager: Well, I’ve been thinking a lot about this. As you mentioned, I’ve been writing some of this for City Journal myself. I’m sort of feeling very nostalgic now for neoliberalism, but that was a time where I think we were somewhat both in the center. You had things like NAFTA, which came in under Clinton. He cared about debt too for a little bit too. If we use the framework of economics that there are trade-offs, that we exist in budget constraints, that we can’t just spend as much as we want, then we end up with more sort of sensible economic policy on both sides and I really applaud Jason for calling out Democrats from getting, not just doing policies that were more left wing than people like us would like, but actually really rejecting basic wisdom from economics altogether.
Jordan McGillis: And to dig deeper, we have invited Jason Furman onto the show himself to talk one-on-one economist to economist with Allison.
Allison Schrager: I always found it so extraordinary during the Biden administration that we kept being told how great the economy was and he was giving out so much money yet and were doing things that were supposed to be so great for labor, yet he always had such terrible economic ratings. What do you think went wrong and why do you think that was?
Jason Furman: Part of it is that the economy wasn’t as good as people were bragging about. And I was making this point throughout the administration and it shows up again in a recent piece I wrote in Foreign Affairs, but just look at wages. People were saying wages are up more than inflation. Two points about that. One is they were only up a little bit more than inflation normally they’d be up a lot more than that, so they were below trend and I look at lots of different measures of trend, but secondly, most of that increase in wages or all of it actually happened in the year 2020. The Biden administration would put out statistics for wage growth in the year 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023, but somehow people didn’t give him credit for all the real wage growth that took place in the year before he was president, which shouldn’t be that surprising. So I think this is part of the story. I think there’s other parts too. There’s money illusion, both wage growth and price growth were faster than usual and you blame him for the price growth. You don’t credit him for the wage growth and understand the link between them. And then there’s a whole bunch of partisan polarization things that show up too. So in some sense, I think everyone got part of the story. The mistake was denying that there was any reality at all to it.
Allison Schrager: I recall for Bloomberg I had to do these, we do these metrics and I was looking at wage distribution statistics and how it fared for each income growth and I think it was like 2023 and I was really shocked to see real wages down. I was like, how did I miss this? I think I was not really looking at the data myself, but this narrative had emerged that everyone was doing better or particularly wage inequality had narrowed. I feel like we kind of missed that one and I guess that’s why people weren’t happy. I guess people really hate inflation.
Jason Furman: Some of that is even if wages went up 30% prices went up 20%, people were 10 percentage points ahead. People would still hate that much more than they would the exact same real wage gains but at a lower inflation rate and economists call that money illusion, but maybe we should have a less condescending term for it, one that respects that we’re trying to make people feel better, not just trying to make what we assume people should feel like better.
Allison Schrager: The other thing that surprised me, reading your columns, you talk a lot about how a boosted demand but didn’t really do much about supply and we see sort of a big emphasis on demand and less supply, which in retrospect as you’re describing their policies is true. But don’t you recall in those years we heard so much about supply abundance, certainly a lot of lip service to it that we were going to do all these things that we’re going to increase the productive capacity of the country. So it seems like they at least had the intention of expanding supply. I mean, why didn’t they? Is it just too hard to do that? Why did they not take on supply more?
Jason Furman: Supply has lots of different pieces and then some, it was expanded. I think we will be making more microchips in the United States a couple of years from now than we would’ve made without their policies. So the supply of US supply at least of microchips will go up. So there are things that go in different directions in infrastructure and climate. They run in a less business-like manner than the CHIPS program. The CHIPS program was like former private equity people doing deals. When it came to infrastructure and climate, there was a lot more politics of using domestic-sourced materials, requiring certain rules around union labor, adding in diversity and other requirements and that certainly slowed down the money getting out the door, raised the price of things that were getting done, contributed to the problem. But some of it also was just trying to spend lots at once. Throwing huge amount in supply at some point gets pretty inelastic. You start driving up prices rather than driving up quantities and that looks like what happened in the highway program.
Allison Schrager: We’ve reached a point where we couldn’t do what Roosevelt did. The economy just can’t take that much ambition in such a short amount of time.
Jason Furman: I just read a terrific book by Mark Dunkelman called “Why Nothing Works,” strongly recommend it to all your listeners, and it’s a history of how we used to do really big things and now just things are just incredibly hard to do. The story he tells, and it certainly tracks with my own experience when I was in government during the Obama administration, was just there’s a vetocracy of all these different groups that each have some angle of it, often environmental, but there’s other ones as well and you need to get through that whole thicket and I have a bit of sympathy for difficulty making progress here. I was in a meeting with President Obama where he said, “All this environmental regulation, it’s slowing us down. We can’t build anything. Let’s just rip through it and get stuff done.” I went to the deputies meeting that I was running at the time and I said, the president just said this. Let’s implement it. And the people from the EPA at the table, they just knew so much more than I did about the law, about everything. They knew more than anyone else at the table. I felt like I barely delivered on what President Obama himself ordered us to do. And so some of it is going to require things like I almost wish you could have a Republican staff at some of these agencies and a democratic administration. Democratic administration sets the big goals, pushes forward and the Republican staff in a businesslike way make sure it actually happens.
Allison Schrager: Well, maybe DOGE will get it done.
Jason Furman: Maybe they will.
Allison Schrager: The other thing is something I’ve been writing and thinking about a lot too, and this isn’t necessarily just unique as you’ve pointed out to Democrats for sure, is it seems like we’ve sort of given up on the idea that there are trade-offs, which is just so central to economic thinking from the very start in economics you sort of are taught a lot about budget constraints, winners and losers, cost-benefit analysis. Reading this, it just seems like we gave up on the idea of trade-offs. For instance, thinking you can run the labor market hot, it will help the lowest wage earners, which in principle it would if you didn’t get inflation from it, which you do. It also made me think a lot about when you’re talking about the need to do industrial policy instead of a carbon tax, which I guess might have some political reasons, but I think what was so compelling about industrial policy is it seemed to offer a free lunch. Like we can just create jobs, give everyone new cars, and we can make the planet greener without anyone paying anything, which just as an economist just sort of always makes me sort of skeptical. What do you think happened? Why did we abandon trade-offs and do you think that was just a momentary lapse or do you think we’re coming back to that?
Jason Furman: This is something that troubles me a lot and take sometimes different characteristic forms among conservatives and among liberals. The economic impact of something is so massive that it becomes the only consideration. Any regulation you do for climate change, for some social goal, for poverty, whatever it is, just the side effects economically, it kills growth, so don’t even think about it, rather than weighing it. With Democrats, it’s all good things go together. You have some regulation that helps with climate change and it also creates jobs. That means that Democrats end up doing benefit-benefit analysis, which is propaganda for whatever it is they want it to do anyway. Conservatives do cost analysis without having the benefit part in the equation, which is also propaganda for whatever it is they want to do. And neither one is using this very powerful tool that we have to try to figure out what we should do and what we shouldn’t do.
Is this worse than it used to be? I’m not sure. What feels worse to me is there’s more of a celebration of it and rationalization of it with intellectual frameworks than used to be the case. So even economists that will go out and say industrial policy is win-win and crowds in when you read their paper and they don’t take into account there’s a fed that might respond that there’s some capacity constraints in the economy as a whole that the price level might change, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So to me, what got me more upset and part of why I wrote, I’ve written a couple different things and spoken a couple different things about this, was trying to make a virtue out of this denial of trade-offs. Whereas I think it’s really a vice.
Allison Schrager: You have brought up that it might’ve been an overhang of 2008 that we thought we were spending so much and we thought all the expansionary monetary policy we’re going to bring all these horrible things and then it didn’t happen, and then we didn’t get the recovery what I wanted and then we had a very low interest rate of environment, which also can enable the idea that budget constraints don’t exist, that this sort of is it fed this idea that maybe we didn’t have to think so carefully about trade-offs anymore?
Jason Furman: Yeah, and look, there are fewer trade-offs when you’re in a very deep recession with interest rates at the zero lower bound. In fact, the idea that public investment might crowd in private investment when you have an unemployment rate of 10%, an inflation rate of zero, and an interest rate of zero is something that comes straight out of a textbook and is a totally reasonable thing to think. The issue is that by 2021, interest rates were higher, inflation was much higher. Clearly you needed to adopt a different way of thinking. That’s why I’m a big believer in economics. I don’t think it has all the answers. I think it’s a process of discovery. But MMT, for example, modern monetary theory, it might have correctly said in 2010 that a fiscal expansion is a free lunch, said that for the wrong reason, it got the analysis wrong. So it’s like you’re taking a test and your answer is right, but when you have to show your work, you get it all wrong. Well, why does that matter? Why do we check people’s work? Because then modern monetary theory gets it totally wrong in the year 2020 and 2021 and 2022. So thinking the right thing for the right reason is pretty important.
Allison Schrager: What broke inflation? We thought we’d licked it in the eighties, I got into a lot of fights and various newsrooms over the years insisting that inflation could still happen and people just did not believe me. While it’s certainly come down a lot, it does seem sort of persistent whether or not the tariffs caused more problems. Do you think it was inevitable with the pandemic or do you think we broke our low inflation environment?
Jason Furman: There’s three pieces to it and they fit into the three pieces of the New Keynesian Phillips Curve. The first is that there were supply shocks. That was part of what happened. They were overstated, but they were there especially in things like food and energy and those supply shocks have largely gone away. Second is slack and there is much more slack than there was a couple of years ago. Now what’s interesting is how that slack came about. The unemployment rate only rose a little bit, but job openings fell quite a lot. And in fact, if you look at my favorite indicator, and this was my favorite one before inflation rose and fell this last time, job openings divided by unemployed, that fell by more in this episode than it did in the great recession. So there’s more of a labor market loosening now than the great Recession.
But then the third thing, which is the third term on the New Keynesian Phillips Curve is expectations. Those did stay pretty well anchored in this episode. In the seventies and eighties, they were wildly on anchored and didn’t get themselves back down until you actually did have a massive recession. And that last part was the place where all of this worked out probably a bit better than I would’ve thought. Well, I wasn’t sure what was going to happen to expectations and I certainly thought it was possible that they would stay well anchored. They really did stay well anchored and I’d argue that was because Jay Powell listened more to the people that were telling him to raise interest rates really quickly and aggressively. And if he had listened to the doves inflation, what expectations would’ve been unanchored and then we actually would’ve needed a recession to get inflation down.
Allison Schrager: Inflation is still like a good a hundred basis points higher than it was before pandemic. Why do you think that is? I mean, do you think that’s just our new reality or do you think this is just still takes a long time for inflation to go back?
Jason Furman: Yeah, so that’s the fourth part of the answer. I gave three reasons why inflation came down, but then the fourth thing is still hasn’t come all the way down. Expectations have risen some. So they’ve stayed reasonably well anchored but not perfectly anchored. It’s possible there’s still some labor market tightness out there, but I think now it’s mostly this expectation story. I’ve been for a while, a believer in the last mile that ringing out the last bit of inflation will be a lot more difficult and a lot more painful.
Allison Schrager: You had one line in your piece that says labor markets have failed to deliver high levels of employment for primary age workers for decades. Well actually women have the highest rates of participation that they’ve ever had in particularly coming out of the pandemic, really went back to work in droves, but that is true for men giving the Biden administration the benefit, the doubt, maybe their drive to revive manufacturing was them trying to come up with a solution for that. Why do you think that’s been and what do you think policymakers can do about it?
Jason Furman: Yeah, so on prime age employment rates, just to be clear, that was not a criticism of the Biden administration. I don’t think that problem long predates them, but it still postdates them as well. For women relative to US history participation is quite high, but you look at prime age employment rates for women in the United States compared to Europe, and we’re still on the low end of the spectrum, but there may be some trade-offs there. In Europe you see a lot fewer women in management positions and so maybe they do keep women in the workforce, but more of it is part-time work and end up on more mommy track, so-called, jobs. Some of this is difficult trade-offs. Once again, just as we were talking about before, some of it I don’t know the answer to. I’m skeptical that manufacturing is the solution because it’s such a tiny fraction of the population, less than 10% that works in it.
Moreover, you try to do stuff in one part of manufacturing and it can crowd out other parts of manufacturing through higher interest rates, higher prices, higher input costs and the like. So I don’t think manufacturing is the answer. They certainly have more active labor market policies in Europe. Maybe those work, some evidence for that. Things like paid leave and childcare I think do help employment rates, but they might be at the expense of wages and management. So my biggest plea on this is to just not be so self-satisfied that we’ve gotten it right in the United States, but instead to have more people angsting and worrying because then maybe we’ll come up with a better solution than I’ve come up with just now.
Allison Schrager: Yeah, I mean I don’t have a solution either. Sometimes I worry that it could just be structural. I agree. I don’t think it gets enough attention at all.
Jason Furman: And look, I do think there’s this ecosystem we began with in the beginning, at least in certain spheres really is more sort of left-enthusiastic than right-enthusiastic. US growth was higher than other G7 countries over the last couple of years. I saw that quite a lot on Twitter. That was also true in 2019, but I didn’t see it nearly as much. The US GDP recovery was quite good, but the US employment recovery compared to other countries was actually quite bad. I saw the GDP recovery much more than I saw the employment one. Now what’s the cost of that type of selective amplification? If you’re a progressive and you’re really worried about employment in this country, you don’t want to fool yourselves. You want to sort of look forthrightly where there were successes, where there were failures, how it compares to other countries, angst a bit more about what could be done better next time. Even though, again, just to be clear, I think on the employment thing in particular, there’s not something I can point to that the Biden administration got wrong. It seems more structural feature of the United States. We should be trying to figure out what that feature is and whether we can fix it.
Allison Schrager: It was actually under the Trump administration. We made a choice, which I actually thought was better at the time, but maybe I was wrong and you can tell me if you thought it was the right choice, that we let people lay people off and gave them big benefits rather, in Europe they just paid people to keep them on staff. In retrospect, do you think one way was better than the other?
Jason Furman: In retrospect, I am somewhat more partial to the European system, but we still need to figure out a number of different things. First of all, European countries have very different employment contracts, labor unions, et cetera. So how much of it is interacting with a set of institutions versus not? The fact that it worked decently well in the U.K. employment retention, which is institutionally closer to the United States gives me a little bit of hope. A second is we just had incredibly high replacement rates in Europe. You stayed with your employer, but you got paid at most the same wage and sometimes a lesser wage than you were making. In the United States, in 2020, most people were paid much more from unemployment than they were getting on their job. They had what let’s call a replacement rate of above a hundred percent, and in 2021, quite a lot of people had replacement rates above a hundred percent.
Finally, there’s another difference between the two systems, which is just leverage. In Europe, if your employers said, Hey, come back to work, you either went back to work or you lost your job and lost your income in the United States, your employer furloughed you. They said, come back to work. You said, no, de facto you could keep collecting your unemployment insurance and so they couldn’t make you come back. I say de facto because under the law that some ambiguity in some people that maybe would’ve lost their unemployment insurance had they been reported, but in practice that wasn’t relevant. So I think part of what happened in Europe was employers could make people come back and they couldn’t in the United States.
Allison Schrager: Another trade-off that is going to be more acute. I think we really started seeing this in the Trump at first Trump administration. Then Biden did more of it, and now we’re doing a lot more of it is putting, I guess, economic policy second to I guess more political considerations, particularly around trade, and you bring that up as well as another trade off that we ignored. I’m trying really hard as someone who’s been incredibly dogmatic about tariffs my entire career, to be more open to the idea that maybe there’s some national security considerations that could make the odd tariff worthwhile, and as it, I think the pandemic certainly exposed some national security issues around this that I really wasn’t aware of. How are you thinking about this and do you think we’ve opened a Pandora’s box of putting politics above economics?
Jason Furman: I think we’ve opened up a Pandora’s box and it’s gone way, way, way further than makes any sense at all. But I agree with you. There are times when trade and other international economic restrictions make sense. The only way you’re going to ever persuade me that you found one of those times is if you acknowledge the costs of the policy, the benefits, and make a case that the latter outweighs the former. If you just do benefit-benefit analysis to get back to our theme from before, you’re going to have a hard time convincing me.
Let me give an example where I think the benefits outweigh the cost, which is sanctions on Russia. No one ever argued sanctions on Russia would help the American middle class restore prosperity, bring back manufacturing, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Russia sanctions hurt us. They make our stock prices go down a little bit. They hurt some jobs, they raise some costs, but they have quite a big benefit in terms of restraining the Russian War machine, disincentivizing Russia and other countries, et cetera. I think, and other people might have a different argument, but totally reasonable to me to think that those national security benefits of sanctions outweigh the costs. The costs are relatively modest for American. So then when it comes to China, somehow people leave that framework they’d use with Russia and they start saying like, oh, tariffs on EVs and tariffs on solars. They’re good for America economically. Now we’re going to have an EV and a solar industry, and that’ll be awesome and it’ll create jobs and increase growth, and by the way, we’ll be more resilient from national security. Strongly disagree there. One, we might get a worse EV industry if it’s protected because it can be flabby, not compete. Moreover, there’s crowd out. You get more of those industries, you get less of something else, and you’re not getting these incredibly cheap great solar panels. So that to me is a bad argument. If you want to persuade me, say, China makes better, EVs makes better solar panels, but there’s a real risk that they’re going to put a Trojan horse in and shut ‘em all down in a time of war, and it’s worth us paying more for crappier solar panels that can’t be shut off in time of war.
Allison Schrager: I mean, do you think we can draw that line and okay, we’re only using tariffs or do you think it inevitably gets captured by politics and it gets out of control and here we are with tariffs everywhere?
Jason Furman: Unfortunately, I think you have to try to draw that line. I’m not saying I know how to do it correctly. I don’t know if there’s anyone who I sort of trust embodied in one person. Most economic policies, it’s not like we can mathematically prove for certain that it should be x, y, or Z, so a general presumption that tariffs are bad, an extremely high bar to overcome that presumption. In the case of allies and friendly countries, Canada is one that just happens to come to mind, a still decent sized bar when it comes to countries like China because the economic gains for the United States of those trade is just incredibly, incredibly high. There are legitimate national security risks. To me, this becomes really almost entirely about China and within China, a subset of the trade that we do where you want to have these conversations.
Allison Schrager: One of your other criticisms is that Biden didn’t do more to expand the safety net and with his mandate, that’s maybe what he should have done. It seems like what we are doing now to expand the safety net is mainly benefiting the middle class like the child tax credit, not only expanded benefits to middle class, certainly a lot of the Obamacare subsidies. When you say we need to expand the safety net, is that what you mean or is there more we can do for lower income people?
Jason Furman: Yeah, so I definitely want to make sure that at least some Manhattan Institute-type listeners of this podcast think I’m unreasonable and wrong and a far left wing socialist. I’m a little bit old fashioned. I largely believe that you maximize prosperity by maximizing the size of the pie, which is mostly through markets with some limited exceptions, but then you don’t presume that that gets the distribution the way you want it, and so you use the tax and transfer system to get it there. I absolutely agree with you though that we have budget constraints. There’s a limited amount of money. I find the fully refundable child tax credit, just taking the existing amount, but making sure everyone gets it would be the first, second, and third place that I would use my dollars long before I got to raising the child tax credit for middle class families.
Allison Schrager: I saw you on Bloomberg Surveillance and you said what a lot of conservatives were getting wrong about your column is just gloating and not recognizing that the Trump administration was making a lot of the same mistakes, which actually did delight me. That was, I think, the headline of my Bloomberg column that day, so I guess we have agreement on that. What do you see the Trump administration doing that isn’t heeding the lessons that the Biden administration should have learned?
Jason Furman: Much, much more protectionism. They’re not taking the fiscal situation very seriously. While they think that inflation is a problem on any given decision, they don’t prioritize inflation and they make an excuse for not doing it there. And then finally, just sort of selective use of data to say everything’s good. I mean, who would’ve thought that the 10 year treasury falling has become a huge talking point for success when first of all, there’s a lot of other things that matter, and second of all, the yield on it is falling for a bad reason. That uncertainty has gone up and the economy is slowing. I’d say all of them and mostly more.
Allison Schrager: Yeah, I saw someone on X argue seriously that they just care more about the 10 year than the stock market,
Jason Furman: And I think that’s because the 10 year interest rate is down and the stock market is flat, and so which one are you going to talk about? The sense in which the Trump stuff intellectually bothers me less, even if substantively it bothers me more, is that there’s more of a recognition that much of it is just intellectually incoherent, wrong, and makes no sense. There’s some people that try to rationalize parts of it, parts of it may even be rationalizable, but it’s a little bit more of a populist, anti-intellectual, we don’t care what the eggheads say. The Biden errors, I think in many cases were smaller, but when it’s eggheads that are helping to make those errors or at least people pretending to be eggheads, it just bothers me more and makes me feel like writing about it more. Even if
Allison Schrager: That’s true, I’m noticing all these people were complaining about neoliberalism all these years, all of a sudden anti-tariff, and I’m like, welcome.
Jason Furman: I’m thrilled about that. Yes, really big tariffs are bad, pretty big tariffs are bad, and then somehow there’s some non-linearity reversal as they get smaller and the party changes.
Allison Schrager: Well, I just want to say them. What did you think anti-neoliberalism was like? Vibes? It was always anti-tariffs or sorry, being pro tariff.
Jason Furman: I’m a low tariff guy.
Allison Schrager: Yeah. Well, anyway, thank you so much for joining us and thank you so much for writing the Foreign Affairs story. It really, I think is going to have a lot of influence and make people think a lot and hopefully move policy forward in the future better, so I think we’re all grateful you wrote it.
Jason Furman: Thanks for the discussion.
Jordan McGillis: So Allison, a lot of that was music to my ears, hearing this very balanced cost-benefit type of approach that Jason advocates for. I’m not as optimistic as you are though that it’s going to have much of an influence, particularly on the party he tends to be more aligned with. If you look at the recent decisions that the DNC has made in terms of its staffing going forward at a leadership level, it seems like they might be swinging even further to the progressive side with the recent appointment of, I think his name’s Roger Lau as top boss at the DNC. He’s an Elizabeth Warren staffer. Do you think there’s really a chance this will bring the Democratic party back to a place where we can have these rational discussions?
Allison Schrager: Well, I’m not sure people in the party who are on that side are reading Foreign Affairs much anyway. I don’t think the Democrats are honestly or the Republicans are really going to have a choice anyway. Rates are down, I guess 20 basis points or so. They’re still up like 350 basis points from where they were pre-pandemic, and that just puts a bigger constraint. I’ve been writing in City Journal about how the low-rate environment made people believe there were no trade-offs and you were just not in that world anymore. That’s true in the public and the private sector. I think reality is going to hit one party eventually, whoever’s in power when it really does hit. They can say that now at best two years from having any sort of influence on government, so they can indulge whatever they want now, but eventually they are going to have to acknowledge that trade-offs exist and hopefully come back more towards the center.
Jordan McGillis: As you point out though, with two years here in the political wilderness, it’s going to be very easy for the Democrats to indicate that this is actually a Trump problem. If we do see stuff hit the fan in the next two years, maybe there’s a chance that there will be some shared culpability if we really run into some problems. The more we can get thinkers like Jason onto platforms so they can have influence across the spectrum, the better.
Allison Schrager: Yeah, I mean it’s very brave of him, I think, and I think we need definitely more policy makers and academics like him who are willing to call out his own side for weaknesses. I think that’s how we get better policy. He’s so well thought of in his community that certainly serious people in the Democratic party really will read this, listen, and think very carefully about what he’s had to say.
Jordan McGillis: On the other hand, people that we thought of as being serious in the Republican party are no longer at that echelon of power where they can have the influence that we might’ve expected. Time will tell.
Allison Schrager: Well, losing an election does usually give you some self-reflection. As I said, I think Democrats might be still in a self-indulgent phase because they’re just so far away from power right now. I think also what struck me as I was speaking to him is just how much we are just in a higher inflation environment. I don’t think we’re ever going to come together and say, well, Democrats were like, sorry guys. We spent too much and now we live with higher inflation forever. They’re always going to be pointing fingers at each other.
Jordan McGillis: Allison, thanks for leading that dialogue and listeners, thank you for following along. If you like this podcast, please let people know and share it widely on the internet.
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