Jared Bernstein, former top Biden economist and all-round economic expert, and I bat around the puzzle of persistent negative economic sentiment. Recorded Wednesday.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Paul Krugman in Conversation with Jared Bernstein
(recorded 4/22/26)
Paul Krugman: Hi everyone. This week I’ve got Jared Bernstein with me for a talk about economic vibes. We had planned and hoped to have G. Elliott Morris in on the conversation, but he came down sick. So it’s just going to be two economists talking about why people are still so negative about the economy. Clearly this is very important for lots of purposes, but also just kind of interesting. So, hi Jared. Maybe you should lead off by explaining why it’s so compelling and then I’ll chime in. We’ve both done work on this, but you’ve done more.
Jared Bernstein: Yeah, well, to me, it’s personal because I was in the White House—in the Biden administration’s Council of Economic Advisers, as you know—during this period when what began to be called the vibecession arose. I associate that term with Kyla Scanlon. This was a situation where we were posting some good strong macroeconomic numbers. GDP was strong. It was above trend. We got back to full employment very quickly after the pandemic-induced recession. But there was a big spike in inflation. As that spike came down, we were rolling down the other side of inflation mountain in the second half of 2022, we thought that was a pretty good development, given how upset people were. But consumer sentiment, consumer confidence, people’s feeling about the economy—these vibes—just kept getting worse. And it seemed to me at the time that that shock, not just to inflation, but to the level of prices—how much prices went up—was more important than most economists were realizing. As you well know, people in our field think a lot about inflation and inflationary shocks. We think less about the level of prices and sort of take that as a given. So that struck me as quite important at the time. And I began to look into it in ways I’m sure we’ll get into.
Krugman: I mean, what was striking about it was that historically, there’s a pretty good relationship between consumer sentiment and macroeconomics. And way back they called it the misery index, which is the inflation rate plus the unemployment rate. It was designed by Arthur Okun, and it did a pretty good job. And then you added a little more sophisticated version of that, and it has historically done a pretty good job of tracking sentiment. But after 2022, even by these measures that had worked before, it looked like an economy that should have had people feeling a lot happier, but they weren’t. But let’s talk a little bit about price level because what always struck me, even from the beginning, was a question about: what period of inflation are we talking about? You know, why should it be the one-year rate of inflation that enters into the misery index as opposed to a two-year, or three-year, or four-year? That’s how we kind of started. In your recent work, you started by saying, “well, maybe with inflation over a longer period,” but this kind of morphed into this price level issue. So why don’t you tell me about that?
Bernstein: So, a couple of things to amplify points you were just making. My coauthor on a recent paper, Daniel Posthumus, and I made a model of consumer sentiment. And this works both on the Michigan version and on the Conference Board version.
Krugman: By the way, people should know that U. Michigan is the longest-standing regular survey of how people feel. But the Conference Board—I don’t know how far back they go.
Bernstein: It actually goes back to ‘62, and U. Michigan goes back to ‘52. But that’s kind of relevant for what I was about to say. So we built a model to predict the sentiment or confidence indices. We used the stock market returns, real consumer spending, inflation, and unemployment. Very simple. And we ran it from 1990 to 2019. It then predicts very well what the index does all the way back to the 1950s. So even though we ran it from ‘90 to 2019, it tracks the index very well. And then as you said, it breaks down in 2019. And as you well know, the ‘20, ’21, ‘22 inflation shock wasn’t the first inflation shock in our history. But it was the first one in this series where you see this big gap between how people should feel based on those variables, those predictors, and how they do feel.
And I do want to get this down early on: that’s a pretty complicated thing to explain—how people feel about the economy. You know, you ask ten economists what “vibes” mean, or pollsters, whatever; they’ll tell you ten different things. But I think what happened to prices is very important. But I want to be clear— and you’ve underscored this in some of your recent work— it’s not the only thing. So, there’s that.
I guess one other thing I’ll say: I have a particular set of experiences. I used to go out on WHNL, which stands for White House, North Lawn, and that’s where we used to go and talk to the cameras about how things were going. And no matter where we started, no matter what we were talking about, like a good unemployment report: “We just had 250,000 payroll jobs.” You know, “productivity is up, GDP inflation’s way down.” “Groceries had a 12% inflation rate. Now they have a 1.5% rate.” These are the things we were talking about out on WHNL, and it always got back to [the press saying], “Why do people feel so bad about the economy? They’re telling us things are too expensive. What are you going to do about that?” So that really got into my head.
Krugman: So your story is one that I have largely gone with. You did the hard work on the econometrics, which I have not, but again— you or I would say, “Look, inflation is way down.” They said, “What do you mean? Things cost so much more than they did in 2019.” And so you kind of introduced this “excess price level” as a story, which is very widespread. But why not that as opposed to just inflation over a longer period, or is there really a better story there?
Bernstein: Yeah. So, they’re quite similar. Inflation over a longer period is basically asking the question: how much did the level of prices go up over this period? So you raise a fair point. Most of what we talk about on inflation day is the change in the monthly inflation rate or, maybe, the yearly rate. But I think in some senses we’re circling around the same thing, which is people’s memory about prices. And that’s key to this research. It’s something I hadn’t thought enough about but I’ve more recently been kind of obsessed with, which is people’s memory of what things used to cost. And this gets you down an interesting set of questions.
So if that were the only thing in play here, everybody—including me and you—would be walking around totally depressed all the time because when I started driving, gas cost $0.60 a gallon. And, you know, right now it’s a $4 national average, but this increase from $0.60 to where it is now or any other price you want to focus on—that’s salient to the consumer market basket. It tends to go up very gradually. When you have a shock, like we did in ‘21, ’22, people have this set of prices still emblazoned in their head. I used to call it the “personal price vector,” which is this idea that we walk around knowing what the things we buy kind of cost. And when that gets shocked, you know, it’s really quite upsetting to folks, and it takes a while for them to acclimate. The question is, what do we mean by “a while”? And I’m still wrestling with that question.
Krugman: Yeah, I think there has to be a statute of limitations there somewhere. I mean, people aren’t pining for the days of 15-cent McDonald’s hamburgers. I started driving a lot earlier than you did. So, I don’t remember what gas cost, but I do remember a quarter to go to the movies. But obviously, at some point, people stop remembering. I’m probably going to get all nonlinear here, but I mean, we’re now five years on from the big price shocks from Covid. Admittedly, I am more affluent than most of the population, but I don’t remember what ground beef or eggs cost in April 2021, but I’m not sure that many people really do. So how is it that we are still feeling this?
Bernstein: Yeah. So this is something I think about a lot. And I think the answer is that it’s not just that we had that one shock—one and done, done and dusted. It’s that we’ve actually had a series of shocks and that people haven’t had time. A lot of this comes under the rubric of Trumpian chaos or, put differently, horrible crap that the Trump administration has thrown at the economy. You know, just really bad economic policy that has continued to fuel the shock that consumers have been experiencing. So, again, if it was one and done, I think people would be feeling better. But you get the Trump tariffs—that’s the big shock to prices. Now granted, we only import 11% of our GDP in goods. But walk down the aisles of Target and Walmart, and you’ll see a lot of those imports. So that’s in play. And now we have the shock of the war. I think there are some other factors in play. Social media amplifies this stuff in a way that it hasn’t in the past.
And, you know, actually, while I take your point about remembering what things cost—from talking to a few people, looking at some polling— actually, people do still remember at least what eggs cost, which was around $2 a dozen, or $1.50 a dozen. Although it’s not that far from that now, it’s closer to $2.50 or $3, depending on what kind of sale you can get. It wasn’t that long ago that it was four and five because of avian flu. So there’s been a lot of other shocks to prices in the interim. And I think that’s played an amplification role.
Krugman: Let me just say, people hate inflation. I mean, there’s a widespread view among economists—which, if you are not sufficiently cautious and laying it out, can sound condescending—but if you have a big increase in prices, but also a big increase in wages—which is kind of what happened during the Biden years—people should be saying, “Oh, I’m okay. My real income has kept up.” But they don’t. They think that they earned the wages and that the prices were done to them. Are you okay with that view, or do you think there’s something more going on here?
Bernstein: I think that view is correct. And that goes way back to research from many decades ago and has recently been updated by Stefanie Stantcheva, who shows precisely that people, right or wrong, kind of understandably feel like: “If I get a raise, it’s because of my hard work and I deserve it. If something happens to the price, that’s not me. That’s something somebody else did.” And in a world of politically intense partisanship and vicious social media, that “someone” became Biden. So, you get, “I got my raise, but Biden did this to my price.” And so I do think that plays out in both political and economic spheres.
Krugman: Something that I think I was quite wrong about was I thought that the bad vibes would kind of alleviate, or diminish, with the new president, much as I thought that there was a strong element of partisanship in moving those numbers, and that has not happened; if anything, it’s the reverse. And just a few hours before we had this conversation, I posted something about that. But what’s your view on that?
Bernstein: I have a strong view on this. And you captured it in your graphic this morning. I think that what’s happening to Trump—and this is not rocket science, by the way; if Elliott was here, he’d have more authoritative points on this, but I’m pretty sure I’m right. I think there are three groups in the electorate. There is the Never Trumpers, the Always Trumpers, and then this really key group in the middle that’s pretty dispositive in terms of which way they swing and it’s dispositive in terms of determining election outcomes. Some people call them “persuadables.” What I think of them, at least in the context of our conversation, are people who believed Trump when he said, “I’m going to lower prices on day one.” But these are folks, according to my theory which we’ve talked about so far—these are people walking around saying, “Damn it, I want my old prices back. I want my old interest rates back. I want my old mortgage rates back. And this guy not only is saying that he’s going to give them to me, but actually, the last time he was president, prices were lower and interest rates were lower. So let’s put him back and, you know, maybe we’ll get back there.” So they rolled the dice and they bet on the wrong pony. Whoops, I mixed the metaphor. But you get what I’m saying.
And now they understand that they’ve bet on the wrong guy and that their prices are right back to where they were. And in fact, inflation, if anything, has accelerated because of decisions Trump’s made. It’s not just that he’s ignored affordability or called it a hoax; it’s that he’s pushed hard in the wrong direction on these things. And this key middle group—which I think is behind some of the numbers you posted this morning—is very disenchanted by what they’ve seen.
Krugman: Yeah. Again, it’s hard to talk about this stuff without seeming condescending, but the people who swung to Trump in 2024 and swung hard against him now are disproportionately low-information, which—you know—that’s not a pejorative. It’s just a description there. He defines it as people who don’t know which party controls Congress. And I guess the argument is that they may well have actually kind of believed Trump, or at least either believed Trump’s promises, or just remembered that they were feeling pretty good in 2019.
Bernstein: I also want to be very careful not to sort of criticize anybody for being what looks gullible to an economist, because economists know that the only thing that really brings the price level down—meaning broad price deflation—is a deep recession, and nobody wants that. But people are getting jammed with all kinds of signals about how “I’m going to make your life better for you.” And I don’t think the media has distinguished themselves in helping people sort this out. So, you know, why not throw the dice and make a bet on someone who you think is going to do that kind of magic for you?
The problem that a lot of people face—the group that we’re talking about— is nobody ever seems to really help them enough. So that is a very important part of the agenda—what I call the affordability agenda—that I think we need to be working on and delivering on, you know, sooner than later.
Krugman: So, this is me being probably more partisan than you, despite the fact that you were actually in the administration, but I would have said that Biden did a lot to help people, that there were a lot of aid programs. I remember how worried people were about long-term economic scarring from Covid, and instead, we had this roaring recovery. And yet it didn’t seem to penetrate. People didn’t seem to give it any credit.
Bernstein: Well, the roaring recovery was real. I mean, you’ve been writing about this. I know we both admire Arindrajit Dube’s recent book, which is really a great documentation of the wage impacts back then. We wrote a chapter much like what Arin is saying in one of our economic reports for the President, where we documented the benefits of such low unemployment to folks. So, yeah, it’s true that we definitely were delivering some things that improve living standards, but some of them, based on just the political hurly-burly of the time, didn’t last long enough.
So the child tax credit was hugely important and took child poverty down to historically low rates. Cut it in half. And that was amazing. And by the way, it also underscores the point that whatever the child poverty rate is or the poverty rate in general, that’s a policy choice. And Biden chose to make it a lot lower. I thought it was the right policy choice. But, you know, it wasn’t okay with Joe Manchin, and so it went back up when that program ended.
And then when it comes to a lot of the investments, like building our industrial policy, building new computer fabrication plants, and investing in clean energy, that stuff takes a long time to pay off, and folks don’t really see that. And then when it comes to affordability, people were concerned with housing prices, healthcare, childcare, and the price of energy, which you highlighted this morning. And those were areas where we tried but weren’t able to do enough.
Krugman: The consumer price index— the standard measures of price level—do not include interest rates. I mean, the way we measure housing prices is by either rents or an estimate of what your house would rent for if it were rented; “owner’s equivalent rent.” And when I look at different things, one thing that really does stand out, the one thing where prices have effectively risen a lot more than wages, is in fact the mortgage payments. So how much do you think...? I mean, there was a paper by Larry Summers—though that doesn’t discredit the work— saying that was a big part. What’s your view on that?
Bernstein: I think that that is true. I mean, I think the point of that paper and my reference earlier to interest rates and mortgage rates is that this is the price of money. So it’s prices again. You know, “I want my old prices back.” Well, what’s the interest rate? It’s the price of borrowing. And so, yeah, I think that’s in play. But I think where that rubber meets the road is definitely in housing costs. Housing costs really went up very quickly over this period. And a very big part of this sentiment that we’re talking about—and this has been documented—is a lot of young people feeling like they’ll never be able to afford to buy a house. Which is very pervasive. That sentiment and that truth is very pervasive. And how do many young people start building wealth? Through home equity, through buying a home. So that’s a source of a lot of upsetness.
But it’s the rental side of the equation that was really giving folks a lot of problems back in the period when these negative vibes started to percolate—and still do. If you look at the numbers, the share of income that people are paying on rent, it’s 30, 40, 50% in some cases. And that makes it really hard to get by. So I think both the interest rate and housing costs are part of this puzzle. Absolutely.
Krugman: It’s one of those things, because if you look at rents, rents really shot up in ‘21, ’22 and then they really sort of flatlined after that. And I’m not sure that, at this point, rents are any higher relative to 2020 and before. Maybe I’m wrong about that, but I thought rents were actually not looking like that big a problem now.
Bernstein: Yeah, at least in terms of inflation. The shelter, or the housing component of the CPI is back to where it was pre-pandemic. So again, this is a level thing. So, this gets back to something we said before. I would go out to talk to the TV cameras, and I’d say, “Inflation was 9-10%. Now it’s 2%.” And people would kind of hear: “Ok, so the prices that I already don’t like—they’re not falling. They’re going up more slowly. And you want me to stand up and applaud for that?” And I think that dynamic has been in play in rental markets as well.
Krugman: I think that was an old John Kenneth Galbraith line where he said: “When people say inflation has fallen, they’re saying that things are getting worse more slowly.” Which is not really right, but on the other hand, it gets at this.
Bernstein: I would say that’s “not really right,” but just what you said. And I have this theory that I’m working on with some folks. I don’t want to lean too far into something that I haven’t empirically really fleshed out yet. But I think there’s something that goes on in this space when you have a shock to the price level. When instead of gradual movements in something people care about, if something’s getting bad, I guess it’s the boiling frog story. If something’s getting kind of bad, really slowly, you can learn to live with it. You can adapt. And if your income and wages are kind of going up at around the same rate, then you’re not really the boiling frog. You’re pretty comfortable and you’re getting along, or you’re pretty uncomfortable.
You know, you made an important point this morning: a lot of people are just always having a tough time. So you’re either doing okay or you’re doing badly. But at least it’s not a shock. You’re used to what you’ve been experiencing. And I think the interaction of a shock that’s that sharp, that quick, when you’ve had two decades of really low inflation—and this gets into the ‘70s story, which we should probably get into a little bit—that’s really a cluster mess for people’s thinking.
Krugman: Yeah. You did your estimates starting in 1990. So it’s really three decades. I mean, basically, Paul Volcker brought inflation way down in the ‘80s. But we used to think there was low inflation when it was 4%; but by the time he was finished, it got down to around 2% and stayed there for a long, long time. So only old codgers like me even remember a high inflation environment until what happened in ‘21, ’22. So, yeah. The shock aspect, I think, was really clear.
Bernstein: But, you know, first of all, I sat in gas lines in the ‘70s, so... A lot of our conversation, Paul, is two old boomers saying, “Well, I remember when things used to...”
Krugman: Yeah.
Bernstein: But you asked a good question in some correspondence we had, which was, “Why didn’t we have this kind of vibe shock when we had the late ‘70s, early ‘80s inflation shock? Because that was also a big shock.” And, again, that was when people like me were sitting in gas lines, which is pretty uncomfortable and unfamiliar an experience to most Americans. And you just didn’t see the kind of vibes gap that we see in the data now. And I think one of the reasons is because we hadn’t had 20 years with inflation. It was just very quiescent. Inflation below the Fed’s target of 2% for many of those years where we just didn’t have to think about it. We actually had a cascading series of shocks back then. So, I think the way we put it in the paper is that when people have been living with good weather for 20 years, a hurricane is way more upsetting to them than if they’re sort of used to storms.
Krugman: Yeah. And it turns out that the increase in the price level under Reagan’s first term and under Biden were actually shockingly identical. I mean, within fractions of a percentage point, equal. And yet, Reagan runs on “Morning in America,” and with Biden, everybody thinks, “I want the good old days of Trump back.” And that might just be stormy weather. Also, it’s just that people came into the Reagan era expecting [some inflation]. The U. Michigan median expected inflation over the next five years was, I guess, 7.4% or something when Reagan took office.
Bernstein: Right. When you start, it sets off a path dependency that you kind of have to live with. But, Paul, I actually wanted to ask you something about this, which is a little more forward-looking. This gets into some nerdy economic stuff that’s less about the vibes and more about inflation and those dynamics. It gets into the Federal Reserve a little bit, which is topical given that, you know, Kevin Warsh is in the news this week. And Chris Waller, one of the Fed governors, gave a speech that I thought was quite articulate on this point. There is some thinking now that because we’ve had this series of shocks—of course the pandemic, but then, you know, the war in Ukraine, which, by the way, was another energy shock. And now the war in Iran, which is yet another energy shock. And the tariffs, which is another price shock. Because we’ve had all these kinds of repetitive upward pressure on prices, the inflationary anchor— which I’ll let you explain— is at risk of getting dislodged. And that is something that I do worry a bit about. Could you talk about that? But also, you know, maybe clarify what the hell we’re talking about?
Krugman: Yeah. I think you probably have the same underlying model, although I think I may express it a little differently. But when we think about inflation—I guess one way to say this is that inflation is a process of leapfrogging—that a firm sets its prices, and then another firm sets its prices overlapping a bit, and then the next one and so on. And what prices are you going to set? Because you don’t change your prices every day, at least in most things. It’s partly catching up with price increases that have happened before, and it’s partly getting ahead of price increases that will happen. So you’re concerned about the prices that your suppliers will charge. You’re concerned about the prices that your competitors charge; it tells you how much you can get away with. We usually put this as expected inflation. But it’s actually both past inflation and expected future inflation that enter into determining what the current rate of inflation is. And the great, big story that we tend to have is that inflation, if you have a bout of it—even if you have a spike in prices because of something like Russia invaded Ukraine or the United States bombing Iran— it’s not as big a problem if it doesn’t get built into people’s expectations about future inflation.
But we’re always concerned that expectations will get un-anchored or that people will start to do what we think happened in the ‘70s. That people started to build expectations of future inflation into their pricing, and that that was extremely— you know, extremely costly to get rid of it. The severity of the ‘79 to ’82 slump was comparable to the global financial crisis. And the question, obviously, is: are we doing badly enough for that to happen? And, actually, I’d say there’s two forward-looking questions. I mean, we had a great experience, right? That’s part of what I want to get at. In terms of the things that macro economists were worried about, the ‘21-’22 inflation spike turned out to be kind of... everything worked out fine and expectations didn’t get un-anchored; the inflation was transitory, although transitory turns out to be longer than we thought. Slow, but in the end, the definition really should be functional by the time period. And in the sense that we did not need to go through an extended 1980s-style slump to bring inflation down. That was what we had all hoped for. But can we count on that happening again? And that’s the question. I mean, how much do you worry?
Waller, by the way, was a big dove. He was one of the people who basically kind of went after people who were predicting many years of high unemployment, saying, “No. You’re wrong.”
Bernstein: Yeah. So people who are interested in what we’re talking about should go read the speech that Waller gave late last week. It’s very clear and, I thought, incisive on these issues. So I’m worried, Paul, and I’m a historical dove. And when it comes to full employment and inflation balancing the Fed’s mandate. I’ve long worried about the full employment side of the coin. And now I’m worried a little bit more about the inflationary pressure side of the coin. Now, that may be because of my own PTSD from when I was going through this in the administration. But, you know, the Fed has been above its target for five years. That’s a long time. And inflation seems kind of stuck around where it is now.
Krugman: Look, if the target were 3% instead of 2%, the world would be fine. Obviously, wages and incomes would have to catch up to that. But I think that would happen on average. It’s a big statement.
Bernstein: Yeah. But if the Fed can’t get back to its target in a climate with a reckless and unchecked person in the White House whose instincts are highly inflationary—as is true of all authoritarians, regardless of what country they preside over— yeah, I’m worried about it. I’m worried about the anchor.
Krugman: I have turned a little more hawkish than I used to be. I used to be very critical of the 2% inflation target, which in many ways I thought was too low. And if we consult the history of how we ended up with 2%, it’s kind of weird and also kind of funny. I mean, it’s one of the few major things that you can really blame on New Zealand because they were the first to do it. But you know, there were a lot of arguments, particularly during the long slump after the global financial crisis, saying that 2% was too low. But now we kind of say: well, 2% is low enough that people just stopped thinking about inflation and 3% is starting to draw concern. We used to say 4% makes sense, and now I’m not sure that would be okay. And that credibility—the ability to get over the inflation shock, the supply chain, and Ukraine shock— I think had a lot to do with the fact that people really did not expect higher inflation on a sustained basis. I’m worried now that losing 2% unintentionally might be a serious problem.
Bernstein: Yeah, I share that concern. But let me ask you a question. And I should speak to this, too. But I want you to go first, which is: so we’ve talked a lot about what we think are driving these negative vibes. What do you think we should be doing about it? What is the right path? What is the best path forward to realign vibes with where they were pre-pandemic, at least?
Krugman: That’s a really good question. And a part of the answer is: what do you mean “WE,” white man? You know, who is “we” that should be doing what? Well, certainly not me. And at this point, not you unfortunately either.
Bernstein: No, that’s not correct. I’m very ensconced in policy efforts, which I’ll talk about in a minute, but you go ahead.
Krugman: All right. But, you know, a big part of the answer lies with the Federal Reserve. But also, there’s a very good chance that Congress will be in different hands in a few months and that the White House will be in different hands in 2029. But I mean: “don’t do stupid stuff” would be a good start.
Bernstein: That’d be a great start.
Krugman: Don’t launch unnecessary wars. Don’t politicize the Fed. But I do worry. I mean, we’re in the middle of an ongoing discussion in which you and Elliott have been making the point that it is about price levels. And then there’s a lot of people saying, “Does this mean that the vibes are going to be negative for the foreseeable future?” Are we in, among other things, for a political universe in which every president, of whatever party, has a disgruntled public because prices are too high, and so it’s always “throw the bums out” every four years? And I don’t know. I think this is one of the things that actually hinges a lot on what we think really is driving the vibes. And when is the statute of limitations on the price level that people expect? But it is a real concern.
Bernstein: Yeah. I mean, it’s funny. I myself framed this as like, the goal is getting vibes back to some level that they used to ride at. Really, the goal is much more a political economy goal, at least in my head, which is to help people be able to make ends meet in an economy that’s been growing at a good clip for a long time. I mean, we’re actually quite productive. We have good GDP growth. Even the unemployment rate is pretty low, even if job creation has been just about zero.
A lot of people justly feel—and this is not just a low-information sentiment—a lot of people justly feel like they’re just not getting their fair slice of the pie that they’re helping to bake. And so we have to reconnect their living standards to the growth in the overall economy. You said something decades ago that’s always stuck with me, which is: for way too many people, economic growth is a spectator sport, not a participatory sport. So what’s the linkage there? To me, it’s the affordability agenda. And this is what I’m working on at the Center for American Progress and at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, which is crafting an agenda—a policy agenda—and getting politicians interested in it (which is another part of the problem) that will help correct market failures and flaws in key areas of the household budget: health care policy—something you’re very familiar with. Child care. We have great plans in that space. Housing— we’ve already put out a plan that’s been quite positively viewed in that area. We have a great plan coming out on electricity prices. We tried to do a thing on groceries. That’s a lot harder because it really is pretty much a market good. But that’s the agenda. And I don’t think that people necessarily have to understand all the fine points on the policies. But you got to deliver and, you know, that’s a really heavy political lift. But I think that’s the connection that needs to be made.
Krugman: Yeah. I mean, I would say also that you have to be seen as trying to deliver that. That’s really kind of important.
Bernstein: Yeah, gotta get caught trying.
Krugman: Although there was sort of this question: were you and your colleagues bad salesmen?
Bernstein: Yes.
Krugman: Well, “could you have done something different?” is the question. I’m sitting right now in the heart of the communist, anarchist, Islamic world revolution, or whatever. You know, with the Mamdani administration in New York, which has very limited ability to affect these issues.
Bernstein: Right. Although the area where he does have more impact probably is housing affordability because that is a lot of local policy. But at least 100 days in, he’s been spectacularly successful and visibly trying to do something. I think Mamdani is exhibit A of what I’m talking about. He ran on affordability. And, you know, you can call it sidewalk socialism, but he’s filling potholes as well as delivering child care and working on housing. He is, I think, a model for exactly what I’m talking about. And look, yes, his powers are limited given where he sits. But however many months in, it’s working. Now, it’s way too soon to make any kind of a judgment. And by the way, yes, Mamdani is the most visible example of the model I just described in action, but it’s working as well or better than I could have hoped, at least thus far. But here in Virginia, we have a centrist governor named Abigail Spanberger, and there’s Governor Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey— both centrist Democrats running on similar policies. So this is not just a socialist thing.
Krugman: I know. It’s just, New York is sui generis on every level.
Bernstein: Including pizza and bagels, but that’s a different discussion.
Krugman: Well, it’s even more that I think it’s a lot easier to find Eritrean food, which I had here with friends the other day. But anyway, one of the things that worries me about this whole vibes episode is—aside from the political economy and all of that— it’s: what do we do in the next economic crisis? Because what strikes me is that when the supply chain issues became clear, when it became obvious that some things had been disrupted and that demand was really a very different mix from before, and that you started to see those container ships steaming back and forth, waiting for a berth and all of that, there was going to be a large and inflationary shock coming from that and that the right policy—assuming that you could keep inflation expectations anchored— was, in fact, to accommodate; to have a burst of inflation and then stabilize after that; that a one-time rise in the price level was actually exactly what the optimal policy model said you should allow. And it did happen and people hated it. And now I’m worried that we will do something stupid next time. Is that your concern as well?
Bernstein: Yes, but first of all, the concern about whether we will do something stupid is bearing out in real time. But I guess the way I would frame your question is: has Keynesian stimulus in a recession been discredited by what just happened? And I very much obviously hope that’s not the case. The supply shock, or what you described as the supply chain snarl-up part of the pandemic, was very sui generis, of course, and was a function of a 100-year virus. So that’s a lesson we don’t want to over-learn.
Adding to my worries about this is the reality that our fiscal outlook is actually as bad as it’s ever been, at least in my lifetime. Even though the kind of fiscal interventions we’re talking about—the Keynesian kinds of interventions we’re talking about—you’ll actually be fiscally worse off if you don’t do them than if you do do them because you’ll end up with worse GDP outcomes. But there will be those who will point to the debt and say, “We can’t do anything. Look at the magnitude of the debt.” So, yes, I’m very worried about that. And my only solace is that one definition of a Keynesian is a Republican in a recession. They all get very stimulative-oriented pretty quickly in that situation. So maybe just the power of a rising unemployment rate and its populist impact will drive better policy in that regard. But it’s a concern.
Krugman: Yeah. I would have said that Covid and Ukraine were unique events. Except now there’s Hormuz and you start Googling choke points and it’s not hard to think that maybe it’s not that unique an event right now.
Bernstein: I agree with you. And I do think that one of the things I’m trying to do—and I think you’re trying to do this in some of your work—is to just remind people what good economic policy looks like. It wasn’t that long ago, as you’ve said in numerous posts and in this conversation, where we applied a lot of economic thinking in the Biden years. And if you take away everything we’ve been talking about for the last hour—which is the negative vibes around the inflation and the price level—I think you’d have a good example of really pretty effective policymaking that helped not only increase the economy’s growth in its capacity, but delivered those bigger slices to folks who are helping to bake the pie and, in many ways, are the most economically vulnerable people. Whether it was the advantages to the poverty rate, whether it was lowering the uninsured rate, or whether it was simply helping to maintain a strong enough labor market that wage gains reached the bottom of the scale. So I guess my point is: we know how to do this, or at least we have an idea. We just have to really fight hard for the politics to get back there.
I guess the last point I’ll make on this—and we’ve talked about this as well— resistance is not futile, and people want something different than what they’re getting. That seems very clear.
Krugman: Yeah. And I wonder. A year ago we probably would have said: “Look, the Biden team by and large did good stuff, responded very well to the Covid crisis, and got totally savaged politically for their success.” And that meant that we might be taking all the wrong lessons. I have to say that one small silver lining to all of the crazy stuff now happening is that it does seem to be gradually making people think better of the previous experience and kind of understand a little bit. I’m not sure. I think the public is actually probably ahead of the political universe there... but I don’t know. Do you feel that people are more appreciative of what you all did now than they were before?
Bernstein: Well, it’s a good question. I run in circles that are maybe somewhat similar or adjacent to ones you do. And what I get a lot of, from at least the people I talk to, is, “You guys did a great job, and your messaging was terrible.” And, you know, we sort of referenced that a few minutes ago. I will agree that our messaging was far from optimal in that a lot of times we were talking past people. But I think there’s a difference between talking past people and lying to people. We were honest. But I don’t think there was some magic set of words we could have said that would have made things all that much different. And I think you made a similar comment a while ago.
So I do think that sentiment—“You did a good job, but you didn’t convey it”—is live. I don’t know what people are feeling. I think if you go out and poll people again—as Elliott would know—at this point, they might be saying Biden was better than Trump because Trump has turned out to be such a mess. But they didn’t agree with where Biden was—and they probably wouldn’t agree with where you and I are—on the economics.
At some level, vibes are a function of people’s faith in the government to actually have their back, to get behind them and lastingly help them. And it’s been a long time in the Trump years— Okay, it’s actually been a little over a year, but it feels like decades since that’s been the case. Joe Biden and his administration—which I was proud to be a part of— certainly worked hard to do that. And we can have good debates about how far we got. But we were trying and at this point, we have a government that’s not trying at all. And in fact, when it’s not self-dealing, it’s pushing in the other direction. So I don’t think it’s that heavy a lift to get back to a point where we’re trying to rebuild people’s faith in a government that actually does useful things for them. And that, to me, is a north star.
Krugman: Good place to end. Thanks for talking with me.
Bernstein: Thank you, Paul.
Market Design
