The Reluctance of Economists to Talk About Inflation in a Proactive Way

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The science that we were about to be in this inflationary crisis was becoming a lot more obvious. Yet my sense is that there was real reluctance among a lot of left-of-center economists to talk about this in a proactive way, because it seemed politically an opportunity. Even conservative economists, that wasn't the objection they had to it, it was inflation. They were making other ones. That's actually when you got the greed narrative.

Jason Furman is a professor of economics in the Economics Department at Harvard and at the Harvard Kennedy School. He also served as the chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Barack Obama.

In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Jason Furman discuss the causes of today’s persistent inflation in the US and whether it is likely to continue; how concerned we should be about the recent failures of mid-sized regional banks; and why America’s share of world GDP has remained resilient over the past decades even though it sometimes feels dysfunctional relative to other developed economies like Germany and Japan.

This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

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