Economists Are in the Wilderness. Can They Find a Way Back to Influence?

Partway through a panel discussion at a recent economics conference in San Francisco, Jason Furman, a former adviser to President Barack Obama, turned to Kimberly Clausing, a former member of the Biden administration and the author of a book extolling the virtues of free trade.

“Everyone in this room agrees with your book,” Mr. Furman said. “No one outside of this room agrees with your book.”

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Speaking to a roomful of economists at the conference, Oren Cass, a conservative policy expert — but not an academically trained economist — ticked through a list of the profession’s perceived failures:

• The loss of manufacturing jobs and the deindustrialization of the American Midwest, which Mr. Cass and others attribute largely to free trade.
• The 2008 financial crisis and the ensuing recession, for which some partly blamed the financial deregulation championed by many economists.
• The long-term slowdown in economic growth despite repeated tax cuts that many economists argued would have the opposite effect.

“I think people rightly look at what the economists are recommending and say, ‘Why on earth should we expect that to be true?’” he said. “If what you have been doing is not working, you cannot retain credibility and expect good outcomes simply by continuing to do it.”

Many economists, unsurprisingly, reject much of Mr. Cass’s analysis. They argue, for example, that the decline of manufacturing was at least as much a result of technological change and global forces as American trade policy, and that tariffs will wind up only hurting the people they are intended to help.

And in any case, they argue, Mr. Cass presents an outdated caricature of who economists are and what they believe. Perhaps in the 1980s and ’90s, economists overwhelmingly favored an agenda of lower taxes, reduced regulation and unfettered globalization, but in recent decades the field has evolved to take a more nuanced and varied view of these subjects.

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