michelle goldberg

I’m Michelle Goldberg.

ross douthat

I’m Ross Douthat.

david leonhardt

I’m David Leonhardt. And this is “The Argument.” This week, are Democrats blowing their chance to win back the Senate?

michelle goldberg

Being in the Senate used to be considered a really good job.

david leonhardt

Then, how much can we blame economists for income inequality in America?

binyamin appelbaum

Their predictions were rooted in an understanding of the world that was not actually the world in which we live.

david leonhardt

And finally, a recommendation. I mean, if money were no object, I think I would have bought seven hats. [MUSIC PLAYING] The Democrats don’t just need to beat Donald Trump in 2020 to accomplish their goals. They also need to win back the Senate. And to do that, they’ll need to pick up at least three seats. And yet the party doesn’t seem totally focused on the Senate. Some of its strongest potential Senate candidates are not even running. Democratic donors, for their part, are focused on the presidential race, not the Senate races. And the debate in the presidential race on issues like immigration seems to bring a very real risk of alienating voters in the races where Democrats would need to win Senate seats. But the news isn’t all bad for Democrats. John Hickenlooper, the former governor of Colorado, has just dropped out of the presidential race and announced he’s going to run for Senate there against an incumbent Republican. The Democrats also have a strong candidate running in Arizona. When I look at it all, I’m left thinking that the Democrats are most definitely not doing all they could and should be doing to win back the Senate, but that it’s also not some kind of worst case scenario. And I’m interested, Michelle, when you sort through all of it, how optimistic or pessimistic you end up being?

michelle goldberg

Well, I mean, I find it extremely frustrating. Beto O’Rourke and Steve Bullock, I wish would run for the Senate. Obviously, I would be thrilled if Stacey Abrams wanted to run for the Senate. But I feel like people talk about her as if there’s a kind of dereliction of duty when what she is doing, this massive both voter registration and anti-voter suppression campaign that she’s running, that could end up being pivotal to the Democrats’ Senate hopes whether or not she actually gets in the race. Beto O’Rourke is the one that kind of frustrates me the most, because he had this opening when the Houston Chronicle said, you know, come back, Beto, we need you, it would have sort of been the perfect off-ramp from this campaign to say, you know, I’m answering the call of my state at this moment of emergency.

ross douthat

I think the Democrats are blowing some chances here, and I obviously probably agree more with you, David, about some of their general mistakes in the ideological valence of their candidates. I think the Democrats keep leaving winnable purplish state Senate races on the table. But with that being said, I mean, one, there is still time for Beto or Bullock or even Abrams, for that matter, to get into these Senate races. And what you saw with Hickenlooper, this sort of brief presidential campaign that he pulled out and is now running for Senate, that still could be the template for some of these candidates.

michelle goldberg

What it makes me wonder is being in the Senate used to be considered a really good job and the fact that you kind of have top tier candidates, who aren’t interested in doing it, to me, just highlights the extent to which Mitch McConnell has broken that institution, both by being a force of such total obstruction when he’s in the minority, and then being such a partisan hack in the majority. And so he’s kind of taken away a lot of the discretion and autonomy that individual senators used to exercise.

ross douthat

I mean, I think I would be more inclined to blame deep structural forces in American politics, rather than Mitch McConnell. But it is a reality that we have evolved towards a system where the Senate, because of polarization, is just less important for American politics. I think it is a feature of our system right now that the presidency and the judiciary are the key branches of government, and the legislature is just defined by gridlock and incompetence.

michelle goldberg

Because politics has been so nationalized, being a senator is a much better stepping stone to ultimately being president. There was a long time when people thought that being a governor was a more natural stepping stone to being president. And so again, it’s sort of mysterious to me that people are so unwilling, you know, again, particularly Beto O’Rourke, because he wanted to be senator just a couple of years ago. But I do think Ross is right that most of what happens is going to be done at the executive level. It’s symbolic of a crisis of confidence in lawmaking in the legislature writ large.

david leonhardt

Hey, on Beto, I do have one question. Is it really a big deal that he’s not running? It seems a really big deal that Governor Steve Bullock is not running in Montana, because he’s the only Democrat who seems to have any shot of winning that seat. But there is a candidate who seems quite strong in Texas. Her name is M.J. Hegar. And I’m not actually sure that Beto has a vastly better chance of beating John Cornyn, the Republican there. Do you think Beto really is sort of a difference maker in the Texas Senate race, if he were to run?

michelle goldberg

You know, it’s true that Beto was able to do some thing really significant in mobilizing a lot of people to almost beat Ted Cruz, even though he didn’t quite get there. And so I understand why people kind of think if anybody could do it, he could. And he’s obviously an extremely energetic campaigner, just kind of visiting every part of the state, including parts that maybe don’t get a lot of political attention. But no, I don’t see any reason to think that only Beto could do it. And it’s not as if he has a proven track record in the way that Steve Bullock does.

ross douthat

I think the question is do you think his limp presidential campaign has changed the way the mix of Texas and national media would cover his race against Cornyn?

michelle goldberg

So I don’t really know. But I do think that you saw him after the El Paso shooting, you know, become this voice of moral clarity and remind people why they loved him so much to begin with. When I saw him when he was running for Senate, I was at that event he did with Willie Nelson and got Obama vibes just in the sense of energy and expectation and the massive size of the crowd. Whether he could recapture that, I don’t know.

ross douthat

I just wanted to mention one other piece of news, which is that Joe Manchin, long my favorite Democratic senator, has decided to not run for governor in West Virginia, which is not something that’s setting progressive America on fire with excitement, but is, in fact, essential news for the Democrats in their quest to take the Senate. And it points to the core reality of the next Democratic presidency, which is that Joe Manchin is going to become one of the most powerful people in America.

david leonhardt

It should set progressive America on fire with excitement. It’s a big deal.

ross douthat

Do you think there is a path for Doug Jones to win re-election in Alabama?

michelle goldberg

I am reluctant to say, let’s all cross our fingers for Roy Moore, because some people made that internal calculation with Trump and look how it turned out. But it does seem at least possible that Roy Moore is going to be the Republican nominee, right? He’s going to take another shot at it. It seems unlikely, but it seemed unlikely to begin with.

ross douthat

Right. I guess I just see Jones as a counterexample to Manchin, of someone who got very lucky, but has sort of conspicuously declined to tailor his politics to the politics of his state. And so while Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema in Arizona are sort of strong Democratic Senate candidates, Jones has sort of been, you know, not the most liberal politician, but a much more liberal politician than the kind who could win re-election in his own state.

michelle goldberg

I just think Doug Jones, he was always a long shot candidate. He was a civil rights lawyer. So on issues regarding civil rights and civil liberties, I don’t know. I don’t know how many people he picks up by betraying his core convictions. I’m all for people making any sorts of compromises that they have to win these tough races. It’s just not clear to me where those sort of politically advantageous compromises would be for him.

david leonhardt

I mean, Ross and I have both mentioned the fact that we think that some of the tenor of the debate in the Democratic presidential race is hurting the party’s chances of winning Senate seats in more conservative states. Do you agree with that or is that just too much hand-wringing and do we have no idea how the discussion of immigration affects the Iowa Senate race, and thus it’s not worth spending much brainpower on?

michelle goldberg

That. I mean, I think that, first of all, we’re in a primary. Everything that happens, especially in this political environment— I mean, how long ago was the government shut down? Eight months ago?

david leonhardt

30 years.

michelle goldberg

Right. We are much further than eight months out from the election. So the stuff that people are talking about now in this primary are not going to be super salient in the general election. At this stage, it doesn’t make sense for Democrats to triangulate too much or to think too hard about who other people want to vote for. I think that they need to be thinking about what excites them. People’s positioning on a lot of individual policy issues are pretty changeable, particularly if they feel like they can believe in and trust a person’s broader vision.

ross douthat

I think the issue is, it’s more about the Senate candidates themselves than it is necessarily what the national party is doing. I mean, I think the lesson of the survival of a figure like Manchin in West Virginia, is that if you’re running for Senate in states that tilt towards the other party, you have to establish a credible distance from your own national party. Whatever the Democratic nominee ends up standing for, the question then becomes what do Democrats running in Texas or Alabama or Colorado or Arizona say about the national party’s stances or the standard bearer stances, and how credibly can they say, you can vote for me even if you’re not comfortable voting for Bernie Sanders for president.

david leonhardt

And if Democrats are going to retake the Senate, they absolutely need Colorado.

michelle goldberg

Wait, can I just say, though, I mean I feel like if we’re talking about the Senate, Maine is really instructive. Because that’s actually a place where you do see the wages of the Trumpification of the Republican Party. I mean, Susan Collins is no longer favored to win that race, right? I mean, I think that most people who look at it say it’s a toss up. There’s always a story about Democrats in disarray. It’s at least theoretically possible that Republicans are not in much better shape.

ross douthat

Totally. And Collins is a perfect example of how hard to pull off this kind of distance from the national party is especially when you have sort of high profile national debates like the Kavanaugh hearings. And I was just in Maine, where I have family, and my cousin has a job working to unseat Susan Collins in Maine. So I’ve been really in the heart of that vital contest. But if Trump intervenes, though, on behalf of lobster fishermen in a conflict over whether lobstermen need to put down fewer lines for their traps, that could be a difference maker in Maine.

david leonhardt

O.K., well, let’s leave it there, and we invite lobstermen in Maine or voters in any other state having a Senate race to call us with their thoughts about this subject as well. We’ll be right back after a very short break. [MUSIC PLAYING] It’s no secret that income inequality in America has soared in recent decades. The rich have done extremely well, and everyone else has not. Binyamin Appelbaum writes about business and economics for The New York Times editorial board. And he also has a new book out. It’s called “The Economist’s Hour.” In it, he blames much of the country’s income gap on economists. Binya is joining us today to talk about that book. Binya, welcome to “The Argument.”

binyamin appelbaum

Thanks for having me.

david leonhardt

Your book is about the rising power of economists over the past half century, and you’re quite critical of economists. But you also say that they’ve done some good, too. So let’s start with the good. What do you think is the greatest accomplishment in terms of human well-being of this era of economists’ influence?

binyamin appelbaum

Yeah, the book is basically about this revolution in policymaking that begins in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, where economists began to exert much greater influence in shaping public policy. And I do think that there were some really beneficial aspects to that, in particular, the rise of cost benefit analysis or the systematic consideration of the costs and benefits of policies, which now feels very organic and just part of the way policy is made. But it was an innovation. It was invented and created and imposed on the policy making process. And I think it brought a real benefits to the federal government, that it forced consideration of whether programs were actually worthwhile, whether they were worth the cost. I think that’s been a pretty unmitigated good thing.

david leonhardt

And you also mentioned in the book some of the huge reduction in poverty in parts of the world that have moved toward market based economies, most obviously China and other parts of Asia. But as I noted much of the book is quite critical of economists. So let’s get to the heart of it. I mean, what do you think has been the central problem of this economists’ hour.

binyamin appelbaum

The central problem is that economists argued that there was a direct trade between focusing on efficiency or making the economy as large as possible and focusing on equality, or ensuring that everyone was benefiting from prosperity. And they advocated that policymakers should focus on efficiency, that they should make the pie as large as possible and not worry about how large the pieces were. And the results of that decision to essentially ignore inequality was soaring inequality. By failing to weigh against inequality, by failing to work against inequality, the government in effect allowed this yawning gap to open.

michelle goldberg

So could you just clarify, when you’re talking about economists, I mean are you talking about a specific school of economists, you know, Chicago school economists, or are you talking about neoliberal economists? Or are you talking about the biases that are built into the profession writ large?

binyamin appelbaum

So economics is an enormously diverse discipline, and there’s no question that there have always been economists on the right and left fringes of mainstream economics who had critiques of what was happening. But I think it’s important to recognize that during this half century period, there was a remarkable degree of consensus in the mainstream. It was not just the case that conservative economists often associated with the University of Chicago were advocating for free market policies. It was also the case that liberal economists in Democratic administrations were coming on board with this agenda of deregulation, of flattening taxation, of imposing cost benefit analysis on regulations, on supporting free trade without a particular concern for who was being disadvantaged by those policies, on strongly, strongly condemning unions, on opposing minimum wage laws. None of these things were particularly controversial among mainstream economists. And it wasn’t just the conservatives doing this to the liberals. It was Democratic administrations, as much as Republican ones.

david leonhardt

Do you think there is still this sort of neoliberal consensus? I mean, as I look, I basically now see Democratic administrations try to raise tax rates. They try to spend substantially more money on the poor and the middle class. And I take your point that for much of the last 40 or 50 years, there’s been a kind of consensus. But it does seem to be breaking apart a little bit.

binyamin appelbaum

Absolutely. You know, this is a work of history. And I think we’re still living with the consequences of that history. But there’s no question that particularly in the academy, economists have become much more ideologically diverse. There are many economists who are focused on inequality. In fact, many of the critiques in my book have their roots in work by younger economists. So I think the new generation of economists is raising these questions. I’m not sure how completely that has infiltrated the policy space. I think there’s a good argument to be made that this presidential cycle is the first time that we’re really seeing a questioning of some of these assumptions. I don’t think that particularly happened in the Obama administration. But I think the next Democratic president might be the first to really break from this consensus.

michelle goldberg

Were the economists that you’re talking about, were they wrong in their calculations or their predictions or just that their field operates with a set of metrics that doesn’t graph easily onto a kind of functioning democratic society, so that they’re kind of thinking in terms that leave out huge spectrums of human flourishing.

binyamin appelbaum

I think, you know, their predictions were rooted in an understanding of the world that was not actually the world in which we live. They argued that if you sort of simplified the world and assumed that people would behave rationally, that that would be a useful construct, that you could derive useful results about public policy by making that assumption, most famously by assuming that financial markets would regulate themselves and didn’t require the babysitting of the government. That turned out to be wrong and consequentially wrong. It was a misunderstanding of the way the world works and the way that policy works.

ross douthat

So maybe I should speak up briefly for the economists here, I guess, because I feel like there’s a story that progressives are very comfortable telling, where neoliberal economists came in, influenced both political parties every government in the West, and ushered in this kind of new Gilded Age, this period of growth and technological change that was also a period of skyrocketing inequality, and therefore, the way to correct for the inequality is to take more of the wealth generated by growth and redistribute it. But when I look at the history of the last 30 or 40 years, and especially really the history of the last 20, what’s striking is how little growth there has been in certain ways. And if you look at the one period where there was growth, substantial growth, the 1990s, it was a period of increasing inequality, but a period that was also a period of sort of political stability and generally increasing optimism. So my sense, looking at that history, is that maybe the neoliberals weren’t wrong that there is a trade-off, but they underestimated how hard it is at a period of sort of extreme development to generate further growth. And a lot of the disappointments that we’re dealing with have to do with the stagnation that their policies have failed to solve, but there isn’t some other magical policy toolkit that will solve them. You know, if you look across the economies of North America and Western Europe, there’s been a lot of differences in how they’ve implemented sort of economistic thinking. But they’ve all ended up with the same populist disturbances, the same rise of ethno nationalism. And I’m not sure there’s a counterfactual story where we just did better on redistribution, and all of this worked out more happily.

binyamin appelbaum

I don’t think it’s about redistribution alone. But I think the ‘90s are a really important period to go back and look at because that gets told as a story of the last time things were good. But I think with the ‘90s really were is a period in which an orchard that had been planted and cultivated, we went into it and we picked all the fruit, and it was really great, and we enjoyed eating from the orchard. But we weren’t planting a new orchard. We weren’t making investments. And I’ll give you a very specific example. The ‘90s are a period in which America has a much more educated workforce than any other developed nation because of our investments in public education in the prior generation. But during the 1990s, we’re disinvesting in education. And so today, we have a workforce that’s significantly less educated than in many other developed nations. There’s a delay here, right? The policies don’t immediately impact the economy, but over time if you’re pulling back from making those investments, you’ll experience slower growth. What you need to be doing as a society is to be investing and making sure that people have opportunities to prosper. And that’s how you get faster growth.

ross douthat

But which are the countries that are doing better at investing in education? Because American growth rates are generally better than European growth rates. Demographic stagnation and sclerosis are afflicting East Asian economies. The problems in France and Italy and Germany and the U.K. and, for that matter, Japan and South Korea all suggest that there is this deep force pushing us towards stagnation.

binyamin appelbaum

So with regard to Europe, one very interesting statistic is that if you compare American and French growth over the last four decades, America obviously has grown more quickly. But if you remove the portion of that growth that went to the top 1 percent of the population in each country, income growth has been much faster in France for the bottom 99 percent. And so there are measures — I think important measures — by which Europe’s experience has been significantly more positive. There is a demographic weight bearing down on all developed countries. We’re all aging, and that is having real consequences for growth, and there is a dearth of significant new innovation. And the reasons for that are hotly disputed. But once again, it’s weighing on growth everywhere. But the question is what do you do with the world in which you live? And that’s where I think that there is a consequential difference.

david leonhardt

We’re obviously in the midst of a presidential campaign right now. Let’s imagine that campaign ends with a different president from the current one, who is less enamored of economists than recent presidents have been. What can you imagine being different in terms of government policy, specifically, if we had a Democratic president who was more skeptical of the ideas of economists?

binyamin appelbaum

So we should probably start by saying that the current president is more skeptical of economists than anyone in recent memory. So we already have a president who doesn’t like economists. But I think there’s basically two answers to that question. The first is that I think you need to rebuild a consensus that government investment can be productive, that investing in education, for example, in universal pre-K, investing in basic research and science can have important long term benefits for the economy. We’ve really lost that consensus. And then the second piece of it is I think you need to be explicit about making inequality a metric of public policy. How does this policy distribute its benefits or its costs? That’s something that policymakers have essentially treated as an afterthought. It needs to be central. If inequality is the problem, then focusing on inequality is the beginning of a solution.

michelle goldberg

Donald Trump is extremely skeptical of economists, but trade aside, a lot of what he’s done isn’t that different than what any other Republican president who’s enthralled to conservative economics would do, right, cutting taxes, cutting regulations, being unconcerned with inequality, declaring war on the labor movement. And so is the problem these set of technocratic ideas, or is the problem that people who had different ideas weren’t able to be heard? I would go back to the question I was asking before, because presumably, there are kind of economists who have cogent solutions for addressing inequality. And I guess my question is, let’s say, Elizabeth Warren became president. You know, Elizabeth Warren is someone who obviously is going to focus very intensely on equality. But the way to do that is not to ignore economic expertise, right? It’s to seek out a different category of economic expertise. And so to me, what I keep stumbling on is the idea that is the problem the preeminence of this field that measures everything in terms of growth and G.D.P. and things like that, as opposed to other metrics. Or is the problem that there was this centrist consensus that served particular political interests?

binyamin appelbaum

Economics is an approach that emphasizes things that can be measured. It values things that can be measured more than things that cannot be measured. So to take an easy example of this, in antitrust, economists really prioritized consumer prices as the measure of whether corporate activity was bad for society. But the original concept of antitrust had a broader set of concerns. It was concerned about the influence of corporate power on the political process. It was concerned about the viability of small businesses and their importance for the communities in which they operated. It was concerned about the labor market and whether workers had choices of employers and leverage to negotiate. Those things all got set aside essentially because they were difficult to measure. So this is a long way of saying I think economists do a lot of things that are valuable, and they’re going to be part of the policy making process, and they should be. And there’s no doubt that better economics can get us to better policies. But I also think it’s important to talk about the limits of economics and the biases of economics as a discipline, because I think those have been consequential, too.

ross douthat

But isn’t there then a danger if you say the problem is that the economists didn’t care enough about inequality to repeat that error and basically say, well, we have all these social problems in the West that are spilling over into our politics, and we can measure with Gini coefficients how unequal these societies are, and if we just make them more equal, those social problems will go away. But meanwhile, the problems themselves seem to be more sort of psychospiritual than they are economic.

michelle goldberg

Well, that’s a big assumption, Ross.

ross douthat

But I’m leaning into Binya’s argument that economists miss non-economic things, right? So on those grounds, it seems striking that France, which has less inequality than the U.S., has ended up with many of the same political and social derangements that we have. Isn’t there a danger in saying, well, Elizabeth Warren will fix it all by changing the American Gini coefficient?

michelle goldberg

There’s no danger in saying Elizabeth Warren will fix it all.

ross douthat

That’s fair. That’s fair.

binyamin appelbaum

I mean, to me it’s very interesting, there was this sort of coalition of market conservatives, economic conservatives, and social conservatives, built around a mutual fear of big government, a concern for property rights, a concern for social values. They thought the big government was going to impinge upon their lives in ways that they didn’t like, and they made common cause. And as far as I can tell, that turned out much better for the economic conservatives than it did for the social conservatives. I don’t doubt that there is reason to fear that some new approach will cause problems for the issues that you’re raising, Ross. I don’t think there’s any guarantee that you improve on those dimensions. And I think they are important issues. But the status quo has not been great. And so I think it’s worth considering whether alternative approaches might do a better job of addressing some of those problems.

david leonhardt

O.K., well, we’ve focused a lot on the ideas here, because that’s part of what we do, but the book itself is full of personal stories about individual economists. And I really highly recommend it to any of our listeners who are interested. The book again is “The Economists’ Hour.” So congratulations on the book, and thank you for coming on the show.

binyamin appelbaum

Thanks for having me. [MUSIC PLAYING]

david leonhardt

Now it’s time for our weekly recommendation when we make a suggestion meant to take your mind off of politics. This week is my turn. And like both Ross and Michelle, I’m also just back from vacation, and my recommendation will come from my vacation. I was in Europe, and my recommendation comes from London, which is to visit Lock & Company Hatters, which is a tiny little hat shop that has been around for more than 300 years, and I think you should think of Lock & Company Hatters as a museum. I went to visit because I actually wanted to buy a hat. I like wearing hats. I’m bald. When you’re bald, wearing hats is good. They protect you from the sun. My dad also liked to wear hats and so wearing hats and buying hats reminds me of my dad. And so I went to Lock & Company Hatters and it’s as I said it’s basically a hat museum. So even if you don’t want to buy a hat, they have the sketches for the hats that they have made for Laurence Olivier, Winston Churchill, Jackie Kennedy, Emperor Akihito, F.D.R. I mean, it’s just absolutely amazing, Oscar Wilde. So you go in and you see these measurements that they’ve done for all these famous people over the last 300 years, and then they’ll do a measurement for you, and you can try on a whole bunch of hats. And it really feels like you’re stepping back in time. And the cost of admission is zero pounds.

ross douthat

What hat did you buy?

david leonhardt

I like caps. So I bought a cap that has these ear flaps that will keep my ears warm when the winter comes.

ross douthat

But is this like a Sherlock Holmes deer stalker type?

david leonhardt

Yeah. I mean, if money were no object, I think I would have bought seven hats in this store. I mean, I was just happy as could be. Do either of you wear hats?

michelle goldberg

No. I don’t wear hats, but I have — especially my six-year-old son, he loves a newsboy hat. I would definitely make a stop there.

david leonhardt

O.K., well, my recommendation is to visit Lock & Company Hatters if you’re in London. Buy a hat or just absorb the history. [MUSIC PLAYING] That’s our show this week. Thank you so much for listening. If you have thoughts or questions or ideas, leave us a voicemail at 347-915-4324. You can also email us at argument@nytimes.com. We may include your thoughts in an upcoming episode if you do. And if you like what you hear, please leave us a rating or review in Apple podcasts. This week’s show is produced by Kristin Schwab for Transmitter Media and edited by Lacy Roberts. Our executive producer is Gretta Cohn. We had help from Tyson Evans, Phoebe Lett, Ian Prasad Philbrick, and Francis Ying of the Kaiser Family Foundation. Our theme was composed by Allison Leyton-Brown. We’ll be back here next week.

michelle goldberg