A group of top economists published a letter this week warning voters that former President Trump would be a disaster for the economy if he wins election, but many of them made the same warnings in 2016.
Of the 16 Nobel Prize-winning economists who signed Tuesday’s letter, at least nine made similar warnings about the economic danger of electing Trump in 2016. Their letter this election cycle highlights their fears about inflation.
“Many Americans are concerned about inflation, which has come down remarkably fast. There is rightly a worry that Donald Trump will reignite this inflation, with his fiscally irresponsible budgets,” the economists wrote, according to Axios.
The group is led by Joseph Stiglitz, who won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2001. The other co-signers include George Akerlof (2001), Sir Angus Deaton (2015), Claudia Goldin (2023), Sir Oliver Hart (2016), Eric Maskin (2007), Daniel McFadden (2000), Paul Milgrom (2020), Roger Myerson (2007), Edmund Phelps (2006), Paul Romer (2018), Alvin Roth (2012), William Sharpe (1990), Robert Shiller (2013), Christopher Sims (2011) and Robert Wilson (2020).
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Several of the laureates were among a group of 370 economists who urged voters not to support Trump just days before the 2016 election. Others derided Trump’s economic policies both before and during his term.
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The 2016 letter argued Trump “promotes magical thinking and conspiracy theories over sober assessments of feasible economic policy options.” They also said Trump had “a deep ignorance of economics and an inability to listen to credible experts.”
“If elected, he poses a unique danger to the functioning of democratic and economic institutions, and to the prosperity of the country. For these reasons, we strongly recommend that you do not vote for Donald Trump,” they wrote.
That letter featured signatures from Deaton, Hart, Maskin, Myerson, Phelps, Romer, Roth and Shiller.
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“Academic economists are ruled out” of working in Trump’s administration “unless they’re some kind of extremist,” Shiller said in an interview with the Lindau Nobel Laureates group in 2017.
Siglitz made similar criticisms of Trump ahead of the economic conference in Davos in 2016.
“Unfortunately for [Republicans], I believe he is going to fail,” Siglitz said of Trump. “What he is doing is trying to create a protectionist wall, not to manage the economy better.”
Hart also went into greater detail about his misgivings on Trump in a 2016 interview with CNBC.
“I’m very concerned about the possibility of a Trump presidency,” he said days before the election. “I think it would be disastrous for the economy as well as other things and I felt compelled to speak out.”
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Despite their predictions, the American economy thrived during Trump’s term prior to the coronavirus pandemic, with the poverty rate reaching an all-time low in 2019, wages steadily rising and the unemployment rate low.
