The Election’s Other Biggest Losers? Economists.

Twenty-three Nobel laureates warned last month that Donald Trump’s agenda would “lead to higher prices, larger deficits and greater inequality.” I think they were right. But voters utterly ignored them.

This week’s election was a defeat not just for Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party, but also for the mainstream of the economics profession. On one issue after another — tariffs, taxes and immigration — Trump delighted in taking positions that would earn him an F in most economics courses. He also slammed the Federal Reserve, which is quite likely the nation’s biggest employer of economists (and maybe the world’s).

And voters ate it up. Economists were perceived as spokespeople for the power structure — if not outright harmful, then at least ignorable.

“The elites cannot come to grips with how alienated they are from the country,” Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, who is an informal adviser to Trump, told The Times this week.

The agony for the Harris campaign is that Harris’s platform would actually have done a lot more for the working class than Trump’s ever will. It included measures to lower costs by increasing competition and to promote economic growth and prosperity through targeted investment. Trump touted populist measures like ending taxes on tips and Social Security, but also has less-discussed and not-so-populist plans for cutting taxes on corporations and easing up on antitrust enforcement.

President Biden made a big bet on what the commentator Matt Stoller called “deliverism” — the principle that if you run the economy right and deliver the things people need, particularly good jobs, the votes will follow. It didn’t happen: Voters turned Democrats out of the White House despite strong job growth and the defeat of the Covid-related inflationary surge that marred the beginning of Biden’s term.