I’m not going to lie, bro. The bench of populist economists is thin.<\/p>\n
The star is Oren Cass<\/a>, who does not have a doctorate. If nationalist populism becomes the governing philosophy of the Republican Party rather than a temporary Trump coalition, Cass is the person most likely to be treated as its principal economist. American Compass supplies what the movement otherwise lacks: a connected theory of tariffs, manufacturing, labor power, family policy, immigration restriction, financialization, and national economic sovereignty. Its political ascent is already visible. Vice President Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and Senator Josh Hawley have appeared at its major events. Bessent sat for a public discussion with Cass in June 2026.<\/p>\n Oren Cass’s<\/a> importance would resemble that of John Kenneth Galbraith<\/a> or Milton Friedman<\/a>. He supplies the vocabulary, identifies the enemies, integrates policy fields, and tells politicians what their economic program means. He would probably become more powerful than economists with stronger academic records because he’ll be more useful.<\/p>\n Stephen Miran<\/a> is the strongest candidate to become the movement\u2019s technically credentialed economist. His importance is that he can translate Trump\u2019s intuitions about tariffs, trade deficits, reserve currencies, and burden sharing into something resembling a formal macroeconomic theory. As chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, he argued that conventional trade models failed because they assumed that trade deficits would correct themselves through currency adjustment. He connected persistent deficits to the dollar\u2019s reserve role and defended tariffs as a way to redirect investment toward the United States. Miran has since left both the CEA and Federal Reserve, but his brief ascent showed that a nationalist administration wants economists who can defend policies that most of the profession rejects.<\/p>\n Michael Pettis may become the deepest intellectual source. Pettis explains American deindustrialization through global savings, capital flows, suppressed foreign consumption, and the United States\u2019 role as absorber of last resort. This gives nationalists a more sophisticated explanation of trade deficits than \u201cforeigners are cheating us.\u201d American Compass has already adopted his work as a central part of its globalization program. A serious nationalist government interested in managing capital inflows, the dollar, and persistent trade imbalances would eventually need Pettis more than it needs tariff slogans.<\/p>\n Michael Pettis<\/a> will remain a favorite of the fighting, Trump-centered wing. He has an economics doctorate and possesses something more valuable in populist politics: complete willingness to attack the professional consensus in public. As of July 1, 2026, he remained Assistant to the President and Senior Counselor for Trade and Manufacturing. Peter Navarro<\/a> remained director of the National Economic Council. Navarro is likely to retain symbolic status as the economist who fought the free-trade establishment. His function is combat, justification, and bureaucratic pressure. Every time I hear him, or read him, I feel embarrassed and repulsed. <\/p>\n Kevin Hassett<\/a> represents the continuing power of the older Republican economic establishment. He can defend tax reductions, deregulation, business investment, and conventional growth policy while accommodating Trump\u2019s tariffs and immigration restrictions. The current administration\u2019s program combines nationalist trade policy with large tax reductions, expensing, deregulation, and supply-side claims about investment. If the populists consolidate power without defeating the donor and business wings of the party, Hassett-style economists will remain inside the government as coalition managers.<\/p>\n George Borjas<\/a> will be the favorite economist on immigration. His work argues that immigration can lower the wages of workers who compete most directly with new arrivals. American Compass is already using his research to argue that the H-1B system gives employers access to less mobile and less expensive labor. Nationalists will place Borjas against economists who emphasize aggregate growth, complementarities, entrepreneurship, and the relatively small average effects of immigration. He provides the movement with the simple and politically powerful proposition that labor scarcity raises worker bargaining power.<\/p>\n David Autor<\/a>, Gordon Hanson<\/a>, and David Dorn<\/a> will be repeatedly cited. Their \u201cChina Shock\u201d research<\/a> established that exposure to Chinese import competition produced persistent employment and community effects that did not disappear through rapid worker relocation or adjustment. That research has already become evidentiary infrastructure for American Compass. Nationalists will invoke the findings while ignoring or opposing many of the authors\u2019 other political positions. Autor will function as the establishment witness who admitted that the old trade story was inadequate.<\/p>\n Dani Rodrik<\/a> will occupy a similar but more theoretical position. His argument that deep globalization, national self-government, and democratic politics cannot all be maximized simultaneously is almost perfectly designed for nationalist appropriation. His support for industrial policy and greater national policy autonomy makes him useful to them. His liberal politics, climate commitments, and opposition to authoritarianism will keep him from becoming identified with the American populist right. He will be the economist they quote when they want Harvard authority for limiting globalization.<\/p>\n Anne Case<\/a> and Angus Deaton<\/a> will be the movement\u2019s favorite diagnosticians of working-class decline. Their research on deaths from drugs, alcohol, and suicide, and on the widening divide between Americans with and without college degrees, supplies empirical support for the claim that GDP growth concealed social disintegration. Nationalists will cite them to show that the market order failed non-college America. <\/p>\n Family-centered nationalism will elevate Melissa Kearney<\/a> and Catherine Pakaluk<\/a>. Kearney supplies mainstream empirical authority for the economic advantages associated with stable two-parent families. Pakaluk is more culturally aligned with religious and natalist conservatives. Her work examines women who deliberately choose large families despite falling fertility. Kearney would be the empirical citation. Pakaluk could become the movement intellectual.<\/p>\n E.J. Antoni<\/a> is likely to gain official and media status if loyalty and rapid policy defense become more important than recognition inside academic economics. He is Heritage\u2019s chief economist and has become a regular defender of the administration\u2019s inflation, budget, and growth claims. He could become important in congressional hearings, conservative media, and staffing networks without becoming intellectually central.<\/p>\n Christopher Phelan<\/a> and Aaron Hedlund<\/a> represent another category: reputable academic macroeconomists willing to serve in a populist administration. They currently occupy the senior positions listed by the Council of Economic Advisers. Their status will depend on whether nationalist consolidation still seeks approval from academic economics. Phelan could provide institutional respectability. He is unlikely to become a mass political economist or ideological founder.<\/p>\n The historical canon would also change. Milton Friedman<\/a> and Friedrich Hayek<\/a> would be demoted. They would remain useful on regulation, socialism, school choice, and government bureaucracy. Arthur Laffer<\/a> would survive as the authority for tax cuts.<\/p>\n The people moving upward in the historical canon would be Alexander Hamilton<\/a>, Friedrich List<\/a>, Henry Charles Carey<\/a>, and perhaps John Maynard Keynes<\/a>. Hamilton offers national development, public credit, and manufacturing. List offers productive power and infant-industry protection. Carey offers an indigenous American protectionist tradition. Keynes offers tools for managing investment, demand, capital flows, and international imbalances, although nationalist conservatives would separate those ideas from the later welfare-state Keynesianism.<\/p>\n The likely hierarchy according to ChatGPT is therefore:<\/p>\n Oren Cass as the movement builder.<\/p>\n Stephen Miran as the technical defender of Trump-era nationalism.<\/p>\n Michael Pettis as the most serious theorist of trade and capital imbalances.<\/p>\n Peter Navarro as the political combatant.<\/p>\n George Borjas as the immigration economist.<\/p>\n Autor, Dorn, and Hanson as the empirical witnesses for deindustrialization.<\/p>\n Dani Rodrik as the respectable heterodox authority.<\/p>\n Case and Deaton as the diagnosticians of social collapse.<\/p>\n Kearney and Pakaluk as the family and fertility economists.<\/p>\n Hassett, Phelan, and perhaps Laffer as bridges to the older Republican establishment.<\/p>\n The crucial point is that the nationalist-populist economic canon will be assembled issue by issue according to what is situationally convenient. Its leaders will take tariffs from Miran and Navarro, trade imbalances from Pettis, labor-market evidence from Autor and Borjas, industrial policy from Rodrik and Cass, family analysis from Kearney and Pakaluk, and tax policy from Hassett and Laffer. The political synthesis will come from Cass, Lighthizer, Bessent, and elected politicians. Most of them are not going to knock your socks off. They will provide ammunition, while those in power decide where to fire it.<\/p>\n The available material clusters in three areas: trade imbalances (Pettis, Autor), labor supply (Borjas), and family formation (Kearney, Pakaluk). There is no nationalist monetary theory, no nationalist account of the price level, no nationalist growth or productivity theory, and no nationalist fiscal framework. Those holes explain the personnel. Hassett (b. 1962), Warsh (b. 1970), and Laffer (b. 1940) stay inside a populist government because the movement has nothing of its own to put where they stand. The composition of the coalition follows from the gaps in the canon.<\/p>\n On whether economists matter, the useful literature separates channels. Daniel Hirschman<\/a> and Elizabeth Popp Berman<\/a> argued in 2014<\/a> that economists influence policy through three routes: professional authority, institutional position, and what Berman later called the economic style of reasoning, the cost-benefit<\/a> habits embedded in agency procedure. Berman’s Thinking Like an Economist<\/i><\/a> (2022) makes the case that the durable victories came through the second and third routes. Peter Hall<\/a>‘s The Political Power of Economic Ideas<\/i><\/a> (1989) and Mark Blyth<\/a>‘s Great Transformations<\/i><\/a> (2002) add that ideas do their work in periods of uncertainty, as weapons for assembling coalitions and then as blueprints for institutions. Marion Fourcade<\/a>‘s Economists and Societies<\/i><\/a> (2009) explains why the discipline reproduces the way it does. explains why the discipline reproduces the way it does.<\/p>\n Two things fall out of that literature.<\/p>\n First, economists hold the most power where the public is not watching. Bank capital rules, actuarial assumptions, Medicare payment formulas, the discount rate in a regulatory impact analysis. Trade and immigration are now the loudest subjects in American politics. High salience destroys technocratic authority. So the fields the populists care about most are the fields where no economist of any persuasion will govern, and the fields economists will keep governing are ones no populist will contest.<\/p>\n Second, the supply-side precedent settles the question of whether a thin bench is fatal. Jude Wanniski<\/a> (1936-2005) was a journalist. Robert Bartley<\/a> (1937-2003) was an editorial page editor. Laffer<\/a> had a Stanford<\/a> doctorate and modest standing in the profession. Norman Ture<\/a> and Paul Craig Roberts<\/a> (b. 1939) were staff economists. That group reorganized American tax policy for forty years against the near-unanimous view of academic macroeconomics. They won because they supplied a rule a congressman could state in one sentence and a staffer could apply without calling anyone, and because they spent three decades fighting over how the Joint Committee on Taxation scores a bill. A movement does not need great economists. It needs a decision procedure and a scoring convention.<\/p>\n Until February the tariff program ran on presidential discretion. On February 20, 2026, the Supreme Court held in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump that IEEPA does not authorize the President to impose tariffs. The administration pivoted within days to Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, a temporary balance-of-payments surcharge capped at 150 days. That surcharge expired by operation of law on July 24, 2026, with no extension legislation pending. The replacement is a Section 301 regime proposing duties of ten to twelve and a half percent across forty-six countries, which carries no statutory sunset. <\/p>\n Discretion required no economists. It required one man. Section 301 and Section 232 require administrative records: country-specific findings of unreasonable or discriminatory practice, hearings, responses to comments, injury evidence, causal claims that survive review in the Court of International Trade and the Federal Circuit. That work gets done by staff economists at USTR, Commerce, and the International Trade Commission, an apparatus that has been running antidumping and countervailing injury determinations for decades without producing a single famous name. The Court did more to hand economists power over populist trade policy than any appointment could. Whether the movement can staff that apparatus is the test, and it will be settled by people who appear on nobody’s list of favorite economists.<\/p>\n The industrial policy toolkit is left-coded: Mazzucato<\/a> (b. 1968), Ha-Joon Chang<\/a> (b. 1963), Rodrik<\/a> (b. 1957). The tax toolkit is right-coded. The evidentiary base belongs to liberals who reject the program, Autor<\/a> (b. 1967), Case<\/a> (b. 1958), Deaton<\/a> (b. 1945). A canon assembled from other people’s research cannot run a seminar, and without a seminar there is no reproduction. Think tanks reproduce staff. Departments reproduce scholars. American Compass has produced a generation of Hill aides and no dissertations. That guarantees a movement whose sources will always be available for hostile quotation at the worst moment.<\/p>\n The personnel record already shows the strain. Miran left the Council of Economic Advisers on February 3, 2026, and left the Fed on May 22, 2026, succeeded by Warsh. Pierre Yared<\/a>, the acting chairman since September, returned to Columbia<\/a> at the end of June 2026. Three chairs or acting chairs in eighteen months. The credentialed people arrive, defend the policy, and go back to a university or a bank. The people who stay are the ones with no academic exit. As consolidation proceeds, that ratio shifts further toward the permanent staff, and forecast quality falls, because the man who can afford to say the number is wrong has already left the building. <\/p>\n What I would watch, in order of how much it predicts.<\/p>\n Measurement and scoring. Whether CBO’s baseline treats tariff revenue as durable. Whether OIRA’s cost-benefit guidance keeps the revisions to Circular A-4. Whether immigration’s fiscal effects get scored on a Borjas method or a National Academies method. Whether anyone institutionalizes a domestic-production statistic alongside GDP in the Federal statistical system, something Cass has wanted for years. A statistic embedded at BEA outlasts every name on the list.<\/p>\n The Pettis test. His theory implies capital-account measures: taxes on inbound portfolio flows, willingness to surrender reserve-currency privileges, a weaker dollar with higher long rates. Miran’s Mar-a-Lago paper flirted with it. If the movement takes the diagnosis and refuses the medicine, Pettis is decoration.<\/p>\n The List<\/a> problem. List argued for protection by a rising industrial power catching up to a leader. The United States is a mature, high-wage, services-dominated economy holding the reserve currency with nobody ahead of it. The closer comparison is Britain after 1900, Chamberlain’s tariff reform, a declining industrial hegemon arguing about imperial preference and losing the argument for thirty years. Or Latin American import substitution, where capacity got built, productivity stalled, and the payments crisis arrived on schedule. The essay explaining why the American case escapes those outcomes has not been written.<\/p>\n Finally, the number. Manufacturing employment sits near twelve and a half million and has been flat for a decade. Run the tariffs for eight years. If the number does not move and consumers carry the cost, no canon saves the movement. If it goes to fifteen million, the profession will reorganize around the result inside a decade, and the same journals now publishing tariff skepticism will publish the revision, with citations to Autor and Pettis and none to Navarro.<\/p>\n Economists hold power when they hold a procedure. They hold little when they hold a microphone. The populist bench is short on microphones and shorter on procedures, and the Court just told them they need procedures to keep the policy they already have.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’m not going to lie, bro. The bench of populist economists is thin. The star is Oren Cass, who does not have a doctorate. If nationalist populism becomes the governing philosophy of the Republican Party rather than a temporary Trump … Continue reading