What’s Happening to Our Economy Is Like a Natural Disaster

<p>The Biden administration’s first legislative priority is a $1.9 trillion economic rescue package. It’s the kind of mega-package where the individual policies contained inside it — a $15 minimum wage, $1,400 checks, a huge child tax credit expansion, a $50 billion virus testing infrastructure — would be big deals on their own. But together, this would be one of the most consequential packages ever passed.</p><p>So there’s a lot to talk about here. And who better to talk about it with than my now-colleague Paul Krugman? We dig into the details of the plan and then spiral off into some other topics I wanted to run by the nearest Nobel laureate: the major rethinking of debt and deficits among left-of-center economists, the differences between Keynesians and Modern Monetary Theorists, how Krugman made a bunch of money off Bitcoin (it’s not how you’d think!), why progressives need a better theory of technological change, Krugman’s favorite indie bands of the mid-2000s, and more.</p><p><strong>Mentioned in this episode: </strong></p><p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/01/opinion/notes-on-the-coronacoma-wonkish.html">“Notes on the Coronacoma (Wonkish)”</a> by Paul Krugman</p><p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/01/upshot/why-markets-boomed-2020.html">“Why Markets Boomed in a Year of Human Misery”</a> by Neil Irwin and Weiyi Cai</p><p><a href="https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2019-01-27/whos-afraid-budget-deficits?utm_medium=email_notifications&utm_source=reg_confirmation&utm_campaign=reg_guestpass">“Who’s Afraid of Budget Deficits?”</a> By Jason Furman and Lawrence Summers</p><p><a href="https://www.piie.com/system/files/documents/pb19-2.pdf">“Public Debt: Fiscal and Welfare Costs in a Time of Low Interest Rates”</a> by Olivier Blanchard</p><p><a href="https://www.vox.com/2021/1/6/22215728/senate-anti-democratic-one-number-raphael-warnock-jon-ossoff-georgia-runoffs">“America’s anti-democratic Senate, in one number”</a> by Ian Millhiser</p><p><strong>Book Recommendations: </strong></p><p><a href="