This is The Reason interview with Nick Gillespie. My guest today is Harvard economist Jason Furman,

who is one of Barack Obama's chief economic advisors and an architect of the Affordable Care Act.

These days, he's in the news for his withering critique of Joe Biden's dismal economic record

and his two-fisted attacks on Donald Trump's trade policy.

We talk about Furman's defense of global markets.

Obama cares unfulfilled promises and why he now thinks the national debt and AI are bigger deals than he used to believe.

Here is the reason interview with Jason Furman.

Jason Furman, thanks for talking to Reese. Really excited to do so. Love, love reading you.

So you recently wrote a piece talking about the failure of binomics and what you called the

post-neo-liberal delusion.

Let's start with that.

Irving Crystal famously said that a neo-conservative is a liberal who got mugged by reality.

What is a neoliberal the way that you're defining that true?

Sometimes I think a neoliberal is like whatever I happen to think that somebody else disagrees

with and they bundle it all together.

It's often defined more in the negative as an epithet.

If I had to do it in the positive, it is one understands gains from trade that when you

have markets, when you have exchange, you can

end up with more for everyone. Number two, respects a corollary that follows from that, that

decentralized decisions can result in the best outcome. Now, you may want regulation or taxes

to move them in a certain direction,

and I might want more of those than you would want. I suspect that's true. Number three,

...