And the Hi, I'm Bill Crystal.

I'm Bill Crystal. Welcome to the Conversations.

I'm very pleased to be joined today by Harvard Professor of Economics,

former Bush administration official Greg Mankew who's going to explain

economics to us here.

Nice to be here.

An hour and a half.

So what's going on?

I mean 45% of the American public in 2016 voted for either Bernie Sanders, a socialist, or Donald

Trump, whatever he is, a certain kind of populist to reject, both of whom reject, I would say,

a lot of the mainstream claims of,

a lot of the claims of mainstream economics.

Are things so bad, is the country in such bad shape

that people are right to sort of turn to more extreme, I guess we could say,

policies and solutions and what does it say about the country?

Then we'll talk about what does it say about economics.

Sure.

The first thing to say is that the United States remains one of the richest countries in the world,

so you don't want to lose sight of that fact.

But there are a couple very troubling trends that I think make people unhappy for good reason.

One is that if you look at growth rates,

they've been slowly trending downward over time.

...