Welcome to Ten Blocks. I'm Jordan McGillis, economics editor of City Journal.

In the final months of 2024,

economic indicators have looked astonishingly strong for the United States. Inflation has fallen to 2.5

percent. Unemployment has remained near record lows. The stock market has surged to record highs.

And yet ask Americans how the economy is faring, and they're more likely to tell you it's not doing well.

To discuss the state of American Economic Affairs heading into 2025 and the discrepancies between metrics and opinion,

I've invited Simon Rabinovich onto the show. Simon is U.S. economics editor of The Economist.

Simon, thanks for joining.

Great to be here, Jordan. Thank you.

In recent months, your coverage has celebrated the American economy as triumphant, standing head and

shoulders above peer countries. What indicators are you looking at that inform that position?

I mean, we look at a variety of indicators, but I guess there's two big dimensions that we've

looked at. And just to be clear,

I mean, we first began to kind of go big on this topic late in 2023 when the kind of the degree

of the outperformance was already clear. But the two dimensions, one is the more obvious one,

which is the recovery from the COVID pandemic. And I think that's got a lot of attention by now. But,

you know, for example, you look at real GDP growth. And if you go back to, you know, the beginning of

2020 to today in America, real GDP growth has been north of 10%. And virtually every pure country.

So by pure country, I mean other rich world countries, other developed economies,

the G7, but broader than just the G7 as well, the average is less than half of that. So,

you know, just an astonishingly strong recovery over the last five years. The other dimension,

though, which I think has got a little bit less attention, is that, you know, if you go back actually several decades, so to the early 1990s, there you have an American economy that has just, again, gone from strength to strength. And I think often the conversation in America is about the U.S. versus China. And of course, China has had, you know, a remarkable period of development,

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