Would you trust an economist with your economy?
Planet Money
NPR
4.6 • 29.8K Ratings
🗓️ 2 August 2025
⏱️ 33 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In decades past, economists whispered in the ears of presidents. Now, many politicians and voters are disenchanted with the field.
On today's show, we speak with economists about how distrust is messing with their minds and interfering with their work. Can they build up trust again?
Today's episode was hosted by Amanda Aronczyk. It was produced by Sam Yellowhorse Kesler and edited by Marianne McCune with help from Jess Jiang. It was engineered by Robert Rodriguez and fact-checked by Sierra Juarez. Alex Goldmark is Planet Money's executive producer.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Come see Planet Money Live, August 18th, at the Bell House in Brooklyn. |
| 0:04.6 | We're taping the finale of Planet Money Summer School, where we're going to crown our valedictorian. |
| 0:09.5 | It'll be a fun night out with storytelling, special guests, trivia, and of course, economics. |
| 0:14.8 | You might even end up on the podcast. |
| 0:16.5 | Buy your tickets now at npr.org slash planet money live. |
| 0:20.0 | That's npr.org slash planet money live. That's npr.org slash planet money live. |
| 0:24.4 | This is planet money from NPR. It has been a big week for economic data, new GDP numbers, new consumer |
| 0:35.0 | spending numbers, a jobs report, and it's the job of economists to |
| 0:39.7 | interpret all of these indicators. But increasingly, people are challenging what they say. In fact, |
| 0:48.6 | today, Friday, August 1st, President Trump fired the economist in charge of publishing that |
| 0:54.1 | jobs report. |
| 0:55.5 | She ran the Bureau of Labor Statistics, or BLS, and Trump is accusing her without evidence |
| 1:01.1 | of faking the numbers because there was less job growth than expected. |
| 1:06.4 | And this kind of distrust has me thinking about this one particular discussion at the American Economic Association Annual Meeting to a place earlier this year. |
| 1:15.7 | This is a very big deal. |
| 1:17.6 | Thousands of economists are in attendance. |
| 1:20.6 | Now, I took notes at this particular session, and one of my notes says, people don't believe economists. I decided to bring in a friend of the show |
| 1:30.3 | who was also there. My memory of it was, it was pretty crowded. Oh yeah, it was a packed room. |
| 1:35.6 | The session was about economics and politics. And Ben Castleman, longtime economics reporter |
| 1:40.8 | at the New York Times, he wrote about it, so he had a lot of detailed notes. I know they didn't record the session. I actually emailed them and I was like, can I get a copy of the recording? And they said, no. I'm pretty sure I have a recording if you want to. Okay, I just want to want to want to know that Ben just opened his jacket. Because either you have a wire or you have an iPhone in your jacket and you recorded the session? |
| 2:02.7 | Yeah, I'm pretty sure I recorded the session. |
| 2:04.8 | Turns out it was true. He had. |
... |
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