Transcript: Paul Krugman on How Badly Trump Voters Have Been Scammed
For a fair bit of the base, that’s true as well, but not all of it. And he couldn’t have won if it was only that. For somebody like that, some of his stuff is almost … There had been books and classes on how to lie with statistics, and it uses a lot of bogus numbers, which anyone who knows anything about the subject can tell you, Look, that’s a really, really misleading set of numbers you’re putting there. But that’s too complicated. If you’re explaining, Well, the reason we haven’t been adding all that many jobs for native-born Americans is because us baby boomers are dropping out of the workforce, most of the younger workers coming in are immigrants, you’re losing.
Sargent: In your piece, you write that if inflation does rise as a result of these policies, Trump will simply say the data is faked. I’d like to broaden that idea and suggest that, with MAGA loyalists distributed throughout the government in key places, we’re likely to see a very deep corruption of government information. We’re looking at manipulated data supposedly showing how bad immigrants are, contradicting what economists are saying, maybe even data manipulated to make Trump’s economic performance look better than it is. Can you talk about what this corruption of government info might look like in broader terms?
Krugman: This is, by the way, [what] standard autocratic regimes are known for. In some ways, among their first targets are statistical agencies because they want the numbers to say what they want the numbers to say. I’ve been at conferences in Asia where the Chinese government announces that the economy grew 5.3 percent. And everyone at the conference asks not “why did the Chinese economy grow by 5.3 percent?” but “why did the Chinese government decide to say that it grew by 5.3 percent?” The numbers are our political statements, not reality. And if I were a federal employee at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, I would be extremely frightened; quite quickly they’re going to be in the line of fire.
