Paul Krugman and Nate Silver butt heads over the US economy

Paul Krugman and Nate Silver butt heads over the US economy
FiveThirtyEight founder Nate Silver at SXSW 2013 in Austin, Texas, Wikimedia Commons
Alex Henderson
April 06, 2022Economy

In 2022, liberal economist Paul Krugman has been bullish on the U.S. economy in his New York Times column and his Twitter threads, stressing that while inflation is a problem, unemployment has reached historic lows during the Biden era. And Krugman took exception when statistics expert and FiveThirtyEight founder Nate Silver offered a less bullish view of the economy in a Twitter thread posted on March 5.

Silver tweeted, “Real wages are declining and real disposable income has declined for 7 months in a row. The idea among some folks on here that voters are silly to be concerned about inflation and that Actually The Economy Is Great But The Media Won't Tell You is ridiculous.”

The FiveThirtyEight founder went on to say that the U.S. economy has had “weird distributional effects,” posting, “There are certainly some winners but there are also lots of losers, e.g. people on fixed incomes.”


Krugman, on March 5, responded to Silver’s thread with a Twitter thread of his own, posting, “Straw man alert. Nobody is saying that voters are silly to be concerned about inflation. The question is why the bad news on inflation isn't at all offset by the good news on jobs.”

On April 1, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that the United States’ unemployment rate had fallen to 3.6%, which is lower than it has been in more than half a century.

Krugman posted that it is “bad faith” to overlook the jobs growth of the Biden era:


Here are some responses to Krugman’s thread:




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