With less than two weeks to go until Election Day, more than half of the living U.S. recipients of the Nobel Prize for economics signed onto a letter that called Vice President Kamala Harris’ economic agenda “vastly superior” to the plans laid out by former President Donald Trump. Twenty-three Nobel Prize-winning economists signed the letter, including two of the three most recent recipients.
“While each of us has different views on the particulars of various economic policies, we believe that, overall, Harris’ economic agenda will improve our nation’s health, investment, sustainability, resilience, employment opportunities, and fairness and be vastly superior to the counterproductive economic agenda of Donald Trump,” the economists wrote in the letter.
A group of 16 Nobel laureates led by Joseph Stiglitz, a Columbia University professor and a 2001 winner of the prize, published a letter in June to highlight what they called the “destabilizing effect” of a second Trump term on the U.S. economy. The group said then-President Joe Biden’s economic agenda was also “vastly superior.”
The new letter, which was drafted by Stiglitz, includes more signatories than the last one and represents a wider cross-section of Nobel laureates in terms of areas of expertise and approach to economics. Some of the economists who signed the letter began coming together after Harris detailed her economic vision in late September.
There have been warnings and forecasts from economists across the political spectrum since Trump kicked off his campaign, which is probably why the letter got so much attention when it came out.
Since then, Harris has steadily chipped away at Trump’s advantage on the issue of the economy, according to polling.
Their first letter followed a poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research that indicated 59% of American adults said the U.S. economy was “in bad shape.” About one-third (32%) described their financial situation as “poor,” up from about a quarter (23%) a year ago.
Harris’ new focus on the economy and more positive economic reports have helped improve the public’s perception of the U.S. economy.
The Federal Reserve started cutting interest rates in August, when it lowered the federal funds rate to a range of 4.75% to 5%. Employment data showed hiring numbers were up in September, unemployment fell about 0.3% in October, and wage growth has been strong.
Retail sales also remained durable in September.
Harris has moved to address voter concerns about prices, the cost of housing, the cost of child and elder care, and pushed for tax cuts targeting middle- and lower-income Americans. In the final weeks of campaigning, she focused on industrial policies championed by Biden that would bolster U.S. manufacturing for critical industries.
If elected, Trump has promised to cut taxes beyond his 2017 tax law and abolished taxes on tips, overtime and Social Security benefits, which analysts say would cost the federal government trillions of dollars. He pointed to tariffs and economic growth as a way to pay for revenue loss.
Economists view tariffs as effectively a tax on consumers who buy imported goods. Tariffs also risk inflation and increasing the federal deficit, which could contribute to economic instability.
“Among the most important determinants of economic success are the rule of law and economic and political certainty, and Trump threatens all of these,” the Nobel laureates wrote.
The economists who signed the letter said deregulation would be another economic risk under Trump, which he has vowed to do if he is elected.
James Bullard, a nonresident fellow at the Hoover Institution, was among the Nobel Prize winners that signed the letters published in June and October. He raised his concerns during a recent speech, in which he reminded more than 150 economists at an economics think tank about the 2017 tax cut for individuals and corporations.
“The economy was booming when he did that — it didn’t look like something we needed,” Bullard said about Trump. “But then it looked like it did work to put the economy on a strong foundation, and now we want to undo some of those things, including the individual tax rate cuts.”
And make no mistake, the Trump campaign has no problem attacking economists.
After the first letter was published in June, a representative from Trump’s campaign said the people who signed it were “worthless out of touch ‘economists’ preening for attention and desperately griping about the American people who rejected their failed ‘armchair advice.'”
Robert Hall, a Stanford University economics professor who has previously advised Democratic and Republican presidents and was a White House economic adviser for then-President Ronald Reagan, thinks responses like these are dangerous.
Trump’s “willingness to take on all these things out of left field, and not listen to his advisers, is a very dangerous tendency,” Hall was quoted in a recent article. “As we’ve known for a long time, the U.S. needs competent government; that’s the big issue.”
Hall also signed the letter.
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