Pod Insights The Ezra Klein Show Matter of Opinion: Paul Krugman on Inflation, ‘Bad Vibes’ and 2024 About this episode We’ll be back on Friday with a new episode. In the meantime, we wanted to share one of our favorite recent episodes from our sister podcast, “Matter of Opinion.”
Why does the economy look so good to economists but feel so bad to voters?
The Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman joins the hosts on “Matter of Opinion” to discuss why inflation, interest rates and wages aren’t in line with voters’ perception of the economy. Then, they debate with Paul how big of an influence the economy will be on the 2024 presidential election, and which of the two presumed candidates, Joe Biden and Donald Trump, it could benefit. Plus, Ross Douthat’s lessons on aging, through Michael Caine impressions.
Mentioned:
“Believing Is Seeing,” from Paul Krugman’s newsletter
“The Age of Diminished Expectations,” by Paul Krugman
“The Trip” scene: “This Is How Michael Caine Speaks”
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:01 Ezra Klein? Hey, y'all. I wanted to share a recent episode from our friends over at Matter of Opinion. They had on Paul Krugman, my fellow New York Times opinion columnist and a Nobel Prize winning economist, to talk about what is going on with the economy right now, why it looks so good by so many measures, but people still feel so bad about that, whether that's changing, how it might play into the election. It's a great episode. It's a great show that you should be listening to, and I hope you enjoy it. We'll be back on Friday.
0:27 Ross Douthat? Hey, Paul. Welcome, Paul. Thanks for doing this. It should be fun. You say that now.
0:34 Speaker 02 Now, now, Ross, behave yourself.
0:36 Ross Douthat? Be nice to the guests, please, Ross. Yeah. There's just mild hazing involved.
0:43 Speaker 02 From New York Times Opinion, I'm Michelle Kottel.
0:45 Ross Douthat? I'm Ross Douthat. I'm Carlos Lozada.
0:48 Speaker 02 And this is Matter of Opinion.
1:02 Speaker 02 So our beloved Lydia is out, but we have drafted an extra special guest to help us out this week. We've been talking a lot about big issues at play in this year's presidential election. And today, by God, we're going to try to understand what exactly is going on with the economy? Are we headed into a recession? Are we just having what all the cool kids call a vibe session? What's driving public feelings about the situation? And do those feelings favor Joe Biden or Donald Trump? Now, we'll get to politics later. But first, our Times colleague, the Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman, has graciously agreed to step in and help everyone,
1:43 Speaker 02 especially me, make sense of a very confusing economic picture. Paul, welcome. Thank you so much.
1:51 Ross Douthat? Welcome, Paul. Hi there.
1:52 Speaker 02 So we are obviously delighted to have you here. And my opening question for you about the economy is, am I right to be confused? Are you confused? Help me out here.
2:03 Paul Krugman? I'm actually not feeling very confused, which is probably a bad sign. But basically, it's still mostly a story of a soft landing, that a very rough couple of years, mostly as a result of aftershocks from the COVID-19 pandemic, inflation with some bumps, pretty close to where we wanted to be. Could there be a recession? Always. There can always be a recession. But there's very little hint of one in any of the data that we have right now. So I'm much less confused now than I was a year ago. Right now, the picture looks pretty clear.
2:40 Ross Douthat? We had never in my lifetime had a global pandemic as an economic factor. Can you just sort of tell us your story about why 2021 and 2022 were so bumpy? What's your story about inflation right now? And other problems as well?
3:01 Paul Krugman? The main thing that happened, so it was, you know, what in the jargon we call a supply shock, but a funny one. It wasn't so much that people stopped producing stuff or couldn't produce stuff. What happened was that people changed what they bought. So that, you know, the elitist kind of classic example, but it represented if people stopped going to the gym and they bought Pelotons instead, or they stopped going out to eat and they bought kitchen equipment instead. There was this big shift of demand from in-person services to goods. And it turns out that in the very short run, the economy isn't as flexible as all that. So if people start wanting to buy stuff, physical stuff, instead of in-person services,
3:46 Paul Krugman? well, that stuff has to be produced, has to be shipped. And right at the beginning, actually, the White House did an analysis back in 2021, just as inflation was taking off, saying, what does this look like? And they said, this looks like the immediate aftermath of World War II. This looks like the period when we were re-converting from a war economy back to a peacetime economy, which was a period of major inflation. And that analogy, you know, for a while, there was people saying, well, this is going on so long, how can that be the story? But in the end, it does look a lot like sort of 1947, 48.
4:27 Speaker 04 But why does inflation take off then as the pandemic ends rather than at the peak when everyone's ordering Pelotons?
4:37 Paul Krugman? Well, actually, the peak, remember, the economy was quite depressed. So overall, spending fell quite a lot during 2020, during the worst of the pandemic. It's when the economy started rebounding, but rebounding in a different way. We had 14% unemployment in 2020. And with 14% unemployment, it doesn't matter what people are buying. There's plenty of excess capacity to satisfy it. But when you start getting back towards 5%, 4% unemployment, but the stuff that people are doing with their wages is now very different from what they were doing before, that's when inflation takes off. By the way, I think it's worth pointing out, we're Americans, we don't believe the rest of the world exists.
5:20 Paul Krugman? But the cumulative increase in prices in the euro area is almost exactly the same as it was in the United States. So you have a place that never had a Biden stimulus, never had a lot of our policies, and yet their inflation experience, it was a little delayed. Inflation took off sooner and ended sooner, came down sooner in the US. But if you look at the cumulative from January 2020 to January 2024, both sides of the Atlantic look the same.
5:51 Speaker 04 Is your implication then that inflation was more of a reflection of kind of like larger forces and not necessarily induced by policy moves in the United States?
6:02 Paul Krugman? Yeah, I mean, for a while there, it looked as if that big Biden spending package was a driving it. And it may have brought the inflation forward in time. So we had our inflation spike sooner than the Europeans did. But in the end, particularly, if you look at how inflation came down.
6:27 Paul Krugman? It was not at all. You know, there were a lot of economists, thankfully I wasn't one of them, who were saying we're going to need massive unemployment and only by throwing the economy into a recession can we bring inflation down. Instead, inflation came down painlessly. And if you look into the details, it was very much the parts of the economy where supply expanded as we sort of worked out the kinks from the legacy of COVID are the places where inflation came down most. So it's really consistent with a story that says that these were these larger forces that we probably would have had about the same inflation cumulatively. The timing might have been different, but
7:10 Paul Krugman? it would have probably been about the same, whatever the policies had been, whoever had been in the White House.
7:16 Ross Douthat? So to maybe simplify things a little bit, people are now doing better than they were pre-pandemic. And it seems like after a bout of inflation, right, the key question is at what point do wages start outpacing inflation again? Because that's the point at which most people are going to start feeling like the economy is doing better, is actually improving. And there's a lot of, in the data, a lot of different arguments about where we stand with that. But what's your view on where are we with that? When did wages start outpacing inflation again, from your perspective? How long have wages been growing faster than inflation, do you think?
7:55 Paul Krugman? Oh, no, it's well over a year. I mean, inflation peaked around the middle of 2022 and has since fallen off drastically. And you really have to torture the data not to find that most workers are certainly better off than they were in January 2023 and better off by a few percent than they were in January 2020. And right now, if we're just going to be looking at recent developments, it's all sunny.
8:25 Speaker 04 Paul, I wanted to ask you a little, a little sort of more deeply about COVID. I mean, there's been so much discussion about how the pandemic has affected our, you know, workplace culture, our relationships, our commutes, you know, the way we live, et cetera. But what would you say is the kind of lasting legacy of COVID for our economic lives, not just in a sort of aftershock kind of sense, but in a more long haul kind of sense?
8:52 Paul Krugman? Yeah, I mean, it's not at all clear. There were a lot of things that people thought were going to be long term affected. They thought that, you know, a lot of people would leave the workforce and never come back, which has turned out to be basically not true. The big thing is actually working from home, which it turns out that enough people like it and enough businesses have adapted to it, that that's a permanent change, which has, you know, lots of, it's probably beneficial for the economy as a whole, but it's not beneficial if, you know, you're the owner of an office building.
9:23 Speaker 04 Is it beneficial just because it's more efficient?
9:26 Paul Krugman? Well, the evidence on what it does to productivity is mixed, but there's a lot of time that people spend commuting that is now saved.
9:36 Speaker 02 Yeah, I only wash my hair when I have to come in and see Carlos, so.
9:39 Ross Douthat? I haven't washed my hair in six months, so it's really.
9:43 Paul Krugman? Actually, one funny thing is the, when people did start, you know, I'm back in some in-person meetings, but everybody gave up on ties.
9:53 Speaker 02 Oh, I love it.
9:53 Paul Krugman? So we finally ended the tyranny of the men's ties.
9:56 Speaker 02 Ties are so over. So obviously, we're in better shape now than a couple of years ago, but it's not entirely clear that the public opinion has caught up with this yet. So where are we in the so-called vibe session? And by that, I mean how people are feeling about the economy.
10:11 Paul Krugman? That's, I mean, I'm spending a lot of time on that, as I think everybody who's reading me knows. And that's a very weird thing. Now, if you say Americans don't feel good about the economy, strictly speaking, Republicans don't feel good about the economy. Among self-identified Democrats, consumer sentiment, which was fairly low when inflation was at its peak, is right back to where it was before the pandemic. Among Republicans, although it's up some in the last few months, it's still very depressed. So people's evaluation of the economy seems to depend on their politics instead of the other way around.
10:50 Speaker 02 All right, so before we get too far into the politics, this seems like a good time to take a break. We'll be right back.
11:17 Speaker 02 And we're back. Now, we're going to take all that information that our special guest has explained to us. Thank you so much, Paul.
11:24 Paul Krugman? Oh, yeah.
11:24 Speaker 02 And debate the politics. And I know we all have opinions on this one. So let's start with the voters. Why do we think that people on both sides are a little bit pessimistic?
11:35 Speaker 04 Yeah, I mean, I think Paul mentioned the partisan gap in the way we think about the economy. And that means that, to some extent, your views on the economy depend on whether your party, you know, your favored politicians are in office. That seems to be stronger for Republicans than for Democrats, whose views tend to track a little more with the actual economic indicators. But I think there's a way in which even a nominally strong economy can still have you feeling pessimistic. I just look at my own circumstances. I have a good job with a good salary, but I'm scared that AI is going to kill that good job and that my good salary will never be enough to pay three college tuitions that are facing me down.
12:19 Speaker 04 And so I think there are ways in which you can look at positive current conditions and still be concerned about long-term economic prospects. And that can cloud that vision.
12:30 Speaker 02 So the anticipation of trouble down the road. So it's not that people aren't necessarily responding rationally, they're just looking at the longer term?
12:38 Speaker 04 I'm just saying that those are rational concerns, right? Depending on your time horizon.
12:42 Paul Krugman? My last newsletter was called "Believing is Seeing." And it's definitely the case that a lot of voters' perceptions of the economy and of other stuff are very much based upon what they think, based on their politics, should be true, rather than what's actually going on. And it's really clear in the economic data, it's really clear on views on crime. Now, should everybody be feeling happy and comfortable and at no risk? No, of course not. I mean, could technology come for your job? Yes, of course it could. I guess my question there is always, when has that not been true? Technology doesn't have to be AI. It doesn't have to be robots. It can be anything.
13:26 Paul Krugman? But it's hard to really think that the amount of of risk and uncertainty is greater now than it's been pretty much since the Industrial Revolution.
13:36 Ross Douthat? I mean, I think it's worth speaking up for the theory that I know Paul disagrees with to some extent, that people just really don't like inflation in a way that lingers in polling data and people's perceptions of the economy even after this sort of headline number inflation rate has come down.
13:58 Speaker 02 Well, historically speaking, do we have a sense of how long that lasts?
14:03 Paul Krugman? Estimating lags is one of the hardest things to do.
14:07 Speaker 02 Yeah.
14:07 Paul Krugman? In principle, you know, we we tend to look at inflation over a one year period, and it makes a lot of sense to think that people's memories extend further back than that. Not forever. I don't think people are out there pining for the days when a McDonald's hamburger was 15 cents, but the idea that people are still shocked at how much prices are up since 2019. I was much more of a fan of that until I started looking at the consumer sentiment numbers, which, among those who are persuadable, those numbers started turning up in the second half of 2022.
14:43 Speaker 02 Before you go farther, can you just explain the difference, for those of us who are not economists, the difference between consumer sentiment numbers and what we were originally talking about?
14:50 Paul Krugman? Oh, OK. Consumer sentiment, you know, so the we have various surveys that in one way or another ask, is the economy good or not? How good are you feeling about the economy? We also ask people, by the way, how are you feeling about your own finances? And there's been a really big gap there. If you ask, how was 2023? We have a large majorities of people of of all political affiliations saying, OK, good or great. And if you ask, how was it for the country? Then if you're a Republican, you say it was disastrous. And there appear to be a lot of people who you ask, how is the economy doing? And their answer is, I hate Joe Biden. But for what is Among people who are not, don't appear to be answering that question,
15:34 Paul Krugman? their assessment of how the economy is, what's the state of the economy, started turning up in the second half of 2022, just as the inflation numbers started coming down. And the argument that says that people care about the level of prices, not the rate of change of prices, which is the inflation rate, that has a problem with the timing. And among, again, I want to separate out a little bit, but among people who don't self identify as Republicans, views of the economy have improved right in tandem with the falling inflation rate. So, I mean, what Ross was saying is something that I actually, if you'd asked me four or five months ago, I would have agreed with.
16:17 Paul Krugman? But I've been, you know, looking at the numbers on what people say about the economy, and they don't actually seem consistent with that story.
16:25 Ross Douthat? But so I'm looking at Gallup data right now on the question that sort of tries to unite the political and the economic, the famous, are you better off than you were four years ago question, right?
16:38 Paul Krugman? Yeah.
16:39 Ross Douthat? And so in 2020, not surprisingly, when Donald Trump was on the ballot, this is pre-COVID, right? 90% of Republicans say they're better off than they were four years ago. 30% of Democrats, so you have a big partisan divide on both sides. And 60% of independents say they're better off than they were four years ago. Flash forward to Biden, and the partisan numbers swing. Now, most Democrats say they're better off. Most Republicans say they're worse off. But for independents, it's 48% saying they're better off, down from 60% under Trump. So if you take independents as a kind of control group, and obviously they lean left or right, but some of them are swing voters,
17:23 Ross Douthat? they do seem unhappier right now than they were in 2020. And if it's not inflation, we need some explanation besides Fox News for why those voters are sour on the like, how has Biden done question.
17:37 Speaker 02 I mean, do we think people are just sour in general? Because they have a pandemic hangover.
17:42 Paul Krugman? Well, I talked to political scientists and they're, you ask them about independents and they say they, they basically don't exist. That the great bulk of people who say they're independent are really strongly partisan leaners, either Democratic or Republican. There's only a small segment of the population that's truly independent. And if we ask why independent voters are down on the economy, well, think of the independents as being half Democrats and half Republicans. And we know that these partisan effects are much stronger for Republicans than they are for Democrats. They exist for Democrats, but the independent number is going to be somewhat depressed because the, the people who say they're independents but are really Republicans are
18:26 Paul Krugman? going to be much more passionate in, in being negative about a Biden economy than the independents, people who claim they're independents but are really Democrats. It's not clear to me that that's additional information.
18:37 Ross Douthat? But that doesn't make, that does not explain the wild swings in Joe Biden's approval rating. In 2021, in the first year of his presidency, he had approval ratings consistently near 50%. And today, his approval ratings are much lower and he's losing to Trump, which he never was in the polls in 2020. So even if you say the number of swing voters, genuine swing voters, is really small, still there are clearly some genuinely unhappy swing voters whose unhappiness will determine the outcome of the next election.
19:10 Speaker 02 Yeah, which brings me to the question of this kind of pessimism does tend to come back on whoever is in charge. So what do we think the president should be doing about all of this as he goes into this very tough race?
19:23 Paul Krugman? Yeah, the short answer is, why should I know? But look, what I think is quite possibly true. Is that there is a hangover of discontent reflecting not just inflation, but just in general, the pandemic was an enormously disruptive event. I don't know if there's a formula. I mean, it's, there are some people on the left who say, oh, Biden shouldn't talk about how good the economy is because there are lots of people who are still poor and suffering. You know, that's always been true. And if a Democrat can't run on his record because we aren't utopia, then that's a, that's a council of complete political despair. They can try to talk it up, but I don't know.
20:08 Paul Krugman? I mean, if I had to say the, the thing that most amazes me about the current state of political debate is the way that most of 2020 has been kind of vanished down, down the memory hole. You know, people talk about all the, the great job market under, under Trump, but you know, that, he was the first president since Herbert Hoover to leave office with fewer Americans working than before. So people sort of say it's as if history stopped in January 2020 and, and everything after that is not his fault. But somehow all of the pandemic related stuff that continued after Biden came into office is his fault.
20:48 Speaker 04 I, I just wonder that one, one way to maybe square that circle is that, you know, the, the pandemic in 2020 was a shock to the system. And perhaps that is one reason why Trump would get somewhat more of a pass than when Biden comes into office a year later, you know, already kind of knowing that that's what he was going to be facing. So perhaps the, the standard can be higher than for the president who is surprised by the event along with the rest of us.
21:20 Speaker 02 Yeah, I wonder how much of this is public expectations on kind of what the timeline for a return to normal would be. And that obviously was on Biden's watch mostly.
21:29 Paul Krugman? Yeah, we were all, I mean, everyone was surprised by, you know, there, there was within the economics, there was team transitory versus team.
21:39 Paul Krugman? Permanent and at this point it looks like Team Transitory was right, but Transitory turned out to be 18 months, not six months. And what I think you can say is that it may be true that people saw the pandemic as a global event outside the president's control. They don't see the inflation that happened afterwards as a global event outside the president's control, even though, if you look at the numbers, it was. But you know, how many ordinary Americans are looking at European inflation statistics? So I'm not sure that we really know in these days what to make of any of these things. I mean, again, I talked to political scientists and they've been saying,
22:23 Paul Krugman? you know, presidential approval just doesn't mean what it used to mean because we now have such hard partisanship that the presidential approval is remarkably insensitive to developments in the world. So we really don't know what to make of this. And anyone who thinks that we can predict the election based upon polls right now is in for a tongue lashing if you talk to any actual serious political analyst.
22:50 Speaker 04 Paul, I want to, I want to take you for a second in the, in the wayback machine here. And you, you wrote a, a book in the nineties called The Age of Diminished Expectations.
23:00 Paul Krugman? Yeah.
23:00 Speaker 04 Which I read in graduate school. And, and I, if I remember it correctly, you, you wrote that even during periods of sort of broad economic expansion, the economy is just not delivering the kind of progress that Americans had taken for granted in the past. You had people feeling worse off than their parents, fearing their kids be worse off than, than they were. When you think about that, sort of these, these three decades later, what are our economic expectations like now?
23:29 Paul Krugman? Well, I wrote that book, you know, in 1989, believe it or not. So it's, you know.
23:35 Speaker 04 I read one of the later editions. You, you, you kept updating it.
23:38 Speaker 02 It was a different world.
23:39 Paul Krugman? Yeah. When I was writing that book, the big story was that we had all this fancy technology. You know, personal computers were still new and trendy, but it wasn't showing at all in economic performance. Then, you know, we've actually spent the last. Fifteen or so years in another period when we have all this fancy technology that doesn't seem to be delivering a whole lot in terms of people's living standards. So I think people are feeling sour. I think at some level, people do look and say, well, you know, I have all this technology that my parents didn't have. Why am I finding it so hard to buy a house? Where is the the American dream, which is partly just nostalgia?
24:24 Paul Krugman? And again, just want to come back and say that that this is a we're just a far, far more divided society than we were. And it's a lot of the negativity comes from people who don't like where the country has gone politically, culturally, rather than a response to sort of concrete conditions.
24:46 Speaker 02 So wrapping all of this together, I mean, do we think that this economy as an issue is going to favor Trump or Biden in this election? I mean, my my thought is it's going to be Trump, just because it always comes back on whoever's in charge.
25:00 Speaker 04 It it could benefit Trump in the way that you say, Michelle. I also wonder to what extent we think that that partisan gap in in perceptions of the economy is sort of immovable. Or if a sustained, you know, period of several more months of, you know, positive economic outcomes could could put a dent in it. In which case, you know, it's by the time November rolls around and people are voting, you could see a a strong economy benefiting Biden. I guess I don't know what sort of economic growth, how strong does the economy have to be to overpower the partisan lens through which voters look at the economy?
25:36 Paul Krugman? I have a actually almost exactly opposite take.
25:40 Speaker 02 Oh, interesting.
25:41 Paul Krugman? Which is that right now, if you look at who thinks that the economy is bad, it is basically committed Republicans.
25:50 Paul Krugman? And they're never going to vote for Biden regardless. And there's been a big improvement in perceptions of the economy among Democrats, which might mean that it actually doesn't matter at all, that that nobody's going to move on this. And it it might mean that some people on the fence will in fact notice an improving economy and and go for Biden. But my personal guess is that the economy will actually altogether be less of an issue in this election than people imagine. That it's going to be decided on enthusiasm, turnout, driven largely by non-economic issues.
26:30 Speaker 02 All right, so Paul's a vote for it's not the economy, stupid.
26:33 Paul Krugman? Right. You know, Democrats have been doing really, really well in special elections, but that's not because people voting in Queens or whatever are feeling good about the economy. It's because the non-economic issues have actually been playing in Democrats' favor. That people are being turned out by Roe v. Wade and they're being turned out by fear of authoritarianism. This is not, this is really, you know, it's the economy, stupid. That was 1992. And 1992 was a long time ago. It was really a very, very different country. And since then, the economy has mattered, it seems to matter less and less for the election.
27:15 Speaker 02 All right, Ross, you want to have the last word on this one?
27:17 Ross Douthat? Yeah, I mean, I'm a, I'm a vote for the economy matters. We don't know for sure why people, again, not just Republicans, are unhappier with the condition of the country than Paul's analysis of where we are economically says they should be. But I still think the way to bet is that if you have, you know, six months of a booming stock market, stock market hasn't gone up much under Biden, now it's going up, six months of wages continuing to outpace inflation, six months where inflation actually gets down to where it was before Biden, which it hasn't yet. Then that helps Biden win.
27:58 Ross Douthat? You know, there are locked in coalitions, yeah, of 40 to 45% of Americans. But just in in both 2016 and 2020, you saw real swings of different constituencies. And again, it matters on the margin, but I think that happens again. Whereas if inflation starts creeping back up, I think that's really, really bad news for Biden's reelection campaign.
28:21 Speaker 02 So you're a it depends.
28:23 Ross Douthat? No, I'm no, I think it's no, I think it depends. But I think that if you take Paul's understanding of where the economy is right now and you project it forward, you just say it continues for six more months, I think you would bet on Biden winning reelection.
28:38 Speaker 04 One thing I'll say is that even when it was the economy stupid, it wasn't really the economy stupid in 92. If you remember the full slogan in the in the war room with, you know, Carville and Company, it was three parts. It was change versus more of the same, the economy stupid, and don't forget about healthcare. So even then, it was it was multiple, multiple things that they were they were focused on. And and I think that's that's still the case.
29:06 Ross Douthat? Can I ask one more question?
29:08 Speaker 02 Well, I guess you can now.
29:10 Ross Douthat? Paul, I just want to ask about America's fiscal capacity, meaning how much money we can spend in the future without running into inflation again. Because it seemed to me like one of the big lessons of the entire Obama era, where I think, you know, you you were consistently arguing that America could get away with a lot more deficit spending than a lot of conservatives and Republicans and even Democrats thought. And that seemed to be true throughout Obama's presidency and throughout Trump's presidency. But now, in the COVID era, we spent a ton of money, we got inflation back. And I'm just curious where you think that argument stands?
29:49 Ross Douthat? Can America take on more debt in a Biden second term, in a Trump second term, without just having inflation immediately come back, whether it's via new spending or tax cuts?
30:03 Paul Krugman? Okay, I don't think inflation is the issue. The question now is, is there a limit on how much debt the US can run up? We are running persistent deficits. The level of debt relative to GDP has been rising and is now at its highest level since the end of World War II. And it's one of those things where you look at it and you say, well, this can't go on forever. On the other hand, you look at the history of advanced countries borrowing in their own currencies, and you find that it is really impossible to find any example of a country hitting the wall.
30:46 Paul Krugman? And so there is an issue that we have, an aging population, that we've made a lot of promises to people who are at or approaching the age of eligibility for Social Security and Medicare. And at some point, in some sense, we have to find the resources for that. But it really doesn't, there's not a hint in market reactions, not a hint in international history, that we're anywhere close to hitting that breaking point.
31:15 Speaker 02 Okay, so listeners, we'd like to hear from you on this. So please tell us how the state of the economy will affect your vote and why. Leave us a voicemail at 212-556-7440, or you can email us at [email protected] . So let's take a quick break, and when we come back, we're going to get hot and cold.
32:03 Speaker 02 And finally, it's time for some hot and cold, where every week, one of us shares something we're into, over, or somewhere in between. So who's got this week?
32:12 Ross Douthat? It's me. I was gonna say something about being hot for showing kids old movies, meaning, from my perspective, movies from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. But actually, what I'm hot for is using old movies to acquaint your children with the harsh realities of aging and mortality. [laughing] In recent days, we have showed our kids a couple of movies. The Man Who Would Be King. Yeah. The Rudyard Kipling adaptation with Sean Connery and Michael Caine. Great movie. Great movie. And the even better movie, Bridge on the River Kwai, from 1957 with Sir Alec Guinness. Also a great movie. Also a great movie.
32:53 Ross Douthat? And in both cases, our kids' previous exposure to Alec Guinness was, of course, as Obi-Wan Kenobi, right, in Star Wars. And to Michael Caine was as Scrooge in The Muppet Christmas Carol. And so, in each case, we basically rewound the clock on those actors. And my 11-year-old daughter just sort of stared in horror and shock when she realized that the voice of Alec Guinness as, you know, the middle-aged, 40-something British officer was also the voice of the aged Obi-Wan Kenobi. And Michael Caine, our kids basically think that Michael Caine is like, you know, the biggest global celebrity ever because he was also a voice, I think he was a voice,
33:37 Ross Douthat? he was, no, he was a voice in Cars 2, where he was a British secret agent, right? So he's, he's everywhere.
33:43 Speaker 04 Yes, that's right.
33:44 Ross Douthat? We showed them the famous, you know, Michael Caine impersonation.
33:48 Speaker 04 That impersonation contest is glorious.
33:50 Ross Douthat? Michael Caine. No, no, that's not Michael Caine.
33:53 Speaker 04 We've been doing Cold War movies at home. So recently, The Manchurian Candidate, Doctor Strangelove, War Games.
34:02 Ross Douthat? Oh, War Games.
34:03 Speaker 04 Yes, it's excellent. So that's been our kind of, you know, dip into old-ish movies.
34:11 Paul Krugman? It's funny, because we've been taking a bit of a time trip as well, streaming Rumpel of the Bailey.
34:16 Ross Douthat? I've never seen that.
34:17 Paul Krugman? Well, we've had fond memories of it, you know, once upon a time. Watching it again, two things. One, God, Britain was a lot more British.
34:27 Paul Krugman? Careful, careful, careful, Paul. There, you know, there, it's just the, the, the whole culture seems far more alien than, you know, modern Britain does to an American. And second, maybe it's, it is getting older. I turned on the closed captioning.
34:42 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah.
34:43 Paul Krugman? Because I was having a little trouble understanding, you know, all of this received pronunciation is actually harder to track than it used to be. But actually, in a way, it's a demonstration of how homogenized global culture has been because I think Britain and America are a lot more similar than they used to be.
35:00 Speaker 02 Hmm. All right. Well, on that international note, I think we're going to call it for the week. Paul, thank you so much.
35:06 Ross Douthat? Thank you, Paul.
35:07 Speaker 02 For coming to help us out.
35:08 Ross Douthat? Thank you so much, Paul.
35:09 Paul Krugman? Thank you.
35:10 Speaker 02 All right, guys, let's do this again next week.
35:13 Ross Douthat? See you next week.
35:22 Speaker 02 Matter of Opinion is produced by Sophia Alvarez Boyd, Phoebe Lett, and Derek Arthur. This episode was edited by Jordana Hoagman and Alison Brusak. Our fact-check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker, and Michelle Harris. Original music by Isaac Jones, Carol Sabaro, Sonia Herrera, and Pat McCusker. Mixing by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Christina Samulski. Our executive producer is Annie Rose Strasser.
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