Paul Krugman Profile picture
Feb 2 6 tweets 2 min read Read on X
Immigration is looming larger in the campaign, partly because it's becoming harder for Republicans to run against Biden on the economy. But there's a strong case that immigration has been a key part of Biden's economic success 1/
Inflation has come down so easily in part because of strong labor force growth. How much of that growth can be attributed to foreign-born workers? All of it 2/ Image
Some people might look at that and say that foreigners have stolen 3 million jobs from Americans. But we have full employment, indeed a very tight labor market. Look at what the Conference Board survey says 3/ Image
So employment is being constrained by supply, not demand. Foreign-born workers expand the supply. And lots of evidence that they are complementary to native-born workers, so that they let us run the economy hotter without inflation and hence *raise* native-born employment 4/
Some evidence to that effect: relative wages of foreign-born workers have fallen a bit relative to native-born since the pandemic. That's OK — they gain a lot from coming here, and their presence allows bigger gains for the native born 5/ Image
All this is short-run; add in huge long-run benefits from immigration in helping us pay for Social Security, Medicare and so on. Immigrants are really good for the U.S. economy — and nativists really bad 6/

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More from @paulkrugman

Jan 26
A tale of two inflation measures. Some analysts are still citing the blue line, when they should be citing the red line. This is professional malpractice 1/ Image
Using annual core CPI puts you way behind the curve, for 2 reasons. First, annual: even core CPI was 4.6 in the first half of 2023, 3.2 in the second half. Second, known lags in official shelter prices lagging far behind market rents 2/
So annual CPI creates a spurious impression of stubborn inflation, with a difficult last mile to cover. PCE puts a lower weight on shelter, and on a shorter-term basis tells us that we've already traveled that last mile 3/
Read 4 tweets
Jan 24
The debate over Fed policy, especially about when to start cutting rates, seems to have become disconnected from the reality of rapid disinflation. Thinking about it reminded me of ... an experience I once had on a cycling trip 1/
In 2015, I think, I went on a week-long cycling tour in Vermont. I was in pretty good shape, but hadn't done a trip like that for a while, and was slightly worried about my stamina 2/
On the second day, I was getting close to what the notes from Discovery Tours said was a major climb. As I approached, there were a series of short, sharp uphills, and I thought "if this is the approach, the real thing must be really hard" 3/
Read 8 tweets
Jan 19
Debates about the causes of inflation and disinflation are getting strangely tangled, partly because some people don't seem to recognize that both aggregate demand and aggregate supply can shift. Here, using standard textbook pictures, is what I think happened 1/ Image
During the pandemic and early aftermath, we had a lot of fiscal stimulus. This sustained growth and employment despite an adverse supply shock, but doing so involved a temporary surge in inflation. Then the supply shock reversed, and we got immaculate disinflation 2/
Doing it this way avoided one risk — long-term scarring from a persistently depressed economy — while running another — inflation getting entrenched. Given how things have actually turned out, it seems obvious that policymakers made the right call 3/
Read 4 tweets
Dec 31, 2023
OK, since the debate is mostly happening here, a thread on why I don't buy the argument that Fed rate hikes explain disinflation, and unwinding of transitory shocks does; Mike Konczal says most of it, but here's my version 1/
First off, I like the idea of a nonlinear Phillips curve, and was very partial to it as late as spring 2023. And it's one way to explain how we got more or less back to target inflation without a massive Summers-type bulge in unemployment 2/
But if what was happening was that monetary tightening was causing us to slide down a steep Phillips curve, you'd expect to see the "signature" of that process in more than just falling inflation 3/
Read 11 tweets
Sep 29, 2023
Good news for the future, but also calls for rethinking the past. Maybe big fiscal wasn't so disastrous after all 1/
Assertions that Biden's 2021 policies were a disaster rested on the proposition that they would cause inflation that would be very costly to bring down. In fact, inflation has come down painlessly, probably as pandemic-era kinks are worked out 2/
This says, first of all, that there were basically no long-term costs due to excessively expansionary policy. And it also suggests that much of the 2021-22 inflation was the result of those temporary kinks 3/
Read 6 tweets
Sep 13, 2023
This is an important point. Gonna do a newsletter on it, but I thought I should hit the high points — it helps explain consumer sentiment, and is also (believe it or not) good news for Biden 1/
Some people saying that consumers don't care about inflation, only the level of prices. Bad news if true, because deflating back to price levels from the past would be a nightmare. But surely overstates the case 2/
What is true is that 1 year is an arbitrary period. Easy to calculate because no need to worry about seasonal adjustment. But as everyone in this biz knows or should know, it's too long for macro analysis; it misses the big recent disinflation 3/ Image
Read 10 tweets

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