AMNA NAWAZ: Let's dig a little deeper on how the public mood and political attitudes have shifted over time, tied in no small part to economic shifts and dislocation.

GEOFF BENNETT: Paul Solman recently spoke with economist and columnist Paul Krugman about his career and how the combination of polarization, globalization and job loss changed the way many Americans see the economy.

PAUL SOLMAN: For just short of 25 years, Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman was a New York Times columnist.

He began the column in the Clinton years.

Krugman left The Times just before Donald Trump was inaugurated.

I asked him back then what has changed in 25 years.

PAUL KRUGMAN, Former Columnist, The New York Times: When I began writing the column, people were extremely optimistic.

I was hired basically to talk about all the good news and maybe funny stuff that was happening in this glorious late 1990s economic boom.

And it's been a very troubled world since then.

PAUL SOLMAN: By trouble, he means, at least domestically, Donald Trump's policies.

But Americans voted for them, didn't they?

PAUL KRUGMAN: Most voters have very little idea of policy.

I mean, you look at the polling, ask people, do you approve of Obamacare, and it's still pretty negative.

And you ask, do you approve of the Affordable Care Act, and it's very positive.

So that's telling you something about what voters understand about policy.

PAUL SOLMAN: Krugman pointed to this recent Michigan consumer confidence survey question.

PAUL KRUGMAN: Are you personally better off than you were five years ago?

In October, a clear plurality of Americans said, no, we're worse off.

In November, a clear plurality of Americans said, yes, we're better off than we were five years ago.

So, people's assessment of their own financial situation turns out to be kind of driven by narratives that are floating out there.

PAUL SOLMAN: Krugman supported President Biden's policy of manufacturing investment to help regions hurt by trade and China.

But voters in those regions went for Donald Trump.

Did they reject the policy?

PAUL KRUGMAN: Maybe, or maybe they just didn't really attribute it to Biden or whatever, although I think we are seeing a dynamic now, which is that it's going to be harder than some Republicans think to reverse those policies, that people may not have given Biden credit for that new battery factory in your town, but they will get really angry if the battery factory closes because we have cut off the subsidies.

PAUL SOLMAN: Did most economists, including yourself, not appreciate how huge a factor the cost of living change pre-COVID to today was, is?

PAUL KRUGMAN: I would have thought - - I did think -- I even looked at statistical analyses that said that most of the discontent over inflation, which inflation peaked in the middle of 2022 and has come way down, and I would have expected people to have largely gotten over it by now.

And they haven't.

PAUL SOLMAN: Do you have an explanation for it?

PAUL KRUGMAN: I think that part of it is just that the shock of this coming for the first time after decades of price stability was part of it.

And then part of it is just that we are -- our political discourse has become much more fragmented, much more polarized.

PAUL SOLMAN: For voters with incomes under $50,000 a year, household incomes, Donald Trump actually did better than Kamala Harris.

Why do you suppose that was?

PAUL KRUGMAN: Trump promised to bring prices down, which is a promise that he immediately abandoned as soon as he won.

But that -- so, that would have appealed to low-income voters as a promise.

And, also, there's a lot of confounding of income and education and paying attention.

We know that Trump won heavily among people who pay very little attention to the news.

PAUL SOLMAN: One great burden of a low income, besides not affording things, says Krugman.

PAUL KRUGMAN: Is the cognitive burden it places on people.

The biggest benefit once I started earning a nice income was not having to worry all the time about what things cost, whether I could afford this or that.

So, asking people to have a sophisticated view on what economic policy can and can't do is going to be correlated with income, unfortunately.

PAUL SOLMAN: Krugman not only made a good living.

He also advised various administrations on economic policy.

Advice taken?

PAUL KRUGMAN: The thing that I have learned in real life is that, no matter how much you know, no matter how right you have been, your ability to actually influence policy is very, very limited.

I mean, if you ask, how many times has somebody with actual power actually taken advice that I gave them, the answer is once my whole life.

PAUL SOLMAN: What are you least proud of?

PAUL KRUGMAN: I think maybe the thing I'm least proud of is that I missed one of the important problems of globalization.

I thought it was on the whole a good thing, but that it would be problematic.

But what I missed was the way that the impact would be concentrated on particular communities.

So we can look and say that the China shock displaced maybe one or two million U.S. manufacturing workers.

A million-and-a-half people are laid off every month, so what's that?

But what I missed was that there would be individual towns that would be in the path of this tidal wave of imports from China that would have their reason for existence gutted.

PAUL SOLMAN: Yesterday, I caught up with him again for two final questions, first why he left The Times and moved to Substack, where more than 200,000 followers now read whatever's on his mind.

PAUL KRUGMAN: It's very important to me, given my sort of dual career, to be able to weigh in on ongoing discussions of economics in a way that you can't do in an 800-word column written for a general audience.

And so I had a newsletter at The Times, which was summarily canceled.

They said I was writing too much.

That was when I decided I needed to leave, but also that I had always been very, very lightly edited at The Times, until the last year.

And then the editing became extremely intrusive.

And I felt that I was putting in an enormous amount of effort trying to undo the damage and that everything was coming out bland and colorless as a result of the fight over the editors trying to tone things down.

PAUL SOLMAN: And, finally, what is he most worried about at the moment with Trump now back at the helm?

PAUL KRUGMAN: Well, I'm most worried about that 2024 may have been our last real election, I mean, given that the -- what appears to be a loyalty purge of the federal bureaucracy, what appears to be unwillingness of the Trump administration to obey court orders, maybe historians will look back and say that American democracy ended in January 2025.

That's top of the list.

PAUL SOLMAN: Well, like his Substack, not bland, not toned down.

For the "PBS News Hour," Paul Solman working from home outside Boston.