ny times book review shuggie bain

Shuggie Bain Makes It Out

Douglas stuart’s neo-dickensian debut might be the best-reviewed book you’ve not yet read in 2020..

Shuggie Bain is 5, prissy and precise. “We need to talk,” he tells his mother, Agnes, when the family moves to a sooty mining village on the outskirts of Glasgow. “I really do not think I can live here. It smells like cabbages and batteries. It’s simply unpossible.” Shuggie abhors everything that he deems “common”; he’s the type to stamp his wee foot. He is a creature entirely out of place in shabby working-class 1980s Glasgow, a changeling who speaks like a prince. His family smells his inevitable truth, powerless as they are to stop it. “You’ll be needing that nipped in the bud,” his grandmother tells Agnes. “It’s no right.”

Much is no right in the Glasgow of Shuggie Bain , the hero’s quest of little Shuggie to survive his neo-Dickensian childhood. It is a novel that seems almost more comfortable in a previous century than in our own — no metafictional contortions, no genre-dabbling, no M.F.A.-burnished shine. (“It even seems appropriate that Shuggie, though reared in this coarse world, should speak with a certain delicate refinement, rather as Dickens has his boy heroes, Oliver Twist, David Copperfield and Pip, speak correct English,” The Scotsman wrote .) But most of all Shuggie Bain is a fat doorstop trudge of perseverance through the alcoholic grimness of poverty and addiction. It is also, despite or because of that, on a very short list, amid a very dissimilar cohort, of the year’s breakout debuts. Shuggie is in contention for the Booker Prize and the National Book Award, both announced this month. And because of an accident of timing — it was released right before the start of pandemic — it might be the best reviewed book you’ve never heard of in 2020, having had other things on your mind.

This was not the plan for Shuggie Bain and its first-time novelist, Douglas Stuart, but this is the year of not-as-planned. Stuart began 2020 with as many good omens as a writer could wish for: a story published in The New Yorker in January (his first-ever published piece of fiction), good reviews all around for Shuggie Bain on arrival in February. For Stuart, who had spent ten years chipping away at a draft at nights, on weekends, on planes, and in foreign hotel rooms on monthly business trips, it was the undreamt-of realization of a long-deferred dream. At 43 — he’s since turned 44 — 20 years into a career as a fashion designer, a trade he learned as a way out of the Glasgow tenement where he, like Shuggie, spent a misfit youth, he was an author at last.

Stuart has a kind, indrawn manner and a Scottish burr softened, though not evicted, after decades of living in New York. “All you really want is for it is to find the reader in the world,” he said over coffee on a bleary, damp gray day in October — Glaswegian weather, except he was sitting only a few blocks from his apartment on Avenue C. “It doesn’t have to be many, but you just want it to sort of join the world.” But within a month of publication, “The world shut down,” Stuart said. Bookstores locked their gates, Amazon slowed shipping on nonessential items. “I mean, my book is the least of anybody’s worries, because we all went through so much,” Stuart said. “But certainly for a debut novelist, we rely so much on people being able to see your book in a store and be curious about it. And so it sort of was — swallowed up is the best way to say it. And so I just went into a period of resetting my expectations, grieving a little bit.”

Shuggie might have slipped unnoticed into obscurity, one of the many worthy titles that fails to find a crowd in the absence of a celebrity book-club plumping or prestige-television acquisition.

Maybe the book was always a bit of a tough sell here. The agonies of 1980s Scotland — riven by unemployment; the erosion of industries like shipbuilding, mining, and ironworking; and a guttering recession – are very real, but, outside maybe Trainspotting , these struggles are hardly well known in the U.S. Shuggie Bain is set in this world of men run aground after the closure of mines, women sunk under the weight of drink, families living week to week on public assistance and disability benefits. It speaks in a Scottish English whose rhythms, even whose vocabulary, can be alien for American readers: misty with smirr and dusty with stour , its bruisers glaikit in their foolishness, gallus in their pride.

At its center is Agnes Bain, an imperious former beauty in a now-ratty mink whose disintegration Stuart observes lovingly but unsparingly. Shuggie is her youngest, her ward, her protector, and her target. He bobs in her beery wake, no more able to save her than his baby doll, Daphne. “I admire things that are unflinching,” Stuart said. “I think that’s the highest accolade.” Not everyone has the stomach for it. When it was submitted to publishing houses, Shuggie Bain was rejected over and over. “My agent told me it was 20 times,” he said. “And then, the other day, she said, ‘Actually, it was 32 times.’”

But the book has always had its supporters. Stuart’s agent is Anna Stein, who represents Ben Lerner and Hanya Yanagihara; when he got 33rd-time lucky, it was with Peter Blackstock, a young English editor at Grove, whose other authors include Viet Thanh Nguyen, the Pulitzer-winning author of The Sympathizer , and Bernardine Evaristo, whose Girl, Woman, Other won the Booker last year. “I was desperate to buy it,” Blackstock told me. And then, with Oxonian tact, “Luckily, I got to be the only person who, I guess, felt quite that way.”

It took a while, but the bet paid off. According to NPD BookScan, which tracks most print sales, the hardcover edition has sold fewer than 5,000 copies to date. But in the wake of the prize attention in October, Grove hurried out a paperback edition of 40,000 copies, and the book is now finding its way onto paperback bestseller lists.

The success of Shuggie Bain inaugurated a new chapter of Stuart’s life, unrecognizable to the young boy he was in Glasgow’s public housing. Shuggie Bain is not a memoir, but the parallels between author and subject are many. “Not a word of it is true, it is all written in truth,” is how he put it. Stuart was the youngest child (as Shuggie is) of an alcoholic mother, besotted with her own Elizbeth Taylor fantasies (as Agnes is). “If you’ve ever loved someone with addiction,” he said, “you’ve developed a lot of strategies to save them from themselves and also to protect yourself. My mother always felt so hard done-to in life and so overlooked — she was never voiceless, but she felt voiceless, I think, because men and society didn’t want to hear from poor women in the ’80s. Too ugly to look at, too uncomfortable to even comprehend. And so I used to sit down and I would say, ‘Let me write your book.’ And she would love that.” They never got farther than the dedication: To Elizabeth Taylor, who thinks she does, but knows nothing about the cruelties of love. Stuart’s writing began there.

Orphaned after his mother’s death, from her addiction, when he was 16 — unlike Shuggie, whose father and namesake, Shug, is a persistent demon presence in Shuggie Bain , Stuart never knew his father — he lived first with his older brother and then on his own in a boardinghouse. He was encouraged by teachers to read Armistead Maupin and Tennessee Williams. (Books had not been a presence in the houses he grew up in; he remembered only a copy of V.C. Andrews’s mass-market incest gothic Flowers in the Attic and a set of pleather-bound “great books” that opened to reveal videotapes.) But to study literature was class-inflected in the U.K. and doubly so in impoverished Scotland, where, as Stuart recalled, “even the word English is quite dangerous on the streets of the south side of Glasgow.” A trade was safer.

Stuart’s relatives were all working men: His uncle a slater (what we would call a roofer), his brother a joiner (a woodworker), his brother-in-law a shipbuilder. None of these were quite the thing for an effeminate, much-harassed young man, who had come to realize, as Shuggie also would, that he was gay. Scotland’s most famous exports are whiskey and textiles — one being self-evidently more appealing than the other — and Stuart had learned the basics of knitting at his mother’s knee. He got into the textile program at Galashiels, as Heriot-Watt University in the Scottish borders is known, paying for his board with a job managing the checkout counters in a supermarket. A master’s degree in menswear at the Royal College of Art in London followed. He was hired from the graduation show in 2000 to Calvin Klein in New York, where he lived in Williamsburg, subsisting on macaroni and cheese from the old L Cafe .

He did well at Calvin Klein and then at Ralph Lauren, but designing luxury goods was alienating. Growing up, he had worn clothes out of catalogues that his mother had purchased on layaway. Suddenly, he said, “you couldn’t make something too expensive.” He left Ralph Lauren for Banana Republic and the promise of a more democratic use of his talents.

Over 15 years at the company, on flights once a month, traveling among Asia, Europe, San Francisco, and New York, Stuart built the kind of life his family had barely dreamed of. But he also felt alienated from himself. In 2008, as the Great Recession set the world soul-searching, he began sketching out characters and scenes. He told almost no one about what he was working on. Eventually, the first draft of Shuggie Bain grew to 900 pages; printed out, it fit in two huge three-ring binders. It was cathartic to write it, even as fiction, he said. “Americans express themselves,” he said. “Americans tell you everything about them. Men from the West Coast of Scotland, we’re not allowed to ever think of ourselves as exceptionally hard done-to or exceptionally talented because we are one of many.” Stuart’s husband, Michael Cary, a curator at Gagosian, learned more about him reading the early drafts than he had ever shared.

Stuart’s project as a writer is in part about clearing space for tenderness among men, space for love. (His second novel, which he has recently completed, is a romance between two boys on opposite sides of sectarian violence in 1990s Scotland.) But it is also about making room for an honest depiction of working-class life. Fiction can be an overwhelmingly middle-class pursuit for writers and for readers. “There’s an enormous burden for people who are writing stories not set within the middle class, because on one hand, we don’t want to be seen to be just doing misery porn,” he said. “On the other hand, we don’t want to be seen as denying the characters the dignity or the truth of what it was really like. There’s a sort of a pressure on working-class stories to not tell the truth with too much reality.” He spoke of a middle-class gaze that believes it is owed a happy ending or, at least, to be let off the hook for its silent complicity. “People like to sort of come along and gawp at the sad bits,” he said. “And then go back to worrying about, you know, do they have almond milk?”

Of course, Stuart himself has long since left the working class, as he freely admits, though not yet so comfortable that leaving a fashion career for writing is not without some anxiety. But no regrets. “I feel like I finally made something happen in my life that I should have done 25 years ago and wish I had done as a kid,” he said. The New Yorker has already run another story , and his second novel is about to begin the editing process. Before then, he’ll dust off the tux for all-virtual National Book Award and Booker ceremonies, where the winners will be announced on November 18 and 19, realizing he is a few pandemic-pounds heavier than the last time he put it on. And he is Scottish enough to have checked Ladbrokes’ Booker odds — the British will bet on anything — and he is not the favorite to win.

The old life that fed Shuggie Bain is behind him, but the path he hoped to follow then is just beginning. He’s there and not there. It is a sensitive business to put your family, even in fiction, out for the entertainment of the world; it’s one thing not to flinch yourself, but another to insist that your loved ones don’t, either. He has only one sibling left living, a sister in Glasgow. She read Shuggie Bain before he even looked for an agent and gave her blessing.

It was smirring grayly on the East Village terrace café where we were sitting, and suddenly, as we sat and talked, out of nowhere, a patio umbrella broke free of its mooring and crashed onto the sidewalk. Stuart laughed. “Maybe that was God’s …” he began, then corrected himself. “Maybe it was my mother reaching out.”

Reaching out to say what? She has been gone almost 30 years; she’ll never know that Shuggie Bain is dedicated to her. How would she feel to be refracted into Agnes Bain, whose pride was her calling card, whose illness was her downfall? “I think my mother felt so unseen in life,” he said. “I think my mother would be thrilled.”

*A version of this article appears in the November 9, 2020, issue of  New York Magazine. Subscribe Now!

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‘Shuggie Bain’ author Douglas Stuart: ‘I have a radar for the suffering soul’

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Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart review — could this win the Booker prize?

Shuggie Bain , which has been longlisted for the Booker prize , begins at the end, with the title character at the age of 15 in 1992, living in a bedsit in Glasgow with a hotplate in the corner and a pervert next door who peeps through the keyhole of the shared facilities. If that’s the view from the summit, how grim must the climb have been? We’re about to find out, in excruciating detail.

Douglas Stuart drags us through the 1980s childhood of “a soft boy in a hard world” in a series of vivid, effective scenes. We get a rounded picture of Shuggie set against his older brother, Leek, and sister, Catherine, his slack father, Shug (whose opening remark to an old flame he picks up in his taxi is: “Take your f***ing knickers off then, I’ve only got five minutes”), and his alcoholic mother, Agnes. The story covers ten years as the family fail to find their feet in a mining community, seeking a new life in a new home, but finding only all their old problems with a bigger garden.

Arguably this is really Agnes’s story because it’s her struggles with vodka and Special Brew that lay out the road that the whole family must walk down. She is an authentic tragic heroine: beaten by her father, raped by her husband, and even when she kicks the bottle for a year, there’s a heartbreaking scene in which a well-meaning new lover talks her into having just one glass of wine — and hope goes bang. Stuart writes emotion well (“the great rainclouds inside her burst”) and doesn’t let up with the grisly details, to the extent that this can at times achieve an over-the-top flavour: a 15-year-old with dentures! Pawning your son’s belongings for drink!

But Agnes is tragic because she’s the moral centre of the family, her ambitions forced into the wrong places and squandered so that at one point the height of her hopes is to go to a different Alcoholics Anonymous meeting to find “a better class of alcoholic”. Everyone can see through her, and through her son Shuggie too, who’s bullied at school, despite Leek’s attempts to show him how to walk like a “real man”.

Stuart does tend to overegg the tragedy, and occasionally puts his own eloquence into the characters’ mouths. Would brutal Shug really think in phrases such as “diurnal masses”? Would a young boy reflect that “when [Agnes’s] belly was empty and her weans were hungry, she did her hair and let the world think otherwise”? But don’t look too closely and you will be swept along by the emotional surface, and there is occasional blunt comedy to provide welcome relief.

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Shuggie Bain is a novel that aims for the heart and finds it. As a novel it’s good, as a debut very good, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it progress from Booker longlist to shortlist. I’ll buy you a drink if it doesn’t. Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart, Picador, 430pp; £14.99

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How ‘Shuggie Bain’ author Douglas Stuart ‘wrote without anybody else’s expectations’

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Douglas Stuart

Stuart, finalist for the 2020 Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, appears at the festival April 18 with Andrew O’Hagan, author of “Mayflies,” in conversation with Times writer Anousha Sakoui. RSVP for free at events.latimes.com/festivalofbooks . If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores.

Growing up in 1980s Glasgow amid a working class beaten down by Thatcherism , Shuggie Bain watches as his family becomes increasingly broke and broken; his mother Agnes’ alcoholism drags her into a pit of despair, no matter how hard poor Shuggie loves her. Oh, and Shuggie is clearly gay — even if he doesn’t understand that at first — and is badly and endlessly bullied for it.

Poverty, abandonment, violence, abuse and self-destruction may sound relentlessly grim, but Douglas Stuart, who built “Shuggie Bain” on the framework of his own life story, sees light breaking through the darkness, resilience and hope in Shuggie’s willingness to try again each day. That’s why he gave voice and stood as witness to the lives of the Bains and their neighbors — but especially Shuggie and Agnes.

Stuart’s true story explains his positive perspective, at least in part: After his mother drank herself to death, Stuart, 44, escaped those dire circumstances, built a successful fashion career and a life with his husband in New York, then carved out small pockets of time over a decade to write this novel. It was rejected by 32 publishers but — here’s where the hope and resilience come in — it eventually found a home, earned the prestigious Booker Prize and became a bestseller.

Is this the saddest book ever?

I don’t think it’s the saddest book ever, but it might be among the saddest. In literature, hope is often telegraphed from a thousand miles away, and in real life hope is just getting up each day and taking another run at it. I think there’s this peculiar resilience of children, where Shuggie accepts what’s in front of him and he keeps coming back and loving his mother and hoping for better, even when it’s clear Agnes is not going to get better.

Scottish author Douglas Stuart wins 2020 Booker Prize for his debut novel, ‘Shuggie Bain’

Douglas Stuart won the 2020 Booker Prize for his debut novel, ‘Shuggie Bain.’ Former U.S. President Barack Obama was among the night’s special guests.

Nov. 19, 2020

Shuggie’s older half-brother discourages his unending devotion to Agnes and tells him to save himself. Is he right? Does Shuggie need to break the cycle of codependency?

You can’t save yourself and someone else at the same time. Shuggie is an extreme version of how most of us have to shirk off our parents to become ourselves. There’s a good argument to say they are in a codependent relationship and any time you love an addict you’re helping them, but that’s also a cynical way to look at it, because what else does the kid have to give but love? I think it’s less cruel to keep loving an addict than it is to abandon them.

When I think of the book, I think of Agnes first, Shuggie second. It seems they both prefer it that way.

She’s the center of his universe; she’s the sun at the beginning and then she becomes a black hole. But she suffers most and she’s the one who loses everything. She doesn’t do it to hurt Shuggie. I don’t judge Agnes — anyone who suffers addiction loses themselves first. The book for me is about loss and grief.

You spent two decades working as a fashion designer, writing this on the side. How do you think that shaped the writing?

Fashion is a collaborative industry that is overflowing with feedback, so it’s incredibly noisy. My writing was a sacred space. I was very protective and didn’t want to invite other people in.

I wrote without anybody else’s expectations, like having a circle of literary friends or an MFA class . What was seen as a weakness — it doesn’t follow the trends of literature — was actually a strength. It just sort of falls out of time a little bit. I wasn’t trying to be part of a movement.

You are unflinching in writing about the characters and the city of Glasgow. But your love for both comes through. Did you need time and distance to write so honestly?

Distance brought a huge amount of clarity and longing. It is like a love letter. I took 10 years to write it, partly because I just liked being with these characters. But it was also an exercise in empathy for me.

As a child of trauma , as someone whose parent suffered from addiction and who saw sectarianism, misogyny, homophobia , I knew what all that felt like, but I never took the time to sit and think, “But why was it that way?” So I was putting myself in the mind-set of Agnes Bain and thinking about the violence of men or the lack of hope, and trying to have an empathetic reading. If I’d written it in a year it would have been flatter.

It’s also a love letter of sorts to the working class, though it also paints them as vulnerable to violence, ignorance and provincialism. It’s an expansive view of a small world. Was it tricky to find that tone?

If you’re going to write a working-class story, you want to rely on the tapestry of a chorus, because everyone was going through the same economic moment, and I felt I could go deeper into the political issues and have a richer portrait with less condemnation if I allowed everybody to tell a little bit.

There’s a cliché in the working class about solidarity, but sometimes if you don’t conform, then the solidarity is united against you, and that’s what Shuggie and Agnes go through. People are telling Agnes she doesn’t have self-worth. She’s defiant to the point where it makes the women around her, who know it’s a veneer, want to pull her down to their level. I’m writing about people suffering under the patriarchy. When men struggle, women and children suffer first and worst. But sometimes the people who uphold the patriarchy the most are other women.

L.A. Times Festival of Books lineup: Don Lemon, Douglas Stuart, Zooey Deschanel and more

The festival will be virtual for the second year in a row, but expanded from 2020, hosting close to 150 writers over seven days beginning April 17.

March 23, 2021

The word “Dickensian” has been thrown around in reviews of the book. Is it accurate?

I’ve taken care and time and built worlds around things in quite a classical way. And these are people who don’t find themselves in literature very often. I wanted to elevate their lives and give them a dignity by paying close, detailed attention to it. That’s why it feels sort of Dickensian. I take the reader by the hand and ask them to sit in the room with them.

What I set out to do was tell an industrial narrative from a mother’s point of view and a queer point of view, because these are people who are always left out. The publishers thought it was specifically Glaswegian, but life on the fringe has a universality whether you’re in Glasgow or Detroit or Philly or Delhi.

Did you worry at all about how much the readers could handle of men and boys committing acts of violence and bullying, of women dragging each other down, of Agnes’ downfall?

I wrote the book for the characters and not for the reader — it’s what I was trying to tell them and not to tell people about them. I felt if I started to make choices about what a reader would want — especially a middle-class reader — then I would be denying the characters their dignity. It was definitely my choice to stick to the truth. These characters don’t count a good day because there’s always bad weather on the other side. That slight fear tinges everything, so it should be part of the reader’s experience.

Do you think that way still or can you take good days as they come?

Oh, that’s a good question. I might have to go lay down. That’s very true about me, still. I have a tough time enjoying good days. I try to be better about it.

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Unflinching in its detail, Shuggie Bain is a worthy Booker Prize winner

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When Douglas Stuart won the Booker Prize for his debut novel, Shuggie Bain , he said that he thought he would always be "inspired by gentle souls surviving in hard places". That's not a bad summary of Stuart's vibrant, sinewy account of a 1980s Glaswegian childhood much like his own, spent in thrall to a mother who is glamorous, charismatic and herself enslaved to alcohol. That sounds like the stuff of misery memoirs, but Stuart has turned this life into something more like a Breughel painting, stuffed with detail, vitality, humour and people who live at the tops of their voices.

Douglas Stuart speaks about Shuggie Bain after being named winner of the Booker Prize during a virtual ceremony. Credit: PA

Shuggie is collecting Agnes Bain's pension cheques by the time he is nine, learning to hold back enough money for food before she spends the rest on liquid relief. He is certainly a gentle soul; he believes, until he has wiped the sick from her sleeping mouth for the last time, that he can somehow save his mother from herself. Agnes aspires less to gentleness than gentility, priding herself on a tidy house and a smart wardrobe; she is convinced she is many cuts above the other sagging, struggling wives in her street.

But Agnes can also be kind; she can spark up for a good time; she loves Shuggie and his older half-brother Leek, another silent survivor, even if she's not much good at getting dinner on the table. We come to feel the same dread Shuggie does when he comes home from school and sees the glint of the Special Brew tins beside her chair, the same sunny relief when she is sober.

From the get-go, Shuggie Bain is unflinchingly exact about the minutiae of poverty. A prologue is set in 1992. Shuggie is 16 and living in the only kind of rooming house that will rent to someone obviously under age: "He dreamed about filling a bath to the very top … It had been a long time since he felt thawed all the way through, all of him warm at the exact same time."

At night he hears the broken-down men who rent the other rooms stumble in from the pub with their cans; he puts his school jumper across the crack in the door so he can't smell them. The rest of the book explains how he came to be here.

Eleven years earlier, Shuggie's father's final act as patriarch was to move the family out of the city to Pithead, a village built to service one of the coal mines closed by the Thatcher government. Stuart conjures a nightmare landscape beyond its few streets: "The land had been turned inside out … The black slag hills stretched for miles like the waves of a petrified sea." The streets themselves are dotted with unemployed men, their hardened wives and dirty, snotty children spilling from overpacked houses who rejoice in mocking Shuggie's overly elaborated speech.

He can't seem to help himself; he's not posh, exactly, but he doesn't fit. The day they arrive at Pithead, he tells his mother: "I really do not think I can live here. It smells like cabbages and batteries. It's simply impossible." Liberace's moving in! squeals one of the watching neighbours; they know what he is, even if he doesn't. Later he will steal a girl's My Little Pony toy, inexorably drawn to its pastel colouring and lush plastic mane.

Manes are his thing: when he is older, he stands across the street from the hairdressing college watching smart young future colourists file into class, filled with the sort of longing others might feel for the dreaming spires of Oxford. It seems just as far away.

Even so, there is never a sense that he won't make good, somehow; that one day he will be able to afford the life Agnes thought should be hers, but never found a man to provide. Shuggie's gentleness has made him strong; he has loved his mother through every humiliation, proving himself tougher than any of the fitba thugs who bully him.

The proof of that is here in Douglas Stuart, Booker Prize in hand, a gay man thanking his husband for supporting his writing, thanking his real "proud, hard-working, generous" mother, thanking his fellow Scots for being so funny. The proof is this terrific novel.

Shuggie Bain, Douglas Stuart. Picador, $32.99

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SHUGGIE BAIN

by Douglas Stuart ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 11, 2020

You will never forget Shuggie Bain. Scene by scene, this book is a masterpiece.

Alcoholism brutally controls the destiny of a beautiful woman and her children in working-class Scotland.

The way Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting carved a permanent place in our heads and hearts for the junkies of late-1980s Edinburgh, the language, imagery, and story of fashion designer Stuart’s debut novel apotheosizes the life of the Bain family of Glasgow. Stunning, raven-haired Agnes Bain is often compared to Elizabeth Taylor. When we meet her in 1981, she’s living with her parents and three “weans” in a crowded high-rise flat in a down-and-out neighborhood called Sighthill. Her second husband, Hugh "Shug" Bain, father of her youngest, Shuggie, is a handsome taxi driver with a philandering problem that is racing alongside Agnes’ drinking problem to destroy their never-very-solid union. In indelible, patiently crafted vignettes covering the next 11 years of their lives, we watch what happens to Shuggie and his family. Stuart evokes the experience of each character with unbelievable compassion—Agnes; her mother, Lizzie; Shug; their daughter, Catherine, who flees the country the moment she can; artistically gifted older son Leek; and the baby of the family, Shuggie, bullied and outcast from toddlerhood for his effeminate walk and manner. Shuggie’s adoration of his mother is the light of his life, his compass, his faith, embodied in his ability to forgive her every time she resurrects herself from a binge: “She was no use at maths homework, and some days you could starve rather than get a hot meal from her, but Shuggie looked at her now and understood this was where she excelled. Everyday with the make-up on and her hair done, she climbed out of her grave and held her head high. When she had disgraced herself with drink, she got up the next day, put on her best coat, and faced the world. When her belly was empty and her weans were hungry, she did her hair and let the world think otherwise.” How can love be so powerful and so helpless at the same time? Readers may get through the whole novel without breaking down—then read the first sentence of the acknowledgements and lose it. The emotional truth embodied here will crack you open.

Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020

ISBN: 978-0-8021-4804-9

Page Count: 416

Publisher: Grove

Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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PERSPECTIVES

THE NIGHTINGALE

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 3, 2015

Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.

Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.

In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring  passeurs : people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the  Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.

Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3

Page Count: 448

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014

HISTORICAL FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP

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by Kristin Hannah

BOOK TO SCREEN

SEEN & HEARD

THEN SHE WAS GONE

by Lisa Jewell ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 24, 2018

Dark and unsettling, this novel’s end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed.

Ten years after her teenage daughter went missing, a mother begins a new relationship only to discover she can't truly move on until she answers lingering questions about the past.

Laurel Mack’s life stopped in many ways the day her 15-year-old daughter, Ellie, left the house to study at the library and never returned. She drifted away from her other two children, Hanna and Jake, and eventually she and her husband, Paul, divorced. Ten years later, Ellie’s remains and her backpack are found, though the police are unable to determine the reasons for her disappearance and death. After Ellie’s funeral, Laurel begins a relationship with Floyd, a man she meets in a cafe. She's disarmed by Floyd’s charm, but when she meets his young daughter, Poppy, Laurel is startled by her resemblance to Ellie. As the novel progresses, Laurel becomes increasingly determined to learn what happened to Ellie, especially after discovering an odd connection between Poppy’s mother and her daughter even as her relationship with Floyd is becoming more serious. Jewell’s ( I Found You , 2017, etc.) latest thriller moves at a brisk pace even as she plays with narrative structure: The book is split into three sections, including a first one which alternates chapters between the time of Ellie’s disappearance and the present and a second section that begins as Laurel and Floyd meet. Both of these sections primarily focus on Laurel. In the third section, Jewell alternates narrators and moments in time: The narrator switches to alternating first-person points of view (told by Poppy’s mother and Floyd) interspersed with third-person narration of Ellie’s experiences and Laurel’s discoveries in the present. All of these devices serve to build palpable tension, but the structure also contributes to how deeply disturbing the story becomes. At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot.

Pub Date: April 24, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-5011-5464-5

Page Count: 368

Publisher: Atria

Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018

GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | SUSPENSE

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by Lisa Jewell

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BOOK OF THE MONTH

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Shuggie Bain

By Douglas Stuart

Shuggie Bain Book Club Questions PDF

Click here for a printable PDF of the Shuggie Bain discussion questions

Winner of the Booker Prize

Finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction

Finalist for the Kirkus Prize for Fiction

Finalist for the Center for Fiction Debut Novel Prize

“We were bowled over by this first novel, which creates an amazingly intimate, compassionate, gripping portrait of addiction, courage and love. The book gives a vivid glimpse of a marginalised, impoverished community in a bygone era of British history. It’s a desperately sad, almost-hopeful examination of family and the destructive powers of desire.”

— Booker Prize Judges

“The body—especially the body in pain—blazes on the pages of Shuggie Bain . . . This is the world of Shuggie Bain, a little boy growing up in Glasgow in the 1980s. And this is the world of Agnes Bain, his glamorous, calamitous mother, drinking herself ever so slowly to death. The wonder is how crazily, improbably alive it all is . . . The book would be just about unbearable were it not for the author’s astonishing capacity for love. He’s lovely, Douglas Stuart, fierce and loving and lovely. He shows us lots of monstrous behavior, but not a single monster—only damage. If he has a sharp eye for brokenness, he is even keener on the inextinguishable flicker of love that remains . . . The book leaves us gutted and marveling: Life may be short, but it takes forever.”

— New York Times Book Review

“The tough portraits of Glaswegian working-class life from William McIlvanney, James Kelman, Alasdair Gray, and Agnes Owens can be felt in Shuggie Bain without either overshadowing or unbalancing the novel . . . Stuart’s capacity for allowing wild contradictions to convincingly coexist is also on display in the individual vignettes that comprise the novel, blending the tragic with the funny, the unsparing with the tender, the compassionate with the excruciating. He can even pull off all of them in a single sentence . . . This overwhelmingly vivid novel is not just an accomplished debut. It also feels like a moving act of filial reverence.”

— James Walton, New York Review of Books

“A debut novel that reads like a masterpiece, Shuggie Bain gives voice to the kind of helpless, hopeless love that children can feel towards broken parents. Shuggie and his mother live in an 1980’s Glasgow subsidized-housing apartment tower, where she drinks and he explores his sexuality under circumstances that allow for scant imagination about a different future for either.”

— Bethanne Patrick , Washington Post

This book of the month and discussion guide are shared and sponsored in partnership with Grove Atlantic. 

Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart Book Guide

By: Author Jen - MMB Book Blog

Posted on Published: 28 November 2021  - Last updated: 26 February 2024

Shuggie Bain is the New York Times bestselling debut novel by Douglas Stuart, published in 2020 .

I was a bit late to the party when it comes to Shuggie Bain. It’s a book that sat on my bookcase for a long time before I finally decided to read it. I think after seeing it discussed on Between The Covers and hearing how bleak it was, I felt I had to be in the right frame of mind before I began it.

It’s been a hugely successful literary fiction novel and has won multiple awards including the 2020 Booker Prize and Book of The Year at the British Book Awards. Not bad for a first novel!

Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart: Plot

The book is set in Glasgow and follows the story of Shuggie Bain and his alcoholic mother Agnes. We are introduced to Shuggie at the beginning of the book when he is 15 years old before we are taken back to the 1980s when Shuggie is just five years old.

Shuggie lives a working class life in a flat with Agnes, his father Shug, his maternal grandparents and two half-siblings. Life is tough for Agnes Bain and she wants more for herself and her children. She dreams of greater things and feels she deserves them.

Shug abandons her after they move away from her parents’ flat and Agnes finds herself with only alcohol as a comfort. Her children do their best to save her but they too eventually have to abandon her in order to save themselves.

Shuggie, however, never gives up hope. Agnes is Shuggie’s whole world. He’s different from the children in his school and community and he is constantly told he is “no’ right”. Yet Shuggie believes if he is good and tries hard, his love alone might just save him and Agnes.

Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart: My Opinion

Shuggie Bain has left a lasting impact on me. It is bleak and my heart broke for the little boy who just wanted to save his mother.

However, amongst the sadness, there are moments of warmth and love. The love Shuggie has for Agnes and his capacity for forgiveness is as moving as it is heart-breaking. His mother was clearly everything to him but, unfortunately, the feeling wasn’t reciprocated.

It was so beautifully written. I could clearly see every one of the characters as well as the poverty and deprivation of 1980s Glasgow. I rooted for Agnes, despite her being a hugely flawed character. I’ve been crying out for a story with characters I really cared about and there are not many characters I’ve cared more about than poor old Shuggie Bain.

I loved how the story was written in Glaswegian dialect. The Scottish speech is spelled out phonetically so it’s easy enough to decipher. This use of dialect adds an extra layer of authenticity to the storytelling and I felt fully immersed in the world of the characters. The dialect really contributes to the novel’s vivid sense of time and place, making the characters and their struggles feel even more real and relatable.

Douglas Stuart writes with such empathy and the story is a raw and unflinching portrayal of Shuggie’s life. Through the author’s evocative prose and vivid storytelling, the novel still manages to find moments of beauty, resilience and love amid the harsh realities of poverty and addiction.

How many pages does Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart have?

Shuggie Bain has 449 pages.

When was Shuggie Bain released?

Shuggie Bain was released on 20th February 2020.

What books are like Shuggie Bain?

Both A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara and Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver have a similar theme to Shuggie Bain. Both follow troubled young men as they struggle to fight their demons.

I would also recommend The Heart’s Invisible Furies by John Boyne as another coming of age epic.

Has Douglas Stuart written any other novels?

Douglas Stuart has also written Young Mungo which was published in 2022.

I loved Shuggie Bain. It’s certainly not an easy read and it made me cry several times. However, the characters will stay with me for such a long time. I would love to read a sequel and find out what life has in store for Shuggie Bain.

It’s a brutal portrayal of poverty and alcoholism but also a tale of love, hope and forgiveness. A beautiful yet heart-breaking book.

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If you’re looking for more reading inspiration why not check out my other book lists and book guides. I have book guides listed by author and book guidse listed by genre . I also have author reading lists and series order lists to help inspire you.

Book Review: Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart

I think Shuggie Bain is likely on everybody’s “to-be-read” list after winning the 2020 Booker Prize award. It’s a tale that spans over a decade and tells the story of deep sorrow and struggle between a boy and his mother.

Please note this article contains affiliate links. This means if you choose to purchase Shuggie Bain via the links provided, I receive a small commission at no extra cost to you to support the blog. These links do not affect my opinion of the book.

Shuggie Bain is the name of the son of Agnes Bain whose life has thrown constant pain and abandonment at her. She’s an alcoholic and the story tells the tale of Shuggie’s and her own experiences over the space of just over a decade. It’s a sad one. Do not read this book if you’re looking for a light summer read.

As mentioned above, Shuggie Bain mostly follows the lives of Agnes and Shuggie Bain. Agnes is left early on by “Big Shug”, the man she’s in love with and Shuggie and Leek’s father, which sends her into an alcoholic down the spiral. This sees hers and Shuggie’s lives change forever. The next three hundred pages take us through different stages of alcoholism including the lowest lows and the hopeful highs. However, inevitably it’s a story that will make you realise just how difficult addiction to alcohol is.

The story itself takes place over many years, progressing us through Shuggie and his mother’s lives as they take on new experiences and the world changes around them. Shuggie soon realises he is gay, and in the 1980s, this is not accepted by his peers at all. With this and his mother’s addiction, he struggles to get through his late childhood and teen years. He is there to support his mother through her highs and lows, showing a true heroic spirit.

Characters – 5/5

Shuggie is an absolute saint. He grows up in an environment where not only does he only know loss and pain but he has to take all of this in and find his own path with very little guidance from his parents or his peers. He develops unique habits and coping mechanisms that see him further ridiculed. He’s someone who clearly loves his mother dearly and only wants the absolute best for her. He wants her to be happy and will do absolutely anything for this.

Agnes herself is a fascinating character. Her addiction to alcohol may make you think you’ll take a disliking to her and there are certainly moments where you do, however, there’s a woman under there who has been severely hurt her whole life and who has got herself trapped into this disease that changes her. She isn’t herself when she’s drunk and unfortunately, she’s drunk for the majority of the time. When she sobers up, she’s a good mother and a kind person. But it never lasts long.

The supporting characters that feature such as Shuggie’s older brother Leek and some of the friends that Agnes makes along the way are all fantastically well written. They’re flawed and their own people and this makes you respect their decisions. 

Shuggie Bain summary – 5/5

You’ll notice I’ve given both “characters” and “plot” five out of five ratings. This book is really that good. It took me a while to get into at first I wasn’t sure what I was reading. However, after a couple of hundred pages, I realised this was one of those books that’s not about the small individual stories but about the journey as a whole. It’s a fantastically brutal and honest telling of the long-term effects of alcoholism. I liked that it wasn’t set in an easy setting, I liked that the author wasn’t safe and fluffy with the addiction of alcohol and I loved the characters, flaws and all.

I’d recommend Shuggie Bain for anybody who is looking for something to tug on their heartstrings; someone who has decided they need to finish off that box of Kleenex or someone who isn’t in the mood to smile. No, but in all seriousness, I’d definitely recommend picking up Shuggie Bain. It’s brutally, truthfully and wonderfully written with real, flawed but loveable characters.

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Shuggie Bain: A Novel

• By Douglas Stuart
• Grove Press
• Reviewed by Mike Maggio
• February 4, 2020

An alcoholic mother and her young son struggle to survive in Thatcher-era Glasgow.

This is a book I did not want to read. Why? I didn’t like the title.

First takeaway: Never judge a book by its name.

Second takeaway: This is an instant classic. A novel that takes places during the Thatcher years and, in a way, defines it. A novel that explores the underbelly of Scottish society. A novel that digs through the grit and grime of 1980s Glasgow to reveal a story that is at once touching and gripping. Think D.H. Lawrence. Think James Joyce.

Third takeaway: the American reader will need a Scottish to English dictionary to get through some of the local language (e.g., wean = child; smirr = drizzle; doubt = cigarette butt). There are many more instances of working-class Scottish dialect, but don’t be deterred. This novel is well worth the slog through unfamiliar lingo. And the language is so well tuned that it transforms a working-class tale into a literary tour de force.

Shuggie Bain is the story of a young boy growing up in a dysfunctional family amid politically fueled economic turmoil. Shuggie’s mother, Agnes, is an unrepentant alcoholic, and his father, Shug, is a taxi driver who despises his wife’s addiction to “the drink,” cheats on her whenever the opportunity arises, and ultimately abandons her to a low-income housing development called Pithead, a depressing colliery where residents survive on government handouts.

Shuggie’s half-brother and half-sister soon manage to escape from an environment they recognize as untenable, leaving Shuggie to take care of a mother who, for the most part, is so inebriated that she is unable to attend to herself. At the same time, Shuggie is forced to face his inability to be like the other boys his age and, as he enters his teens, begins to struggle with his own sexual identity.

Shuggie Bain is as much about Agnes as it is about Shuggie himself. Much of the story centers around her drunken binges and her desire to present herself as someone who is above her peers, for she maintains an outward appearance that belies who she truly is, modeling herself after Elizabeth Taylor, a not-so-subtle metaphor given Taylor’s own struggle with alcohol:

“This was where she excelled. Every day with the make-up on and her hair done, she climbed out of her grave and held her head high. When she had disgraced herself with drink, she got up the next day, put on her best coat, and faced the world. When her belly was empty and her weans were hungry, she did her hair and let the world think otherwise.”

Indeed, Agnes spends most of her government allowance on alcohol and mail-order catalogues, raiding the hot-water dispenser for change whenever she needs to purchase food for her family. Later on, she tries to mend herself by finding a job, attending A.A. meetings, and going dry as she allows herself to become attached to a man who cannot understand the disease that alcoholism is.

This, too, however, leads to disappointment and failure, and Agnes soon joins the ranks of “the drouthies” once again, swigging cheap lager and settling back into the anger she has harbored most of her adult life.

Shuggie Bain is a novel that will capture your interest from the first page and immerse you in a world from which you want to escape but from which, like its protagonist, you can’t. There are characters you will hate and characters you will come to love.

And you’ll find yourself cheering for Agnes as she struggles to overcome her addiction and rooting for Shuggie as he faces down bullies and continues to believe, naively yet wholeheartedly, that his mother will eventually give up the drink.

This is a story of hope and despair. Some things right themselves; others don’t. It is realism at its best: a picture of the world as it is for those stuck in circumstances from which they cannot escape, one that relentlessly strives for redemption. Don’t expect a happy ending, but do expect to find yourself engrossed in a story that will leave you both wowed and numb.

Mike Maggio’s newest collection of short fiction is Letters from Inside: The Best of Mike Maggio (Vine Leaves Press).

Support the Independent by purchasing this title via our affliate links: Amazon.com Or through Bookshop.org

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Shuggie Bain: A Book Review

When I first picked up Shuggie Bain , I have to admit that I had no idea what I was in for. The first time I had even heard about it, was when it won the 2020 Booker Prize. By the end of this incredibly depressing and harrowing tale, I came to the conclusion that this is one of the most important books about Thatcher-era Britain from the last decade. This novel from Douglas Stuart is one that cannot be missed.

Set in 1980s Glasgow, when Britain was under the leadership of Margaret Thatcher, Shuggie Bain follows the story of the titular Shuggie, a five year old who is the youngest of three children, and his mother Agnes. It explores the complex world of Shuggie’s feelings towards his mother who, despite being his hero, is increasingly becoming a cause for concern to the people around her as a result of her alcoholism. Agnes herself struggles to cope with the gradual loss of the people closest to her – her husband, her children, her friends – and all she has at the end of the day is her alcoholism and Shuggie.

Ultimately, Shuggie Bain is a story about substance abuse and addiction, and the harm that it inflicts on those around the victim. As the story goes on, we see Agnes sinking further into her addiction, holding Shuggie back from having the childhood he deserves. Despite all the harm that Agnes has caused him, Shuggie continues to stand by her – even when his father or siblings try to ‘rescue’ him from his mother. It is heartwarming, yet extremely depressing to read about the hardships that Shuggie has to endure, where he tries to save someone who refuses to be saved. Shuggie is a character that Stuart writes so beautifully, that you can’t help but root for him. However, at every turn, Stuart pulls the rug from under us and throws another hardship at Shuggie and Agnes.

I have to warn that this is an extremely bleak book. At times, I even found it hard to keep reading and had to take multiple breaks. However, it is most definitely essential reading. It details the actual pain and trauma faced by the working-class in Britain under Thatcher’s leadership, and her policies which divested the poor communities in Britain. A period with high unemployment,  where poverty, violence and alcoholism was spreading across communities. Despite that, there is still a lot of hope and light in this book, personified in Shuggie and the love he shows for his mother.

To sum it up, Shuggie Bain is a must read. It completely deserves all the awards and recognition it has gotten, and is a brilliant insight into 1980s Scottish working-class life. I’m not sure if I’m ever ready to revisit this book, but it is most definitely going to stick with me for a long while. Saishwar Director of ReadNUS

Only Here, Only Now by Tom Newlands: From pishpuddles to pee-the-beds

Humourless narrator is difficult to root for in this novel set in fife, scotland.

In Only Here, Only Now, by Tom Newlands, the narrator's greatest aspiration is to move to Glasgow. Photograph: Michael Pasdzior

Employing a strong dialect is a risky move for a novelist. Get it right – Trainspotting, The Color Purple, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha – and it pays off, but get it wrong and it runs the risk of sounding parodic. Four years ago, Douglas Stuart won the Booker Prize for Shuggie Bain , set in early 1990s Scotland and featuring a teenage boy going through considerable trauma. By locating his debut in the same terrain, with a similar-age protagonist and comparable ordeals, Tom Newlands, perhaps unwisely, allows Shuggie’s shadow to loom large.

It’s 1994, and Cora Mowat is living with her wheelchair-bound mother and surrogate stepfather while taking tentative steps into the dating world. If there was any doubt about her heritage, they’re put to bed by her incessant pishpuddles, weans, pee-the-beds, hoaching and boaking, which are scattered like Caledonian confetti across every page.

The best young narrators – from Jim Hawkins to Christopher Boone – draw the reader in through a blend of mischief and vulnerability and while Cora displays touches of both, she’s so humourless that it becomes hard to wish her well. Despairing of the broken landscape of Muircross in Fife, her greatest aspiration is to move to Glasgow but perhaps if her ambitions lay further afield the reader might get a better sense of her frustration. The Dear Green Place, after all, is only a bus ride away.

That said, Newlands is capable of some good lines. The glow of an oven door is “like a tiny shop front at Christmas”. Snow goes “sideways in places, some of it swooping and floating up like all it wanted was to go back towards the moon”. And, while eating breakfast, Cora presses “dry Coco Pops down into the milk with my spoon and heard them muttering”, which is a striking image.

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A reader doesn’t need to like a central character to appreciate a novel but we do need to care about them and Cora’s sense of entitlement, exemplified by her complaining about a free room she has been offered, makes her sound more like a millennial than a child of the 1990s. As with most sullen teens, it takes considerable work and goodwill to enjoy her company.

John Boyne, a contributor to The Irish Times, is a novelist and critic

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From New York Times Opinion, this is “The Ezra Klein Show.”

I’ve been thinking about this episode for a bit, so I’m going to spend a couple of minutes here, setting it up.

Back in September, the economist put out this interesting model that pulled in a bunch of different bits of economic data, so things like the unemployment rate, inflation, gas prices, the S&P 500. And they used all that to predict how people would feel about the economy. And they showed that from 1980 to 2019. All these bits of data, they do predict how people feel about the economy.

And then the pandemic hits and the model completely falls apart.

By late 2023, the model is looking at low unemployment, it’s looking at falling inflation, it’s looking at a great stock market, and it predicts consumer sentiment. It’s going to be 98 out of 100, 98 out of 100. That is Joe Biden gets his face on a coin territory. Here, in reality, the actual consumer sentiment was 69. That is Joe Biden might lose re-election territory.

There’s been this debate for a year or two now about whether the economy is good or it is bad. And the language of that, the binariness bothers me. It’s like asking if the 19th century was good or bad. I mean, good or bad for whom? Compared to what? The economy is like this vast, multidimensional hyperobject. It’s a little too big for good or bad. I think we need to be more precise.

This debate is not about whether the economy is good or bad. The debate is about our expectations. Given what we’ve seen before, we would expect — we did expect people to be happier with the economy than they are right now, a lot happier. One way you can try to reconcile that is you can say, the public is misinformed or misled.

There’s this Guardian Harris poll that came out a few weeks ago. It found 56 of Americans, 56 think we’re in a recession, 49 percent think the S&P 500 is down this year, and 49 percent think that unemployment is at a 50-year high. For the record, we are not in a recession. The S&P 500 is at a record high. And unemployment is at 3.9 percent, which is extremely low. So factually, people are wrong about the economy.

But it gets weirder than that because when you ask people how they’re doing, they say they’re doing pretty well. The Federal Reserve collects this data. In 2016, 70 percent of Americans said they were doing at least OK financially. In 2018, 75 percent said they were doing at least OK. And in 2023, 72 percent said they were doing at least OK. So that doesn’t look like an economy that people are experiencing in a way where they should think we’re in a recession or at a 50-year high in unemployment. And yet, people are unhappy about something.

So go back to that Federal Reserve report. By the way, if you’re a nerd who wants to read along here, I’m looking at “The Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households in 2023.” On page 10, they have this chart, which shows the main financial challenges people said they were facing in 2016 and in 2023 — inflation, living expenses, debt, retirement costs, medical costs, educational costs, employment. But in 2016, none of those get above percent, and 53 percent of people say they’re facing no real financial challenges at all. So that’s 2016.

In 2023, they ask the same question but get a very different response. 35 percent say inflation is their main financial challenge. 21 percent say basic living expenses. Only 31 percent say they’re not facing any challenges at all. So yeah, people say their financial situation is at least OK, but they also say they’re facing much more financial challenge than they were eight years ago. And they’re very clear about what those challenges are.

So I’ve been working around this big theory of the economy right now. And it’s based on something that got published in The Atlantic in February of 2020, that cursed month right before everything shuts down.

In February of 2020, there’s this big piece on what they call “the great affordability crisis.” And the point the piece makes is that a lot is looking good in the economy — unemployment is down, wages are rising, people are feeling good. But if you look at the things people really need, housing, health care, education, child care, costs have just exploded. Quote, “The spiraling cost of living has become a central facet of American economic life.”

That piece read a little counterintuitively at the time. People felt the economy was great. How could you say there’s a crisis? And people hadn’t been paying much attention to costs for a while. The big problems after the Great Recession had been unemployment, consumer demand, financial fragility. This affordability problem, it was building in the background, but it wasn’t the thing we were looking at.

But then the pandemic hit, and then came inflation. And it was like this portal of salience for prices. Suddenly, all anybody was focused on was prices. The monthly inflation report got the attention that the monthly jobs report used to get — gas prices, food prices, car prices. Then the Federal Reserve begins raising interest rates, that makes it much harder to borrow money, much harder to finance buying a home.

And so the economy reorders itself to piss you off about how expensive everything is all of the time. The price of a cup of coffee is a reminder of the cost of a house, of child care, of a car, of a movie ticket. Maybe you can pay it. Maybe your financial situation is even OK after you pay it. But it doesn’t mean you like it and you’re reminded of it constantly.

What happened is not that the economy is terrible now and it was great in 2019, it’s at an affordability problem was building in 2019, a cost of living problem. Then inflation hit, and it made prices much worse, and it made the cost of living problem much worse. And now, prices and affordability are the part of the economy that people are seeing, and they hate it.

The 2020 Atlantic piece, which has done so much to shape my thinking, it was written by Annie Lowrey. She’s a staff writer at The Atlantic and an economics correspondent. She’s the author of the book “Give People Money.” And a little awkwardly for this podcast, she’s also my wife — or I’m her husband. So you can imagine what pillow talk is like in my home, but there’s really no one for me better to talk about this with. As always, my email, [email protected].

Annie Lowrey, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me.

It’s a little bit of an odd —

It’s a really weird —

It’s a really weird — It’s also one of the strange things about it is that we’re in a really nice podcasting studio, but we’re sitting like five feet apart from one another. So it has a little like, are we in a legal dispute?

Yeah, that’s a rich person’s Thanksgiving.

[LAUGHS] Exactly.

But unfortunate to have you here because as you know better than other people do, this piece you wrote years ago has wormed its way into my brain. And I bring it up every six months. And it’s become like the way I see the economy.

So 2020, right before the entire world shuts down, you write “The Great Affordability Crisis.” What led to writing the piece?

Both you and I became reporters during the George W. Bush administration. And I was doing a lot of intense beat reporting during the Obama administration. And throughout this entire period, and this is what people are experiencing in the economy, the economy is defined by low growth, low interest rates, low inflation, high inequality. And the primary problem that policymakers are trying and failing to solve has to do with consumer demand, with demand in the economy. The issue is that people aren’t making enough money to buy things.

This entire time, this cost of living crisis is also brewing. And you can even date it somewhat earlier, but I think probably, the aughts are a good place to start it, where the cost of — I identify four things, but there are probably five. These are costs that are big and are sticky, and that you are not transacting frequently. And the four things are health care, child care, higher ed, so higher ed debt, and then housing. And the cost of all four of those things becomes really, really brutal, not just for low income Americans, but middle income, and in some cases, even upper-middle income Americans.

And it really changes our relationship to the economy. And it sneaks up on us again because we’re in this circumstance in which the primary issue is wages and low demand.

You said there was a fifth that you would have included if you’d gone back. What was number five?

Elder care, which is a really, really big issue and has some of the same pressures as child care in terms of wages and accessibility. This is actually becoming a bigger issue as the American population ages.

Why is inflation low? Because housing is going up, child care is going up, the education is going up. So how do prices seem low to people, even as the affordability of basic — the basic items of both middle class life and upward mobility are skyrocketing?

There’s two things that I think are quite important here. So one is that you can have inflation increasing just a little bit more for these items than the overall rate of inflation. And over time, that’s going to lead you to a big problem because if these are large parts of family budgets and large parts of the economy overall, if you have inflation in health care, that’s one percentage point higher than the overall rate of inflation, you’re going to develop a problem really quickly.

The second thing is that our consumer expenditure statistics and our inflation statistics do not take into account the trade offs that people make in order to keep their personal budgets reasonable. So let’s say, as an example, that you would like to live with your partner in a high cost city like D.C., and you’d like to rent an apartment together, but you can’t. So instead, you’re living together in a group house. You probably don’t have a consumer expenditure problem on paper in terms of the amount of money that you’re spending on rent, but you really don’t like the feeling of that.

So I think especially, when it comes to housing, folks, for instance, maybe you’d really like to — you get a great job in LA and you’d really like to live there, but you have three kids and you’re like, I can’t afford that. So you stay where you are. And so your — by being pushed out to a different urban area or an exurb or a suburb, you are probably keeping your spending in line, but you’re probably pretty upset. And cost pressures are still defining your life in some sense. And so that’s why I think that these snuck up on people.

There are two things during this period that are really cheap or maybe two baskets of things. One is things you do buy a lot of. You don’t buy your house very often. You pay your mortgage monthly, but you don’t buy a lot of houses if you’re a normal person. But you do buy a lot of food. You do go to the gas station a lot.

And in this period, consumer purchasing is pretty cheap, right? Things are cheap. You can get a flat screen television for very little money, laptops, smartphones, all these kind of electronics famously come way down. And money is cheap. Interest rates are low.

How much was the cheapness of other things, the cheapness of money, the cheapness of debt, the cheapness of consumer electronics, cheapness of food, creating a sense that prices were under control that allowed some of these other things to go nuts.

Absolutely. So the consumer expenditure that people notice the most — I would say, probably, the two that they notice the most are gas and food. Gas is really important because it’s a throughput. So if the price of gas goes up, the price of other things goes up. But also people, it’s a pretty large single purchase that a lot of folks make every couple days or maybe once a week, and it’ll be like 100 bucks to fill up your tank or $50 to fill up your tank.

And food, folks tend to transact really, really frequently with that. So if you have the cost of stuff that you are purchasing in a store frequently is really pretty low, I think the perception of inflation can be somewhat lower. I think people don’t really think of health care and rent as being really important parts of inflation, but they are because they’re a big part of the overall consumer basket.

So then what connected these four or five categories — health care, housing, child care, elder care, higher ed. Give me a sense of how much prices had gone up, but why in those five? If other things are cheaper, if money is cheap, why is that set of things expensive?

It’s slightly different for each of them. So let’s take housing first, because this is the biggest one and in some ways, I think, the worst one. So housing starts currently are about 1.4 million. It’s a 1.4 million annual pace.

That’s how many new houses were —

Yeah, exactly, how many new houses are getting permitted and are going to get built. We had more housing starts in 1959 than we do now. The population has doubled. And so after the housing crisis, housing starts go as low as like 500,000. And we have a whole decade of depressed residential construction.

So we have decades of under production, and especially, under production in the high cost areas, high wage areas, where most people want to work. So San Francisco or New York are two really, really great examples of this. But we end up having a housing shortage everywhere, and it means people aren’t living where they want to be living, and it means that people are paying a tremendous amount for housing.

So right now, the median sales price for a single family home is six times higher than the median household income. That’s the highest ratio of any statistic that we have. That’s from the Harvard Joint Center on Housing Studies. The number of cost burdened renters. so folks who are spending more than 30 percent of their income on housing, has gone up to a record 22 million households. 12 million American households are spending more than 50 percent of their income on housing.

And so this is a problem that, again, you get over the course of decades. And the cost of housing increases the cost of everything else because businesses pay rent also, and folks need to have wages that cover the cost of housing, right? So there’s that.

Health care is somewhat different. So the health expenditure to G.D.P. ratio in the United States is 17 percent. It’s a little bit less than double the O.E.C.D. average.

So the percentage of our economy that goes to health care.

Exactly. And we don’t have better health outcomes than other countries in the O.E.C.D., we just literally pay more. And so in 1990, the health share of G.D.P. is 12 percent. And it starts just this long, slow climb.

And so there’s actually some good news in health care, which is that the share of G.D.P. that is spent on health care has actually been somewhat flat since the Obama administration. This is great news. The problem here isn’t really inflation, it’s the level. We’re just paying an extraordinary amount for health care.

One of the ways that this is burdening folks is that out of pocket costs controlled for inflation have just gone up and up and up and up and up slowly. So the average person is now paying about $1,400 a year on out-of-pocket health costs. And that’s despite the fact that we have a large share of our population on Medicaid, where out of pocket costs are seriously, seriously controlled.

Yeah, I think of this as the paradox of health care spending, where one way we got overall costs down was we shifted costs onto people. So on the one hand, if you look at health care spending as a percentage of G.D.P., it looks like it is not going up as fast as it was before. And that’s actually true for a bunch of different reasons.

But one way we also got health care cost increases down is to just make people pay more out of pocket. And that does have an effect of getting people to forego both some unnecessary care and some necessary care. But to people, it doesn’t feel like they’re spending less. They are noticing themselves spending more, so they’re pissed about it.

This was always a problem with the Obamacare bending the cost curve idea in the end. What people wanted was to spend less on health care themselves, not for the entire country to spend less on health care. But the way we got the entire country to not see health care costs grow so much was to make people pay more out of pocket, and that makes them mad, not happy.

Absolutely. And the costs are just really high — the costs for surgical procedures, the cost for prescription medication. I’m a type 1 diabetic. I take insulin. Insulin is nine times as expensive in the United States as it is in most of our peers. It is a 100-year-old drug, it is not a new drug. It’s literally 100 years old. Why is it nine times the cost? And I think that we are starting to see some movement towards cost control, but it’s just been really hard in the United States.

So then child care. So child care for zero to five, this is a cost that families are paying for relatively short time in their lives. And it is absolutely, absolutely crushing. Average child care costs for a year are between $18,000 and $24,000 a year. And the problem is not just with how much people are paying, it’s that people don’t pay. A lot of folks cannot afford that. And we do not have enough coverage through programs like Head Start. Head Start is severely underfunded. One in five kids who would qualify for head start, gets head start.

And so folks drop out of the labor force. They rearrange their work schedules. They get family members to help. And the issue is that we have basically maxed out what people can afford to pay, and that still doesn’t mean that child care workers who are among the lowest paid in American life have a living wage. Most child care workers are still making $14 or $15 an hour, it’s just not enough.

And so we just, as a country, don’t spend enough on this. U.S. devotes about 0.3 percent of G.D.P. to early childhood education, that’s less than other O.E.C.D. countries. Another way to think about this is that we have about a 20 to 1 ratio of children under the age of four to child care workers who are aimed at that set. Canada, for instance, it’s 6 to 1. So the issue is that we are not spending enough public money on this to make it affordable, and folks are just paying absolutely obscene amounts.

I had a sociologist on a couple of months ago, Caitlin Collins, who did this great book, looking at parenting and work in a bunch of different countries. And the thing that is seared into my mind is her saying that in Sweden, the cost of child care is capped at well under $200 a month, capped. You just can’t pay more than that. And everybody can get it for that.

It’s absolutely wild. Whereas, here, we’ve said that affordability should be at 7 percent or less per month. Just nobody pays that.

So then there’s higher ed.

Then there’s higher ed. So a really important note here is that folks with college degree have seen really important gains in the labor market. They’ve had higher wage and earnings growth, higher wealth growth than people without a college degree. And so there’s been this long debate about like, is it worth it? And the answer, broadly, is yes.

That said, we have about $1.7 trillion worth of outstanding student loan debt, not all of which will get paid back, but a lot will get paid back. 43 million Americans currently have student loan debt.

Prior to the pandemic, the typical payment was 200 to $400 a month, which might not sound like that much, but is a lot. Add that to rent, add that to whatever you’re paying out of pocket for health care, add that to child care, if you have children, it really, really adds up.

So folks making student loan payments, for instance, they have a lower savings rate for retirement. They have smaller balances in their 401(k)s. They’re likely to delay homeownership because they’re paying their student loan debt. And I think that we’ve started to see a tremendous amount of movement on this. So the Biden administration has given forgiveness to roughly four million borrowers. It’s about $140 billion worth of student loan forgiveness. Nevertheless, this remains a really, really big problem. So these are the four things that I identify that they’ve just created this cost crisis where folks feel like they’re just sprinting to stay in place.

So one of the ways you would frame that piece, that was part of why it struck me at the time, was that everybody was really happy about the economy in early 2020. You have this line up top where it’s like, some of the best years the economy has ever recorded, people are getting bled dry on all these dimensions. If all of that was as bad as you’re saying, and it was, why aren’t people more upset in February of 2020?

There’s a few things. So one is that directionality matters quite a bit. If things are rapidly improving or are falling apart, deteriorating really quickly, that’s going to matter more than a steady state. And here, I think that you are seeing a reversal of some of the trends in wage and inequality that we’ve had for a long time. That’s changing. And I think that people react to that.

The other thing is that the cost of living crisis that I had laid out, it built very slowly over decades. It’s a boiling the frog thing where just extremely, extremely slowly, you start to see all of these things ratchet up. And again, it’s a crisis not of inflation, not of change, it’s a crisis of level at that point.

And so I think that people, it’s less front of mind. The salient things about the economy are the wage gains. These kind of long standing problems are not quite front of mind for people. And things are getting better in a really noticeable way for folks.

I want to pick up on a word you just used, which is “salient,” because this has been — my motivation in this conversation a bit is trying to think about the economy and the politics of it this year, which we’ll get to. And the thing that keeps coming to mind is this question of salience, which is, we can’t hold the whole economy in our head, even in periods when we say there’s a really good economy, it’s bad for a lot of people. Millions of people are in poverty. Millions of people are losing their jobs. Periods where there’s a bad economy, lots of people are starting businesses, people are still getting rich. In a very complicated way, we have to choose what to pay attention to.

And part of my theory of this, having been an economics reporter during that period, is we just weren’t paying much attention to prices. We were paying so much attention to unemployment. We were paying so much attention to wages. We were paying so much attention to inequality. And prices had been really stable in most things for a very long time. Interest rates were low. Most consumer goods were low. And yeah, there were some problems building in housing. We did pay a fair amount of attention, actually, to health care prices. That was a lot of the Affordable Care Act debate. And you would hear people debate higher education prices.

And then the pandemic hits and everything scrambles for a while. And then inflation comes. And inflation makes prices salient. And even now, as inflation eases, that doesn’t stop.

Tell me a bit about how, actually, at this point, you understand the inflationary period we just went through, but also, how you understand the debate about whether or not it is over.

So to give a little bit of a historical perspective on inflation, inflation is really high when Ronald Reagan comes into office. It’s like 13 and 1/2 percent. Then it goes on this long, slow whoosh down through the George H.W. Bush administration. And it’s in a 2 percent to 4 percent range from George W. Bush, Obama, it’s really low, it’s less than 2 percent.

So you have this long period of quietude in which consumer prices, overall, are not changing that much. And the cost of some really important consumer goods, things that people are transacting for on a day to day basis actually go down. Electronics are the most notable example of this. But as a general point, you have this extremely long period of time in which stuff and basic services, things like haircuts or whatever, it’s all really cheap. It’s really, really cheap.

And what happens is in the first half of 2021, we see price increases concentrated among a relatively small set of items in the basket of things that the government looks at to determine the Inflation rate. So energy and car prices go up. You start to see really spiking commodity prices. Then you have this two-year period in which there’s giant spikes in almost everything. Food at home spikes. Food away from home, it spikes. Gas prices go up, natural gas prices, electricity prices. Shelter prices don’t increase in the way that food prices do, but they increase a lot, and they’re so expensive that that really matters. Commodities outside of food and energy go up. So it’s really, really unbelievably broad-based.

And so now, we’ve seen inflation, overall, come down from a 9 percent annual rate to a 3 percent annual rate. But basically, what it did, it was big enough to create this phase shift in prices. And prices don’t really go down. It’s really bad when prices, overall, go down, because it means that people stop spending because why would you pay for something now if you could wait two weeks and the price would drop? I think that there was almost just no muscle memory of it. And folks got really, really, really mad. And the fact that wage gains were enough to cover it, people just didn’t believe it.

How good is our measurement here? How sure are we that the median American or the median working class American has more money, after all their bills and spending today, than five years ago?

I wouldn’t say that statistics are perfect because what an individual family is purchasing and the trade offs that they’re making to keep themselves in budget, it’s really hard to account for all of that. But I would say that generally, our inflation statistics are pretty good. What happens is that we collect prices on a set of items from all around the economy, and then we tabulate them, and we put them into this basket of goods. And then we note the changes in that over time. And we have many alternative measures of inflation.

One thing that I would note is that there’s evidence that the Inflation experienced by lower income families has actually increased faster than higher income families because goods have gotten so much better, and there’s been so much more production aimed at high income families than low income families. So I just want to caveat that. But no, our data is quite reliable, showing that accounting for inflation, families have come out ahead and real consumption has gone up. So the amount of stuff leaving aside prices has gone up.

Inflation is just one statistic. And consumption is just one statistic. And I think that you need to look at a more holistic understanding of what people are spending money on, what they’re getting for their money, and the trade offs they’re making to keep themselves in budget.

I remember talking to the Biden economists when they came in. This is 2021. And they were thinking a lot about how to get to full employment, how to run the economy hot, how to accept the trade offs of running the economy hot, how to get wage gains up, how to make sure you were running at full employment for long enough that wage gains got to the poorest workers, wage gains got to Black workers, wage gains got to Hispanic workers. It’s really fairly easy to get wages up for rich people, but it takes longer in a hot economy to get them up for poorer people. And they actually do a great job in a way on full employment. I mean, it’s amazing that unemployment is still under 4 percent. It’s amazing that wage gains have grown so quickly for the poorest workers. But they don’t really have a genuine basket of ideas early on to say nothing of political rhetoric for what to do about costs. They rename Build Back Better the Inflation Reduction Act. But it’s not really an Inflation Reduction Act, it’s a green energy spending act with some Medicare drug pricing and Obamacare subsidies thrown in.

And this, I think, actually is a fairly big problem. It takes a political system time to adjust to a new set of problems. The player that does adjust is the Fed and begins raising rates, but people don’t enjoy having interest rates go up.

And this gets, I think, to something that Larry Summers and others have been pointing out, which is that our measure of inflation has come down. Inflation tracks how much prices in these different things are going up. But the prices of the things have not come down. And our measure of inflation doesn’t track interest rates. So what people are paying now if they want to get a mortgage, which is much more expensive, if they want to be paying off credit card debt, education debt, any kind of new debt, the price of money is meaningful.

Summers and his team estimated that if you put that into inflation, it goes from roughly, some months ago, 3 percent to 9 percent for people. Do you think there’s something to the idea that actually, the inflation problem isn’t over, that if you’re a family, that because of what you’re paying now for money — you’re paying the high prices of inflation, now you’re paying the prices of higher money, and so actually, to you, it hasn’t really changed that much?

So it’s really important to note, as you did, the cost of borrowing is not included in common price indices. And so in 30-year mortgage rates, they’re close to 7 percent now. The country’s median mortgage rate is just a little bit more than 3 percent. So if you’re trying to get a mortgage now, it’s just blankly unaffordable. You have to buy less house in order to get your monthly price to be the same.

Purchasing a car. About half of folks who purchase a car use financing. And the rates for that are above 8 percent. And so I think that this explains a lot.

I want to go back to something you said, which is that we actually have a tremendous policy toolkit for increasing demand. We can send out stimulus checks. We can do things like sending out child tax credit payments. We can expand the unemployment insurance system. All of these things are things that we did during the Covid recession. And just in general, we can increase the value of the earned income tax credit. There’s a million things that you can do.

On prices, we have a very anemic toolbox. And the problem is that if you have high prices caused by shortages, by things like under-building, a lot of the solutions for that are, A, long term, and B, themselves temporarily inflationary. So if we were going to build a ton more housing in order to bring down rents, if we were like, we are going to solve the housing shortage, we’re estimating at five million units, we’re building five million units, you would create a lot of inflation because that would be just so much additional building. The price of materials would go up. The price of wages would go up. And so I think that we’re in a really tough spot.

So if you’re in the White House, what can you do about inflation? You can release gas from the strategic reserve, which they did do, in response to the Russia-Ukraine conflict. You can do more negotiating on prescription drug prices, which they’ve done. You can do some stuff on antitrust to make companies compete more and to lead to lower prices. But that’s not a really quick fix. And a lot of that is instead going to prevent price increases in the future rather than bringing prices down now. You just don’t have a lot of great options.

And it’s why I think that you’ve seen the Biden administration doing things like tackling junk fees, which are right, there are costs that people pay, and at least, you can get a little bit more traction there. And it’s not, this is not a complete list of ideas and a complete set of things that they’ve been doing. The point is that it’s pretty easy to juice demand. And it’s hard to affect supply and hard to affect prices with the economic tools that we have that are readily there.

Yeah, one thing that’s really striking in the housing market, and you wrote this slightly devastatingly titled piece, “It Will Never Be a Good Time to Buy a Home.” One thing that is striking about the housing market is we turned up the dial on interest rates really quite high by recent historical experience, and prices of homes kept going up. They really show us how bad the supply crunch is, that prices are up, what, like 50 percent over the course of the — since before the pandemic. So now the borrowing cost is much higher, but also the price of a home is much higher.

And yeah, a lot of people have a mortgage from before, but that means they can’t sell because to sell would mean that you have to then buy your new home at this higher price with this higher interest rate. And so also, you have all this supply being kept off the market. The housing market seems really quite broken to me.

And housing, I think, has a pretty outsized effect on how people feel about the future. Young people who are not trying to buy a house right now but want to in the next 5 to 10 years, think about housing. It affects how they feel about the economy, even if they’re not in the market for it right now.

Parents who see their kids not being able to buy a house, that matters to how they feel about the economy. Housing does, sometimes, feel like this master price to me that affects everything. And the level of brokenness there feels quite profound.

Absolutely. Because what’s going to happen when interest rates go down is a bunch of people who have their down payments ready are going to flood back into the housing market, and they’re going to hold prices at the same level or maybe even push them higher. Unless you’re in a world where there’s more supply over long period of time, I don’t see the fundamentals changing, even if prices and levels might go up and down a little bit. We have a very big hole to dig ourselves out of.

The only good thing I can say about it is that you have a lot of political figures who really care about this now, and you have both blue state and red state governors who are really starting to take this seriously. For the first time since I’ve been a policy reporter, you have folks starting to say something like, how can we get everybody on the same building code? What can we do to create carrots and sticks so that places will allow dense construction? And we didn’t have that for a really, really long time.

I actually remember, after the housing crisis, when housing economists started to say, we’re underconstructing. And I remember, at the time that they started to say that, being like, what is wrong with you? What are you talking about? How could this possibly be an issue? But they were completely correct, because the problem actually started before the housing crisis. In some cities, we start underconstructing in the 1970s.

So you have prices way up, basically, on everything now. So prices went up for every good. The affordability crisis set of prices has been up and went even higher post-pandemic. The price of money is way up. And at the same time, you have this debate about whether or not the economy is really great or something is missing. You have these measures, these predictions of what consumer sentiment will be like, given an inflation rate and given an unemployment rate. And they show consumer sentiment should be really high if it is tracking historical trends.

You have this endless back and forth about, well, on the one hand, people say their own personal financial situation is pretty good. On the other hand, they say that the national economy is really bad. People seem to think we’re in a recession, but they don’t look financially like they’re in a recession.

Why has there been this sense of confusion? We’re laying out this whole theory of prices. It just looks really bad. And on the other hand, a lot of economists have been scratching their heads over why people are so upset. So what accounts for the head scratching response?

We’ve talked about this, but I think it’s important to stress. Wages have gone up more than prices, and that is particularly true for lower income folks. So if you are in the bottom decile of earners, your real wages, so wages adjusted for inflation have gone up 12 percent since 2019. If you’re in the highest decile of folks, it’s just about 1 percent. So real consumption, meaning, consumption holding prices constant has increased about 10 percent over the past four years. We are buying more stuff.

And if you look at levels of — measures of material hardship, those have been going down. And that’s not to say that there aren’t problems. I also believe that inflation, A, it was kind of a surprising change for folks, and B, there are some economic facets and behavioral economic facets of it that make people particularly angry about it.

So one is that unemployment is absolutely devastating for the folks who experience it. But even in an enormous, terrible recession, perhaps, 1 in 10 folks who wants a job will be unemployed, whereas inflation affects literally everybody. In an economy, and when I talk to people, inflation is much more pernicious for lower income folks because they’re really spending every dollar that they have on basic necessities, and for higher income folks, that’s not true. But you can talk to really rich people and they will be mad about inflation. They are mad about how much they are paying for things. It’s just universally enraging to people.

And there’s this perceptual problem. So the economist, Stefanie Stantcheva, who is at Harvard, who has found that Americans believe that their purchasing power is falling in a world in which there’s a lot of inflation. About four in five respondents to this survey that she conducted said that prices systematically increase faster than wages. That means nobody’s really getting ahead. This is not true, but this is what people think, real consumption and real wages are up.

And her polling also shows that folks blame corporate greed. They blame Washington for inflation. They don’t see it as a function of input prices, energy costs, supply shortages, rising wages. And they also don’t see inflation as part of any kind of an economic trend that’s positive, including their own wage gains, even though their own wage gains are partially a product of inflation.

I want to hold on that. How does somebody experience a wage gain? Your boss calls you into the office and says, we’re giving you a 6 percent, a 5 percent, a 7 percent raise. You’ve done great work. Thank you for everything you’ve done. Or you go look for a job and are able to bargain a higher salary than you were able to do before. That feels like something you did. I got a good raise.

And inflation feels like something happening to you. I got this raise. I’m making $2 more an hour than I was. And inflation is eating 80 percent of that. Inflation is a bad thing happening to you. And wage gains are a good thing you did. And the fact, frankly, that any of your wage gain is getting eaten by faster than normal inflation or prices that you have not in any way adjusted to, it’s really maddening.

Absolutely. And look, the reason that interest rates are so high right now is to get inflation down because inflation is economically destabilizing when it’s too high, and it’s socially destabilizing. This is really well known. And again, you can tell people over and over and over again that they’re better off, but if you have inflation rates at 9 percent, people aren’t going to listen to you. They don’t like it. They don’t want to have to do mental math every time they go to the grocery store.

And when I talk to people about why they think the economy is bad, the first thing that people say to me, often, is, lunch at Chick-fil-A is $15. And lunch at Chick-fil-A being $15 is neither here nor there in the grand universe of what people are earning and paying for, but it’s a price that people notice, and it really ticks them off. The other thing is inflation has come down. It’s going to take a while for people to believe that. And one thing that I do think is changing now is that you are starting to see companies really start to compete for consumers on price. So both Burger King and McDonald’s have set out these $5 value meals. And Target said that it’s cutting prices for 5,000 frequently purchased items — things like diapers, and cat food, and dog food.

And we’ve been in this million, which prices just feel like they go up, and up, and up, and feel people feel like they’re not getting a break. And already, you’ve seen consumer sentiment start to tick up. And I think that companies engaging in price wars will actually have a pretty profound effect for as long as it sticks around for.

How much do you think the high prices of the small things act as a constant reminder of the high prices of the big things, which is to say, in a world where you know that health care, and housing, and education are incredibly expensive, how much does the fact that Chick-fil-A is $15, that a cup of coffee is $7 act as this constant salience portal to keep you thinking about this thing that is making you mad all through the economy?

I think this is really important. So let’s say, as an example, the average American adult makes a purchase two or three times a day. And some people make purchases way more frequently than that. And a lot of families make purchases less often. They get gas once a week. They get groceries once a week and maybe a few other little things.

And so if two or three times a day, you are being reminded of the fact that your money is going less far than it used to be, I think that you’re going to be pretty angry about that. So one in three Americans eats something from a fast food restaurant every day. And about two in three Americans eat something from a fast food place once a week. It’s just really, really, really common. And the prices for fast food went up a lot. And I think that that contributed quite a lot also. Americans are currently spending more than 11 percent of their income on meals. That’s the largest share since the 1990s. So I think a lot of this is about food and restaurant costs going up quite sharply.

Between the summer of 2021 and the summer of 2022, grocery store prices go up nearly 14. And the cost of some grocery store staples — so dairy products, things like sugar and oil, cereals, it’s more than percent. And so I think that for high frequency items, all of a sudden, you just get this blasted in your face again and again and again. And even if you’re not spending that much overall on these things, I think it’s basically just tapping your shoulder over and over and over again and saying your money is going less far.

Whereas, even something like rent, which people complain about and talk about all the time, but it usually gets set once a year and you pay it monthly, so you’re reminded of it less frequently, even though that’s a much bigger line item on the budgets and fundamentally, I think a much more problematic part of the economy. And notably, rent goes up a tremendous amount during the pandemic. It’s a nightmare. It was really expensive. It’s even more expensive now.

One of the things that economists will say when they’re pushing back on the idea that how people feel about the economy is merited, I think that’s actually the right word for this pushback, is, look, if it was so bad, people would be changing their behavior more than they are, that people are still going out to eat a lot, they’re still buying a lot of food out of the house, that we see what it looks like when people are under very high levels of financial stress. And they make different decisions. Their consumption patterns change really radically. If you lose your job, you don’t keep spending in the same way.

But my sense from them is the consumption data has been pretty stable. And that has been a confusing thing to economists in this period. Inflation should lead to a lot of changes in how people act. It’s not led to very many changes in how people act, but it has led to a lot of anger from those same people. First, is that true? And second, how do you read the both reality and politics of that consumption data?

So if you have price increases and just cost pressures within families, folks tend to make some pretty predictable responses. So one is that they purchase fewer items per shopping trip or they might reduce the number of shopping trips. So folks have not really cut the number of shopping trips much, but they have reduced the number of items that they are purchasing when they go get consumer packaged goods.

The second is that they’ll trade down. So you’ll go for Kirkland rather than Pampers. You will go for Aldi rather than Wegmans. You’ll go camping instead of going to Disney. And folks are doing that. But the main way that consumers have responded is just by paying higher prices. And you can actually go back and look at company earnings calls. The corporate executives themselves are like, well, we kind of keep on testing the water and we’re not seeing much effect. So we’re going to keep on pushing prices upward.

We’ve not seen a dramatic pullback in luxury goods shopping, or travel, or jewelry, all of those things that you would expect to be the first to go because people give those up and they keep on purchasing food. People are just mad about it, but they kept on paying. I do think that that has changed a fair bit recently.

So one is that we’ve started to see a really big increase in credit card balances and an increase in delinquencies. And so that’s some evidence that lower income consumers are starting to get stressed. And they’re putting things on their credit card rather than being able to pay for them themselves. And again, we’ve also seen these companies be like, OK, we’ve tapped out, we’re going for the value meal. We’re going to try to get consumers an increase foot traffic by competing on price.

And so it’s important to note that the costs for big box stores, for fast food restaurants, you’ve had a really big increase in labor costs. You had a lot of big increases in input costs. And both of those things have calmed down. But I do think that we’re in this period where probably, this is as much as folks can safely spend.

You mentioned a minute ago those corporate earnings calls, where C.E.O.s would be like, look, we’re raising prices, people are still paying it. We’re going to raise prices again. One of the more popular explanations among more left-leaning people for inflation was what got called greedflation, which is, there wasn’t really a problem here, except that corporations were taking advantage of a weird moment in the economy to do huge markups. Was the greedflation theory correct or how do you understand that part of it?

I certainly don’t think it was the only thing going on, if it was part of what was going on. The cost of labor really went up. It started going up when you started to have increases in local and state minimum wages, which begins during the Obama administration. Then you have a really big increase in wages for lower income workers that starts around 2018. And the pandemic actually intensifies it quite a bit. So there’s that.

And then input costs go up too. And so the way that companies are going to respond to that is by passing that on to consumers. I do think that there was a moment where companies basically thought that because of inflation, they could increase prices even more, and in this miasma, people would pay it. But I don’t think that it was exclusively corporate greed. I would note that corporate bottom lines are looking pretty good right now, despite the fact that you have really high interest costs and these increases in costs more generally. So I don’t think it was the only thing.

Sometimes, I think the problem with the greedflation thesis was simply the name. Greed made it sound like they were doing something evil, when what corporations do naturally is try to find the price at which they can balance market demand and the highest profits they can possibly make. But it was true that there was more room for them to raise prices than I think they had thought in 2020. And things that you might have thought would happen, like really intense comparison shopping or intense use of coupons didn’t happen.

And it does seem to me that one thing that occurred was a step change reshuffling of prices. And now, consumers are stressed enough that you’re beginning to have price wars bringing things down in certain areas. You mentioned Burger King, for instance, and Target trying to think about how to bring in more budget-conscious consumers.

But there was this period where they’re pretty open about this on earnings calls. And I don’t think the right way to understand it is greed. Corporations trying to earn profits is what corporations do. But it turned out that there was a zone of price increases you could inflict on people, where instead of them changing their behavior, they would get really mad. And that feels to me like the economic zone we’ve been in for a little while. The person paying the cost on this is Joe Biden, not Target or Walmart or McDonald’s, but people are mad about it. It’s just like, the corporations actually did this adroitly enough that they didn’t lose a lot of demand, they just pissed people off.

There is a really interesting raft of studies that has come out in the last five years from economists that show that American consumers have gotten less price-sensitive. So when prices shift, consumption doesn’t shift like we would expect. It doesn’t shift like it would used to. And these studies are mostly looking at consumer packaged goods, consumer goods.

So other ways that we think that households have become less price-sensitive, people are using fewer coupons, they’re spending less time shopping and comparison shopping. So why might this be true? One is just that stuff is cheaper, thanks to globalized trade and manufacturing advances. The second is that people are wealthier. So you’re just less price-sensitive when you’re richer.

Third is women in the workforce — so it used to be much more common for one partner to work and the other to spend the money. And so you would probably have that time, it would be part of your job as a household worker to comparison shop. But now, given that so many prime age women are in the workforce, there’s less time for them to do that. Consumers seem to have gotten more brand loyal is part of this, that’s one theory.

And another theory is that it’s just inertia. People have gotten older. And they tend to have this inertia that they will be less likely to try new things, buy new things as they get older. And so you just always buy the Starbucks coffee, so you’re going to keep on getting the Starbucks coffee.

I also think there’s some chance that targeted advertising and dynamic pricing has something to do with this, but I don’t know. It’s just a really interesting shift that I’m not sure that we completely understand and completely understand the implications of yet.

I want to shift then into the macro politics of this. And I want to separate two pieces of it, which is how people feel about the economy and how those feelings about the economy translate into politics. But one thing that you’ve been doing pieces on for many years now is the rising way in which partisanship shapes perceptions of the economy. Tell me a bit about that and how it might be playing into this period.

So there’s something called the Partisan Economic Expectations Gap. And basically, what this shows is that if you are a Democrat and there’s a Republican in the White house, you’re much more likely to think that the economy is bad. And that’s true, even holding economic conditions constant.

And the flip is also true. This happens for both sides. It’s not an asymmetric thing. If you’re a Republican and Joe Biden is in the White House, you’re like, this is a terrible economy. We need that guy Donald Trump back.

And this had the effect of somewhat divorcing folks opinions about the state of economy from the real state of the economy because it’s become so political. It has also narrowed the band of consumer expectations because people are not changing their minds about anything anymore. You just have way more strong Democrats who say, economy is good right now, and way more strong Republicans who say that it’s bad. This is happening at the same time that we have growing evidence that real economic data might be less predictive in elections than it used to.

But one thing happening in Joe Biden right now is that you do see this huge partisan economic expectations gap. But also, Democratic views on the economy are not as positive as you might think if you were taking that model from a couple of years ago.

There’s something weird happening among the Democrats. They’re not giving Joe Biden the economic pass that you might expect from what we’ve seen in that data before. Why do you think that is?

There’s two answers, and I don’t know which one it is. One is that they don’t really like him. Joe Biden is a somewhat less compelling politician for Democratic partisans than some other folks are in terms of his ability to stir the electorate and increase things like turnout. I think he’s a somewhat less vigorous campaigner than we’ve seen. And I think that he has somewhat lower favorability ratings and higher unfavorability ratings among his own partisans than we’ve seen in the past.

The second is that inflation is hitting them, and they’re just subject to the same forces that everybody else is in the economy. So Democrats are somewhat clustered more in the Northeast than on the Western coast, where you’ve seen really large increases in specifically, housing costs. But then you’ve seen urban housing costs go up everywhere. And so to the extent that we have all of these blue islands, that’s exactly where the prices have gone up, and it’s been really, really, really pretty bad.

That said, I do think that over the past, call it 10 years, you’ve started to see the housing crisis spread to communities that we would never think of as having won before. Rural areas, you’ve seen really dramatic increases in housing costs. Ex-urban areas, you’ve seen dramatic increases in housing costs. It’s everywhere now.

I would note that the mediating influence of the news media probably matters here quite a bit. So we know that holding economic conditions constant, media coverage of the economy has gotten more negative. And it’s especially more negative in social media where a lot of folks are now getting their news.

And I don’t think that that’s entirely the fault of journalists. People seek out bad stories, that’s what people want to read. So these are all headlines that have come out recently about household financial health and consumer spending — Americans keep on spending, but big retailers doubt it’ll last, Slump in big purchases clashes with government’s strong consumer data, Americans are still spending like there’s no tomorrow, Americans plan vacations even as they sour on the economy. These are all great stories. I’m not picking. These are all great. They’re really, really sensitive and really well-reported.

Does this media explanation actually feel true to you? Because here’s what I have experienced, as a person who writes about the economy, is married to a person who writes about the economy, and works in a place full of people who write about the economy, what I noticed happening was there was all this very sunny coverage of the economy, and everybody doing it was getting yelled at.

You write something about how the economy is actually looking really strong or we’re avoiding that recession or something. And people just got slammed by their audiences. They got slammed as out of touch. I don’t want to blow up your spot here, but you’ve written some pieces saying like, this economy’s actually pretty good. My sense is the reader feedback on that can be spicy, sometimes.

And I feel like the media got whipped by its audience a little bit into taking at least, some portion of the audience’s economic experience more seriously, which I’m not saying is a good or a bad thing, I think it’s a complicated thing. But it isn’t my impression that the economics reporting profession wanted to be negative on the economy. It’s that when they started covering the economy positively, what they heard from their readers or viewers or whatever, and then what they saw in the polling data, how people actually felt about the economy, was that people were not experiencing the economy positively at all.

I’ve seen the media in periods when we want to cover the economy negatively because the data is really negative. And that has not been what I’ve noticed happening here. In fact, I see a lot of stories about why aren’t people happier, given all this good economic data? And then all these people yelling at the author of those stories, explaining why it is that they’re not happy.

I think that people’s understanding of inflation is not economists’ understanding of inflation, which is something you were just trying to. I think it is real that people feel extraordinarily taxed by high prices. And the fact that the prices have only gone up 3 percent, they just went up 10 percent. I really credit that because I think that people are experts in their own experience. And I think what people are experiencing is really, really important.

Nevertheless, it feels to me important to point out that inequality dropping, that’s amazing. Declines in child poverty, that’s amazing. This is going to sound, perhaps, simplistic, but we have a gigantic economy. We’re not like Germany, where the entirety of the E.U. And so there’s just always a lot happening. And it can be hard when you’re doing these big gestural stories about the big headline statistics. You’re constantly missing things that are happening in this really vast, really, really, really diverse, really politically diverse, racially diverse, ethnically diverse country in which there’s really, really big problems.

People are allowed to be mad at stories. And I think you just have to hew to the complicated economic truth of any situation. It’s why I actually think that a lot of those headlines are correct. But I think that that leaves a lot of space for people to read in their partisan priors or read in their view of things.

I want to go back to another explanation you offered a second ago, which is the question of whether Democrats like Joe Biden enough to look at the economy through their feelings about Joe Biden. So I’ve been thinking a lot about 2012 and going back and looking a lot at the 2012 data. And I think just inarguably, the economy was just much worse in 2012. I mean, unemployment in May of 2012 was 8.2 percent.

8.2 percent, really bad.

I remember covering the monthly jobs report in 2012, and just I assure you that economic coverage in the media was much more negative then. And Barack Obama was leading Mitt Romney by two points in the real clear polling average. So you have a much worse economy and you have the Democratic incumbent leading.

And the way that the economy figures in to politics is not a one to one like, I like the economy, so I like the incumbent. That’s not how people think about it. You often have incumbents governing in an economy that is recovering from something bad happening to it. That was Reagan in 1984. There had been this big recession, the Volcker recession in ‘81. Reagan and Republicans have a really bad midterm election in 1982. But by ‘84, things are kind of getting better. I mean, they’re worse than they are now — unemployment is higher, inflation is higher, the interest rate is higher, but Reagan makes a morning in America argument. And people credit him with a comeback that they feel is happening.

In 2012, the economy is quite bad, but Obama is making this argument, it’s made very aggressively at the convention that year, that the entirety of the financial crisis wasn’t on him, obviously. And he’s a smart, thoughtful guy who cares about people like you. And he’s got the best economic people around him. And Mitt Romney’s a plutocrat. And you should trust Obama to manage a comeback. And that’s ultimately a winning economic message.

And the thing you’ve been seeing this year, I think, is people not, as of yet, at least, being willing to extend that trust to Joe Biden. When you ask them, they say, they trust Donald Trump on the economy more. But just in general, I don’t think that the argument the administration or Biden himself has been able to make, at least, in enough forums that people are seeing or hearing it, is giving people a sense like, yeah, this guy has it under control. I’m not even sure liking or disliking is the right way to think about it, it’s the has it under control dynamic.

Donald Trump’s pitch is, the economy is good when I was president until the pandemic hit, and I’m a strong man who will jawbone the prices down and cut good deals for you and something, something, something. And Joe Biden’s pitch, I think, has been a little bit more complicated, but also, just the impression he gives off due to age and maybe the way they’re campaigning is a little less energetic. And that feels to me like it is mattering here.

Obama wins at a time that you have a housing crisis that creates a global financial crisis. And I think that we, sometimes, forget that the first domino, the first big thing that happens is you have these dramatically elevated property seizures between 2007 and 2010.

Yeah. So you’re saying he wins in ‘08 this way.

Yeah. Exactly. 10 million families lose their home. 10 million families. He comes in. And George W. Bush and his administration own that. Obviously, the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act is way too small. There’s some questions about whether he should have pivoted to the A.C.A. or not, and I don’t know about the counterfactual there. But by 2012, things are getting better pretty significantly.

And Mitt Romney, notably, he’s like a fancy finance guy at a time that inequality is really, really high, and inequality is the problem, and rich families are rebounding and low income families aren’t. And so Obama is able to make this pretty compelling case. Do you want the bain guy who laid a bunch of you off? Do you want him running the White House? And that economic argument makes sense.

I think that personalities matter here a lot, right? Obama was like a once in a generation political talent who was extraordinarily good at campaigning. For folks who didn’t get to see him, he was magnetic up there. And Joe Biden right now is just a less vigorous campaigner. Donald Trump, I think, just has he’s unusual in running to unseat an incumbent in the sense that he was president himself. It’s just a strange election in that way. And he’s also pretty good on TV. He’s a celebrity. And I think that he’s been capable of making this argument of, yeah, it was better back then, even though I’m not even sure that it was.

So Biden gave an interview to CNN a couple of weeks, a month ago, something like that. And it was very much an economics interview. So why don’t we play the way he’s messaging this?

Economic growth last week, far short of expectations. Consumer confidence, may be no surprise, is near a two-year low. With less than six months to go to election day, are you worried that you’re running out of time to turn that around?

We’ve already turned it around. Look at the Michigan survey. 65 percent of the American people think they’re in good shape economically. They think the nation’s not in good shape, but they’re personally in good shape.

The polling data has been wrong all along. How many of you guys do a poll with CNN? How many folks you have to call to get one response? The idea that we’re in a situation where things are so bad, the folks — I mean, we’ve created more jobs. We’ve made — we’re in a situation where people have access to good paying jobs. And the last I saw, the combination of the cost of inflation, all of the things, that’s really worrisome to people, with good reason. That’s why I’m working very hard to bring the cost of Reynolds down, to increase the number of homes that are available.

But let me say it this way, when I started this administration, people were saying there’s going to be a collapse in the economy. We have the strongest economy in the world. Let me say it again, in the world.

What do you think of that?

As a reporter, I don’t argue with people’s perceptions of how things are. But I think it’s a political problem that he and other Democrats have run into. They feel like they’re being gaslit, if you say, well, you’re coming out ahead. That’s just not how people feel.

I am not a person who thinks a lot about political messaging, but I’m not sure that the Biden campaign has hit on the economic message about how it’s going to be better tomorrow. That is really resonating with folks.

I was struck when I saw that interview because that interview took place in an economic setting, I forgot, it’s like a factory or something. So they clearly had set it up to be an economic interview. And the question that Erin Burnett asks there is extremely obvious, right? Put anybody in that interview chair, you’re going to get a question like that about the economy.

And I don’t want to say Biden didn’t seem ready for it, but he didn’t seem to have an answer ready. There are a couple different answers happening in that answer, and he’s not really settled on one. There’s the — actually, we have the strongest economy in the world, which is true. I mean, in a lot of ways, you look at America compared to other countries right now, and we look great. We look way better than China, which is not true for a while. We look way better than the countries in the European Union. We look way better than the UK.

There’s also the, actually, this has all turned around and you all just haven’t felt it yet, very, very complicated case to make. He goes on to make some points about trying to crack down on junk fees, that kind of thing. What I heard there was, they haven’t decided how to message this.

The other thing is that they don’t really have a big policy package here. It’s a weird thing. You can imagine a world where the Inflation Reduction Act was actually an Inflation Reduction Act. They just renamed something else, the Inflation Reduction Act. And the stuff that got cut out of it by the guy who helped, I think, rename it that, Joe Manchin, was all the stuff that actually might have brought prices down for people, all the stuff that focused on things like child care.

And so if you ask like, what is their big package? What is their headline policy on affordability? There are certain things they are touting that they’ve already done, like Medicare prescription drug pricing, which actually did bring down the price some people pay for some drugs, junk fees.

The insulin price cap, really, really important.

Really, really important. So they — it’s not an accident, I think, that the couple of policies they have that actually brought down the price of something for someone are very central to the reelection campaign. But I don’t think they have had a very clear set of, here are the big things we intend to do on that in term two. If you’re not happy with how things have turned out, you don’t just have to wait. What you need to do is give us the House again. This is the big project here. And here’s what I’m going to do to achieve it.

Absolutely. So it’s pretty hard for them to get prices down. You’re just going to have to have subdued inflation for a while for people to feel good in the grocery store again, feel good going out to target or wherever they’re shopping. There’s a lot of room to really improve the fundamentals of the economy for people by attacking the cost of living crisis.

Health care costs could go down quite a bit. It’s really hard. It’s really, really, really tough. But I think if you made an effort to get premiums and out-of-pocket costs down by instituting price controls, allowing the government to negotiate for prescription drugs, there’s a million different ideas for how to do this. That could be super powerful.

Getting rents down, increasing housing supply, that is going to have a lot of benefits for the economy. Again, it’s going to mean more construction, which is going to be inflationary. There’s tremendous space on child care. It’s really popular when states and cities do 3K and 4K, which a number of places have done now. If you had a comprehensive zero to five plan that had the government come in and basically say, you don’t have to start at five, we’re going to help you starting at six months, that would be great.

And they’ve already had a lot of traction with student loan debt. And I know that there are concerns about the distributional effects of that, but it is quite popular because I think people see the whole system as being screwed up.

Although, polling doesn’t do that well.

Yeah. I mean, it’s popular for the people who do it. And I think that it was polling that led them to do so much on student debt, right? And again, I think people’s perceptions of things are kind of wishy washy, but I think that that can advantage politicians. Whether you can pass any of that through congress, I don’t know. It’s really, really hard. A lot of what we’re talking about would be expensive, but there’s definitely space there.

How about Donald Trump? So I’ve watched some of his rallies around this. And he talks a lot about how expensive everything is, talks a lot about how much it all costs. I wouldn’t say, he’s got an articulated agenda that will bring price decreases, but to the extent you understand what the Donald Trump second term economic agenda is, is it inflationary? Is it deflationary? What are the big ticket items? How would you say he is saying he would handle this?

It’s pretty inflationary. So tariffs are inflationary. If you wanted to lower costs, you would just eliminate tariffs. But tariffs are a big part of his economic package. Immigration is not necessarily an issue that I think people think of economically, but in a world where we have more folks who have immigrated here, and wages are still going up, and you don’t have that sense of low wages being a function of people who got here and didn’t stand in line like they should have taking money away, I don’t know.

I think agricultural communities have also stressed the importance of immigrants to our agricultural workforce.

Mass deportation would be hugely price increasing.

Yes. We’ve had agricultural communities, we’ve had construction companies note that absent labor provided by immigrant workers, they wouldn’t be able to do what they’re doing. Costs would go up. And we would throttle production there. I don’t think it’s the most important thing, but this would be inflationary. The cost of food is going to go up a lot if you’re having tomatoes and berries dying on the vine in California because there’s nobody there to pick it. Disrupting those parts of the economy would be really, really damaging. And again, I think it’s important to note that that is, in my mind, less important than the emotional and moral cost of trying to do something like this.

I think, sometimes, the response you get from Republicans on this, or you did, at least a couple of years ago, is, well then, they’ll just pay American workers more.

Unemployment rate is below 4 percent? What workers are you going to get to do agricultural work? This is why we have so many folks from other countries doing agricultural work here to begin with.

Same thing with construction. Construction is really hard work and it takes a lot of skill. You’re not going to snap your fingers and have millions of Americans start doing roofing work in Florida and Texas in the sun.

Well, you just said about tariffs being inflation, I think, is important. And it struck me that Biden just unveiled a huge set of new anti-China tariffs. We’re not going to allow these cheaper Chinese electric vehicles in here. But his tariffs on a bunch of Chinese goods, which, on the one hand, I get the politics of, you want to take an issue away from Donald Trump. They do have genuine economic and national security concerns about rebuilding certain kinds of supply chains and manufacturing capacities in the U.S..

But at a time when you have a lot of focus on prices on the one hand and climate change on the other, jacking up the price on Chinese-made electric vehicles and solar panels and things like that, from a policy perspective, you are making things more expensive, which struck me as surprising at the moment.

I think that the issue here that I see is not even really exactly an economic one. It has to do with their own energy goals. If we are going to have a transition to green energy, it’s going to be tough to do that with policies like these.

In terms of increasing American manufacturing capacity, I think there’s now a widespread understanding that it’s good to make some things here, and that not making them here leaves us really, really vulnerable. So in terms of the supply of some critical drugs, we had some really bad issues with formula and formula importation. So I think that that is true. And again, manufacturing jobs have this nice spillover.

But with China, yeah, it’s tough. And I think that this is happening for national security reasons, perhaps, more so than economic reasons. And I think the real question there is about how that would fit in with a broader energy policy.

But isn’t there some way in which if people could start buying whatever these are, $15,000, $20,000 Chinese-made electric vehicles that are popular in the rest of the world here, they would experience that as nice, right? I mean, it would be nice to be able to get a good electric car for a lot less money than you can currently get an electric car.

I take some of the set of affordability crisis and price crisis problems as the revenge of neoliberalism. I mean, the neoliberal trade was you kept prices really low. I mean, neoliberalism in many ways is a dominant economic orthodoxy emerges out of the inflationary crisis of the ‘70s. And you keep prices low. And it turns out, that also kept wages pretty low, which is a real problem with it.

The Biden administration has been extremely clear that they are the end of neoliberalism. They are the Democratic administration making a turn on neoliberalism. It’s really the break between them and the Obama administration economically. And so what are you getting? You’re getting the other side of that bargain. You are getting higher wages, but you’re also getting significant higher prices.

And I mean, on one level, I just don’t think they figured out the politics of that. I don’t think they were prepared, not that their policies are the main thing that raised prices, but they definitely don’t have an economic story of like, why paying higher prices is a good thing in some of these areas?

And on things like the Chinese electric vehicles, I mean, I’m very uncomfortable with that policy. I understand the reasons you might want to have a domestic electric vehicle manufacturing chain. I agree with them, in many ways, but you can pull in Chinese manufacturing here. But if you want this E.V. transition to happen quickly and you don’t want people to hate you for it, you need really cheap electric vehicles. And China knows how to make them, and frankly, we don’t.

And you listen to Donald Trump at a rally, and he is going directly at this. He’s like, you’re going to hate these electric vehicles. They’re too expensive. He sees this as like a coming problem. And I don’t know, I think Democrats are about to get caught really flat footed here because on the one hand, they’re cranking up the regulations on electric vehicles, and on the other hand, here’s China willing to sell us a bunch of cheap ones. And we’re like, no, no, no, no, no. We’ll take the expensive ones.

And I’m not saying I don’t hear the rationale, I do, but they’re acting like there aren’t trade offs here. And I think the trade off is going to be politics. I don’t think the policy is going to be popular.

I would isolate cars for a second. And I would think about the neoliberal trade that you are describing, more in terms of domestic labor costs. So for a long time, the cost of fast food and Walmart stuff, part of the reason that prices were so low was that wages were so low. And now, we’ve seen this shift to more European style pricing, where the prices are up a little bit, but the wages are pretty good. And you can start to see families getting by with these jobs.

And I would note that the wages are still way too low for a lot of these jobs. I really worry about delivery drivers, folks who are doing Uber Eats and that kind of thing. But I think it is fundamentally a trade that would be better if big block prices were higher, but all of the wages were higher. And again, we’ve seen really significant wage growth in those jobs. And I think that that’s good. I think people might not like it fundamentally, but I think that that would be, overall, a good trade. On the electric vehicles issue, cars are expensive. People don’t buy them that often. The differential in cost between what we have here in the United States right now and between what China is producing is really, really significant. And so I would almost see it as its own little special issue. And I feel like I just don’t understand the foreign policy implications and the national security implications enough, because it seems to me, again, that those are somewhat predominant.

The reason I do connect these a bit is it feels to me like they reflect an unformed politics of prices, that the Democratic and Republican coalitions knew how to talk about the problems of demand, of jobs, of wages. They knew what their policies were. Republicans wanted to handle all this through tax cuts. Democrats want to do more stimulus. They want to do minimum wage increases, et cetera. And I think neither side is very clear on what they want to do about affordability. It’s harder. It splits your coalitions in weird ways. It has all these cross-cutting elements with other things, like the energy transition.

And the reason I think the Chinese tariffs and E.V. issue is tricky for the Democrats is that on the one hand, it shows the way some of their goals, like, don’t let manufacturing communities in the Midwest be hollowed out, don’t be too reliant on China, conflicts with other goals, which is like, you need to have something to say to people about how you’re going to get them cheap things again.

And Donald Trump and the Republicans are not better. It’s word salad. I think you see some governors who do, like Jared Polis in Colorado. You listen to that guy talk, it is just cost of living, cost of living, cost of living, cost of living. But I do think something you just really hear on both sides is that the economic problem they are facing and that is salient to the public has changed faster than they have changed. They’ve left a lot of this up to the Fed, frankly.

And in terms of really having a message on what we are going to do, and we are laser-focused on this, and we have 50 ideas for what to do here, you don’t hear that kind of talk. It’s not being treated as a kind of policy-amenable problem in the way that low demand was 15 years ago.

I think that you are going to see mean reversion on prices and consumer sentiment. I think that with inflation below 3 and 1/2 percent where it is right now, things will normalize. Supply chains have readjusted. Wage growth has come down to a level that I think is more normal. And so if I were a political consultant, I would worry about fighting the last war a little bit.

I’m not sure that you need to do too much on consumer prices, given that the supply chain disruptions and everything else has evened out. I think there’s tremendous space to do a lot on the cost of living crisis. And I think it would be pretty popular. And I think that you could focus on child care, health care, housing.

Right now, we really do not have a national housing policy. And in part, that’s because housing policy is mostly left to state and local governments. HUD is teeny tiny. It’s teeny tiny. And it hasn’t gotten bigger as we’ve had this housing crisis.

HUD being the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Housing and Urban Development. They do very little housing and very little urban development. It’s almost exclusively the purview of state and local governments. But we’re really just starting to think about how the federal government could start increasing housing supply.

So I think that in the longer term, all of these things — these are still going to be problems for folks 5 years, 10 years from now. And I actually think that the fact that you’ve had this bending in the health care cost curve, there’s space for, yeah, let’s start getting drug prices down. Doctors and nurses, cover your ears. Let’s allow more of them in and allow more competition so that in the long term, you can have lower wages for them. It’s very, very, very unpopular, but that would probably be good. Let’s increase health care supply, but let’s just get the prices down for all of these things. Let’s rationalize this completely irrational system. Is that good on a bumper sticker? Does that win elections? I’m not sure about that, but it’s good policy.

I try to take your point about mean reversion, but I do think there’s a thing in politics. This is what people are worried about now. And they all have to run this year. And there’s something about being caught trying and being caught worrying.

You want people to feel like you were upset about the thing they are upset about. And if you’re the person in charge, you’re working really hard on the thing they’re upset about. I have this slightly strange view on the politics of Israel-Gaza, which is that I think the main way it is going to damage Joe Biden is not a revolt from the left on Gaza, but just a generalized sense among voters who actually don’t care about it that much. If you look at like a list of issues they think are important, like Israel and Gaza are extremely far down there, is that the feeling that Biden and the Democrats are paying all this attention to wars over there and not doing anything about the cost of groceries over here.

And to some degree, I think this is one of Trump’s stronger veins of political attack, which he’s leveraging a isolationism. We just shouldn’t be involved in Ukraine. If it were me, like Hamas would have never done this, and we wouldn’t be thinking about it. He doesn’t seem like he is interested. He’s arguing all these things are a distraction.

Now, he also doesn’t have a policy agenda, but I think that the way these things are hurting Biden is a perception that the focus is on these conflicts that most Americans just find to be like an unwinnable morass. And they’re not seeing the action and the progress on the thing that they’re really worried about.

So in surveys, when pollsters are asking voters what they care about the most, they say the economy. And I recognize that I said that you have to take people at their word. I think there’s some chance that the economy is not going to be the decisive issue here. I think Joe Biden and Donald Trump personally, what people personally think about them and how they see them personally campaigning is going to matter quite a bit.

In 2022, we saw Dobbs and we saw immigration as really important and motivating issues for partisans on both sides. And so I think you need a strong economic message. But I think that there’s this way in which we had some elections recently that were absolutely dominated by economic issues. But in 2016, that wasn’t an economic election. 2020, it wasn’t really an economic election exactly, it was very unusual because of where we were in Covid at that point. 2024, I’m not sure that this is an election where the economy is going to be the dominant issue.

And I think that what happens with gas prices and with price competition from retailers is going to matter a lot in terms of folks inflation perceptions and how they feel about their own capacity to spend. And so right now, I would say that those trends are going more positively. And we’ve seen some consumer sentiment numbers that have gone up, which is exactly what you would expect. But we have the summer travel period, and commodity prices are increasing in some cases. So I don’t know how long that will hold.

Then always our final question. What are three books you’d recommend to the audience?

I was trying to think about books about inflation and consumer prices that might be compelling for the audience.

That feels like a small category.

Yeah, it’s a little bit tough, right?

However, there’s a really great book that came out a few years ago called “Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America” by Marcia Chatelain. And it’s about McDonald’s and franchising, specifically about the growth of McDonald’s and its role in Black communities and with Black consumers. It’s such a compelling book. It’s so wonderful. I learned so much from it.

I recently read the best political book that I’ve ever read, which is called “A Place Of Greater Safety.” It is a novelization of the French revolution. You’re smirking at me.

I’ve never been recommended a book as often in my own household as this book. [LAUGHS]

We were supposed to go out to see friends for drinks, and I was like, I cannot come out because we are in the critical year of 1790. And I need to know what’s happening. It’s like an 800-page historical novel by Hilary Mantel.

Price increases, price instability is a really important part of the French revolution. I didn’t know that much about the French revolution. I knew that it had happened. I knew that you have the French Republic. I knew that you execute a king and a queen, and eventually, you have this dramatic political transformation. It is so unbelievably good and so compelling.

And then I was thinking about, of the best books about the neoliberal economic deal that we make for a really long time in America that I think that we are just starting to upset and grow past, the best book I think about it, and it’s a classic, is “Nickel and Dimed” by Barbara Ehrenreich, which is a book about women in the workforce. It’s about low wages. It’s about tipping. It’s about a million things and it’s just fantastic.

Annie Lowrey, thank you very much.

Thank you. [MUSIC PLAYING]

This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Rollin Hu. Fact checking by Michelle Harris with Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Aman Sahota. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon.

The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin, Elias Isquith and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones and Aman Sahota. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Sonia Herrero.

All right. We did it. We solved the economy.

Produced by ‘The Ezra Klein Show’

There’s something weird happening with the economy. On a personal level, most Americans say they’re doing pretty well right now. And according to the data, that’s true. Wages have gone up faster than inflation. Unemployment is low, the stock market is generally up so far this year, and people are buying more stuff.

And yet in surveys, people keep saying the economy is bad. A recent Harris poll for The Guardian found that around half of Americans think the S. & P. 500 is down this year, and that unemployment is at a 50-year high. Fifty-six percent think we’re in a recession.

There are many theories about why this gap exists. Maybe political polarization is warping how people see the economy or it’s a failure of President Biden’s messaging, or there’s just something uniquely painful about inflation. And while there’s truth in all of these, it felt like a piece of the story was missing.

[You can listen to this episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” on the NYT Audio app , Apple , Spotify , Amazon Music , YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts .]

And for me, that missing piece was an article I read right before the pandemic. An Atlantic story from February 2020 called “ The Great Affordability Crisis Breaking America .” It described how some of Americans’ biggest-ticket expenses — housing, health care, higher education and child care — which were already pricey, had been getting steadily pricier for decades.

At the time, prices weren’t the big topic in the economy; the focus was more on jobs and wages. So it was easier for this trend to slip notice, like a frog boiling in water, quietly, putting more and more strain on American budgets. But today, after years of high inflation, prices are the biggest topic in the economy. And I think that explains the anger people feel: They’re noticing the price of things all the time, and getting hammered with the reality of how expensive these things have become.

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