It’s one thing to tell a nice, neat little story about data and what it all means. It’s another to render the sprawling U.S. economy in a mosaic of narratives that keeps an audience’s attention. Paul Krugman, the former New York Times columnist of 24 years, Nobel Prize winner, and wildly popular Substack blogger, showed how to do that in a recent podcast. He was interviewed by BusinessInsider co-founder Henry Blodget on the first episode of Blodget’s podcast, Solutions.
The mechanics of Krugman’s portrayal deployed used a handful of techniques to carry his audience through the Trump economy. He used a variety of story types, some with explicit beginning-middle-end structures but most that left at least one step to the imagination. Some simply triggered story-rich images from memory, the type of story that deserves respect.
Commerce secretary Howard Lutnick’s let-the-eat-cake moment: “‘People are worried about disruption of Social Security, but if my mother-in-law missed a Social Security check, she wouldn’t complain.’” Krugman adds, “Yeah, because her son-in-law is a billionaire.”
Current news that triggers older news — Donald Trump’s still-fresh firing of the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner Erika McEntarfer was for reporting bad jobless numbers — “rigged,” said Trump. “Were the job numbers ‘rigged?,’” Blodget asked. “No,” answers Krugman. “If they were rigging the numbers, there would be whistleblowers all over the place…We would know.”
“Whistleblowers” triggers old stories. Most American adults have lived through whistleblower moments. Those old enough to have lived through Watergate in the early ‘70s, for example, the word “whistleblowers” can evoke President Richard Nixon’s brush with impeachment. Such stories are all there in the mind’s repertory.
Krugman avoids the stillborn analysis of the usual economics-speak. Instead, he uses narrative frames, which carry the imagination to a climax.
Blodget asks how the BLS politicization would play out if his fears came true. Krugman begins with one scenario: Suppose tariffs and deportations push inflation up while BLS data shows no inflation. The result: “Then nothing is done.” But Trump keeps pressuring the Fed to cut interest rates. Then he says, “This is the Turkey example... You wake up one day and you realize that you’ve got double digit inflation.”
In Krugman’s narrative chain, A leads to B leads to C leads to disaster. It’s storytelling as dominoes. You want to know where the chain ends.
The problem with distrusted data: Why does it matter that Trump tries to control the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports? The BLS data helps steer business decisions, Krugman explained. The BLS data has big downstream effects on jobs and earnings. Without reliable
data, business decision makers lose their footing, and American policymakers don’t know how to interrupt overheating or cooling. Bad data poisons an economy, and poisoned economies easily deteriorate into ones like Turkey’s and Argentina’s.
National debt: He tells his own narrative about the U.S. national debt. “I am much more worried about debt now than I was in 2008,” he says. Advanced democracies can handle high debt, he explains, because investors trust them to handle it in time. The U.S’s possible fixes are clear, such as better control on Medicare spending. But political deadlock makes that impossible. The debt isn’t the crisis. The government’s inability to do obvious, boring things is the crisis.
Tariffs’ legality and damage
What is “Smoot Hawley Two”? The name is an allusion to Smoot Hawley One, the infamous precursor to the Great Depression and its purported spark. The average rate in effect now is 18%, Krugman says, about equal to post-Smoot 1930 level. The cost is “real but modest…not Depression-level catastrophic.” The bigger issue, he says, is that it’s illegal under international law and violates agreements passed by Congress. The cost is reduced American credibility.
Tariffs’ real damage – America as a lawbreaker
“Everything we’re doing is illegal under international law and U.S. Law,” says Krugman. “The world’s second-largest economy has said, ‘Those agreements we made? Those laws we passed? Never mind.’ America used to joke that in China a contract was a suggestion. Now the US government treats its own contracts as suggestions.”
Explicit question: Why is free trade good?
Free trade was always reciprocal, he says, starting with the Recipricol Trade Act of 1934. “Every tariff cut involved ‘let’s make a deal - you cut, we cut.’” Krugman gives a short course in tariffs from the ’30s to the present. He walks through Economics 101, concluding with the final point, that Trump’s tariffs solve a problem that didn’t exist and at a real cost to the American economy.
“Howard Lutnick our Commerce secretary, who is an endless source of comic relief”
AOC, “…a ‘crazy leftist,’ but she’s actually been a pretty effective member of Congress.”
“Erdoğan... in a lot of ways is a Trump-like figure”
He’s not discussing abstract “leaders” or “policymakers.” He’s characterizing named individuals. Lutnick is comic relief. AOC is the surprising competent. Erdoğan is the Trump parallel.
Offers vivid, specific images
He describes scenes that people can picture.
The Commerce secretary “screwing tiny screws into iPhones” — an instant illustration of absurdity
Krugman’s “European academic friends…[who] leave their mobiles behind and take burner phones”
“New manufacturing plants that are virtual ghost towns, [with] a few people watching to make sure machines don’t go crazy, and some janitors”
“Economists are to some extent guilty of overhyping the damage protectionism does.”
We expect an economist to say tariffs are catastrophic. Instead, Krugman says economists overhyped it—the damage is just 0.4% of GDP. This makes listeners lean in: if that’s not the problem, what is?
Then he pivots to the real issue: everything we’re doing on tariffs is illegal. It violates international law and U.S. law. America has become “a place where a contract by the U.S. government is a suggestion.” That loss of soft power, he argues, will have “a real chilling effect on international business.”
The surprise isn’t just rhetorical cleverness. It reframes the entire tariff debate from economics to credibility.
Monty Python
“Willy Loman in reverse”
Old army Marine movies (”look at the man to your left”)
“Barbarians at the Gate”
These references create in-group feeling. If you get them, you’re in the club with Krugman. If you don’t, they still work as metaphors.
Almost every major argument follows this pattern:
State the conventional wisdom
Acknowledge what’s true about it
Show what’s wrong or incomplete
Provide the real explanation
Give concrete examples
Connect to bigger meaning
Once you recognize the pattern, you relax into it. You know where he’s taking you, so you’re willing to follow.
Touchstones
He keeps returning to certain touchstones:
Argentina and Turkey (data corruption)
Scandinavia (inequality solutions)
The 2008 crisis (policy lessons)
His New York life (tax rates)
When Krugman talks about inequality, it’s not “income distribution statistics from 1920-2020.” It’s “[economist] Claudia Goldin’s great discovery” (character) about “six years during World War 2” (dramatic moment) that created “the street I grew up on” (personal memory) which “lasted 30 years then unraveled” (rise and fall) until “we went from General Motors to Walmart” (symbolic transition). Every economic concept arrives with characters, settings, turning points, and consequences. He’s absorbed the data over a lifetime of work, then renders it as human experience.
And so it is in business. It’s the difference between sheet music and performance. A lingering conception of data stories would have it that Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, or “Oh, Susanna” or “A Night in Tunisia” are a set of notes. That’s baloney. It’s what comes from the orchestra, the folk singer, or Dizzy Gillespie — or whoever may interpret the notes.
If you want to improve your storytelling, learn the notes, make them yours, and let your inner data-storyteller sing.
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