The Economy Is Not Doomed

The 2016 election might seem like a death knell for liberals who dream that the United States might eventually come to resemble one of Europe’s social democracies. The Republican Party now controls the White House, both houses of Congress, and the majority of governorships and state legislatures.

But America’s youngest cohort of voters remains an underrated force for leftist economics. Burdened by student debt and the rising cost of housing and health care, this younger generation embraces a larger role for government. If, in a decade or two, today’s young liberal revolutionaries become the mainstream force in U.S. politics, Trump will have been a nativist paroxysm that merely delayed the inevitable evolution toward American social democracy.

To understand how the U.S. might get from here to there, I spoke with Jeffrey Sachs, the renowned economist, an adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders, and the author of the new book Building the New American Economy. The following transcript of our conversation has been edited for clarity and concision.

In the middle of your book, there was a sentence that stopped me cold. You write: "There