The best dinner party I’ve attended all year took place at a conference held at the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge, overlooking the San Francisco Bay. It was a family-style meal, arranged to make you ask the person sitting next to you to please pass the kale salad, at which point you might realize that to your left is a celebrated economist, and to your right, a top government official. Our host, Jennifer Harris, gave a speech about how economic ideas change to meet the needs of a new era.
Everyone listened. In a room full of V.I.P.s, she was the Queen Bee.
I’d wanted to interview Ms. Harris for years. She has been the quiet intellectual force behind the Biden administration’s economic policies, and she seemed key to understanding why both parties in Washington had walked away from free trade and neoliberalism — the belief that free markets will bring prosperity and democracy around the world.
These matters felt personal to me. I spent much of the Trump administration following steelworkers in Indiana who lost their jobs when their factory moved to Mexico. They felt betrayed by elites — and they weren’t wrong. I was thrilled when the Biden administration came in with a plan for big federal investments in the American industrial base, tariffs, support for labor unions and actions against monopolies. No one knew what to call it — Post-neoliberalism? Democratic capitalism? Neopopulism? — but for the first time in generations a U.S. administration was saying that people should control the market, not the other way around. I believed in it. But if it was the right path, why didn’t more voters trust President Biden on the economy?
To understand who Ms. Harris is, you have to know who she used to be. As a young State Department policy planner in the 2000s, she was a lonely voice in Washington raising the alarm about the rise of China. She pushed for tariffs and against trade agreements before it was cool, and was an author of a book called “War by Other Means” about how blind faith in free markets put the United States at a geopolitical disadvantage. For years, she felt like an oddball in Washington, where both parties were still in thrall to neoliberalism.
But after Donald Trump’s election in 2016, which tapped into a deep well of anger over free trade, she was suddenly an It Girl in the world of Washington policy wonks. The Hewlett Foundation hired her as the head of an initiative that has given away $140 million so far to people who are devising a new economic philosophy. Then she served a stint in the White House. Today, she’s an intellectual leader of a growing, bipartisan consensus that my colleague David Leonhardt recently highlighted.
The thinking behind it goes like this: Unquestioning belief in the free market created a globalism that funneled money to the 1 percent, which has used its wealth to amass political power at the expense of everyone else. It produced free trade agreements that sent too many U.S. factories to China and rescue plans after the 2008 financial crisis that bailed out Wall Street instead of Main Street.
Fury over all that helped elect Mr. Trump, who denigrated elites for selling out the country. But if Mr. Trump correctly identified a problem — “China is eating our lunch” — he did not solve it, beyond putting tariffs on Chinese products. His tax cut for the rich hurt rather than helped matters.
It’s the Biden administration that came in with a plan to build an economy that was good for workers, not just shareholders, using some strategies Ms. Harris had been talking about for years.
She didn’t start off as a free-market skeptic. She grew up in Lawton, Okla., an Army town in a state buffeted by the boom-bust cycles of the oil industry. Her father, a former Navy officer, served as a state representative and then a judge. Her mother, who was also a lawyer, advised soldiers on problems dealing with predatory payday lenders and unscrupulous used car dealers.
From an early age, Ms. Harris “was very good at picking up on patterns with numbers and with how people behaved,” her mother told me. She fell in love with economics and studied it at Wake Forest. After she joined a student delegation to a NATO summit in Prague in 2002, a faculty adviser on that trip offered her a job in Washington working at the National Intelligence Council. In those early years, she believed what everyone else in Washington believed about the economy — that governments ought not meddle with it.
Her outlook changed in 2007, after she joined the policy planning staff at the State Department. It was her job to track China’s use of subsidies, industrial espionage and currency manipulation to fuel its rise as a manufacturing powerhouse. Ms. Harris argued that tariffs on China were a necessary defense. Nobody agreed. “I was kind of just banging my head against this wall,” she told me. “The wall was a foreign policy establishment that saw markets as sacrosanct.”
The global financial meltdown in 2008 provided more evidence that the invisible hand can drive the country into a ditch. Barack Obama campaigned on a pledge to renegotiate NAFTA, but he struck up a new trade deal instead — the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Ms. Harris argued against it. “We didn’t have the foggiest idea” of what it would do to our economy, she told me. Nobody listened.
Nobody, that is, except Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s policy chief, who brought Ms. Harris onto the Clinton presidential campaign in 2015.
He was one of the few who would at least hear Ms. Harris out. She argued passionately that Mrs. Clinton should denounce the Trans-Pacific Partnership, something Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders had already done. Mrs. Clinton did eventually reject the agreement, though Mr. Trump won anyway. “Jen not only offered unique perspectives,” Mrs. Clinton told me in a statement, but also “ideas that were often ahead of their time.”
The excruciating loss made Mr. Sullivan far more open to Ms. Harris’s views. (They eventually wrote an article together in Foreign Policy calling for a new economic philosophy.) And it sent Democrats back to the intellectual drawing board. Larry Kramer, then the president of the Hewlett Foundation, recruited her in 2018 to promote alternatives to ideas that had guided U.S. policy for decades. He hoped she could do for free-market skepticism what Milton Friedman and his allies had done for free-market fundamentalism, which became policy under the Reagan administration and eventually was embraced by both parties as truth.
Her work at Hewlett was just getting off the ground in 2020 when Mr. Biden won. Ms. Harris couldn’t resist the chance to join the administration. “It felt like the ‘Nerd Justice League’ was assembling,” she told me. “And I had some FOMO.”
As an adviser on international economic policy, Ms. Harris had a hand in everything from making the case for industrial policy to designing a new framework for trade. This time, she wasn’t a lonely voice. Numerous grantees or partners from the Hewlett initiative entered the administration as well: Heather Boushey, an expert on equitable growth, became a member of Mr. Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers; K. Sabeel Rahman, a scholar of antitrust law, became head of regulatory affairs; and his collaborator Lina Khan became chair of the Federal Trade Commission.
She has since rejoined the Hewlett Foundation, where she funds people who are proposing new solutions to economic problems. One grantee, the conservative think tank American Compass, promotes the idea of a domestic development bank to fund infrastructure — an idea with bipartisan appeal.
But the work that Ms. Harris and others in the Biden administration have done is unfinished, and poorly understood. The terms “Bidenomics” and “Build Back Better” don’t seem to resonate. Just 38 percent of voters trust Mr. Biden on the economy, according to a recent poll. That might be because Americans are, understandably, more concerned about the cost of groceries today than the investments that will pay off tomorrow. Or maybe an era of low trust in the government is just a tough time to revive these kinds of interventions.
Ms. Harris acknowledges that these ideas haven’t yet taken hold in the broader electorate, and that high interest rates overshadow the progress that’s been made. It’s too early for voters to feel it, she told me: “The investments Biden has pushed through aren’t going to be felt in a month, a year, two years.”
Of course, this administration may be running out of time, and she finds the possibility of yet another devastating loss nerve-racking. “Even if Trump isn’t neoliberal, he could well be something darker,” she said.
But she celebrates the fact that leaders across the political spectrum are embracing the idea that Americans need to “get back to building things in this country.” This election has no candidates blindly promoting the free market. The last one didn’t either. In the battle of ideas, she has already won.
