The US economic elite is worried about populism — again. After an initial wave of hand-wringing followed the ascent of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump in national politics, recent inflation has rekindled fears of the uninformed masses intruding into economists’ rarefied technocratic domain.

Especially troubling to economists has been the idea that addressing inflation requires the federal government — and not just the Federal Reserve — to act. As inflation reached a crescendo in late 2021 and early 2022, progressive politicians began to focus on corporate profiteering as a significant driver of price hikes, proposing taxes on windfall profits for oil companies and suggesting that antitrust enforcement might be necessary to break the monopolistic pricing power of large corporations.

Economists responded in force. Larry Summers grumbled that this kind of “hipster antitrust” push was driven more by “a general feeling of hostility and outrage toward business” than by “facts and economic science.” Nobel Laureate Robert Shiller likewise warned against a populist vision of inflation as “an indicator of a cycle of greed and inhumanity, as a conspiracy to rob [the public] of their buying power.” The US public, Shiller counseled, should calm down and “let the Fed do its job.”