Partway through a panel discussion at a recent economics conference in San Francisco, Jason Furman, a former adviser to President Barack Obama, turned to Kimberly Clausing, a former member of the Biden administration and author of a book extolling the virtues of free trade.

“Everyone in this room agrees with your book,” Furman said. “No one outside of this room agrees with your book.”

The academics and policy wonks gathered in the hotel conference room laughed, but the comment captured something real: After decades of helping shape policy on weighty matters such as taxes and health insurance, economists find that their influence is at a low ebb.

Free trade is perhaps the closest thing to a universally held value among economists, yet Americans just voted to return to office a president, Donald Trump, who has described tariffs as “the most beautiful word in the dictionary” and who often seems to view trade through a mercantilist lens the field has considered outdated since the days of 18th-century economist and philosopher Adam Smith.

The president Trump will replace, Joe Biden, was hardly a free-trade zealot himself: He kept in place many of the tariffs that Trump imposed in his first term, and moved in his final days in office to block the takeover of U.S. Steel by a Japanese company — a decision his own economic advisers opposed.

It isn’t just trade.

Economists favor immigration for innovation and growth, yet Trump wants to seal the border and deport potentially millions of people who entered the U.S. illegally.

Economists have espoused a carbon tax as the most effective tool for combating climate change, yet Democrats rejected that approach when designing their climate bill under Biden.

And economists have warned for years about the nation’s unsustainable fiscal path, saying it could result in ballooning debt payments, rising interest rates and increased risk of a financial crisis, yet both parties have run up huge deficits with no credible plan for reining them in.

All of which meant that when economists gathered in San Francisco this month for the annual meeting of the American Economic Association, there was a sense that their famous confidence — critics would say arrogance — had been, if not shattered, certainly dealt a body blow. What was the point of their careful data-gathering, their complex models, their intricate theories if no one was going to listen to their advice anyway?

Trial and ... error?

To its critics, the explanation for the field’s wilderness moment is simple: Economists’ policies have been tried, and they haven’t worked.

Speaking to a roomful of economists at the conference, Oren Cass, a conservative policy expert, ticked through a list of the profession’s perceived failures:

• The loss of manufacturing jobs and the deindustrialization of the American Midwest.

• The 2008 financial crisis and the ensuing recession, for which some partly blamed the financial deregulation championed by many economists.

• The slowdown in economic growth despite repeated tax cuts that many economists argued would have the opposite effect.

“I think people rightly look at what the economists are recommending and say, ‘Why on earth should we expect that to be true?’” he said. “If what you have been doing is not working, you cannot retain credibility and expect good outcomes simply by continuing to do it.”

Many economists, unsurprisingly, reject much of Cass’ analysis. They argue, for example, that the decline of manufacturing was at least as much a result of technological change and global forces as American trade policy, and that tariffs will wind up hurting only the people they are intended to help.

And in any case, they argue, Cass presents an outdated caricature of who economists are and what they believe. Perhaps in the 1980s and ‘90s, economists overwhelmingly favored an agenda of lower taxes, reduced regulation and unfettered globalization, but in recent decades the field has evolved to take a more nuanced and varied view of these subjects.

“Before there was more of a sense of ‘all economists say X,’ and now I don’t think you can necessarily say that,” said Ioana Marinescu, a University of Pennsylvania professor who until recently was an economist on antitrust issues at the Justice Department.

Economists say it isn’t fair to judge the field as a whole on such failures. Macroeconomic forecasts matter to policymakers at the Federal Reserve and to investors on Wall Street, but they aren’t a major focus for most academic economists — and they aren’t something that even most forecasters claim to be particularly good at.

“We’ve always been bad at forecasting,” said Greg Mankiw, a Harvard University economist who was a top adviser to President George W. Bush. “Does that hurt our credibility? Probably.”

Frustration mounts

Not that economists are used to being popular. Mankiw quipped that “being frustrated is sort of the natural state of affairs for being an economist.” Karen Dynan, who worked in the Treasury Department under Obama, said economists there were known as “skunks at the garden party” — always showing up to explain why some attractive-sounding program wouldn’t work as intended.

Still, Dynan said, “they wanted us around.” Politicians may not have liked the advice economists gave, and they certainly didn’t always follow it. But they did want to know what the economists thought.

Trump, in his first term, had few economists in top roles, and perhaps the most prominent exception — Peter Navarro, a Harvard-trained economist who was an adviser on trade policy — held skeptical views on trade, particularly with China, that put him far outside the economic mainstream. (In a 2016 survey of academic economists, not a single respondent said putting tariffs on China to encourage domestic production would be a good idea.)

Economists who held more mainstream views had limited influence. Richard Burkhauser, a Cornell University professor who served on Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers, said he and his colleagues quickly understood that there was little point in trying to talk Trump out of imposing tariffs.

“The most forlorn economists at the CEA specialized in trade,” he said. If they had tried to fight tariffs, he said, “that would have been the last meeting we were at.”

Instead, Burkhauser said, economists focused on a different question: If the administration was going to impose tariffs, how could it do them in the least painful way possible?

Communication gap

But how can economists get back to a place of helping to set policy, not just to minimize the harms done by policies they consider misguided?

Some in the field see the problem mostly as one of communication — they need to do a better job of explaining, to policymakers and the public, why their arguments make sense.

Researchers have long understood, for example, that globalization can have costs, in lost jobs or reduced wages in some industries. Most economists argue that the benefits — cheaper goods and a more productive, dynamic economy — outweigh those costs, and that even many of the people who are initially harmed will be better off in the long run. But they have often talked about those trade-offs in a way that could seem dismissive and insensitive, said Glenn Hubbard, a chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under Bush.

“Our own language got in the way,” Hubbard said. “When we talk about ‘transition costs,’ what an awful piece of language to describe people and places.”

But other economists argue that the profession needs a period of more significant self-reflection. Dynan, the former Treasury official, said economists must grapple with their failures concerning the 2008 financial crisis and the recent period of high inflation.

“It matters that the profession has failed society in a couple of ways,” Dynan said. “I think it’s important that when policy goes awry, people own up to what happened.”