Science & Tech Quote by Martin Feldstein

“First” is doing a lot of work here: it’s the economist’s version of clearing your throat before walking into a policy fight. Feldstein isn’t just complimenting a subfield. He’s staking a claim that modern monetary economics has earned the right to be listened to - by central bankers, by politicians, by critics still haunted by inflationary blow-ups or by the profession’s failures to predict crises.

The line’s intent is strategically modest. “I think” signals caution, not uncertainty; it’s a credibility move from a figure who spent his career near the levers of power (Harvard, the NBER, Reagan-era advising). “Clearly” then snaps the tentpole into place: this isn’t a speculative vibe, it’s meant as a settled assessment. The phrasing quietly fuses epistemic progress with institutional authority, implying that better models and better measurement justify the technocratic autonomy central banks came to enjoy in the late 20th century.

Subtext: the old arguments about monetary policy being mostly guesswork, or merely politics in math clothing, are dated. Feldstein is gesturing toward the post-1970s evolution of the field - rational expectations, credibility and rules vs. discretion, inflation targeting, improved data, and a more disciplined empirical culture. He’s also, implicitly, defending a worldview in which policy mistakes are less about incompetence and more about operating with weaker tools.

Context matters because “monetary economics has gotten better” reads differently after each shock. After the Great Inflation, it sounds like repentance and reform. After 2008, it’s a provocation: better in what sense, and for whom? The sentence carries both confidence and a preemptive rebuttal to the public’s suspicion that the experts are always grading themselves on a curve.