Daily Inspiration Quote by Martin Feldstein

For an economist as careful as Martin Feldstein, “I think” is doing real work. It’s a hedge, but also a tell: this is someone trained to distrust grand narratives, signaling judgment rather than revelation. The line is almost aggressively modest, and that’s the point. Feldstein is making a claim about progress while sidestepping the obvious minefields of economic memory: which decades, whose outcomes, and compared to what baseline.

The phrase “better economic outcomes” sounds neutral, technocratic, even bloodless, yet it smuggles in a value system. In policy circles, “outcomes” tends to mean headline metrics: growth, inflation control, productivity, maybe stock-market performance. It’s a subtle bid to anchor the conversation in aggregate success rather than distributional conflict. If the economy has been “better” in the metrics that matter to macroeconomists, then complaints about stagnation or insecurity can be reframed as secondary, sectoral, or solvable at the margins rather than an indictment of the overall model.

“Over the last few decades” also quietly selects a convenient window: the post-1970s era of central-bank credibility, globalization, and expanded financial markets. Feldstein’s career sat inside the institutions that define that story (Harvard, the NBER, the Reagan-era policy ecosystem). Read in that context, the sentence doubles as a defense of establishment economic stewardship: not perfect, but improved versus the inflationary, unstable “past.”

Its power is rhetorical minimalism. By refusing specifics, it invites assent from anyone who wants to believe in incremental progress, while remaining slippery enough to dodge the next question: better for whom?