Australian economist Justin Wolfers recently detailed the decades of consequences the nation will face due to the wreckage left by the Donald Trump presidency.

Wolfers, who is also a professor of public policy and economics at the University of Michigan, spoke with MeidasTouch, about Trump’s complete disregard for American institutions, calling his administration “the most interventionist government” and “least conservative government” of his lifetime.

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“When you are the richest country in the world, maybe you are not the ones who should be thinking about ripping down your existing institutions,” he said. “It’s those who are somewhat behind, but that’s what this president is doing.”

He explained that the long-term economic impact will not be quantifiable in data. “What that’s gonna show up as in a decade’s time, they’ll be some companies that were never founded, they’ll be entrepreneurs who couldn’t afford to go to business school, immigrants with great ideas who ended up staying in their home countries instead. Whatever the next generation’s Google or OpenAI is, it may not end up being invented – or it may not happen on our soil.”

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“We’ll never see that absence,” he added. “But our kids will feel it… in a set of lost opportunities. There will be businesses they never started, there will be job opportunities, there will be new technologies, there will be ways of creating a greener, safer, more prosperous future that simply aren’t possible. But we’re not going to see it straight away.”

He explained that the media is not equipped to report on these kinds of consequences because there are no numbers and nothing specific in the immediate news cycles. “But it turns out,” he said, “economic research tells us that’s the stuff that matters.”

Wolfers: This is the most interventionist government of my lifetime. It’s the least conservative government of my lifetime. When you are the richest country in the world, maybe you are not the ones who should be tearing down your existing institutions. That’s usually what… pic.twitter.com/54hCClwIrC

— Acyn (@Acyn) January 25, 2026

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