Noah Smith (writer)

Noah Smith is an American blogger, journalist, and commentator on economics and current events. A former assistant professor of Behavioral Finance at Stony Brook University, Smith writes for his own Substack blog, Noahpinion, and has also written for publications including Bloomberg, Quartz, Associated Press, Business Insider, and The Atlantic. Smith left Bloomberg in 2021 to fully focus on his own blog.

Graduate school
Smith graduated from Stanford University in 2003 with a Bachelor of Science in physics. He then began studying economics with the intention of eventually becoming an economic commentator and pundit. Smith started blogging in graduate school, on Google's Blogger platform, inspired by his original goal, as well as feeling disaffected with studying macroeconomics. He attributes the blog's early success to established pundits and economists such as J. Bradford DeLong, Mark Thoma and Paul Krugman reading and referencing it. During this time, Smith also wrote articles for Quartz, with his advisor, Miles Kimball. Smith obtained his doctorate in Economics from the University of Michigan in 2012 and began teaching as an assistant professor at Stony Brook University.

Career
While working as an assistant professor of Finance in New York, Smith was contacted by Bloomberg with an offer to work full-time as an opinion columnist. His first column, "Why is Econ 101 so bad?", appeared on May 22, 2014. After waiting a year and working part-time, Smith accepted the offer in 2016, left Stony Brook University, and moved to California. He continued to blog while working as a columnist and, in 2020, moved his blog from Blogger to Substack. Smith's online presence grew through Substack and Twitter and in 2021, he left Bloomberg Businessweek to fully dedicate his time to his blog.

Starting July 2023, Smith alongside Erik Torenberg began the podcast ECON 102, where technology, current events, and economics are discussed with occasional guests.

Political views
Noah Smith is sometimes considered by others to be a liberal. Contemporaries often group Smith in with other liberal economists such as Krugman, who has also written in support of some of Smith's views. He has written articles or columns that demonstrate a left leaning perspective, expressing support for affordable healthcare reform, mass expansion of public transit, green energy, immigration reform, industrial policy, labor unions, and YIMBY positions. Smith has appeared on the Neoliberal Project's podcast multiple times and was labeled the "Chief Neoliberal Shill" by the group in 2018. Smith aligns himself with liberal commentators and has written in dissent about conservative slants in the economics industry and profession. Smith has expressed disagreements with socialism and communism as well as the degrowth movement, or a post growth world. He has views on the education of economics, particularly microeconomics, stating that more of the focus of economics education should be data driven, and less of a theory emphasis. In a similar vein, he has criticized macroeconomics for being too theory focused, despite it being the most popular field. He has characterized Modern Monetary Theory as "a set of political memes to push for more deficit spending", rather than a useful economic theory.