To protect a hard-earned reputation for objectivity, Nobel laureates in economics usually refrain from making public policy recommendations on the basis of personal values or political beliefs. We comment in public only when logic and evidence show that some proposal is unambiguously worse than a feasible alternative.

Donald Trump embraces so many harmful policies that there wasn’t space to list them all in the letter that a group of us released today. To cite just one that didn’t make the cut, history shows what happens when a nation’s most powerful elected official can influence monetary policy. Given a chance, politicians inevitably use easy-money to chase short-run political gains that entail a permanent increase in the inflation rate. This is what we can expect if Trump gets the influence he now demands over monetary policy decisions.

Often, the best response to a policy proposal is “Well, reasonable people can differ.” Sometimes, the only honest reaction is “That would be stupid.”

The twenty-three of us agree that Harris’s economic policy proposals are vastly superior to Trump’s. I do not know of any Nobel laureate in economics who will take the other side of that claim.