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Transcript

Today i want to give you some encouraging news about the state of the heartland. Well, actually New Jersey, but you got a problem with that?

But I did something kind of different yesterday — which has prevented me from producing a usual analytical Substack post — and it was actually a very uplifting experience.

So hi, I’m Paul Krugman. What i did yesterday was participate in jury selection in Mercer County, New Jersey, where i am still a legal resident.

That is something I’ve done before: back in 2020 I spent 16 weeks on a grand jury. It was done remotely, because it was the depths of Covid.

It was a New Jersey grand jury, which is not high profile cases. It’s actually very ordinary cases in which the police want to bring someone to trial but 23 citizens must agree that they have provided sufficient evidence to bring the case to trial. You don’t have to judge guilt or innocence but you have to judge that there is sufficient evidence to warrant bringing charges.

It was enlightening. I got to see a lot of the negative side of life, obviously, but it was just it was a pretty good experience on the whole.

So I was summoned again this year. I wouldn’t have been able to do it, but I had to participate in the selection in order to explain to the judge, if necessary, why I could not be available during the period of this grand jury — a bunch of already agreed to conferences and talks in Europe.

So it wasn’t going to be something I could do, but I did the right thing and went through the whole procedure of listening to the explanation, being pronounced present, and waiting to see the judge and explain the issue.

Now, as it turned out, I didn’t even have to do that. By the time they had reached the people who had said they could not do it, including me and 77 other people, they already had filled the jury. So it ended up that it was time-consuming, okay, not a terrible thing, but it was a procedure that had to be done. And I did my citizenly duty and was released well into the afternoon.

But what was interesting about it was that those of us who had said we couldn’t do it — 78 people in a Zoom room — had a long wait while the judge did whatever she needed to do with the rest. And after a little while some people unmuted themselves and we started having a conversation. This was by definition kind of a random sample of people — of course people who have felony convictions are not part of this, people are not us citizens are not part of it, and to be fair it’s Mercer County which includes Princeton although it also includes Trenton. Still, it’s on average an affluent, highly educated county so this was not exactly typical America but it wasn’t exactly the elite either: This wasn’t a virtual room full of Princeton professors.

So conversation started. Obviously people are not fools so it wasn’t about politics, it wasn’t about current events, it started with people saying “anybody want to recommend some books that I should read?” and then turned to TV shows and movies and then somehow or other we got involved in a discussion of AI and applications and learning. Because there were several school teachers.

Not everyone spoke up — most people didn’t — but everyone was listening, it seemed fairly attentively. And it was a great conversation! People were reasonable, they were either well informed or were happy to say “I don’t know about this.” There was actually some discussion about “how should I where should I go for news now that everything is so polarized” — nobody talked politics but they did talk about the fact that news is kind of hard to parse these days.

The book recommendations, the TV and movie recommendations to the extent that I know them were pretty good. And the whole tone was, wow, it was civilized. I felt a little bit as if I was in the middle of a Norman Rockwell painting.

By the way, yes, people did recognize me and a couple said you know I read your Substack and I talked a little bit but I made a deliberate effort to step back and not play the celebrity there.

And that was good, because I got to listen to other people who were really level-headed, interesting, pretty well informed about a bunch of stuff. Oh, and just to say that this was New Jersey, so it was a very diverse group of people — a random selection of people from New Jersey, which meant that it was multi-racial and multi-ethnic. The clerk had some trouble with pronouncing everybody’s name, which was okay — I mean everybody was very forgiving of that.

So it was very much America as I see it — a country of lots of people who look very different, who sound different (except a fair number of people did have New Jersey accents.)

And it was just a far more hopeful scene — at least I found it much more hopeful —about the state of the country. It turns out that ordinary Americans — this is, again ordinary Americans from Mercer County, New Jersey, but still — ordinary Americans are a lot nicer, more thoughtful, more willing to hold interesting discussions than you might think.

And it does seem to me, given all the political news, there’s a lot of people out there, I would say primarily on the right, but not only on the right, who fundamentally hold ordinary Americans in contempt, who believe that you have to go with cheap slogans and that you can appeal to the baser instincts of everybody’s nature and that’s the way that you win.

And obviously they do sometimes win. But it’s worth going out there a little bit.

I mean I’m never going to be the kind of person who travels around and has conversations with the person in the street and reports back on what I’ve learned about the real America. But I actually did have, by accident, a pretty good selection of real Americans — because we’re all real Americans — and came out of it feeling just much lighter in mood.

You know, this country is actually okay if we can just get past some of the people who are trying to take us down a dark path. We’re not bad people — we’re mostly good people. And there’s a lot there’s a lot of uplift out here if you’re willing to see it.

For once if I say I’m ending on a happy note, I really am.

Take care.

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