Noah Smith is an American economics writer best known for his blog Noahpinion and for a long stint as an opinion columnist at Bloomberg. Trained as an economist, he built his reputation writing for a general audience about macroeconomics, technology, industrial policy, and the political economy of growth. His work sits at the intersection of empirical economics and political commentary, and he is widely read among policy-oriented liberals, technologists, and journalists who follow debates about how governments should structure markets and investment.
Politically, Smith is associated with a pragmatic, growth-centered strain of center-left thought that overlaps heavily with the "abundance" agenda—the argument that progressive goals such as clean energy, affordable housing, and rising living standards depend on building and producing more, not merely redistributing existing resources. He has been a prominent advocate for loosening regulatory and permitting bottlenecks, for expanding housing supply against restrictive zoning, and for public investment in technology and manufacturing. In this he draws on and popularizes ideas circulating among supply-side progressives, YIMBY housing reformers, and proponents of active industrial policy, while remaining critical of what he views as scarcity-minded or degrowth tendencies on the left.
Smith's influence is largely rhetorical and framing-oriented rather than doctrinal. He is a heavy user of data, charts, and accessible economic reasoning to argue that material progress and technological optimism should be central to liberal politics, and he frequently pushes back against positions he considers economically naive on both the left and the right. He has written extensively on subjects such as trade, the rise of China, energy transition, and the future of the American economy, often defending a broadly market-friendly but interventionist stance. His commentary on geopolitics and great-power competition also reflects a belief that economic dynamism underpins national strength.
As a public intellectual operating primarily through blogging and online commentary, Smith exemplifies a newer model of political influence in which independent writers shape policy conversations directly, outside traditional academic or institutional channels. His work has helped bring terms like abundance, YIMBY, and supply-side progressivism into wider circulation, and he remains a frequent participant in ongoing debates about the direction of American liberalism.