This. If the populist leader reduces the GDP by 2% and decreases a high gini coefficient by 0.2 that's a hit-it-out-of-the-park economic win for the majority of

This. If the populist leader reduces the GDP by 2% and decreases a high gini coefficient by 0.2 that's a hit-it-out-of-the-park economic win for the majority of people. Not according to the authors of the study, obviously. To them an extra 80 cents in a homeless guy's pocket is worse for everybody than an extra dollar in Bill Gates' pocket. Then there's the reversal of cause and effect - were those populists the cause of economic decline or did they get into power because they were surfing a wave of resentment caused by it? Were the economic decline and the populist leader both caused by external actors cough Ukraine cough? Manuel Funke, Moritz Schularick and Christoph Trebesch say "we show that the economic cost of populism is high" so no, they clearly they don't think that this is a plausible explanation but they also don't seem to have accounted for it.