In the U.S., inequality is often framed as the 99% versus the wealthiest 1%. But that’s not quite the right matchup. While the bottom 90% has done dramatically worse over the last several decades and the top 0.1% has done dramatically better, the 9.9% in between those groups still controls more than half of the wealth in the United States. Author and philosopher Matthew Stewart thinks that the 9.9% are not innocent bystanders, and he joins Nick and Goldy to discuss how this group is entrenching inequality and warping our culture.
Matthew Stewart is an author and philosopher. He is the author, among other books, of Nature’s God and The 9.9 Percent.
The 9.9 Percent: https://bookshop.org/books/the-9-9-percent-the-new-aristocracy-that-is-entrenching-inequality-and-warping-our-culture/9781982114183
The 9.9 percent is the new American aristocracy: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/the-birth-of-a-new-american-aristocracy/559130/
Who are the 9.9% A closer look at the math of american inequality: https://lithub.com/who-are-the-9-9-percent-a-closer-look-at-the-math-of-american-inequality/
Website: https://pitchforkeconomics.com/
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Nick Hanauer:
We’ve talked about all wealth inequality in all sorts of ways, the 99% versus the 1% is one, but the facts around the 9.9% versus everybody else is actually pretty interesting.
David Goldstein:
Just statistically, $1.2 million in net worth gets you into the 9.9%.
Matthew Stewart:
Inequality of a certain type, inequality that essentially comes from a certain profound unfairness has profound consequences throughout society.
Speaker 4:
From the home offices of Civic Ventures in downtown Seattle, this is Pitchfork Economics with Hanauer, the best place to get the truth about who gets what and why.
Nick Hanauer:
I’m Nick Hanauer, founder of Civic Ventures.
David Goldstein:
I’m David Goldstein, senior fellow at Civic Ventures. So Nick, it’s the holiday season and we have a gift for you. Normally on this podcast, we berate you and your cohort of 0.1 percenters about how you’re destroying our economy and our democracy, and you’re the source of all the inequality. But on this episode, you get to berate me and my cohort of 9.9 percenters.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s right. We get to revisit with our old friend, Matthew Stewart who has a new book out called The 9.9 Percent: The New Aristocracy That Is Entrenching Inequality and Warping Our Culture. And this book obviously is an elaboration on a piece that Matthew wrote a few years ago in The Atlantic on the 9.9%. And I love this book and this argument because I do think that he very sensibly identifies, I think, a new and sort of more fulsome way to talk about inequality, which is not just concentrated at the top 0.1%, which in many arithmetic ways it is, but the cultural implications of having an economy where basically the top 10% of Americans have shared all of the economic growth over the last 40 or 50 years and has essentially become a culture in and of itself, right? It’s like this society within a society of people competing to maintain their place in that segment of society.
And I think the cool thing about the book and this argument is it both elaborates how this segment of society is harming the rest of society, but also how it harms itself, right? That if you’re part of this society, there are all sorts of crazy behaviors that we have created and are perpetuating and are letting infect the rest of the society from the crazy ways in which we deal with kids sports today, to this nutty obsession with getting your kids into only the best colleges and so on and so forth. It’s just, it’s really, really, I think, pathological and destructive and the book both points it out and points out our culpability\.
David Goldstein:
Right. And I can tell you as somebody who’s at the bottom of the 9.9%, near the bottom, which by the way, so you know, it’s just statistically $1.2 million in net worth gets you into the 9.9%. And I get there by virtue of having owned a house in Seattle for 24 years. So with this crazy housing market, which is another product of the 9.9%. And yet being in the 9.9%, it’s incredibly stressful, this fear of falling out and this fear that my daughter won’t be able to climb into it.
Nick Hanauer:
Absolutely. And as you know, it creates a lot of really, really crazy behaviors and it’s just so different from how I grew up, where the stakes just were much lower. We’ve talked about wealth inequality in all sorts of ways, the 99% versus the 1% is one, but the facts around the 9.9% versus everybody else is actually pretty interesting, if you understand the statistics
David Goldstein:
Right. Since 1963, the bottom 90% have seen their share of wealth decline. Today, they have only 10% of the nation’s financial wealth while the 9.9% controls about half of the personal wealth in the nation. As I mentioned, to get into the 9.9%, you need $1.2 million in net worth. The median is $2.4 million. And it’s not until you have over $10 million in wealth that you get into the top 1%. Anyway, Nick, I got to tell you, I saw a lot of myself in this book throughout and not always comfortably. So I’m really looking forward to talking to Matthew about the book.
Matthew Stewart:
So my name is Matthew Stewart and I call myself a writer and I have published a number of books. People, I think, tend to think that they’re on disparate topics, I see them as all united. The most recent one is The 9.9 Percent. And it takes a look at how inequality affects the way we think and act and how it’s dividing our country up. But it follows on other books about American history and also the history of philosophy.
Nick Hanauer:
So who the hell is this 9.9% that you speak of?
Matthew Stewart:
So there’s a math part, but since you guys are good at math, I’m going to go over it really quickly. So we all know that been this massive increase in inequality, but it turns out that all of the relative increases actually occurred in a much smaller, slower than we usually think. It’s not the top 1%, but it’s the top 0.1% that’s got essentially all of the relative increase in concentration of wealth. And it turns out that not all of the bottom lost out over that 50 years. In fact, it’s the bottom 90%. So in between, if you do math, you get this 9.9% of the wealth distribution, income distribution looks roughly the same. And it turns out that this is actually the wealthiest group as a whole in American society. So if 50 years ago, if let’s say the rich 0.1% had $1, the bottom 90%, would’ve had about $4. Now it’s 50/50, so they each get $1. But all along, the 9.9% has held onto $2.50 flat, just basically held onto its relative share.
So that’s the math, but of course people bounce around in these percentiles and I like to think of it more as a landscape. What we see when we look at the economy that there’s basically this Shangri-La in the American economy of getting into 9.9%. And that’s changed. So the last little bit of the math I think is relevant is that the ratio between the wealth of the 9.9% of the 90%, that’s the best way of visualizing the hill of the American dream. That’s now about two and a half times what it was 50 years ago. So simple way of putting that is that the American dream is about two and a half times is hard for most people. That’s the 9.9%, but it’s meant to open up discussion, not to close it.
Nick Hanauer:
Great. So obviously you didn’t write the book as a math exercise, you’re making a more generalized claim about the effect this math has on American society. So unpack your basic thesis.
Matthew Stewart:
My basic thesis is that inequality of a certain type, I don’t mean just the mere fact people have different amounts of resources at their command, but inequality that essentially comes from a certain profound unfairness, has profound consequences throughout society. And what it does above all is it makes it impossible for people to form a reasonable society, makes them individually unreasonable and it makes their society unreasonable. And we’re seeing that in our society now, we’re seeing how this big tide of inequality is shaping the way individuals behave in unreasonable ways. And it’s also shaping our political system in ways that make it profoundly unreasonable. So that’s a very abstract take, but I also think it comes down to very straightforward things in terms of how we raise kids and how we go out and go on the marriage market and how we think about education and so on.
David Goldstein:
And this is a direct line from some of your previous books in that you make the point that our democracy was grounded in reason.
Matthew Stewart:
Yeah. Well, thanks for pointing out that the connection with the earlier stuff. Because I do think that there’s a strong connection and it works at two levels. One is that, I think that if you interpret American history correctly, you’ll actually see that an unexpected equality was really important in powering America’s revolutionary moments. So while, when we look back now on that the Revolutionary Period, we tend to think of it as a very unequal period with a few people in breaches and wigs and lots of slaveholders running around. In fact, the American colonies were much more egalitarian than the old European world that they came from. And that was a really important precondition for the Revolution. And then the other part is what you mentioned, Goldy, which is of course the tradition of emphasizing reason and basically coming to the conviction that we can form a society that’s committed, not to a particular set of dogmas, but to a process of uncovering useful truths in governing ourselves. So that I think was the essence of the American Revolution. And that’s what I think we’re losing as we go through this massive growth of inequality in recent years.
Nick Hanauer:
Well, can you unpack some more what you mean by the ways in which this inequality makes people unreasonable? In the subtitle, it is Entrenching Inequality and Warping Our Culture. So continue to unpack that.
Matthew Stewart:
Yeah. So I’m really interested in what happens in intellectual culture, I guess, because I’m academic [Monkay 00:11:14] or something. But academic life is always at some risk of being irrelevant, but when you see how it behaves under periods of rising inequality, I think you see a growth in that inequality. And in my book I had a chapter where I had some fun with Amy Chua, the Tiger Mom, right? Of Yale. So she teaches at Yale Law School and she is very much associated with the mericratic values of this upper middle class, wrote a whole book about how you should torture your kids to make sure that they get into selective colleges and so on. But what you see in her intellectual and political work is that, notwithstanding the fact that she can probably see what some of our big issues are, she’s so determined to hold onto her position, so determined to get her kids ahead, that for example, she overlooks the fact that a Supreme Court justice nominee has a pattern of sexual harassment that she herself had warned her students about it because it turns out that he’s a member of the club and he also is employing her daughter. And so she wants to stay in good with her profession.
And I think that that’s a small story, but it reflects the way in which under rising inequality, as the stakes go higher, as it becomes harder and harder to stay on the right side of the fence, people essentially absorb all these crazy value systems and they’re prone to essentially putting out pseudo intellectual stuff, like Amy Chua I think is doing, in order to disguise, not very well, a transparent career interest. So that’s one small example, but there are plenty of others, there’s the whole family and the child rearing thing, I think that’s got a lot of sociological elements behind it. There’s the neighborhood stuff and so on.
David Goldstein:
Right. And by the neighborhood stuff, you’re talking about how home ownership, and I live in Seattle where our houses are wildly overpriced and my very liberal neighbors are just so fearful of losing value in their properties, because they’re relying on it to maintain themselves in the 9.9%. And it warps the decisions we make, in terms of all the nimbyism we see.
Matthew Stewart:
Yeah. I mean, and I feel the pain. I mean, we just moved out of Brooklyn, which is of course the heartland of the 9.9%. And I don’t fault people for individually feeling that pressure. Of course we can all look at the numbers, we all know that those houses and their value is central to our individual economic fortunes. But come on, if we step back, it’s pretty obvious that this is a totally dysfunctional way of organizing housing and also organizing wealth distribution. I mean, the two striking facts about… well, there are more than two striking facts, but a number of striking facts about the American housing situation are that we have this housing affordability crisis where in 74% of metropolitan areas, the average wage is not enough to pay for the average rent or to buy the average home. And obviously the only way that that can be squared is that you essentially have to inherit or find some lucky break or get the parents to contribute.
And the other crucial fact is that we see that in those areas that are most desirable, you actually have a decrease of population in many cases, we certainly aren’t building enough houses. And the obvious explanation for that is that all the nimbyism is freezing out… it’s people gaining control over their local systems. This is something that upper middle class people are very good at doing. They gain control in order to maximize their value. They rapidly build walls and prevent anybody else from coming in. And that leads to huge systemic problems.
And then the other huge thing about our name neighborhoods that has to be said, is we still have pretty amazing residential segregation. I mean, there’s some indications that it’s easing in some areas, but it’s not, it’s pretty astonishing, especially when you go to other countries and you come to the US and you just see how color coded everything is.
David Goldstein:
Right. So as you point out, my neighbors and I were, we’re not innocent bystanders. We are sustaining and perpetuating this system.
Matthew Stewart:
Yeah. I think that’s a big part of it. When you look at the numbers of where does the wealth of the 9.9% come from? Real estate, inherited real estate, that’s a huge part of the picture. And some of that’s dumb luck, but some of it is essentially people gaining a monopoly on space. And then the other thing that for me is a tragedy when you look at it in a historical perspective is what I think of as the Henry George angle on this, in an earlier time, and not that much earlier, I’m talking about the middle of the 20th century, housing worked the other way. It was actually kind of a welfare system that ended up subsidizing the middle class. And some of that was unintentional, some of it was intentional. The intentional parts were things like mortgage finance systems and mortgage tax relief. And the unintentional things were the compression of home values that, as the values at the top came down, the values of middle class homes, in relative terms increased. And so it worked as a kind of welfare system for the middle class, but I think people have lost sight of the fact that now it’s a welfare system for the top decile of our economy and everybody else has to ultimately pay the price for that.
And of course, that also feeds into the segregation issue because it turns out that blacks, for historical reasons, often because they haven’t got the house to inherit, are renters to a much greater degree and so they haven’t been able to participate in this weird system where we all throw the money into the pool and the biggest pieces go out to people with the biggest homes.
Nick Hanauer:
Matthew, can you unpack a little more how concentrating basically all of the benefits of economic growth in the top 10% is warping our culture? Can you give us some more examples?
Matthew Stewart:
Yeah. So one thing that got me into this was just looking at the parenting issues. I’m using culture here broadly in that it includes sociocultural things. And if you’ve been in the game, or the parenting thing, you see it’s nutty. I mean-
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, it’s completely insane.
Matthew Stewart:
… Yeah. What people are doing. And I’m guilty to some degree, we’re trying to protect our tots from many possible harm. We’re also sculpting them right from the beginning with those precious experiences that are going ensure their success within this 9.9%. There’s a good amount of sociology that looks at this and can quantify it. And it can show that yes, American parenting is at one extreme and when you compare it with other countries, what you find is that this American style of parenting, the hyper parenting, the supreme parenting, when you compare across countries, what you find is that it’s associated with inequality. So the bigger the gap between the rich and the poor in any given, the more likely you’re going to have parents, and I don’t mean just the rich parents, I mean all parents, competing madly to try to make sure that their kids have some chance. And as we all know, it’s not great for the kids.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. I mean, just to expand on that, I think that in a world where… if I compare the world my kids live in today with the world that I grew up in, the difference between doing super well and doing moderately well were not vast, right? You lived in the same kinds of homes and you lived in the same kinds of neighborhoods and you drove slightly different cars, but your kids went to roughly the same schools and had roughly the same chance. But today, it’s this crazy winner take all mentality where basically the only possibility of living the good life is to become a bond trader for Goldman Sachs, right? Or some such. And that creates this crazy pathology in parenting where everything is high stakes, where, at five years old, your children have to decide what select sports team they’re going to get on. Right? I mean, when I grew up, kids played all the sports, right? In fall, you played soccer and then it’s spring, you play football or basketball or whatever it was. And then you ran track and it was all for fun and to be in shape. And today it’s this high stakes game that cost $5,000 per kid per year in the hopes that they will be able to get a scholarship to a college or something like that.
Matthew Stewart:
Yeah, no, that’s right. And something else you said that really resonates with me is that, at the end of the day, the great prize is that you become a banker for Goldman Sachs. Right?
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah.
Matthew Stewart:
So then that leads this further complication where you invested so much, not just money, but psychologically all of your identity into this project, and at the end of the day, you’re writing PowerPoint presentations until midnight kind of thing. What most people at Goldman Sachs actually do. And that leads to a big existential quandary for the people who end up there. And then of course, for the many people who don’t, then there’s this sense that somehow they’ve failed, even though they’ve simply failed to make it into that tiny sliver at the top.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. And the toll this is taking on kids today is really, really obvious with all the depression and anxiety and angst and combine that with social media and all that stuff, it’s not great.
David Goldstein:
I think that’s an important point you make in the book because essentially the 9.9% are not only complicit in this regime of inequality, we’re also victims of it, both in the way it warps our own lives, but also the sense of precarity that it instills in us, this fear of falling out of the 9.9%, ourselves or our children.
Matthew Stewart:
Yeah. No. I wanted to bring out both of those sides, right? That on the one hand, there’s this obliviousness that comes from being on the winning side, that essentially you are making, so you think that the system works and it’s just a matter of doing the right things. And aren’t those people idiots are not doing it. But on the other hand, we all get that actually luck had a much bigger role than we thought, that so many things can go wrong, one little misstep, I mean, your kid gets mono at the wrong time, they fail their AP exams and there’s no college, or no good college for them to go to, and it’s all over, it’s Starbucks or the rest of their life. So, yeah, there’s a kind of precarity that extends throughout the society when you get this extreme inequality.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. And I think that sense of precarity, that sense of continual risk creates stressors in people’s lives that I think is contributing mightily to the craziness of our politics and our culture today. This is why people are so angry.
Matthew Stewart:
Yeah. Well, when you mentioned stress too, though, Nick, it makes me think of the health issues. So what we’ve seen in the United States before the pandemic is some disturbing health trends where you have one part of the population getting healthier and healthier, bravo, living into their nineties and so on, but then serious health issues showing up pre pandemic among large groups of the population. And I take this to be evidence of a distribution of risk. So we often look at distribution of income or the distribution of wealth, but in some ways what matters in a society that’s collectively as wealthy as ours, is not those numbers, but this distribution of risk, I mean, how volatile and precarious life is. And what the health numbers were suggesting pre pandemic was very simply that we’ve distributed risk, we’ve jammed risk downward onto a big group people who somehow are willing to take it.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, well, they actually weren’t willing to take it, but we did it anyway.
Matthew Stewart:
Yeah, there’s that.
Nick Hanauer:
Thank you, neoliberalism.
Matthew Stewart:
You’re right though, Nick, about the politics. I mean, the politic also is a big issue. I’d be curious to hear how you connect those issues, all the anxiety and so on that results from these structural economic factors to our politics?
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. I mean, I think what we’ve believed for a really long time is that the massive economic inequality that we’ve seen in our society has effectively shredded the reciprocity norms that make social cohesion and democracy possible. And you can’t heal that with better political speeches, you can only heal that by paying most people in the economy substantially more, and a few people at the top, a little bit less. But short of that, you cannot fix this problem any other way. Which I think is effectively the central argument in your book that it takes more than talk, you have to actually change the socioeconomic relationships. So most people both are and feel like they’re included in and enfranchised.
Matthew Stewart:
Yeah. No. And thanks for pointing out that that is a central argument of my book, because for me, that is really important. And in some ways, that is why I thought it was worth concentrating on the 9.9%, because culturally the biggest problem with the political culture of the 9.9% is that it’s very happy to talk about all kinds of solutions, as long as they don’t address the big structural problems that we have, big structural economic problems. And I would just like to convey the point that you stated here so eloquently, Nick, that unless we pay people better, they’re going to be on happy and no grand speeches and no amount of virtue signaling and showing just how enlightened we are is going to get us very far.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s right. Yeah. So we love to complain about the traffic, but aren’t willing to not jump in our Suburbans every morning with a few of our children and drive them across town to the private schools that they attend.
Matthew Stewart:
Right.
David Goldstein:
Right. And as you also point out, Matthew, that this really speaks to a fundamental misunderstanding of where wealth comes from. We, in the 9.9%, like to think that we’re here because we made the right choices and we’re talented, and we work hard and we’ve produced this wealth, but that’s not where wealth actually comes from.
Matthew Stewart:
Yeah. I mean, this is one of the ways in which I think an unequal society starts to become really unreasonable. It doesn’t understand where value actually comes from. So I just take it as a very simple premise that most of the value that human societies produce comes from cooperation, comes from getting people to figure out how to work together. Some of it definitely comes from maximizing individual talents because some people are really, really good at something or other. But in the broad mix of things, what matters far more is getting people to work together in happy, coherent, ethical ways. And what happens as inequality rises is that people develop a completely different theory. They think that there are a handful of superheroes, that somehow, people like Elon Musk have IQs that can’t be measured with an ordinary computing device because they’re just so much better in every possible way. And that same logic extends farther down so that the people in the 9.9%, well they’re generating all the wealth out of their pure brain power and they really don’t need anybody else. And of course this is a delusional state of being, this is just false. So it’s not just that they’re claiming more than they observe, in my mind, it’s that they’re mis-analyzing where the wealth comes from. So I want to write a book called the origin of wealth, but I hear the title’s already been taken.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, that title is taken. So Matthew, let’s finish the interview up by talking about what we should do? What as Americans can we do to address this problem?
Matthew Stewart:
Yeah. That’s really important. Of course I write books, and I read about history of ideas and so on, so I’m really a pretty bad person to ask for specific policy advice. So some of my suggestions are quite general and I think one is that I would like us collectively to think big and think politically. When I say think big, I mean, I don’t think just adding a public option on health care is quite enough, I think we need to go farther than that. I think that we should be thinking, being in the sense of an economic bill of rights along the lines that FDR proposed. And I think that we have to do that politically. So I want to start with that because I don’t think that we can solve many of these problems without being political and without thinking about how these things can be implemented.
But there is of course, some room for individual action and community action. And I think that there, it’s a matter of, I think people looking at the local organizations in which they’re involved and seeing how they can be improved. I mean, you don’t have to be a nimby and you don’t have to take a narrow minded view of how to have a better community around you. And you don’t have to just move into the so-called good public school zone because you’ve been told basically it’s a white school zone or something like that. So there are a lot of decisions that people can make that would perhaps free them up and also help open up the system from the ground. But I do think that most of the real action is going to have to be political and hopefully it will involve some significant change.
David Goldstein:
How important is self-awareness?
Matthew Stewart:
Well, I think that self-awareness is critical. And I have to say, I’m into a little bit of a chicken and egg paradox here, because my argument is that the economic structural factors are really working against self-awareness. I mean, when it’s in our economic interest not to be self-aware, we tend to not be self aware. But that’s what we have to fight, because I think that that’s what’s… If we could break, and this is the point, this is where books are useful, if we can break some number of people out of the narrow forms of thinking that economic conditions create, well then I think that that can move things forward. So at the end of the day, if we were all self-aware, we probably wouldn’t be facing most of these problems.
Nick Hanauer:
So, one final question, why do you do this work?
Matthew Stewart:
You know, I have limited abilities to contribute in a useful way to society. So for me, it’s just my one limited gift is writing, I think. And so I feel that if I can get the words out right, and get the message out right, it can shape a few people and make a slightly better world. That’s that’s my schtick.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s a great answer. Well, thank you again for being on the podcast, again.
David Goldstein:
Yeah.
Matthew Stewart:
Yeah. My pleasure. I’m happy to come.
Nick Hanauer:
And best of luck with the book, we think it’s really important.
David Goldstein:
Yeah. Absolutely love the book.
Matthew Stewart:
Oh, that’s great. Well, thanks for having me again.
Nick Hanauer:
We’ll talk soon.
So Goldy, do you feel guilty?
David Goldstein:
Well, you know me, Nick, I was raised to feel guilty. That’s just all a part of growing and being Jewish. But yeah, as I mentioned before the interview, I see myself in this book in a lot of ways as a white male who went to an elite college and he spends a lot of time talking about elite education and how twisted it is. I look at myself and comparing myself to my cohort, throughout out my life, Nick, I made a lot of decisions against building wealth and earning a lot of money. When the opportunities came along, I went the other way and pursued other interests. And yet, despite all of the bad economic choices I made, I still find myself in the 9.9% percent. And it’s largely due to the privilege of having grown up in the 9.9%.
My story is really very typical. My parents sent me to an elite college and I came out with relatively little student debt. And I graduated in 1985 into a job market where, oh, you’re a smart kid from a good school. Here’s the equivalent of $75,000 a year. And don’t worry, we’ll train you on the job. Largely I’m in the 9.9% due to buying a house in Seattle, which by the way, I couldn’t have bought without a down payment from my mother who, by the way, the house I grew up in outside of Philadelphia was bought with a down payment from her father. So it’s this perpetuation where once you’re in it, you’ve got all these advantages that set you up. And to be honest, a lot of the stupid choices I made, well they’re not stupid, I don’t regret them, but a lot of the choices I made in my life that were not based on money, I was able to make because I had the privilege of knowing that I always had this family support system to fall back on if I ever needed it. And the fact that I didn’t largely need it doesn’t mean it wasn’t there and didn’t guide me through my life.
And so I feel charmed that I’ve been able to end up as comfortably as I did. And on the other hand, I also see the precarity of it. I mean, I got to tell you, I was not making much money before I went to work for you and I hadn’t made much money for a decade. And my lifestyle has hardly changed at all, partially out of fear of what I’ll need in retirement. But also because honestly, Nick, I want to leave my daughter something because I don’t want her to fall out of the 9.9% because I see how mean and difficult it is out there for 90% of Americans. And it doesn’t have to be this way.
Nick Hanauer:
No. I think that the thing to really recognize is that I’ve seen the enemy and it is us, right? We have created these circumstances for ourselves. The fact that we’re all competing madly to get our kids on select sports teams and into the best colleges and turning ourselves inside, out into pretzels, these are choices is that we made collectively as a society. And we could undo them as easily as we did them, if we had the clarity of purpose and the moral intentionality that we should have. It is a terrible shame, but again, at the end of the day, Matthew’s argument and his book reinforces, I think, a really fundamental premise of the podcast, which is that, if we want the country to be better, then people have to feel better. And if they want them to feel better, they’re going to have to actually do better and to actually do better, we’re going to have to pay them more. And if we did, a lot of this stuff would melt away, both the math inequality, but also the cultural pathologies that come along with it. And I think at the end of the day, that’s what it’s all about.
David Goldstein:
Right. In the end, it all comes down to inequality and maybe those of us in the 9.9% wouldn’t be so jealously guarding our wealth and our status if the cliff that we’ve created wasn’t so steep.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. Absolutely. That’s it.
David Goldstein:
On the next episode of Pitchfork Economics, we’ll be talking with journalists, David Wessel about how a program that promised to drive economic development into struggling communities turned out to be a gold rush for the super rich.
Speaker 4:
Pitchfork Economics is produced by Civic Ventures. If you like the show, make sure to subscribe, rate and review us wherever you get your podcasts. Find us on Twitter and Facebook at @CivicAction and @NickHanauer. Follow our writing on Medium at Civic Skunk Works, and peek behind the podcast scenes on Instagram @PitchforkEconomics. As always, from our team at Civic Ventures, thanks for listening. See you next week.