This week, Nick and Goldy talk to Katharina Pistor, a legal scholar and professor at Columbia Law School, about her book “The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality.” Pistor sheds light on how the law shapes the distribution of power and wealth in society. They explore the way that law’s prioritization of capital has changed over time and its contribution to rising economic inequality within and between nations. Pistor also explains how we can reconfigure the legal playing field to address economic inequality.
Katharina Pistor is a legal scholar and author known for her expertise in the fields of law and finance. She is currently the Edwin B. Parker Professor of Comparative Law at Columbia Law School, where she also serves as the Director of the Center on Global Legal Transformation. Pistor has published extensively on topics such as property rights, financial regulation, and the role of law in shaping economic systems.
Her most recent book, “The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality,” explores the ways in which legal systems around the world have been designed to benefit capital owners and perpetuate wealth inequality.
Further reading:
The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality
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Nick Hanauer :
The rising inequality and growing political instability that we see today are the direct result of decades of bad economic theory.
Speaker 2:
It’s time to build our economy from the bottom up and from the middle out, not the top-down.
Nick Hanauer :
Middle-out economics is the answer.
Speaker 2:
Because Wall Street didn’t build this country. Great middle class built this country.
Nick Hanauer :
The more the middle class thrives, the better the economy is for everyone, even rich people like me.
Katharina Pistor:
This is Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer, a podcast about how to build the economy from the middle-out. Welcome to the show.
Goldy:
We talk a lot about capitalism on this pod, Nick, but you know what we haven’t really discussed? We haven’t looked into what the hell is capital.
Nick Hanauer :
Yeah, it’s true. We sort of assume that we know what it is and where it comes from and what form it takes in the world.
Goldy:
But it’s money, right? You’re a venture capitalist, so people think it’s money or I guess if you’re an economist originally, the idea that it’s the capital where Ricardo would have said it was the physical equipment used in the process of production, making that distinction between financial capital and capital goods. But it turns out it’s a lot more complicated than that.
Nick Hanauer :
It is distressingly complicated, and our guest today hopefully will provide a little bit more clarity. Katharina Pistor is a legal scholar known for expertise in fields of law and finance, and she’s the Parker Professor of Comparative Law at Columbia Law School, and she’s just written this really fascinating book called The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality in which she, I mean, really highlights what is obvious, but I didn’t see it. How it’s really the law that creates capital and it’s-
Goldy:
In a sense that there’s no capitalism without it,
Nick Hanauer :
And that capital doesn’t really mean anything unless the law provides it with claims on profits-
Goldy:
[inaudible 00:02:36].
Nick Hanauer :
And future and enforcement. And that law can be written in a whole bunch of different ways with various different kinds of strengths of claims and who has power and who doesn’t. I guess, again, kind of obvious, but really complicated. In any case, it’s a fascinating argument. And with that, let’s talk to Katharina and try to get some clarity on it.
Katharina Pistor:
Hi, my name is Katharina Pistor. I teach at Columbia Law School in New York, and I’m the author of the Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality.
Goldy:
It was a bit of an eye-opening book for me. I hadn’t thought about this before. And one of the things that stood out to me at some point in the book, you say that capital is not a thing, it’s a quality. Could you explain what you mean by that? What qualities make an asset capital and how capital is endowed with these qualities?
Katharina Pistor:
Yeah. So I’m thinking about capital as a right, a claim to things. Very often a right or a claim to things that even happen only in the future. So if I want to make profits, I have to first make sure that these profits are generated, but I want to make sure I can capture them today. I may even want to trade a claim to these future profits today as I do when I hold shares. So it’s not really just the piece of land or it’s a corporation or a debt, but it’s the right to claim profits from others. That is key, and that’s why I’m talking about equality rather than a thing. So in my view, the law creates that quality. The law codes, the rights that come with capital onto different types of things, or even non-tangibles. Think about intellectual property rights, think about financial assets. They’re not even things that you can touch physically, but they’re just abstract claims.
Nick Hanauer :
So it’s a fascinating thesis and it’s both really complex and blindingly obvious too. Both. But could you summarize the core argument of your book for our listeners?
Katharina Pistor:
Yes. So what I’m basically saying is give me any object or promise to pay or an idea, and with the right legal coding, I can flip these things if you want, that you can flip these things into capital. And capital here is defined as an asset that has the capacity to create, generate wealth, but also protect the wealth once it has been generated. So if I have a piece of land that’s just a piece of dirt, if I’m lucky, I can harvest some fruit or produce from it. I can graze my cattle, but if I want to make money off that land, if I want to sell it for profit, I need title. And that’s what the law gives me. It gives me legal title or not. So some get legal title, others don’t.
Similarly, for a promise to pay, if I give you a loan, you can promise to repay the loan. If it’s just an empty promise, then I might not be in luck and you might just say, no, I’m not going to pay you back. What do I do? Then I can, of course, use physical force, but it’s much more convenient to say, I have a legal claim against you, and if you don’t pay, I threaten to bring you into court. And if the court gives me right, then I can use the court’s system, the bailiffs, basically the state’s enforcement power to make good on that climate to enforce against you. They can come and seize your assets, they can come and freeze your bank account, etc.
Or if I think about knowledge or ideas, if I use a new innovation that as such could be mimicked by everybody, which might just be fine because we could share all of our knowledge. But again, if I want to make money with it, I want to be the only one who has access to that asset, the only one who can make profit on it, and that requires legal titling. That requires a patent or similar intellectual property right.
Goldy:
And when you talk about legal coding, that’s not simply legislators writing a new law. You say that most of this actually is done by lawyers.
Katharina Pistor:
Yes, of course, it’s also done in law. So I think most people think of the law as something that is created top-down by the state, and it’s mostly comes in forms of regulations or maybe criminal sanctions. But we forget that a large part of our legal system really consists of property rights or contract law, law of business organizations, etc. And these things are mostly available off the shelf, so anybody can use them. Anybody can use contracts and engage with others. And the law assumes that everybody is completely equal, formally equal to enter into contracts. But of course, not everybody has the same resources. Not everybody has the same sophistication, and not everybody has the lawyers on their side, two structures, transactions in such a way that maybe one side has a better bargain than the other side.
So the coding of capital is really a process by which lawyers take existing modules. I call the modules of the code of capital such as property rights, such as contract law, such as corporate law, trust law, etc. And then they structure transactions such that their clients have better rights over others. So what the law does, it gives holders of these claims a priority rights, a better right, a stronger right than others. And that means that typically will win if there’s a dispute.
The law also creates what I call durability, which means it protects assets behind illegal shield or legal veil so they can incubate over time and prevents different claimants from putting their hands on these assets so that they can grow. The law also makes it possible to convert certain claims into safer claims. So most people think that the legal system is made by legislators that it comes top-down from the state and is used to regulate to tell them what to do and what not to do or to sanction them in criminal law.
What we forget in this image is that a lot of relations are actually coded in private law. There are horizontal relations amongst people that are not state actors and they use things like contract law, property rights, the law of business organizations, sometimes bankruptcy law to arrange their relations with one another. So the assumption of the legal system is that all parties are formally equal, that they meet each other in an open plane and then they can negotiate whatever deals are best for both of them together.
In that sense, now lawyers can come in and help their clients to get a better deal by simply using the modules of the code of capital such as property rights, such as corporate law, such as the laws associated with debt contracts including collateral to design contracts that give their clients stronger rights over others that make sure that their client’s assets are protected against too many claimants that can put their hands on them. This is what I call durability, that their clients perhaps can exchange assets that are losing in value such as financial assets in times of crisis against safer assets. The safest assets in the end is actually state-issued money. And that all of these claims are protected by the legal system, which is what I call universality, which means that somebody who claims a right of this nature can go to court or ask the police and the bailiffs to come in and help them enforce their rights against anybody who is violating them.
Goldy:
And you don’t need to be a citizen or a corporation of that jurisdiction in order to claim those rights.
Katharina Pistor:
No, in principle not. And let me just add to that, corporations themselves are creatures of that legal system, right? A corporation has been endowed through the law with certain types of features. Well, it’s a legal … Contract law is both right? Any kind of, we can make agreements amongst friends to do certain things or don’t do things. I can promise you to pay you $100,000 or a million dollars for something you give me today. If you come tomorrow, and I don’t pay, I don’t give you what you ask for. The question is whether this could be an enforceable agreement in a court of law, and that’s where law comes in.
In order to make an agreement an enforceable agreement, it has to meet certain minimum features that legal systems define. Has to be relatively precise. We have to stipulate the actions that we owe each one another, and it can’t be a completely crazy type of arrangement. So it’s minimum. But if you want to invoke the state’s power of coercion, you must have a legally enforceable claim. You can agree on all kinds of things. You can gamble and do whatever, but don’t ask the state to enforce it. If you want the state to enforce it, it becomes something that is privately agreed to. That’s the beauty of this private law that is you can actually take the law off the shelf, design contracts in all kinds of ways, and thereby even make the first step of saying, actually this is legal if somebody challenges it, and if somebody wants to challenge it, maybe then that person will have to go to court.
So we can play that game a little bit by saying, I’m just claiming something is legal and you challenge me if you want to challenge me. But ultimately, whether or not you can enforce a contract or other legal claim is decided by those guardians of the legal systems. Typically, a court. It can be a regulator, etc.
Goldy:
And as an example, you cite the merchant of Venice.
Katharina Pistor:
Yes. So that’s the example is basically what can you use as a collateral? What can you use of a collateral? And we can agree that it will be a pound of flesh, but then the question becomes, will a court ever enforce an agreement that it will be a pound of flesh or something else? And so when it does not enforce that, then this was a nice attempt, but it’s not enforceable. But if it does, then actually you can mobilize the bailiffs and the court enforcers, basically the police to make good on that claim.
Nick Hanauer :
So how has the legal coding of capital evolved over time?
Goldy:
Right. And when we use the word contract, we’re using it in a broader sense than a lot of people are familiar with. For example, the various financial instruments at the heart of the financial collapse in 2007, 2008. Those complicated financial products were contracts.
Nick Hanauer :
So, Katharina just … I’m going to reveal my ignorance here, but is contract … Never even occurred to me. Contract law is a private product?
Katharina Pistor:
Yeah, they’re actually made up of different legal devices. So at the very basic level, yes. Any financial instrument is an IOU. IOU is something to be paid at some point in the future. Either we specify it now or it’s going to be a share of the profits that I will make in the future. That’s what a financial instrument is. So it’s very hard actually. It is a contract, but then you can start playing around with the law. You can dress it up. You can give it a collateral like a pound of flesh, or you can say, actually your house, if you don’t pay, I will be able to evict you and take your house. That’s what a mortgage is all about. And then I can become even more fancy and can basically say I want to create a derivative on top of not one mortgage, but thousands of mortgages. And so then I use other legal devices such as the trust and put all the claims against lots of different house owners together in one big pool and sell interest in that pool to different investors.
So it’s contract at its heart, but then you can make it more viable, more interesting for parties to buy into it and get more investors to take part in this game by dressing it up with other legal devices.
Nick Hanauer :
So for example, and I’m not sure if this is exactly relevant, but take non-compete agreements, which we have spoken about before on the podcast. Corporations basically extended a property right to people, correct? They just asserted that the people working for them were effectively their property for call it two years after they left. And as a consequence, anything those people did that was relevant to the company was violation of their property rights and they therefore couldn’t do it. That’s a blunt example of the kind of thing you’re talking about is taking quite a simple thing and then just making it bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger over time to aggregate power, influence, and profit.
Katharina Pistor:
Well, I think it’s an interesting process. I think it’s mostly basically trial and error and using existing principles that have been validated by a court or sometimes exposed also has been validated by enacting a statute that says this is now how we do things. Take the example of a corporation. We’ve not always had business corporations. We’ve only had since the early 19th Century standard corporate law that says if you comply with these principles, then you can actually set up a corporation without requiring specific state approval. So there has been a back and forth, but once you have something that has been legitimized and legalized in law, you can start playing with it and then you can push the limits of this.
And so what resourceful private actors have done with the help of their lawyers is say, let’s try something new. Let’s try to out-compete our competitors by using legal devices to get a headstart over them. Take something as a collateral nobody else has done before, create a derivative on top of claims so we can access and even create entirely new markets so we can make more profits. So it’s basically saying we just learn something how we can create, let’s say, stronger rights over others, priority rights over others. We created property rights to land, we threw out the commoners. Maybe we can use property rights to other things such as ideas, know-how, and then make sure that we are the only ones who can use these ideas and we exclude everybody else again with the help of the state.
So once you have the ginny out of the bottle, you can play around with this. And I think that’s how capitalism has evolved, that people started playing with it and trying to ensure that what they have produced in that game is something that the courts will recognize and enforce against others. And since resourceful power also have the resources to go into court and play not only for the outcome of a particular case, but they’re also playing in the long term for the rules themselves, they want to establish certain rules that will be recognized so they can continue this game and they can continue this game also with different assets. And that’s basically how they’ve pushed the envelope over decades and centuries.
Goldy:
To what extent has the legal coding we have now, to what extent has that contributed to the rising economic inequality both within and between nations?
Katharina Pistor:
Let me start with within nations. When you think about the fact that capital is coded in law and that it is basically the product of some having better recourse to legal mechanisms that allow you to create stronger claims over others and therefore win against them and to invoke the state’s powers to make sure that they win, not always but more likely than not win, then you can easily see how it contributes to wealth creation and inequality within society. Because there is sort of a feedback loop between having resources and then being able to use the resource to hire the lawyers who can create the legal rights that you need to generate even more profits. And these resources can be fed back again, not only to win a particular battle but to win the war, which is about setting the rules of the game, right? And if you can control the rules of the game, that’s really what gives you the ability to make even more profit over time.
So that’s domestically. And I think when we can trace this back to the early Enclosure Movement in the 17th Century in England, we can trace it back to the creation of corporations to the recognition of financial instruments as quasi-property rights, et cetera, et cetera. So there one layer after the other has been put on top of each other over time to create these assets. Now internationally, I think a couple of things are happening. First of all, the same mechanisms that I described are being exported elsewhere. So we think about legal systems as being domestic, but they can have extraterritorial reach. One way to do this is to do colonization and to bring the law with you. So when England colonized the world of France, did so or Spain, they brought their own laws with them. That’s important to realize it’s not only criminal law and administrative law, it’s also the private law. So the English creditors that operated in North America during colonial times or in India used basically a common law, property rights and collateral law, et cetera, to extract resources and to make money in the colonies.
Today, we don’t colonize directly anymore, but you could say, first of all, we built on the colonial empire that has been built. So the countries that were colonized by different European powers still have that law of those countries. That private law. And on top of that, the World Bank and other international organizations are telling these countries to adapt their laws to what they call best practice, which is typically the laws of the US and the UK. And then last but not least, there is a mechanism that is also not widely understood is that all legal systems, all countries have some rules that determine which legal system applies to a particular case if more than one might be in place.
So if I enter into a contract with a friend in France, we could dispute whether it’s going to be governed by French law or American law or whether we could make a choice to say, actually we like Swiss Law because it’s neutral, or we like maybe German Law or we can choose a legal system. And over time, domestic legal systems have become more liberal to allow private parties to pick and choose the laws by which they wish to be governed. So if I can pick Delaware to set up a corporation and I can still do all my business in California or in Israel or in Italy for that matter and be recognized as a corporation, if I govern my contract under New York law or under English law, then that contract, even though the two parties might be from very different parts of the world, would have access to that legal system. And that very often would also enforce their rights under that law.
So to put it bluntly, we have right now a global legal system that is not a patchwork of 189 different legal systems playing with one another equally. But when it comes to the globally traded assets, the majority of financial assets that are traded at the global level are coded either in English law or the law of New York that is the United States.
Nick Hanauer :
So where did we go wrong? Do you think there’s a problem in all of this?
Katharina Pistor:
Well, I think a problem is because there’s basically a unilateral capture of what I think is a social resource. So our legal system is not a commodity that is up for sale, but it actually claims legitimacy on authority and should not necessarily be captured by those who have most resources to do so. So it’s difficult to say that there was a particular point where we went wrong. I think it’s a confluence of several points which have expanded the ability of private actors to use a social resource. There’s a kind of a bias built into our legal system that private ordering might be superior to public ordering. I think there has been probably a mistake at the time we created our constitutional orders, democratic constitutional orders in not thinking harder about how the private law should fit into this constitutional order. So Jonathan Levy, who has written a wonderful book about the stages of American capitalism, he has made this point very simply. He says capitalism was their first then came democracy.
So the private law institutions that I talk about in my book can be traced back to feudalism, some of them all the way back to Roman law. They existed already. And then we created democracies and constitutional mechanisms to constrain state power. But we never thought very hard about how to constrain private power. And private power now use not only the old good old private law, but also constitutional protection such as the protection of property rights or the sanctity of contracts to play the game against the state and against attempts by democratic orders to rein them in.
Nick Hanauer :
So interesting and so complicated. Can you point to some examples of things that you would change?
Katharina Pistor:
Let me just start by saying property rights should be protected for certainly for individuals. It’s not clear to me that the same level of protection should be afforded to corporations. More generally, I think corporations are legal persons, but they like to claim all the rights that have been created in the impetus of freedom for individuals like me as humans, because we think the humans are weak in relationship to the state, but also in relationship maybe to majoritarian rule in a democracy. But corporations are not necessarily weak, right? They are creatures of the law, but they have claimed, especially in this country, not only property rights and the right to contract, et cetera, but they have also claimed the freedom of speech and even religious rights if you look at the Supreme Court rulings. So they have expanded the scope of their powers and claimed things that I think were done for humans and should be done for humans.
And humans in my view, should have the same kind of rights against corporations that they have otherwise against states. So we have basically enabled the emergence of private power with tools that pre-existed our constitutional order that can now be used or have always been used to some extent, but excessively so today can now be used against state power and democratic self-governance.
Goldy:
But of course, we can use our democracy to change this code and rein in these actors. For example, we’ve done that. We were talking about non-competes. We’ve passed regulations essentially outlawing them.
Katharina Pistor:
Correct. And I think we could do more. We have to reckon with the fact however, that there will be claims for let’s say expropriation. So if what I just said about corporations would be put into law in this country, I’m sure there will be expropriation claims as there have been when Germany enacted co-determination that has put employees on the boards of companies. In the seventies, there were expropriation claims made and the companies lost in Germany. I’m not sure whether they would lose here necessarily. Similarly, with non-competes, I’m sure there will be legal challenges.
I’m not saying that the powerful actors will always win these cases, but I think when you realize that these claims are referencing the law, using the law, and sometimes are built on legal structures that have given them those rights for quite some time, it’s actually not that easy to change them. I don’t want to say there’s no way out, but it’s more complicated than you might think, but better saying, let’s just pull a switch and change all that. Nonetheless, I think I would say yes. If the FTC says we will now outlaw non-competes to the shock of the world, then that’s what we are doing. And then they have to challenge it. The burden is now on them to challenge it, and then you have to just go if necessary, all the way up to the Supreme Court and see what happens.
Nick Hanauer :
Obviously, the Supreme Court in the United States is a pretty screwed up body today. So it’s hard to say. I mean, it’s a trickle-down court, so very difficult to see what will happen. But I do really want to get to an expansive part of one of our last questions, which is the benevolent dictator question because what you raise is truly fascinating. Your book is fascinating, but it’s not clear. What we often say is, okay, so if you were in charge and there were no political constraints, what would you do to make the society better and the economy stronger?
Katharina Pistor:
Yeah, I think as I said before, where I would start is basically say rights are for humans, not necessarily for organizations including private organizations. They should have more limited rights and not so many rights over others. I would try to expand the access that ordinary people have to the law, both on the law-making front and also on the law enforcement front. When you look at the way in which our system currently is configured, again in the US, it’s always an extreme case, but employees and customers very often are forced through mandatory arbitration clauses in their contracts to go through arbitration rather than directly to the courts to enforce their claims. So there has been a lot of explicit disempowerment of people who otherwise might be able to at least raise some voice.
I think more generally, you could think about how to create better access channels for people to two courts or two regulators, or even two legislative processes to empower them to participate in those processes. So I would say you need to both play offense and defense. Defense is protect the rights of individuals against, let’s say corporate power in particular. And offense is trying to reinforce and strengthen the rights of individuals vis-a-vis more powerful actors. One could go, of course, further, but I think this is what basically a first step to reconfigure the playing field.
Nick Hanauer :
And one final question. Why do you do this work?
Katharina Pistor:
Why do I do this work? I’m sort of fascinated with social systems. I’m a lawyer by training. I spent the 1990s looking at the transformation of the former socialist world after the fall of the wall. I’m from Germany originally, and I was just fascinated about what it would take to change socialist legal systems into something different. I was very concerned with the ways in which people thought you could just take out the state and then markets would emerge spontaneously. So I looked at these transformative process for a while, and after the 2008 crisis, I felt that maybe capitalism is sort of beginning a transformative process that is worthy understanding. And so I started this line of research and I’m still with it.
Nick Hanauer :
Well, thank you so much for being with us.
Katharina Pistor:
Well, thank you for having me. It’s been a pleasure. I hope I could make it a little clearer, but I do realize it is complicated.
Nick Hanauer :
It is complicated.
Katharina Pistor:
But then [inaudible 00:29:57].
Goldy:
It’s a privilege. The thing I love most about the podcast is I get to read a book again, not a lawyer. So a lot of this is new to me. And then when I have questions, I get to talk to the author. It’s the best book club ever.
Katharina Pistor:
Okay. Well, thank you. Appreciate it.
Nick Hanauer :
Well, Goldy, that was a crazy interesting and wonky discussion.
Katharina Pistor:
Mm-hmm.
Nick Hanauer :
And it’s really fascinating how when you start to peel back the layers of the onion, how true the argument really is about the impact of law and private law and just sort of this iterative process of corporations making greater and greater claims over time on what capital is and what you deserve if you have it, and the limits that other people have on claiming it back and so on and so forth. And how malleable all of this is, how not set in stone this is, how little the democratic process often has with respect to this. Don’t you think?
Goldy:
Yeah, and it gets back to a topic we’ve discussed before, Nick, and it’s come up a number of times. And that is this tension between private power and public power. That what these private lawyers are doing on behalf of their clients in encoding capital is encoding power and giving more rights to their clients than to the rest of us. And obviously, the better your lawyers, the better the results you’re going to get and the more expensive they are, and only the very wealthy and powerful can afford the best lawyers. If we leave it up to private law, you end up with this increasing inequality, not just in wealth and income, which we’ve had over the past 40, 50 years, but in power. By seeding these things to the market, we end up seeding power to the market and making our democracy weaker.
And with very real-life impacts on ordinary people. For example, one of the examples she uses in the book is in discussing intellectual property. When a company was granted a patent on the BRCA cancer mutation, it’s literally … They didn’t make it. They didn’t alter the genetic code, and they didn’t even discover that, oh, there is this mutation. They’re the ones who first figured out what the sequence of that mutation was. And I take this very personally because this is a mutation that runs in my family. And I was very fortunate to be involved in a very early study at the University of Pennsylvania where they tested us genetically in the late eighties before this was really being done widely. And fortunately, I don’t carry it. My sisters don’t carry it, my cousins don’t carry it. Apparently skipped our generation. We’re all okay.
But shortly after that, this company obtained this patent and basically prevented others from testing for this. So a test that should have cost about $150, they were charging for years and years, $3,000 for. And that didn’t just mean that people spent more money for these tests, it meant a lot fewer people got tested when they should have been because they just couldn’t afford it or their insurance wouldn’t cover it.
And eventually the court threw out, the Supreme Court threw out that patent, but it was really too late because this company still dominates the market for this kind of genetic testing because they had this monopoly for so long. They were given this commercial headstart. And that’s the sort of things that happen when we say, oh, this knowledge of this genetic mutation, the law is now going to turn that into capital that you can make profit off of for years and years and years. And that’s the sort of thing that happens all the time.
Nick Hanauer :
No, it’s true and so complex and so hard to govern.
Goldy:
Intentionally. Again, some of the book goes into incredible wonky detail on the financial instruments that were responsible for the Great Recession, the financial collapse, and so forth, and how these things were encoded and modified and encoded code upon code upon code, and again, devastating consequences. The big players mostly made out okay. They kept the fortunes that [inaudible 00:35:05].
Nick Hanauer :
They were fine.
Goldy:
That’s right. And then millions of people lost their homes and were thrown out of work and suffered a decade of stagnation and slow growth following which … And by the way, we’re still suffering from because this sort of inequality and immiseration is what has led to the fractured democracy we have today, and all the unhappiness and discontent, not just with the economy, but with democracy itself.
Nick Hanauer :
Yep, absolutely.
Goldy:
Yeah. So essentially capital, not just money, a lot of it is … It’s all made possible by the law there. Without the law and the courts, none of this would exist. But the good news, Nick, is that if it’s the law that created this inequality through this coding of capital, the law can reverse that. We can change the law.
Nick Hanauer :
That’s true.
Goldy:
It may be hard, it may be unimaginable, but it’s not impossible.
Nick Hanauer :
Impossible.
Goldy:
Again, if you want to read more from Katharina, I highly recommend her book, the Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality. You can buy that from your favorite online monopolist or a local bookstore. And of course, there will be a link in the show notes.
Speaker 5:
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 @CivicAction. And Nick Hanauer, follow our writing on medium @CivicSkunkWorks, and peek behind the podcast scenes on Instagram at Pitchfork Economics. As always, from our team at Civic Ventures, thanks for listening. See you next week.