It’s our 300th episode! To mark this milestone, we’ve gathered some of the most thoughtful and inspiring answers to one of our favorite questions: Why do you do this work? Plus, Nick and Goldy share what keeps them in the fight for a better economy. We’re deeply grateful for the wisdom of our incredible guests and, most of all, for YOU—our listeners—who’ve supported us along the way. Here’s to many more conversations unpacking who gets what and why in our economy, and how to build the economy from the middle out.
Love what you’re hearing on the pod? Follow us on social media using the links below for updates and spicy takes on the economy! And if you haven’t already, make sure to follow the show so you never miss an episode. While you’re at it, give us a rating and leave a review wherever you get your podcasts—it helps us reach more people interested in rethinking or better understanding the economy and want to build a better future. Thanks for listening!
Guests Featured:
Jared Bernstein – Chair, White House Council of Economic Advisors
Reshma Saujani – Founder, Girls Who Code and the Marshall Plan for Moms
Mark Blyth – Political Economist and author of Diminishing Returns: The New Politics of Growth and Stagnation
Rohit Chopra – Director, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB)
Joseph Stiglitz (3-time guest) – Economist and author of The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society
Caitlin Myers – Professor of Economics at Middlebury College and Co-Director of the Middlebury Initiative for Data and Digital Methods
Kim Stanley Robinson – American Science Fiction writer and author of The Ministry for the Future
Marshall Steinbaum (2-time guest) – Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Utah and a Senior Fellow in Higher Education Finance at Jain Family Institute
Elizabeth Anderson – Professor of Public Philosophy at the University of Michigan and author of Hijacked: How Neoliberalism Turned the Work Ethic against Workers and How Workers Can Take It Back
Bharat Ramamurti – Former Deputy Director of the White House National Economic Council
Elizabeth Wilkins – Senior Fellow at the American Economic Liberties Project and former Director of the Office of Policy and Planning at the Federal Trade Commission
Website: https://pitchforkeconomics.com
Twitter: @PitchforkEcon, @NickHanauer, @civicaction
Instagram: @pitchforkeconomics
Threads: pitchforkeconomics
YouTube: @pitchforkeconomics
Substack: The Pitch
Goldy :
I know it’s been easy to lose track of time, Nick, since the pandemic living now in the aftertimes. But did you know that this is our 300th Pitchfork Economics episode?
Nick:
Goldy, it turns out I did not know that until you told me that two minutes ago. I did not know.
Goldy :
Can you believe it, Nick? We’ve been doing this particular podcast since December of 2018.
Nick:
Time flies when you’re having fun. Wow! That is amazing.
Goldy :
And I have to tell you, I don’t think that I have ever in my life managed to have such long and in-depth conversations with my employer without ultimately getting myself fired. You have set a record here in toleration.
Nick:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow, that’s amazing. 300 episodes. Cheaper creepers. Who’d a thunk it?
Goldy :
That’s a lot of talk about economics.
Nick:
Yeah, it is.
Goldy :
More than most people can bear. But the thing is, we don’t just talk about economics, obviously. We take all this personally because economics should be personal. It’s not just math and models and charts and whatever. Well, that’s the theory, however it works out in the real world. And one of my favorite parts, and I know it’s one of your favorite parts of the podcast, is at the very end when we ask that final question, why do you do this work?
Nick:
Yeah, it’s always interesting to hear that answer. People come from all sorts of different places and have all sorts of different motivations for doing what they do. Goldy, it’s an interesting question to ask, particularly if you were in this business. Because when I go to meet with people in Washington, D.C., the White House, and so on and so forth, and throughout the ecosystem of folks who work on progressive causes and particular progressive economic causes, I mean, virtually all of them could go make twice as much money doing something else, right?
Goldy :
Yeah. I’m pretty much the only one in this business who couldn’t.
Nick:
Probably. Probably. But the folks that we talk to on a day-to-day basis and the people that I work with, all of them could have sold out to the man. All of them could have gone done econ for Amazon or Goldman Sachs or whatever and made not twice as much money, 10 times as much money.
Goldy :
And some of them eventually do. It happens.
Nick:
Some of them eventually do. It does happen, but the folks who end up in our orbit are deeply moved by the need or desire to make the world a better place, are so moved by that that they’re willing to sacrifice a lot economically to do that. That’s why I think that question is so interesting. It’s not an interesting question if you’re interviewing hedge fund managers.
Goldy :
I do this work because I make $100 million a year.
Nick:
It’s the easiest way I can find…
Goldy :
Who wouldn’t do that? I just sit at a desk and tap a few numbers and I’m rich. Market’s amazing. They work for everybody who has $100 million to start with.
Nick:
It’s an interesting question because so many of the people, virtually all of the people that we talk to, have from a compensation point of view so many other better options.
Goldy :
When you get a PhD or a law degree, there’s a lot of opportunity there to make money.
Nick:
Absolutely.
Goldy :
Like in economics. Economics is one of those PhDs that you can make money off of.
Nick:
Or a master’s degree, even an undergrad degree or a law degree. You can soldier in the bowels of the Department of Justice for 100 grand a year. You go sell out to Skadden, Arps and make a million. And so it is a really interesting question, what motivates people, where that motivation comes from, what happened in their lives to make them want to choose this path?
Goldy :
And some of them are incredibly personal and heartfelt. It comes out of their personal experience.
Nick:
No, it’s really true.
Goldy :
People who rose out of struggle and poverty, who could have pursued much greater remuneration, but they recognize, and we’ve talked about this, how lucky they were to be not just smart and talented and hardworking, but lucky they were to be the ones that got out and they feel an obligation to give something back. I’m not sure that we’ve asked that question of each other.
Nick:
Okay, you go first.
Goldy :
Go first?
Nick:
You go first.
Goldy :
Specifically, why do we do this podcast? Why do I do this?
Nick:
Well, there you have it.
Goldy :
Well, obviously in terms of the broader work and the podcast, I obviously do this because you are paying me the market clearing price for my labor. Just like all humans, I’m a sucker for equilibrium. There could be no other explanation for why I’m doing this and not something else. And if I was doing nothing, it would be because I wanted to be voluntarily unemployed.
Nick:
Yes.
Goldy :
Did I get the Orthodox economics?
Nick:
Mostly right. Yeah, mostly right.
Goldy :
Mostly right on that one? Oh, well, the podcast, man, it’s so much fun.
Nick:
Yeah. It’s really interesting.
Goldy :
The do-gooding aside, I mean, I have to say, I’ve been doing activism, blogging, journalism, whatever it is that I do for you for more than 20 years now, Nick. And very personal to this podcast, the thing that I take the greatest satisfaction in, I’m sorry to tell you, is not the paycheck that you send me every two weeks. The thing that I have taken the greatest satisfaction in actually comes from the works that brought me to you. And that is I feel I know that I played a substantial role more than some people might know in passing a $15 minimum wage in Seattle.
Nick:
Yeah, for sure.
Goldy :
There were a certain sequence of events that happened that my work as an activist journalist helped trigger. And I know that passing the $15 minimum wage in Seattle spurred minimum wage measures in cities and counties and states around the world. And therefore, and I assume you take a lot of pride and pleasure in this as well, you know that the work we have done, while it’s hard to quantify how much of it we contributed to, we know that we contributed to improving the lives of tens of millions of Americans through higher wages in what was really an improbable quest.
Nick:
But there are 10 more things like that.
Goldy :
Right, but this is the one for me that is easiest to quantify. That was a big win. When you’re done with your life’s work and you can point to at least one thing that you’ve accomplished, that you believe has changed the world for the better, that it’s improved other people’s lives, I can say that if everything else was a waste, it was worth it just for that. I know that I contributed.
I played my own role. It wasn’t just me. It was a lot of people, but I know that I contributed in a way that in that moment maybe nobody else could have. And I’m okay with what I’ve done with my life, whatever else happens. On a more personal note, like I said, this is just so much fun, and we’ve talked about this on the podcast before, particularly this is the greatest book club ever. It’s just me and you and the author of the book on so many of these episodes.
Nick:
And if it’s not a book, it’s an idea or a policy agenda or whatever it is, but it is some consequential, interesting, challenging set of ideas that we need to explore.
Goldy :
And there’s a lot of criticism of elite education, but one thing if you take advantage of it at an elite Ivy League school is this chance to be in a very small class with just a few students and a professor. And when you have a question on a complicated subject, and a lot of these are, you get to ask and talk about it and have a back and forth, this dialogue, which is so much more illuminating than just reading. And that’s what I feel like. I feel like I’m back in that seminar again and it’s great. It’s just so intellectually satisfying. How about you, Nick?
Nick:
I completely agree with the way in which you reasoned about why we do this work.
Goldy :
The equilibrium.
Nick:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Goldy :
You feel like we’re meeting your market caring price.
Nick:
Yeah, but I’ve always wanted to live a life of consequence. I wanted to have a life of meaning. And the most meaningful thing I think you can do in your life is make life better for other people. And the way to do that at scale is economics. I, of course, could not do any of this.
I could use the money that we spend to do all these projects on C3 donations to soup kitchens and so on and so forth, and I would be able to help directly thousands of people, but not tens of millions, not hundreds of millions. And the thing about our work is that when it works, it works at scale.
Goldy :
Yes, it does.
Nick:
Those are very consequential things, whether it’s the minimum wage, the overtime threshold, another one of our pet projects. I mean, most folks on this podcast don’t know, but in Washington State, the overtime threshold is going to reach approximately $70,000 this year, probably the highest in the nation.
Goldy :
Everybody who earns under $70,000, whatever that number becomes because we’ve indexed it, everybody who earns under that threshold must be paid time and a half for every hour worked over 40 hours a week.
Nick:
And we’ve helped other states raise their thresholds and certainly had a big part in the federal government raising their threshold to $58,000 a year, which will hopefully soon be implemented if we can get through the courts, of course. But anyway, all these interventions make a huge difference to tens of millions of people.
Goldy :
Also, Nick, though we don’t talk about it much on the podcast, our office is 90% economic inequality, 10% gun violence prevention. And we’ve done really remarkably consequential work in that realm that literally you can quantify has saved lives.
Nick:
Oh, for sure, for sure. And most people listening to our Pitchfork Economics Podcast don’t know that Civic Ventures runs the gun violence politics for… Or one of our organizations runs the gun violence politics for the State of Washington and now three or four other states. And we’ve passed, I don’t know, 60 laws or something like that, and four statewide initiatives and made a big impact.
Goldy :
And beat the NRA out of our state.
Nick:
That’s right.
Goldy :
They’re not even competitive here anymore. Actually both NRAs, the National Rifle Association and the National Restaurant Association.
Nick:
The other NRA.
Goldy :
The other NRA.
Nick:
So all of that, and cripes, we’ve done tons of other things across a range of issues. But all of this work, of course, is very, very satisfying and worth devoting your time, money, and thinking to, and it’s what makes life go around. I think we’re both very lucky to get to do this. I’m lucky I can afford to do it. You’re lucky that you get to work for me and get to do it.
Goldy :
Well, that means I can afford to do it too. Honestly, Nick, I shouldn’t tell you this, I’d do it for free. And in fact, as you know, for about a decade before I started working for you, I did do it virtually for free. But one other thing that’s really satisfying, Nick, about this is having a really appreciative audience who we can share these conversations with, because we wouldn’t be doing this at all if nobody was listening.
And I know a lot of you are probably like public radio listeners and you hear during pledge drive that we couldn’t do this without you and they’re talking about your generous contributions. We don’t ask you for generous contributions.
Nick:
We actually do do this without you.
Goldy :
Well, but we don’t. This is my point. We don’t need your generous contributions to do this without you because we have a grant from Nick Hanauer.
Nick:
Me.
Goldy :
That’s right. He pays for this. Let’s put it this way. Without our audience, Nick, it would be a vanity project.
Nick:
No. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No.
Goldy :
But with our audience.
Nick:
We’ve had over 7 million downloads, which is a crap load of downloads.
Goldy :
It’s a lot. It makes us… You know how it is, Nick, to be like in the top 1% is nothing compared to being in the top .001% like you are. It’s like that in the podcast world. We’re not Joe Rogan, but we’re still a top podcast in the scheme of things, and big enough, by the way, that we could sell ads. We could at least cover our costs by selling ads, and we don’t.
And all we ask in return from our loyal listeners is that you tune in. You follow the show. You share it with friends. We’ll tell you, because our goal is just to have as many listeners as possible. We want you to rate it and review it and do what you can to promote the show for us, because this is all about sharing ideas, really important ideas that can and do change the world hopefully for the better.
Nick:
Absolutely.
Goldy :
We hope you enjoy this show as much as we enjoy doing it.
Nick:
And now Goldy, we’re going to get the best of why do you do this work from many of our guests. That should be really interesting too.
Goldy :
Yeah, and I’d wager that most of them are better than the one that we just did.
Nick:
Yes, exactly.
Jared Bernstein:
I am Jared Bernstein. I chair President Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers.
Nick:
And one final question, why do you do this work?
Jared Bernstein:
I’m not going to say that I’m good at it, but it’s the only thing that I do okay, I think. So part of it is just personal proclivities. You try to do what you’re least bad at. It is really… So you said it earlier, Nick. You and I have been talking about this stuff forever. So you and I would be sitting around in a ratty old couch in the boardroom of some underfunded think tank talking about, what’s this all about? We thought we had it right, but not too many people were listening to us.
Thanks to President Biden, we’ve had a chance to implement a common sense agenda that we thought would have many of the very outcomes that we’re seeing. And to be able to sit here and talk to the president about this, to brief him on a jobs report, calls me from Air Force One the other night and says, “Wow! Tell me about what just happened with the jobs number,” and I can talk about this in a way that resonates with him.
That’s why I do this work because I think that an economy that is failing to reach the people who need it most is a huge problem. And an economy that’s reaching folks who would otherwise be left behind is my life’s work. And I know your life’s work. And to be able to do that life work from here, tremendous privilege. That’s why I do it.
Reshma Saujani:
My name is Reshma Saujani. I’m the founder and CEO of the Marshall Plan for Moms and the founder of Girls Who Code and the author of Pay Up: The Future of Women and Work (and Why It’s Different Than You Think).
Nick:
Why do you do this work?
Reshma Saujani:
I’m a Hindu, and in my religion, they say that you’re put on earth to do something, and to figure out your life is about figuring out what that thing is. Ever since I’ve been a little girl, I’ve been a warrior. I have just always fought for the most vulnerable. And so for me, it started with girls and giving them…
I built Girls Who Code, not to teach them just to code, but to give them economic opportunity, to have them march up into the middle class, to leave homeless shelters and get jobs in tech, or maybe you can change… And that happened. And then I found myself in the pandemic just looking at what really pissed me off was the school closure decision. It pissed me off and it terrified me that they didn’t even think about us and they knew who was doing that work.
I have been, as a feminist, as an activist, have been just fighting for the wrong things, focused on the wrong things. I want to change the lives and the trajectory of 40 million mothers. And to do that, this is my focus. It’s the next movement that I’m building, and I feel just as passionately about this as I did 10 years ago when I built Girls Who Code.
Mark Blyth:
My name is Mark Blyth. I’m a political economist. I teach and work at Brown University, and I’ve most recently published a book called Diminishing Returns, which is about underlying growth models of capitalism and where all the growth went.
Nick:
So one final question, why do you do this work?
Mark Blyth:
I wasn’t meant to do this work. I was basically meant to be a professional musician, but then I realized something that’s true about life in general. There’s no shortage of talent, only opportunity, and there’s always someone who’s better than you. So I gave that up after trying it in New York for a while, and I finished my PhD. And I discovered that I’m good at this. I’m not the best.
Other people are better than me in different things and all the rest of it, but I figure I can contribute. I enjoy teaching. I enjoy research. But now, particularly this moment, I have an 11-year-old, and I want her to actually have a future. So if we are not focusing on this stuff, if we are talking about trivia, if we are doing the politics of distraction, you’re putting my 11-year-old’s future and everyone else in her generation in deep, deep risk, and that is unacceptable.
Rohit Chopra:
This is Rohit Chopra. I’m the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau or CFPB.
Nick:
Why do you do this work?
Rohit Chopra:
I think that I don’t want to be someone who’s just mad. I think it can become really easy to feel ticked off about how the system is working. But the only way that I can channel that energy is to find a way to fix it. And I think we’re lucky here at the CFPB. We have a whole crew of people who are really every day just trying to fix things. And we’re lucky that the results we’ve delivered are real, billions of dollars that are back into people’s pockets, but a sense that there is not going to be just someone watching on the sidelines while people get ripped off. And I really love that.
Joe Stiglitz:
I am Joe Stiglitz. I’m a professor of economics at Columbia University. I’ve just written a book called The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society.
Nick:
And one final question, why do you do this work?
Joe Stiglitz:
I guess I’d say I love my work, but I entered economics because I was concerned about issues of inequality. I had thought I was going to be a theoretical physicist. That was my aspiration. But the problems of our society just kept getting at me and I couldn’t put them aside. And so my junior year in college, at the end of my junior year, I said, that’s what I want to do with my life.
Nick:
That’s great. In what year was that?
Joe Stiglitz:
That was 1963.
Nick:
Okay, interesting.
Joe Stiglitz:
61 years ago. When you make a decision like that, you don’t know where it’s going to land you. And it turned out it was a good decision in terms of my having a life that I found intellectually interesting and stimulating in so many ways.
Caitlin Myers:
I’m Caitlin Myers. I’m an applied microeconomist at Middlebury College. I am also the co-director of Middlebury’s Data Science and Digital Methods Initiative.
Speaker 1:
We always wrap up by asking one final question, and that question is, why do you do this work?
Caitlin Myers:
I do this work because I am fascinated by questions of why and how, of really diving into understanding why and how the social phenomena that we see around us have come to be. Being a social scientist is a really interesting job. And for me, a bit more than a decade ago, I became interested in why and how the gender gap in economic outcomes had come to be and what was continuing to maintain it.
And you can’t start answering that question without getting interested in reproductive autonomy and reproductive control. Abortion access, again and again, kept appearing in the data and the analysis as a really important part of the story.
Kim Stanley Robinson:
I am Kim Stanley Robinson. I am an American science fiction writer and the author of The Ministry for the Future.
Nick:
Stan, we have one final question, which is why do you do this work?
Kim Stanley Robinson:
So as an English major and just a lover of novels, I early on decided I would like to write novels myself and slowly taught myself the craft of it. So as I decided to set my fiction in the future, or really something decided in me and I had to follow it, I was forced to try to think out what makes a novel feel real. And there you end up at economics.
You end up trying to express the totality by understanding its economic system and how much that influences everything else, which is a project you guys are already onto. So that’s why I do this. You could, and it would be tedious to do so, go back to my novels of the late ’80s when I was a young man. They get more and more obsessed by political economy as being utopian science fiction.
If you want to present a better world, it’s going to have to have a better political economy than this world right now, right? So I’m a utopian science fiction writer because I would like to help to make a better world. And so novels have use value, and then I get dragged into all the rest of it as a kind of necessary corollary to my main project.
Marshall Steinbaum:
I’m Marshall Steinbaum, assistant professor of Economics at the University of Utah. I study labor markets and in particular power imbalance between employers and employees and labor markets. And that is what I always enjoy discussing with you.
Nick:
One final question, why do you do this work?
Marshall Steinbaum:
To empower workers. Having studied the question of why workers are disempowered, this is a big reason why. There’s lots of complicated legal shenanigans going on behind the scenes that have the effect of segregating workers away from profits and segregating away from one another so that they can’t join together collectively bargain and seek an equitable distribution of power and resources.
And I view all of what we’ve been talking about today as necessary conditions for restoring and building an equitable political economy in the labor market and the country and economy as a whole.
Elizabeth Anderson:
I’m Elizabeth Anderson. I’m Max Shaye Professor of Public Philosophy at University of Michigan, and my new book is called Hijacked: How Neoliberalism Turned the Work Ethic against Workers and How Workers Can Take It Back.
Nick:
Why do you do this work?
Elizabeth Anderson:
Why do I do this work?
Nick:
Yes, ma’am. Be consistent here with your book.
Elizabeth Anderson:
Yeah, yeah. Well, political philosophers want to basically enable people to understand the path in order both to recognize the ways in which we’ve gone wrong, but also to provide resources for thinking about how to make the world better. And in uncovering this tradition of the work ethic, I think I’m doing both things.
One, showing how the work ethic in part originated from some pretty problematic ideas, which we’ve carried with us without justification, but then in another part actually has major resources for uplifting the status of workers and for creatively thinking about how to make our work lives better. And so that’s what gives me meaning in life is I’m supplying ideas for people that I hope can help us remake the world in better ways.
Bharat Ramamurti:
It’s Bharat Ramamurti. I’m the deputy director of the National Economic Council at the White House.
Nick:
Final question, why do you do this work?
Bharat Ramamurti:
Look, I do it because there’s no better feeling than seeing the American public benefit from some of the things that you do. I remember after we worked hard on finishing those hearing aid rules and getting them in place last fall, walking into an electronic store and seeing a booth set up where people were talking to the store employees and trying on different hearing aids and realizing that, hey, maybe that was a person who couldn’t afford a $5,000 pair of hearing aids and maybe missed some conversations and couldn’t fully participate in social interactions because they were having trouble hearing.
But now we’ve given them an option for a lower cost hearing aid that they could afford, and now they would be able to do all of those things. That means a lot when I see workers with disabilities working at the highest rate that they’ve ever worked at. I think you think about all the people who’ve been maybe excluded from economic opportunity in the past who are now getting that chance to show what they can do.
That’s a good feeling to wake up to every morning, is the feeling that maybe you can do something good for people out there. What we’re working on, not everything, but most of what we’ve done has really worked, and that’s a good feeling.
Elizabeth Wilkins:
My name is Elizabeth Wilkins. I was formerly the Chief of Staff at the Federal Trade Commission and also the Director of Policy.
Nick:
And one final question, why do you do this work?
Elizabeth Wilkins:
Oh, man, I love that question. Thank you for asking. I was very lucky growing up. I consider myself someone who grew up with a lot of privilege. I’m African American, but I was the daughter of two professors, one of whom was a civil rights leader, my father, for his whole career. And I just grew up with this sense of responsibility that I had been born into a set of privileges.
I’d won the lottery basically, and I didn’t do anything to deserve it. I was just lucky. And I didn’t have to feel guilty about that. I just had to make sure that I was using that to make sure that the world looked more like that for other people. My dad, every day when I went to school, he’d give me a hug and he would say, “Use this day well,” And I think that’s what he meant.
Every single day how can I use this day to make the world a little bit of a better place in whatever sphere? If I’m five years old, that means that I hold some kid’s hand when they’re crying. When I’m 40 years old, then here we are. So I think that’s been kind of my guiding principle for my whole career. I have learned an enormous amount working in all kinds of places, like I started my career off at SEIU organizing workers.
I’ve always believed in creating more power for people, creating a world in which people have true governance over the meaningful choices in their lives. I have found my skills and talents to be best applied in the government sphere as a regulator. And so that’s how I found myself in most of the places that I’ve been in. And humbly, I hope I’ve made a difference.
Goldy :
Pitchfork Economics is produced by Civic Ventures. If you like the show, make sure to follow, rate, and review us wherever you get your podcasts. Find us on other platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Threads @PitchforkEconomics. Nick’s on Twitter and Facebook as well @NickHanauer. For more content from us, you can subscribe to our weekly newsletter, The Pitch, over on Substack.
And for links to everything we just mentioned, plus transcripts and more, visit our website, PitchforkEconomics.com. As always, from our team at Civic Ventures, thanks for listening. See you next week.