Why have wages for working Americans stagnated for decades—even as productivity, corporate profits, and the wealth of the people at the top continued to rise? The mainstream explanations are familiar: automation, globalization, education, or simply the unavoidable forces of the market—but wage stagnation was not inevitable. It was the result of policy choices. This week, we’re revisiting a conversation with economists Lawrence Mishel and Josh Bivens about the decisions that reshaped the American economy, weakened worker bargaining power, and made it harder for working people to claim their share of the prosperity they helped create. As we continue sharing more about Market Humanism—the idea that markets are human-built systems shaped by rules and power—this conversation feels especially relevant. The economy we have did not emerge naturally. It was built. And that means it can be rebuilt.

Radical and rising economic inequality is no secret — and now, thanks to new research from the Economic Policy Institute, neither is its price tag nor its cause. There’s never been a study quite like this — one which places specific, real dollar amounts on every trickle-down policy American politicians have embraced. The study’s authors, Larry Mishel and Josh Bivens, explain how their work  reveals that the massive upward redistribution of income our nation has suffered these past four decades can largely be attributed to policies intentionally designed to suppress the wages of American workers.

Lawrence Mishel is a distinguished fellow at EPI after serving as president from 2002-2017. In the more than three decades he has been with EPI, Mishel has helped build it into the nation’s premier research organization focused on U.S. living standards and labor markets.