You know the drill: Nick and Goldy answer your questions! Did we see ‘pitchforks’ at the Capitol insurrection? What should people who subscribe to the economic theories we talk about in this podcast call themselves? What are the smartest investments the average person can make for a stronger, more prosperous, more democratic America? And more!
To ask Nick and Goldy a question for a future AMA, leave us a voicemail at (731) 388-9334.
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The Pitchforks are Coming… For Us Plutocrats: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchforks-are-coming-for-us-plutocrats-108014
CORE Economics: https://www.core-econ.org/
Evonomics: https://evonomics.com/
Institute for New Economic Thinking: https://www.ineteconomics.org/
Rethinking Economics network: https://www.rethinkeconomics.org/
Raising the minimum wage leads to significant gains for workers, not to ‘benefits cliffs’: https://www.nelp.org/publication/raising-minimum-wage-leads-significant-gains-workers-not-benefits-cliffs/
Study finds increasing minimum wage does not cause loss of jobs: https://www.dailycal.org/2018/09/10/study-finds-increasing-minimum-wage-does-not-cause-loss-of-jobs/
Website: https://pitchforkeconomics.com/
Twitter: @PitchforkEcon
Instagram: @pitchforkeconomics
Nick’s twitter: @NickHanauer
Nick Hanauer:
Today we get to answer a broad variety of questions from listeners.
Jordan:
Why haven’t these people try doing the same thing with the saner economic paradigms?
Andrew:
Has your belief and free market capitalism changed?
Shannon:
My question is this, does the pursuit of a strong economy come at the expense of environmentalism?
Patrick:
What can an individual person do to push back against these systems that perpetuate unfair and undemocratic outcomes?
Annie:
From the home offices of Civic Ventures in Downtown Seattle. This is Pitchfork Economics with Nick 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. Hey Nick, with the new Biden Administration coming in I’m sure you’re getting a lot of questions from folks on social media.
Nick Hanauer:
Oh yes. And the anti minimum wage trolls come out in force freaking out. So worried about the jobs for poor people. It’s just- [crosstalk 00:01:18].
David Goldstein:
That’s right. Nothing more threatening than calling into question that a supply demand curve chart in your ECON101 textbook.
Nick Hanauer:
Oh yes. Yeah. But today we get to answer a broad variety of questions from listeners and Annie is going to even read some to us.
Annie:
Hi.
Nick Hanauer:
So, should be interesting.
Annie:
All right, let’s get started. The first one is from Jason. He says the Capitol insurrection got me to rewatch your Pitchforks are Coming TED Talk. Do you think that we witnessed pitchforks? If we did, did you ever expect it would come from this kind of mob? It never occurred to me that the pitchforks could be people that I can’t identify with.
David Goldstein:
So Nick, when you wrote The Pitchforks are Coming in 2014, did you expect they might be coming from the right?
Nick Hanauer:
Well, to be clear, I always, I’m not sure I distinguished in my head the difference between people who felt left behind who leaned left versus right. But I mean, the basic thrust of the argument is, and I think the claim that most successfully aligns with what we know from history is that if you impoverish the majority of citizens in a democracy and what social scientists now call mass immiseration, what Peter Turchin calls mass immiseration, people will lose faith in the democracy and begin to believe that it doesn’t serve them or their interests. To be clear, a lot of the people who stormed the Capitol were not economically left behind. In fact, some of them came in and private planes, they were just right-wing fascist clowns.
But the objective truth is that the majority of citizens in this country have been economically exploited for the last 45 years. And as we said, a billion times, if you make the median wage of about $50,000 a year for a full-time worker, if you’d been held harmless by the last 40 years in neoliberal economic policy, you’d make a hundred today. And that gap between 50 and a hundred is roughly why everybody feels so taken advantage of. And so I made the claim that you can’t have this kind of inequality without a police state or an uprising and here we are.
David Goldstein:
They stormed the Capitol in defense of a police state.
Nick Hanauer:
Yes. Which they believe that police state would advocate in their interests, right? And in favor of a state that wouldn’t. And I’m not sympathetic to the riders, but I’m deeply sympathetic to the anger and pain most people feel. And it’s a very dire situation. And the only good news is that the indications are that the Biden Administration from the very top down through the majority of picks that they have made to helm the levers of power absolutely understand us. I mean, I have been at this for 20 years and this is the first time that people have said some form of holy shit we better deliver.
David Goldstein:
Right. So, this is how I would sum it up, Jason, this is my take on it, I can understand why people reading that Pitchforks piece would understand it as we’re talking about people coming from the left, that it all, if you have this rising economic inequality, you’re going to get some sort of socialist revolution. And that’s clearly the first thing that’s going to jump into somebody’s head, I get that. But of course the best example of this is Weimar Germany. You had mass immiseration and you ended up with the country taken over by the far-right, by the Nazis, the fascists. And that’s what we saw in the storming of the Capitol here. That was a fascist attack on democracy.
So I think that original Pitchforks piece anticipates that because the larger argument is not necessarily that the inequality is the direct cause of a particular protest or attack it’s that it contributes to the dismantling of our democratic norms which makes something like a fascist takeover possible. And when I hear these calls now from Republicans and their fellow travelers calling for unity now, I think it’s important to point out that you can’t unite a nation that’s being divided so widely on these economic lines. You can’t have unity in the United States when 90% of Americans are being left behind.
Andrew:
This is Andrew from Los Angeles, California. And on your show, you talk about the free market as one of the greatest human utilities. And at least Nick is an avowed capitalist. My question is in your time doing the show has your belief in free market capitalism changed?
Nick Hanauer:
This is a great nuanced question. I would say that our belief in the power of markets to do the only thing that they do, which is to in an evolutionary way solve human problems is undiminished. That is why markets are the greatest social technology ever invented for increasing prosperity is because they’re an evolutionary system in which groups of people work together to solve one another’s problems. But the problem with free market capitalism and that’s something we do not believe in, we do not believe in laissez-faire capitalism, is that it tends to solve all the wrong problems like- [crosstalk 00:07:17]
David Goldstein:
It stops problems for rich people like you.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s right, exactly. Securitizing imaginary assets, which is what Wall Street did leading up to the global financial collapse is not a legitimate human problem, right? And if Wall Street had been constrained by reasonable regulation then they would have been forced to solve problems that actually created increases in human welfare. And so our healthcare system is effectively a giant price fixing scheme because the market doesn’t work very well with respect to how we’ve organized it. So, anyway, I mean, I think that our view is that if you properly constrain market forces and balance market power with democratic power, that’s about the best economic and political system that humans are likely to be able to create. A highly constrained market system that maximizes both the economic, political and civic inclusion of all citizens. And if you do that, you’ve got a pretty good society.
David Goldstein:
I’d sum this up, Andrew, by saying that we’re huge fans of the market, not so much with capitalism. And I think you need to separate the two because not every market economy is a capitalist economy like the one we have now. And when you go back definitionally to the term capitalism, it was originally coined as a pejorative to describe an economy that was run by the capitalists, by people like Nick and which they had all the power and control. And clearly we don’t want a system like that when that’s undemocratic. It has come to be understood as an economy in which the primary constraint is the availability of capital. And that may have been true a couple hundred years ago, but it’s not true today. The primary constraint on our economy is our ability to broadly include people more fully in it. There’s plenty of capital. Capital is cheap, that’s why interest rates are so low. So the calming conception of free market capitalism, we came into this not believing in it. I think if anything, Nick, over the past couple of years, we believe in it a little less.
Nick Hanauer:
I think that’s true.
Jordan:
Hi there, this is Jordan from New York. So books like Democracy in Chains tell us that 50 years ago when these guys like Hayak and [inaudible 00:09:56] handed conservatives a very well slanted roadmap to unbridled greed, several billionaires got together and started funding think tanks and working out measures to permeate the zeitgeists with this new neo-liberal philosophy. To me their cleverest coup d’etat was installing their orthodoxy into college curriculums, systematically imprinting onto the minds of the next crop of bankers and the business people and politicians and such, is that it’s their version of economics what you guys call ECON101 is not just one of the many theories, but is the conclusive description of how things work. And as a result, it’s become crazy hard to pry the brains of even most Democrats away from resorting to stuff like austerity to 60 sessions and being obsessed with balancing budgets, et cetera.
So my question is this, there are billionaires on the liberal side, why haven’t these people tried doing the same thing with the saner economic paradigms. I love your show and I definitely wish that I could turn all our lawmakers into regular listeners. And don’t think that I haven’t written several strongly worded letters to them about it.
David Goldstein:
Nick, you’re going to spend a billion dollars to create the Seattle school of economics?
Nick Hanauer:
No. No, I’m not. But I am a funder of an effort coming out of the Institute for New Economic Thinking that seeks to essentially redraw how ECON101 is taught, because I think it’s correct, one of the most insidious strategies of neo-liberalism was to infect all of the universities with these ideas. And to be clear, I mean, again, we have to be generous, this was not all some giant plot by rich people to steal from poor people, a lot of these academic ideas seemed right and harmless and worthy of teaching for a very, very long time. The people who came up with the idea that the system, the economy was in equilibrium and Pareto optimal surely could not see into the future of the ways in which that idea would be used to suppress the minimum wage, for instance.
So, I mean the world is made up of ideas and the dominant orthodoxies in most societies are built for and by the elites to defend the interests of the elites and to maintain the status quo, our society is no different. And we just have a lot of work to do to tear down a bunch of these orthodox ideas and replace them with better ideas, but to be absolutely clear, relying on left-leaning billionaires to re-engineer how we think about these things is feudal. I’m deeply connected with most left-wing billionaires and I can tell you for certain that although they lean left, their interests do not in general include reorganizing the economy in ways that will make them poor and other people richer. It’s just a fact. So it’s really going to be up to ordinary citizens to drive these changes and not rely on a couple of well-meaning rich guys like me.
David Goldstein:
Right. But I can tell you, Jordan, you’re on to something there’s a huge part of the problem is the ECON101 curriculum. Not as much for the people that go on and study it further but for the people that that’s all they get because they are given the simplified models and theories and told that’s the way the real world works. And then all of the qualifiers come in ECON201 and ECON301 and ECON401 et cetera, but they never get that far. I think part of the why this is so difficult to replace that introductory text is that it is an introductory text and orthodox neoclassical economics is actually relatively simple. Its ideas are very clean and neat and beautiful and easy to teach to a freshmen in college. When you get to the type of economics that we talk about on this show, the whatever you want to call it with the economy as a complex adaptive system well, complexity is complex. It’s hard to learn. It’s hard to teach. It’s hard to break down into these clean, simple models with a y-axis and an x-axis and a graph that always works on paper.
I would suggest that there’s some progress being made. If people want an alternative introductory economics course, we recommend they go to core-econ.org and take a look at the CORE Econ curriculum, which is freely available to high schools and colleges. All the information is online. One of the principles behind that project is Sam Bowles, a prior guest of our podcast. And Nick you’ve actually gone through that whole curriculum, right?
Nick Hanauer:
I have, yeah.
David Goldstein:
Yeah. So, we highly recommend that. And also the Institute for New Economic Thinking, which Nick mentioned he helps fund, there’s a lot of great material coming out of that. We recommend folks subscribe to the online magazine Evonomics, That’s a great place for a cutting edge thinking in economics. And if you’re currently in college and you’d like to challenge the curriculum in your school, we suggest you check out Rethinking Economics, it’s an international network dedicated to just that. And of course, we’ll provide links to all of this in our show notes.
Annie:
All right, this one is from Chris. He says, if I totally subscribed to PES economic theory, what should I call myself?
David Goldstein:
Nick, do we share our a trademark yet?
Nick Hanauer:
You know, fuck it, Goldie, let’s share it.
David Goldstein:
Okay. So let’s be clear, Nick, in your professional life, where you make your money, you are a capitalist, you are a proud venture capitalist.
Nick Hanauer:
Correct.
David Goldstein:
But in terms of what you believe about economics, what do you call yourself?
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, so Goldie, the best term that we’ve been able to come up with and my colleague Eric Beinhocker and I have been back and forth on this for a really long time, is we’re calling ourselves market humanists. That is to say, we believe in the market but in service of humanity, not the other way around. And I think it’s a term of art that is important and can stick and it’s likely going to be the title of the book we publish on economics. So, I think market humanist for now is the best way in which we can describe ourselves.
David Goldstein:
And to explain that this gets back to my critique earlier of the word capitalism that we don’t want an economy that’s run by the owners of capital and we don’t believe that this is an economy where the primary constraint is availability of capital. We believe that this is an economy of, by and for human beings, that humans are at the center of the economy, humans should be running the economy for their own interest and humans are where all of the value comes from. And in that sense, we are humanists, market humanists.
Nick Hanauer:
Yes.
Patrick:
My name is Patrick Kensil and I’m calling from Gualala, California. When we talk about raising the minimum wage systemically across the board, a response I often get is, well, wonder if we just outsourced labor in other countries. So how do you account for that? Do you impose some kind of tariff or tax on that to disincentivize that behavior? And if you’re able to do that successfully, what would stop a business from relocating entirely to a different country where certain wage laws might be more favorable? Thanks so much. I love the show.
Nick Hanauer:
It’s an old, but good question around trade. And what do you do if you raise wages here, won’t businesses just outsource their labor? And one of the great problems we have in this country is that the same neoliberal economic policies framed our trade policy is did our wage policy. And all of it worked to the benefit of owners of capital and none of it worked to the benefit of labor. And so it is completely valid to rethink how we do business with other countries and to be circumspect about letting countries that exploit their labor to effortlessly steal jobs from American citizens and steal industries from our country and make it elsewhere. And I think that, Goldie, you and I have long talked about how essential it is to maintain an economy that has a ton of diversity, not just of people, but of a diversity of capabilities, economic capabilities that we lose a lot more when an industry leaves our country and goes to another country than just the jobs. We lose a set of skills that we can apply to other industries or connected industries or future industries.
David Goldstein:
We can innovate into adjacent new industries.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s right. And so, just because for the last 40 years the neo-liberals wrote trade policy doesn’t mean that for the next 40 years they need to. And I think we’re not protectionists, but I do think it makes sense to be circumspect about how we deal with other countries. And I’ve done, I grew up doing business with China and they’re as mercenary a competitor as a country could have just one tiny example is it when I grew up in the pillow business and down comforter business and in the midst of competing hardest against them, the down comforter manufacturers in China were given a 10% tax rebate from their government for every finished product that they exported. Which is to say they deliberately made the finished products less expensive than the raw materials to make them that we could have imported. How do American citizens compete against that? I mean that’s bullshit.
David Goldstein:
You can’t.
Nick Hanauer:
You can’t, it’s bullshit.
David Goldstein:
And this gets, I think Patrick, and a little directly back to answering your question is that the truth is most of the manufacturing jobs that make sense to offshore from the perspective of the owners of capital, most of those jobs have already been off short because look, the difference between 7,25 and $15 an hour when you’re sending garment industry jobs overseas to Bangladesh, they’re not making 7,25 an hour, it’s already at 7,25 cheaper to manufacture those goods overseas. And if that’s the company’s only concern, they’ve sent those jobs.
A lot of the jobs we look at now, America is becoming a service economy an information economy and a service economy and those jobs are much more difficult to off shore. You can’t offshore a line cook or a server at a restaurant, or the person delivering your groceries or your packages or anything else. So you local barber, your hairdresser, this is what our economy is becoming, an economy where we service each other. And there’s no downside to making that a high wage economy for everybody. You’re not going to send those jobs overseas because you physically can’t. So in that type of economy, you start to look at and we’ve seen it here in Seattle, it turns out that a higher minimum wage is good for businesses, because as you say Nick.
Nick Hanauer:
When workers have more money, businesses have more customers and hire more workers. That’s how the economy works.
David Goldstein:
Yeah. That’s how it’s worked in Seattle. That’s how it’s worked in other cities and states that have raised the minimum wage. And you find it turns out we’re all much better off when we’re in a race to the top than we are when we’re in a race to the bottom.
Shannon:
My name is Shannon and I’m calling from Canada. My question is this, as I’ve learned more about economics and how a strong economy is built I’ve grown more concerned about the strain on the environment, given the economic growth, necessitates, increasing consumption and production of goods and services doesn’t the pursuit of a strong economy come at the expense of environmentalism? It seems to me that we need to collectively consume less if we want to put less strain on the environment. If these two, environmental wellbeing and economic wellbeing, are mutually exclusive, no wonder so little has been done to protect the environment. Might it be possible that prioritizing a strong economy is a priority of the past that might need to be retired in today’s world? Thank you so much.
Nick Hanauer:
Shannon. That’s a really, really great question and an important question about how we reconcile ordinary folks having more and obviously the strain that puts on the energy systems and just the planet generally. And we’d be naive not to say that these two things at least today are in opposition.
David Goldstein:
But it depends on how you define growth, what we’re talking about.
Nick Hanauer:
Exactly. Exactly.
David Goldstein:
When you think about a lot of the growth in the modern economy, in our information economy, it is an economy that is increasingly dematerializing itself. Think about all the streaming of content that you now get online, cheaper and faster than ever before. That’s a dematerialization of the economy, which does not necessarily use natural resources. When you think about how much more light you get from an LED bulb than you did from an old incandescent bulb, that is a form of dematerializing the economy, you’re getting more out of the same amount of energy. And you can go throughout the economy and see this everywhere where a lot of the best parts about the modern economy are the parts that are connecting us together and allowing us to entertain each other as opposed to being stuck just with, 200 years ago, the goal of improving the most fundamental material aspects of life.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. I mean, imagine that the transition from most Americans don’t need more food, they need better food, right? And there is no reason to believe that we have to use more energy in fact, we can, in many ways, based on modern farming techniques, we can not only use less energy to create that better food, we could use less chemicals and the farming process itself could take carbon out of the atmosphere rather than put it in. A good massage doesn’t consume resources and so if you define prosperity not as GDP, which is simply more and more economic activity of any kind, but if you- [crosstalk 00:25:52].
David Goldstein:
Yeah, more stuff.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s right. If you define it as solutions to human problems, that does allow you to begin to think about dematerializing the economy and increasing the welfare of people while decreasing the impact it has on the economy. Now, obviously these are easy words to say, and that’s a hard thing to do, but we do believe that we could have an economy where ordinary people do better and the environment does better too.
Jed:
This is Jed from Denver. Pitchfork economic team, thank you so much for giving you a narrative that better explains the injustice in the world around me and how we got here. But because nobody is going to make you or me benevolent dictator at the end of the episode, I want to know what an individual can do to make a difference. So, other than voting and sharing the good news, which are obviously important, what can an individual person do to push back against these systems that perpetuate unfair and undemocratic outcomes? Specifically, I’d like to know what actions individuals could take, but also where individuals can send their money? What are the smartest investments that a person of middle-class means can make to create a more prosperous, more democratic America? Nick, who makes the most of the dollars that you invest? Where can Goldie amounts of dollars have an impact? Thank you so much for the work that you do. And I look forward to hearing your response.
David Goldstein:
Yeah. Nick, can I get social investment advice from you? What can I do with my meager amount of money to make an impact?
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, so I do think that, I mean, for absolute sure, being involved in local campaigns in cities and states to increase, minimum wage campaigns and so on and so forth is, in my opinion, has always been the highest impact way you can drive change in the United States because in our system of government, local proceeds national change. The Federal Government, the United States Senate is not a leadership body, it merely confirms the change that has already taken place in the country. And so local action is super important, but I do think that it is incredibly important for ordinary citizens to challenge the orthodoxy in their conversations and in their lives. And again, we come back to this again and again and again and again and again, but this idea that raising wages kills jobs, which just got shoved down people’s throats for 30 or 40 years and that idea made jobs suppression seem logical, right?
And just being a citizen who pushes back on that and recognizes that that’s an intimidation tactic masquerading as economics. It’s a polite way for rich people to say, we’re rich and you’re poor and if you try to change it, we will bring harm to you and your family, that is super useful. It’s just incredibly powerful when ordinary citizens tweet back at some Republican Senator who says raising wages kills jobs and calls them a fucking liar, they hear that. If you are one of their constituents, they hear that, send them an email, call their office and say, that’s a lie, the economics is clear, you’re protecting the interests of your biggest donors, stop it. And that makes a big difference. And recognize that no one has done this up to now, right? If you do that it’s unusual for them to hear not usual.
David Goldstein:
Yeah. I will emphasize something that Nick started with and that is focus locally. I give money, I’m in a position now where I can give a little bit of money to political campaigns, some of them out of state Senate campaigns and I feel good about that, but I know I’m not making a huge personal impact in that way. Nick can have a bigger impact with money than I ever can. And I tried to spend what money I have conscientiously. I try not to spend it at companies that do bad things, but the big impact and I think minimum wage is the example, we wouldn’t have a $15 minimum wage proposed nationally if not for the $15 minimum wage we passed here in Seattle in 2014. We wouldn’t have had it in a bunch of other states and cities either.
Nick Hanauer:
And by the way, Goldie, we wouldn’t have had it in Seattle if we hadn’t passed it in SeaTac. We started in a tiny, tiny town outside of Seattle and won there and then took it to Seattle and then nationally, right?
David Goldstein:
So I think that the lesson is that you can lead by example, if you’re in a city like Denver, you can lead by example, show that progressive policies work great in Denver and try to drag the rest of the country with you. And I think you can do that everywhere in any town, in any city, if you make positive change locally there’s a good chance that the rest of the country will eventually see it, it might take years, but eventually see it and follow along because as Nick has pointed out on many occasions, Congress, they don’t lead. That’s a confirmatory body. They get you there after the fact, these things are happening now in DC because they’ve worked elsewhere first.
Abby:
This is Abby from Kearney, Nebraska. Almost half of our state’s population lives in Omaha on the East side of the state so we’re right at the heart of the divide between urban and rural America. In your episode talking about the urban-rural divide you said you don’t know what the solution to never ending migration to big cities is. Here in a solidly red state we have right to work laws and our farmers have such a strong attachment to the party of personal responsibility that I don’t think that’ll ever change. I just don’t think advocating for a minimum wage increase to $15 is likely to fly here since our current $9 minimum wage meets most people’s needs, at least where I live on the rural side of the state. Many businesses in Carney already start at 10 or even $11 an hour. There’s no way a UBI or even a federal jobs guarantee would be very popular here either since most people here hate any form of government welfare and many believe businesses have too many regulations as it is.
Do you think maybe encouraging more public investment in self-employment can be the answer? Unlike many other suggestions I’ve heard from moving the country in a progressive direction, it seems like it would be harder for Republicans to spin this in a negative way. One of the biggest problems rural America is facing is the trend of big businesses taking over small mom and pop stores. Every day it seems like there’s yet another locally-owned grocery store closing and a new Walmart popping up instead. I personally would love to start my own business and I know lots of other people here would too, but it seems like there are a lot of barriers to doing so if you don’t have a stable financial situation to begin with. There’s just no way for a small business to compete with larger companies like Walmart and Google.
Even if I do manage to start the business, I want making Android apps there’s nothing preventing Facebook or some other Big Tech company from California from running me out of the market before I even have a chance at becoming financially stable. Incentivizing small business and self-employment seems like it could partially reverse this trend. What are your thoughts on this topic? I love listening to your podcast every week, and I hope you have time to answer my question. Thanks for everything you guys do.
Nick Hanauer:
Abby, I hate to rain on your parade, but I think that the likelihood of what you suggest is very, very low. I think what’s most important for you is to be a voice of economic common sense, which is to say that a thriving middle class is what creates economic growth in the country. And the higher the median wage or the minimum wage goes the better it will be for businesses overall. And that a system of economics, which among other things effectively pays giant corporations to underpay their employees in the form of EITC isn’t capitalism, it’s socialism for the rich. And nobody has been worse treated by this economy than people who live in rural areas and among the things that are bad is that the minimum wage is very, very low and remember in your own town, it has to be true, it’s true across the country, that the majority of citizens in rural America work for giant corporations.
David Goldstein:
This is something that most people don’t realize. It seems counterintuitive, but a larger percentage of the workforce works for large corporations in rural America than they do in cities.
Nick Hanauer:
Correct. And so there is simply no getting around the necessity to force those big companies to pay people enough to live in security and dignity. And there is no excuse for them not to other than they just love it when they don’t have to, because they make tons of profits and they pay their executives high bonuses. So screw those guys. I mean, there’s just no way to get by that. Now, secondarily, one of the other terrible things about neo-liberalism is the way in which we abandoned antitrust policy and let all of the industries in our country consolidate and pooled all of the local companies, the anchor retailers or manufacturing companies in smaller cities and towns out of them and put them basically in a few giant cities around the country and that was a catastrophe too, we have to try to reverse that. But at the end of the day, rural people need to earn more money and one of the biggest levers available we have to force big companies to pay people more.
Wayne:
I’m Wayne from New Hampshire and I’ve been wondering, you’ve been presenting us with a lot of great and useful information regarding economics and ways we can try to improve the economy, the general wellbeing of everyone in the country, make things more fair, more equitable and let people have a life of dignity. Out of curiosity, how are you doing that in your own companies in your own holdings? I know you don’t need to brag technically on your own show, but I’m willing to give you the chance because it’s always good to be able to set the positive example of the change you want people to be able to make in the world. Thank you.
Nick Hanauer:
The answer for me is it’s easy to be off the hook for that example, because I’m mostly a tech investor. And if you work for a tech company, you basically make a lot of money. As I’ve always said, it’s unfair to press an individual company owner to pay wages twice as high as their direct competitors. You’re basically asking them to put themselves out of business. What is their responsibility is to collectively force the standard to increase so that all people in the industry have to pay fair wages because in that case, then everybody’s on the same playing field and now competition is between people who produce the best product rather than who can be best at exploiting their workers. And I think that’s the key thing.
So thank you all for the questions, they’re always so much fun to answer and I’m sorry that we didn’t get to them all, we get a lot, but if you have a question, leave us a voicemail at (731) 388-9334.
David Goldstein:
Yeah, send us an email, leave us a voicemail, we’d love to hear from you. On the next episode of Pitchfork Economics, we told you so, no really, back in 2012 we told you that a $15 minimum wage was the right wage for America and now almost everybody agrees. Tune in and listen to why you’ve got to tune in and listen to what we have to say plus, we’ll give you the resources you need to tell other people so too.
Annie:
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 Civic Action and Nick Hanauer, 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.