What’s the opposite of neoliberal economics? What would the manifesto of the perfect political party look like? How much money do corporations spend lobbying against taxes, and is it even worth it? Nick and Goldy answer these questions (and more!) from listeners.

To ask us a question, use the contact page on our website: https://pitchforkeconomics.com/contact/

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Further reading:

Economism: https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781101871195

The Curse of Econ 101: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/01/economism-and-the-minimum-wage/513155/

Arguing with Zombies: https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781324005018

Nick’s publications: https://nickhanauer.com/publications/

Trends in income from 1975 to 2018: https://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WRA516-1.html

The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90%—And That’s Made the U.S. Less Secure: https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-america/

Money spent on lobbying skyrocketed during tax overhaul: https://apnews.com/article/bd8a878c5fe84ea48ffbcf05b4edba0e

The 4 companies that lobbied most on tax overhaul – and what they got for it: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/12/7/16709586/republican-tax-bills-lobbying

Corporations now spend more lobbying Congress than taxpayers spend funding Congress: https://www.vox.com/2015/4/20/8455235/congress-lobbying-money-statistic

Website: https://pitchforkeconomics.com/

Twitter: @PitchforkEcon

Instagram: @pitchforkeconomics

Nick’s twitter: @NickHanauer

 

David Goldstein:

It’s time for another Ask Me Anything.

Nick Hanauer:

It is, and we have some great questions from listeners.

Praim Ragrupaul:

I was wondering if you could unpack the economics of divestment.

Jordan:

Do the Republicans know that their economic policies are actually ruining our country and our economy, and they just don’t care?

Marshall:

Am I missing something here? How do you reckon with this huge split in winners and losers?

Speaker 6:

From the home offices of Civic Ventures in downtown Seattle, this is Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer. Where we tell you how the economy really works.

Nick Hanauer:

I’m Nick Hanauer, founder of Civic Ventures.

David Goldstein:

I’m David Goldstein, senior fellow at Civic Ventures.

So Nick it’s time for another Ask Me Anything.

Nick Hanauer:

It is, and we have some great questions from listeners from around the world.

David Goldstein:

Completely around the world it looks like from this list. Let’s start with Ian from South Africa. Ian asks, “Your point about economics being a narrative and not a science is a total mind shift. My question is what is the easy narrative and title of the alternative to neo-liberalism, the Chicago School, Milton Friedman, et cetera? Pitchfork and progressive appeal to the converted and are primarily an anti-narrative, not a restoration story.”

Nick Hanauer:

We’re still searching for something better, but I do think that middle-out economics is the best answer that we have right now, and I think that middle-out economics is an anti-narrative in the sense that you really can’t understand something unless it’s in contrast to other things. So I think the contrast is important, and I think middle-out economics makes a lot of sense, because it contrasts with the fundamental trickle-down narrative of the Freedman school. I mean, the basic idea at the core of the Chicago School, Milton Friedman, neo-liberalism, market fundamentalism is the idea that if the rich get richer that is automatically good for the economy.

David Goldstein:

Right? Because markets. Markets!

Nick Hanauer:

Because markets, right? And that turns out to be just false. That there’s an insane amount of empirical evidence now. That shows that that’s not true and that the opposite is true, really. The more the middle class thrives, the better off everything is.

David Goldstein:

Right. That the middle class is the source of growth, not its consequence.

Nick Hanauer:

That’s right. And when middle class families incomes are rising, all sorts of amazing things happen to the economy, including increasing rates of innovation, and increasing consumption, increasing political and social enfranchisement, so on and so forth. So middle-out economics, I think, is the best thing that we’ve yet come up with, and I think that it is really important to understand that economics is this weird mixture of science and art in the sense that it is both-

David Goldstein:

Storytelling.

Nick Hanauer:

That’s right. It is both theoretically an account of how the economy does work and also when account of how it should work.

David Goldstein:

And also it is all about persuading people that your story is right. You need a persuasive, compelling story and it’s important to remember Ian, that neo-liberalism was constructed as a counter narrative too.

Nick Hanauer:

Right.

David Goldstein:

It was a counter narrative to Keynesianism to what they perceive to be the growing democratic socialism in the West and to the Soviet style socialism communism in the East.

Nick Hanauer:

Correct.

David Goldstein:

So they constructed this counter narrative that emphasized, I guess in their minds, the classical liberalism that the freer the economy is, the more prosperous everybody would be. And it was a very compelling counter narrative that we wanted to believe, and we ended up believing it, and it didn’t turn out to be entirely correct.

Jordan:

Hi, this is Jordan from New York. My question is, do the Republicans know that their policies, their economic policies are actually ruining our country and our economy and they just don’t care. And they’re just greedy. Since the time of Reagan, I’ve watched Republicans voice their policy, and in 40 years, I see no evidence that it works. And even worse, they’ve convinced the working class that all of the hardships that it caused them are the fault of the Democrats, creating an angry misinformed mob. Why can’t the Democrats see this and make their campaign about telling us that trickle-down is a lie, and that putting money in the pockets of the people is the only plan for economic growth. And that one more term of trickle-down might actually kill us. Just seems like a marketable message. Can’t you help them? Thanks.

Nick Hanauer:

It’s a great question.

David Goldstein:

It’s multiple questions.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah, it’s multiple questions.

David Goldstein:

It’s a multi-parter. Let’s start off at the top.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah. Do the Republicans know their policies are ruining our country? One of the things you learn about people, as you get older, is they don’t believe what they believe because there are facts or evidence, they believe what suits them, or what makes them feel good. And the truth is that the responsibility for trickle-down economics lies with more than just a core of Republican adherence. Democrats for a full generation essentially fully embraced that version of market fundamentalism too. I truly believe that the guy we used to call the trickle-down clown, Paul Ryan, who was the King of trickle-down economics, completely believed that nonsense.

David Goldstein:

Right.

Nick Hanauer:

I don’t think for a minute, he believed that he was lying to people when he said that tax cuts for rich people created economic growth.

David Goldstein:

And it turns out Nick, that the reason why Democrats can’t make a campaign about this is because fundamentally many of them believe it too.

Nick Hanauer:

Absolutely. And then there’s another layer of the onion there, which is, well, do they believe it because they’re stupid or do they believe it because they’re evil? And sadly, that’s not true either, because if you went to college 20 years ago, even today, more or less, but certainly in the last 40, 50 years and took a couple of economics courses from Orthodox economics professors, they would have told you that that was true. And they would have dazzled you with a bunch of mathematics to prove that it was true. And so you would have left college believing, in the same way that physicists offered you formulas like force equals mass times acceleration is true, that raising taxes on the rich killed growth was true.

David Goldstein:

Right?

Nick Hanauer:

And so you end up with an Orthodox ideology that dominated policymakers thinking for a generation, both on the left and the right. The only difference on the left being that they saw more market failures occasionally, and wanted to take the hard edges off trickle-down economics a little bit more than Republicans.

David Goldstein:

But they still believed in the big trade-off.

Nick Hanauer:

Absolutely.

David Goldstein:

What it was-

Nick Hanauer:

Absolutely.

David Goldstein:

You had, on the positive economic side, how things work. Republicans and Democrats have generally been in agreement for the past 30 years.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah.

David Goldstein:

On the normative side, democrats believe that we should make more of a trade off between fairness and growth.

Nick Hanauer:

Exactly. But that was the only distinction between them.

David Goldstein:

Right.

Nick Hanauer:

And we’ve said this many times on the podcast that when we got to work, raising the minimum wage of $15 an hour, everyone we encountered on the left believed that we had lost our minds, and we were going to destroy our economies by raising the minimum wage this much. From academic economists, who theoretically were on the left, to United States senators who were theoretically on the left. And that is because, to a person, they were convinced that if you raised wages, it killed jobs. And that just is demonstrably false. And it’s demonstrably false, because the fundamental mechanisms that undergird neoclassical economics are also false.

And so there’s another layer to this, which is that people believe what suits them. And if you’re rich and white, this is a system of thought that has advanced your interests an astounding way over 40 years. And it is very difficult to come to terms with the fact that it is not true that you deserve what you have. And so Jordan, we have been at work, grinding political leaders to embrace the set of ideas, but you’re definitely swimming up a giant stream of bullshit that has been created by the academy that benefits a huge number of powerful interests. A narrative that is driven by the people who benefit from that narrative. And so it is hard to press back against it.

David Goldstein:

Yeah. I would add burden that, yeah, there are some bad people in the world. There’s some bad people, there are sociopaths out there that are only in it for themselves. They’re also people who just have been convinced that it’s a social Darwinism dog eat dog world, and I might as well get mine, because if I don’t somebody else will take it. But mostly what this comes down to is people believe this for the same reason they believe anything else, religion, whatever. It’s how we make sense of the world. We’re a story telling animal. Ideology is a shortcut. And we use this all the time. You use ideology, I use ideology, we rely on these things to get through at life every single day. And it just turns out that this particular ideology isn’t well-suited to reality.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah. And less and less every day in an increasingly complex technological world where the only thing that matters really is your capacity to cooperate at scale, and to generate new knowledge. But a great question.

Drake:

Hi there, this is Drake from Austin, Texas. After listening to the show, I’ve become a lot more confident in my discussions with people regarding all of the trickle-down economic myths. One person who I have not had as much luck with is my dad, who was a classic conservative Republican. He doesn’t listen to podcasts, so my question is, what books would you recommend to someone like him who has all of these misconceptions, but ultimately is pretty pragmatic when it comes to his beliefs and responds well to data. Thank you for all the work you’ll do. I love the podcast. Bye.

David Goldstein:

I’ve given this a lot of thought, Nick, and I’ve got a couple of books to recommend both by a former guests of the podcast. The first is James Kwak’s Economism.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah, I would agree. That’s a really great primmer on all these ridiculous myths.

David Goldstein:

He doesn’t necessarily use all the same terminology that we do.

Nick Hanauer:

Correct.

David Goldstein:

But in terms of an accessible book that really steps the reader through what is wrong with Orthodox economic thinking and how it has wrecked havoc on the economy. I can’t recommend a more highly James Kwak’s Economism.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah.

David Goldstein:

The other book I’d recommend is Paul Krugman’s Arguing with Zombies. It’s a wonderful collection of his essays, plus some new material. A good mix of accessible narrative, some wonkiness, and also numbers. If Drake’s dad is into numbers, you’ll find a little bit more of that in Krugman’s book than in Kwak’s.

Nick Hanauer:

Thinking about the problem confronting Drake and lots of other people, I often want to start with the emotional or psychological motivations that drive people’s belief systems. And the thing about economics that we all have to remember and continually remind ourselves about, is that it is how we all rationalize who gets what and why. It’s how we instantiate our social and moral preferences about status, privileges, wealth, and power. And the thing about neo-liberalism and trickle-down economics, ideas like when you raise wages, it kills jobs, is that these are moral stories that enforce status constructs, that some people just really prefer. I think if you’re trying to talk to somebody, you have to understand where they’re coming from, and let’s say you’re a business executive that employs lots of low wage workers, the story, if you raise wages, it kills jobs is an incredibly persuasive one to you, because what it does is it gets you morally off the hook from raising wages, right? That’s the thing that makes it so powerful. Is if it is true that raising wages kills jobs, and by raising the minimum wage, we’re harming the very people we’re intending to help, and therefore, that policy idea is a bad, it makes no sense. You would just never do it. And that releases us from the responsibility of doing it.

And so for, you know, a lot of people, particularly older white people who have very much benefited from the arrangement that exists today, it’s not the data that holds them to these old ideas. It’s a moral and a social preference for the implications of these ideas. And so I think what’s really worth exploring with folks you’re trying to persuade, is why they believe what they believe. And just at least suggesting the possibility that one of the reasons they believe what they believe, is that it’s super comfortable to believe that. That it feels good to believe that.

Again, I know this because I used to believe this stuff, and I remember how good it felt to believe that the rich deserve to be rich, and the poor deserve to be poor. And our station in life was all a consequence of the hard work we did. It just makes you feel good to believe that stuff. So anyway, tax cuts for rich people don’t create growth, but it is a fun thing to believe if you’re rich. Right?

David Goldstein:

Right.

Nick Hanauer:

And there are certain people, and I definitely believe that conservative people tend to be conservative because they are more prisoners of this kind of emotion. They definitely want to believe that the better they do, the better off everyone else will be. And so, to me, that’s the thing you really got to break through.

David Goldstein:

And I should say, Drake, if your father doesn’t want to read a whole book, then I suggest you send him to nickhanauer.com, and there’s a list of everything he’s written. And he can just click through and read those articles. All very accessible and informative.

Nick Hanauer:

Goldie, we have a really thoughtful question from Stu from New Zealand, and he asks, “What should the manifesto of the perfect political party look like? What are the absolute core principles that should be addressed? That’s a great question.

David Goldstein:

I got an answer, I think.

Nick Hanauer:

Okay.

David Goldstein:

And it is a derivation of what we think maybe the number one rule of thumb of economics should be.

Nick Hanauer:

That’s right. The golden rule of economics is to?

David Goldstein:

Well, I’m going to phrase it this way that we say the economy is people, the more people you include in the economy, the faster and more prosperous it grows.

Nick Hanauer:

Yep.

David Goldstein:

And I think that’s true about a functional democracy as well. The country is people.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah.

David Goldstein:

That that should be our number one concern. We want our people to do better.

Nick Hanauer:

That’s right.

David Goldstein:

Not our capital, or our businesses, or GDP, or any metric you can think of.

Nick Hanauer:

That’s right. And I think that the heuristic we use is around the word inclusion, and that we don’t mean it in this sort of soft namby-pamby way. We believe that because economic progress is the product of a feedback loop between increasing amounts of innovation and increasing amounts of demand, that the more people we deliberately, systematically, and intentionally include in our economy, the better it will work.

David Goldstein:

Right.

Nick Hanauer:

And what’s interesting is that humanity I suppose is on an arc. The arc of history, I do think bends towards justice, because it bends towards inclusion, because inclusion is a necessity for increasing amounts of prosperity. A thing about inclusion is, is that anybody who’s ever raised kids knows that getting them to be included as functional adults in society takes work.

David Goldstein:

Right.

Nick Hanauer:

Right? It does not happen automatically.

David Goldstein:

It takes years of education, and training, and socializing.

Nick Hanauer:

And just grinding. Right?

David Goldstein:

Right.

Nick Hanauer:

You have to grind your kids.

David Goldstein:

It’s hard.

Nick Hanauer:

It is.

David Goldstein:

Learning is hard.

Nick Hanauer:

Well, and just being responsible is hard. And being motivated is hard. All of these things do not happen naturally. And so in the same way that parents need to be fairly deliberate if they want their kids to be reasonably high functioning members of society, a society needs to be deliberate, and intentional if it wants its citizens to be high functioning. And so we all have a huge stake in making the investments, in building the structures that enable every single citizen, irrespective of where they were born, or in what circumstance, to rise to the level of their maximum capacity. And when you do that, you have maximized the potential in your economy. Our country will not thrive unless individual Americans thrive, and that’s the game.

David Goldstein:

And I want to be clear Stu, that this is not just moralizing on our part. This is grounded in science. On one of our earliest episodes, the physicist César Hidalgo made the point that human knowledge and know-how is the only factor of production that can increase in per capita terms. And this is why I hate the word capitalism, because it implies that capital, or capitalists, are the heart of our economy. It’s not. It’s people. And it’s people putting their knowledge and know-how to work, which is how we improve the lives of everybody.

Praim Ragrupaul:

Hi, my name is [Praim Ragrupaul 00:21:01]. I am a sustainable engineering master’s student at the University of Pittsburgh. And I was wondering if you could unpack the economics of divestment. I know that divestment has been a powerful movement for things like devastating from apartheid, but I’m just curious about the economics of divestment from fossil fuels, what type of impact they make in the grand scheme of things, and what type of argument our coalition can make to really convince our university’s administration that this is more than just a moral issue. It’s a financial issue as well. Thank you.

Nick Hanauer:

So [Praim Rag much 00:21:32] the issue of divestment is complex, but I guess from our point of view, when you understand prosperity in human societies is solutions to human problems it makes clear that every economic act, what we do economically, is an explicit moral choice. And if the thing that we have chosen to do is leading to a mass extinction event, then you probably shouldn’t do it. And I think that every fiduciary, everybody who’s deploying capital on behalf of other people, has a responsibility, both to create returns, but equally to make sure that what they’re investing in, what the folks are doing is actually solving human problems, not creating more problems than they’re solving. Everyone who’s deploying capital on behalf of other people needs to ensure that the people they’re investing with are actually solving human problems, not creating more problems than they’re solving. And the fossil fuel industry definitely has been creating more problems than they’ve been solving. And we need to do everything in our power to encourage them to be better. And one of the best ways to do that is to refuse to own their stock.

David Goldstein:

And I’d say one more thing, it’s not just about not investing in fossil fuel stocks. It’s about investing in renewables. That the money they’re using to invest in fossil fuel stocks, that are tanking, is money they could have used to invest in wind, solar, and other renewables. And that’s not just a moral choice, that is an economic choice, and clearly they made the wrong choice.

Nick Hanauer:

So Dean from Australia writes, “What do you think is the wage ratio of a healthy company and/or nation? 10 to one, or 40 to one, or 100 to one, or more differences in wages, salaries between lowest paid employees to the CEO board, et cetera, including bonuses.” I think this is a really interesting question that sort of gets to the heart of the question of unequal compensation. And again, the sort of market fundamentalists, neoliberal view, is that everyone is paid what they’re worth. And if you earn $7.25 cents an hour, which is the United States’ minimum wage, that is because that’s all you’re worth. That’s all you produce for the company. And if you’re the CEO of that company and earn 100 million dollars a year in bonuses, salary, and stock options, well, that’s because that’s how much value you created. And again, the neoclassical construct basically validates that, but it’s all nonsense. It’s just a made up bunch of bullshit designed as a protection racket for rich people.

David Goldstein:

But in terms of an actual number, he asked for a number. And I think-

Nick Hanauer:

No!

David Goldstein:

And I think there’s some numbers we can go to. And that is, that report from the RAND Corporation recently came out on the upward redistribution of income from the bottom 90%, $50 trillion over the past 45 years, $2.5 trillion a year. Had inequality remain unchanged since 1975, median income would be twice what it is today, and I think we can go back to that period after World War II, from 1947 to 1974, when everybody was seeing their incomes rise in line with GDP. We had a lot more equity and equality in this country. And back then, CEO, that ratio of CEO pay to the lowest worker pay was between 20 to one and 30 to one, depending on the year. And now it’s somewhere around 300 to one.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah.

David Goldstein:

And more importantly, and this comes directly from the RAND report, the average in the top 1% back in 1975, earned 10 times what those at the 25th percentile did. And today they learn 42 times.

Nick Hanauer:

Right.

David Goldstein:

They earn seven times what the median worker earned, and today they earn 28 times.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah, but the broader point is, that what people get paid is not a consequence of what they’re worth, it’s a consequence of how much power they have.

David Goldstein:

Right.

Nick Hanauer:

And definitely some of your power comes from being a rare contributor to an enterprise, right? Like if you’re very, very, very good at a particular thing that the enterprise cannot get away without, it is likely that you will be paid reasonably well. But like you said, Goldie, the economy of the United States of America in the last 100 years grew at the fastest rate when inequality the lowest. Because, when the middle-class thrives, that’s what drives the economy. And so, again, going from a ratio of 300 or 500 to one, back to a ratio of 20 or 30 to one, seems like a reasonable target and something that policy makers should strive for.

David Goldstein:

Nick. Our next question is from George from an undisclosed location.

Nick Hanauer:

Okay.

David Goldstein:

“Thank you for this podcast. Please keep it going. I am curious, is there any data that points to the amount of money lobbyists spend to fight taxes on the wealthy and corporations? Would that amount be greater, less than, or equal to the amount they would just pay in taxes anyway?”

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah. Well, if only.

David Goldstein:

Well, I think answer to the question, Nick, is that they’re spending the money, and they wouldn’t be doing it if they weren’t getting a return on investment.

Nick Hanauer:

Exactly. And it’s an astounding return, right? Because as much as lobbyists spend in the tens of millions, or an aggregate hundreds of millions, the returns can be billions or even trillions. And we did a little research on this question and the National Association of Realtors spent 22 million to fight for tax breaks in 2017. Business Round Table spent 17 million, and the Chamber of Commerce spent 16 million. So in aggregate, what is that 50 million bucks or something like that? But the tax cut was worth 1.5 trillion. Trillion.

David Goldstein:

That’s a pretty good return.

Nick Hanauer:

An astonishing return on your investment. And this is the reason why it’s so hard to fight these guys is that there’s literally no amount of money that these guys can spend that doesn’t make sense.

David Goldstein:

So anyway you add this up, George, the huge return on investment in 2014 alone, corporations spent a total of $2.6 billion on lobbying expenditures. More than the $2 billion we spent to operate the House and Senate together. So yeah, lobbying is a bigger industry than the House and the Senate. And that’s only a tiny fraction of the amount they got back from just one tax cut. And to be clear, it’s more than just tax cuts they’re getting, it’s also regulatory decisions. For example, I don’t know how much Sprint and T-Mobile spent to get their merger through, but now we’ve got just three major cell phone companies instead of four, and you can be sure that your cell phone bills are going to go up.

Marshall:

Hi, my name is Marshall and I’m calling from Madison, Wisconsin. First of all, I love the podcasts and this critical thinking it inspires. I know Nick that you are a capitalist, so I’d really like to hear your response to this question. My company was started around 15 years ago and has grown to over 400 employees, and recently sold itself into an employee stock ownership plan. The founders split over 70 million in the sale. This seems like an overall virtuous move for my company, but it got me thinking in general about selling companies. The founders get a huge payout, while the employees who have also contributed to the growth of the company to at least in order of magnitude get nothing and may even lose their job if it’s deemed redundant in the case of a merger. Am I missing something here? How do you reckon with this huge split in winners and losers?

Nick Hanauer:

You know, Marshall, I don’t understand the details of what happened in your particular company, and if it was a sale that was broadly beneficial or not, certainly sometimes when owners sell a company to the employees, that’s a good thing. And sometimes they’re scamming them. So I can’t speak to that directly, but I can speak directly to the second question, which is the owners split a whole bunch, the rest of the employees, who also contributed, get nothing. Does that make sense? Is that fair?

So it’s a complex question, but it’s made simpler in a world where employers are required to pay workers enough to lead dignified secure lives, and where you got a pension, and you got healthcare, and you earned a fair salary, and it was big enough for you to have some savings. And in that way, your work for that enterprise was fairly compensated.

Now there’s this other layer, which is that sometimes people who start companies make employees owners. Then the sale can be more broadly shared, but I will tell you that at least it’s been my experience. And this is, of course, is also reflective of the downward pressure on wages for the last 40 years, is that most workers would prefer cash over stock in compensation. Why? Well, because they can barely make ends meet. Of course, in a world where you’re getting paid a lot better, it’s much easier to accept some compensation in stock. But the other thing that is going on here of course, is that the reason that companies are so valuable today, the reason the stock market is so high, the reason those owners got such a big payout, is that American style capitalism has become a scam in the sense that the owners get to extract all the value from the enterprise by paying their workers mostly shitty wages, and keeping profits very high because workers have no power.

So the workers get paid crappy wages for a long time. The owners get a high profit margin, which makes the enterprise worth a lot. And then they sell it, and the workers are left with nothing. And the owners laugh all the way to the bank. And so I’m not sure that the answer is to require the founders of company to automatically share the value of the proceeds upon sale. But I am sure that every company should be required to pay their workers enough to get by and lead dignified lives. In the other question, we referenced the RAND report, right? Like this is a much less serious problem if the median full-time worker was earning today a hundred thousand dollars a year, not 50.

David Goldstein:

So I’d just like to add one more thought, Nick, and this is reaching back to a couple of our previous episodes, I know with Elizabeth Anderson, we talked about co-determination, the German model, where the workers actually have some representation on the board. Some representation in how to manage the company, and in case of the sale of the company, some say in whether the company should be sold, who it’s sold to, and how this might be divvied up. And I think that would work very well here in America to at least have somebody there looking out on behalf of the employees.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah, Goldie, I totally agree.

Well, thank you all you awesome listeners for your questions. We get so many more questions than we could ever answer, but we do appreciate every single one, and I hope you will all keep them coming. Leave us a voicemail at (731) 388-9334.

David Goldstein:

You can also email us a question, just go to pitchforkeconomics.com, and use the contact page. Or you can go into iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts, leave a five star rating, and then ask your question in your review.

Nick Hanauer:

And five star ratings really help us reach more listeners. So help us please.

Speaker 6:

Pitchfork Economics is produced by Civic Ventures. If you liked 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.