We know that inclusion drives economic growth because when our nation’s prosperity was most broadly shared, in the 1950s and 1960s, the American economy was at its strongest. But the sad truth is that even then a broad swath of the population wasn’t allowed to fully participate in the economy—Black people and other communities of color were purposefully denied the shared prosperity that white families enjoyed. The folks at Liberation in a Generation believe it’s possible to create an economy where all people of color can participate and thrive. Jeremie Greer, the organization’s co-director, explains how racism is profitable under our current economic system, and breaks down how we can build a Liberation Economy that truly includes—and benefits—everyone.
Jeremie Greer is the Co-Founder and Co-Executive Director of Liberation in a Generation, a national movement-support organization, building power for POC and demanding a Liberation Economy.
Twitter: @liberation_gen, @JeremieGreer
Liberation in a Generation https://www.liberationinageneration.org
Racism is Profitable Podcast https://www.liberationinagenerationaction.org/podcast
The Road to Zero Wealth https://ips-dc.org/report-the-road-to-zero-wealth
Website: https://pitchforkeconomics.com
Twitter: @PitchforkEcon
Instagram: @pitchforkeconomics
Nick’s twitter: @NickHanauer
David Goldstein:
We really believe this: that inclusion drives economic growth.
Jeremie Greer:
We like to think of a liberation economy, an economy that all people have their basic needs met, where all people are feeling safe and secure, where all people have value, and that all people feel like they belong.
Nick Hanauer:
The only effective way to build the economy is from the bottom up and the middle out, which is precisely what the folks at Liberation in a Generation are trying to do.
Speaker 4:
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.
So, this is a podcast Nick, not a YouTube, but I’m guessing that a lot of people might know that we’re just a couple of old white guys here. And so we talk a lot about inclusion on this podcast, and of course, we talk about it because that is the core of our economic theory. We call it the golden rule of economics, that the more people we fully include in the economy in every way possible as entrepreneurs, innovators, workers, consumers, the faster and more prosperous the economy grows. We really believe this, that inclusion drives economic growth. It’s an argument about cause and effect that we’ve made repeatedly throughout the life of this podcast. But when we talk about inclusion, for us personally, it’s theoretical. It is economic theory. But as far as our lived experience, I’m guessing like me, inclusion hasn’t been a big problem for you.
Nick Hanauer:
No, no, definitely not despite being Jewish. But as Jews, we generally pass.
David Goldstein:
We’ve been included in this economy from the very start, you and I, but that’s not the case for-
Nick Hanauer:
As have our families.
David Goldstein:
And that’s not the case for a lot of Americans because let’s be honest, we live in a country with a long and profound history of racism that continues to this day.
Nick Hanauer:
Absolutely. And today we get to talk to Jeremie Greer, who’s the co-founder and co-executive director of Liberation in a Generation, which is a national movement support organization building power for people of color and demanding what they call a liberation economy, something very much up our alley. So it’ll be really interesting to chat with Jeremie about how they’re thinking about the economy and how it needs to be transformed.
Jeremie Greer:
I’m Jeremie Greer. I’m a co-executive director of Liberation in a Generation. I’ve been doing that… We’re an organization that’s been around for about three years, and we also have a podcast, Racism Is Profitable, that can be found on all of your podcasting platforms.
Nick Hanauer:
So Jeremie, tell us about your organization. What do you do, and what are you working on right now?
Jeremie Greer:
Really, we want to build the power of people of color to completely transform the economy away from what we call an oppression economy that thrives off theft, exploitation, and exclusion to a liberation economy, an economy in which all people of color have all their basic needs met, are valued, are able to thrive and have safety and security and completely belong. So we do that every day, by working with grassroots organizations that are building power to really advance transformative policies that’ll bring that reality to life.
Nick Hanauer:
Jeremie, are you guys a policy shop or an organizing… Tell us more about precisely what y’all do.
Jeremie Greer:
Yeah, so we’re somewhere in between. So if you think about organizing groups, they’re on the ground every day mobilizing people to change policy either at the state level, the local level. They door knock. They’re bringing people together around taking collective action. The thing that we’ve learned is that a lot of those organizations, they’re really fabulous at that. They build power. But one place that we heard that they needed some help was around doing policy analysis, and particularly policy analysis around the economy and race and the way that intersects with race. So what we do is we offer our services free of charge to organizing groups, and we partner with them to really bring that analysis to their campaigns to help strengthen and build their campaigns.
And then also what we do is we bring in new narratives to think about different ways to understand and describe the economy because the current way that we understand the economy just won’t bring us to that future, that neoliberal, rustic individual, pull yourself up by your bootstraps way that we understand the way the economy works just isn’t going to bring us to the future. The other thing that we do is really help them bring in a truth telling about why the economy is the way it is. Because that understanding that people have really is rooted in blaming people. You’re poor because there’s something wrong with you. And what we know is the reason that people are poor is because, particularly people of color, is that we have a system that has exploited racism for profit, for a small group of few and exploited people. So the reason that people are in the position they’re in is because of centuries of systemic racism and not anything they did in particular. And we bring that analysis to people so that they can use that in their mobilizing work.
David Goldstein:
So I love the name of your podcast, Racism is Profitable, but you mean that literally.
Jeremie Greer:
Yeah.
David Goldstein:
Explain that a little bit.
Jeremie Greer:
The existence of racism throughout the history of our country has been a thing that has been used by the very powerful, the elite and wealthy, to extract value from people of color and to do it to make profits on the other end. And it’s really fundamental to the fabric of the economy we live in. All the way from literally our economy sits on stolen land from Indigenous people. And all the value that land holds today was stolen and taken from a group of people. The way that our economy grew quickly before the Civil War was totally rooted in slave labor. And the way that we understand things like how we value an hour of work, how we value assets, a lot of those accounting practices were built on slave plantations. And a lot of the things that we have in our economy today and the way that we view certain workers, the way that we exploit certain workers, the way that the wealthy do that for profit is rooted in racism. And the racism is what justifies the economy that we have.
So yeah, it’s literally… And what we do through our podcast is really try to unpack that stuff. So just last week, Solana and Devin on our team, were really, really dissecting AI and how AI today is really rooted in these algorithms that are perpetuating racial biases that are already embedded in the economy and actually doing it intentionally to extract value out of people. So that’s an example of what we get into on our podcast. And you’re right, it is.
David Goldstein:
And it gets into a lot of people look at it, I have these conversations and they think of the… Because the legal racism is in the past that somehow it doesn’t exist in an economic sense anymore. But of course, when you have something that is grounded in several hundred years of legal and systemic racism… I’m curious the name of your organization, Liberation in a Generation, is it possible to liberate in a generation?
Jeremie Greer:
Yeah. Well, we absolutely believe it is, or else we wouldn’t be doing this. But I’ll tell you, there’s a real statistic that hit us. So Solana and I, give you a little of our background. We worked at national policy think tanks and worked with a lot of… And I read the list of guests y’all have had on your show, and we partnered with a lot of those people and a lot of those organizations where we were before. But a report was done. One of our colleagues, Emmanuel Nyavez, did a report with Chuck Collins. You may all know-
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, I know Chuck.
Jeremie Greer:
Yeah. So it was on this report that they did called Road to Zero Wealth. And there’s a statistic in that report that is sometime by the middle of this century, Black and Latino wealth will be zero. And that stopped us in our tracks, Solana and I. And we thought, wow, there is a deadline in which there is no return. It’s kind of like the climate. There’s a point in time where we can look and say, “Oh, there is no return beyond this.” So we really need to fundamentally change the way the economy works for people of color in order to live into a different liberated economy.
So the question is almost not whether it’s possible, but can we afford as a nation, and particularly as people of color, to let that reality come into being? So it pushed us to say, “Okay, if we were to do that at a generation, what are the kind of changes that we would need to see in the economy in order to get there? And what kind of organizations are going to take us there?” So that’s why we really are thinking about what are the bold, transformative policies that would make that change? And for us, we believe it’s the people who are building power, political power in communities are the ones that are going to actually deliver on that vision.
David Goldstein:
And to put that in context, in that timeframe, by the time that you have aggregate zero net wealth with people of color, people of color will be the majority of Americans.
Jeremie Greer:
Yes, that’s right.
David Goldstein:
So that means the majority of Americans will have net zero wealth.
Nick Hanauer:
This podcast is obviously devoted to tearing down neoliberalism in all its forms. And we often reflect on the fact that neoliberalism is, in some ways very similar to racism and sexism. It’s a modality of oppression, but for money rather than race or gender. And one of the things that got me into the business, if you can call it that, of addressing inequality and neoliberalism, the neoliberal way of understanding economic cause and effect at large, was that I got a look at the IRS tax tables in about 2007, which showed income distributions. And in 1980, the bottom 50% of Americans shared 18% of national income, while the top 1% shared about 8%. By 2007, the top 1% had risen to about 22%, and the bottom 50% had fallen to about 12%. Today, actually not today. In 2020, which is the last numbers that are available because they lag unless you have better connections than I do to the IRS-
David Goldstein:
I do not. I do not, no.
Nick Hanauer:
The share of income that goes to the bottom 50% of Americans has fallen into 10%. And one of the things that… I mean, basically what I did is I took those numbers in 2007, I just stuck them into a spreadsheet and just assumed that the trend would continue for another 30 years. And your point was made by that analysis, which is that in another 30 years, you end up with an income distribution where the top 1% has something like 45% of all national income and the bottom 50% shares 4%, which basically makes your point.
And that 50%, by the way, includes a lot of people who are not people of color. Statistically speaking, there are almost three times as many poor white people in this country as there are Black people. So the thing about neoliberalism is that although it leverages racism, it doesn’t give a shit who it makes poor. If you were trying to maximize wealth, you will very happily exploit white people just like Black people. It doesn’t matter. And so people of color have, in our country, been the most disadvantaged by these frameworks and systems. But there’s a lot of common cause to be made with white people who are in many ways being disadvantaged too by these incredibly stupid ideas.
Jeremie Greer:
And I think that the thing to think about, what I think differentiates the experience of people of color, because you’re absolutely right, there’s a lot of poor white people, and the wealth and income distribution is skewed to the detriment of all of us.
Nick Hanauer:
Yes, correct.
Jeremie Greer:
That is the true reality. The thing that happens with the reason why we focus on people of color is because there have been structural and systemic efforts that come together between private corporations and government where the intent is to subjugate people of color to a lower class so that value can be extracted from them.
Nick Hanauer:
100%.
Jeremie Greer:
That’s where I think it deviates a bit, which puts it to a place where the solutions have to be a little different. A good example of that is redlining, and if you’ve read the Richard Rothstein’s book, the Color of Law, it talks about the way that intentionally the government denied mortgage loans to whole communities of people, of Black people, so that not only could their wealth be restricted, but predators could go in there and extract wealth in other ways. And then also the government raised whole communities so that we could build highways, we could build other public utilities in Black communities, which brought the value of those communities down so that again, the predators could go in and extract value.
So I think the difference for people of color is the relationship between public policy and wealth extraction. It creates a different dimension that, I would add on to your analysis-
Nick Hanauer:
No, no, correct.
Jeremie Greer:
… of how wealth is distributed.
David Goldstein:
Are you familiar with Dorothy Brown’s the-
Jeremie Greer:
Oh, yeah.
David Goldstein:
One of the things that I found most fascinating was in that book was when she talked about housing that even redlining and predatory mortgages and other forms of legal or even illegal discrimination aside, the housing market doesn’t work for Black families the way it works for white families, simply because whites prefer not to live near Blacks, and therefore white neighborhoods appreciate faster than Black neighborhoods.
Nick Hanauer:
Well, and that has to do with the fact that 85% of the market is white.
David Goldstein:
Right, and the market serves the majority of buyers-
Nick Hanauer:
Whoever they may be.
David Goldstein:
… and it’s that… I mean, that’s just the way markets work. If the majority of buyers want to live in majority white neighborhoods, those majority white neighborhoods are going to appreciate faster. And in her book, she suggests that home ownership is not a great wealth building strategy for Black families unless they choose to be minorities in white neighborhoods. Instead, she suggests the stock market because there are no Black or white stocks.
Jeremie Greer:
And one thing to add on is that one of my good friends, Derek Hamilton, he often says, “Wealth begets wealth.” So the way in which people enter the housing market is they usually get some inheritance from a family member that they use to purchase a home, and that passing down is how the wealth sustains through the family. That doesn’t and hasn’t happened for Black people in particular, but for most many people of color because that wealth has not been able to be passed down. And that is a real, and again because of structural barriers that have been in place. So again, that passage of wealth is why you get a number where like 85% of the home ownership market in a lot of places is white.
Nick Hanauer:
Absolutely. And one of the really nefarious parts of both neoclassical economics and neoliberalism is the way in which it ignores things like path dependence in outcomes. Because market economy is what they call nonargotic, which means that it’s a system characterized by path dependence, luck, and compounding. And neoliberalism wants everybody to believe that if you’re rich, it’s because you deserved it, that you earned that place in society somehow. And if you’re poor, that’s because that’s all you’re worth. When in fact, most of the difference is a consequence of exactly the kinds of things you just pointed out, that both advantages and disadvantages compound over time in these systems. And this whole pull yourself up by your bootstraps, it’s all your fault narrative, it persuades people that those fundamental dynamics do not exist.
David Goldstein:
So it’s interesting, Jeremie, Nick asked you at the beginning to describe what your organization is, whether it’s a policy shop or organizing. It sounds like you do very much the same type of work that we generally do, which is narrative work, trying to put the right narratives in the hands of these other organizations. What do you find to be your biggest challenge from a narrative perspective in? Because we struggle with Democrats all the time trying to get them to tell a better story. What do you think the biggest narrative obstacles are?
Jeremie Greer:
One of the big ones is as you all have mentioned, the neoliberal doctrine is so pervasive that it’s really embedded in all of our psyche. And for us to get to a place, and I include people of color in this, to get to a place where we can wrap our heads around the type of systemic change that needs to take place, we really have to undo a lot of the teachings that we’ve gotten to this point. An example of this is your wellbeing should not be tied to whether you are able to work or where you work. You should have the ability to thrive in our economy. You should have income that you can use to take care of your basic needs, whether you are able to work or not. And that work does not have to be something that’s just extractive. It can be something that gives you that pride. It can be something that fulfills you.
It can be all of these other things, but people have come to understand it as something that is extractive and that their wellbeing has to be tied to that. And that’s just one example of the kind of reprogramming that we have to do to get people to a place where they could even wrap their mind. And I heard you all had, I’m blanking on who the guest was, but talked about a homes guarantee or not a homes guarantee, job guarantee. To even wrap your head around the idea that we could do that almost takes a rewiring of understanding the way that the economy works. And that’s a huge challenge.
The other challenge that I have, and it’s in our name, is the urgency. We need to treat this with real urgency. And we often at Liberation in a Generation think about Dr. King’s the fierce urgency of now. That we cannot just sit back and think that these things are going to work themselves out via the status quo. There’s too many people invested in the status quo, and we have to attack this with urgent ways. And that’s another reason why we love working with organizers so much because it doesn’t take a lot to convince an organizer of the urgency of what needs to be done. And so those are two things, two challenges that I think we have. And on the urgency, I feel like sometimes when we are sitting in boardrooms in Washington DC or New York or San Francisco where a lot of these heady economic conversations happen. I just don’t feel the urgency.
Nick Hanauer:
Why should they be urgent? Everything is fine.
Jeremie Greer:
Well, I do think-
Nick Hanauer:
For them, yeah.
Jeremie Greer:
I’m glad you raised it because I do think that that’s a real challenge. Those with closest proximity to where the pain is being caused in the economy feel the most urgent about changing it. And the further you get away from that, I feel like sometimes less urgent the conversation feels.
Nick Hanauer:
Our work on economic policy includes deep rethink about what prosperity is, where it comes from, how to get more of it, how all this stuff fits together. And we are persuaded that the entire neoclassical framework for understanding this stuff is just nonsense. It’s highly mathematized, internally consistent and completely untethered from anything that happens on planet Earth. And one of the core propositions within Neoclassical economics and neoliberalism is that as justice increases, economic efficiency decreases. This idea that there’re always trade-offs, that you could pay people more, but then there’d be less jobs. You could ask rich people to be taxed more, but they would be less effective as job creators. All of this nonsense.
David Goldstein:
Big Trade-Off.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. Arthur Okun’s book, the Big Trade-Off being the canonical example of that kind of thinking, which permeates everything about how we think about economics in the country. All of this is total bullshit. It’s not just wrong. It’s the opposite of true that the economy isn’t money or GDP or corporate profits. It’s people, and the more people you include in the more ways the bigger the economy gets and the faster it grows. And that way of understanding economic cause and effect makes it easier to persuade, we believe, makes it easier to persuade all people that everybody has a stake in addressing the problems that people of color face. That there is no trade-off when you pay people more money other than the bonuses that a few old, rich white guys currently get. In fact, the economy gets better for everybody. Does that thinking align with the narratives that you guys are activating?
Jeremie Greer:
Oh, it totally aligns. And I’d add a dimension to what you said, which I think is implicit in what you’re saying, but I’ll make it a little more explicit. One of those trade-offs is that a lot of white people, a lot of middle class wealthy and upper middle class white people believe, they may not say it out loud, but do believe that the subjugation of Black people is necessary for them to have the vitality that they have.
Nick Hanauer:
Well, status.
Jeremie Greer:
And it’s why we have all the nimbyism. So one of the trade-offs is in some people’s mind, which I agree with you is total bullshit, is that yeah, it’s sad that that’s happening to Black people, but it’s necessary. And I think that that’s something that I want to make explicit. I think was implicit in what you were saying. And as it relates to yes, I agree. So we like to think of a liberation economy, an economy that where all people have their basic needs met, where all people are feeling safe and secure, where all people have value and feel like they’re valued and they’re compensated for their value, and that all people feel like they belong no matter their race, no matter their sexual orientation, no matter gender, so on and so forth.
And the reason why we think that vision is powerful is because in that vision, in that reality, there is collective wellbeing. And the collective wellbeing is coming from a relationship between the people and the government in which we are holding our government accountable to taking care of all of us, rather than just taking care of the very few, which is what’s happening today in what we would call the oppression economy. And that that kind of relationship that kind of co-governance that could take place, will actually lead to a place in which we’re all prospering. But we think that it’s important to ensure that we’re focusing on the people who have been most marginalized in our economy because that will be the true barometer of whether we’re all thriving. Because if we’re taking care of the people who have been harmed the most under this expressive systems that we currently have.
David Goldstein:
It’s also from at least our way of looking at the economy, it’s also the greatest opportunity to grow the economy and add value and prosperity to the economy because the least included are the people who have the most to give, the most to contribute.
Nick Hanauer:
There’s the most leverage there.
David Goldstein:
There’s a lot more that the least included have to contribute to the economy than the most included. Try to include Nick Moore. It’s really hard, very difficult.
Nick Hanauer:
Extremely difficult.
Jeremie Greer:
It would be hard, very expensive. The wealthy… Just look at the last tax cut that Trump… That was a record level wealth transfer in the trillions of dollars, and we’re fighting over a few $100 billion for something like Medicare for all.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s right. In the last 20 years, we have cut taxes for rich people four times. We have raised the minimum wage $1.00. And the big frustration, and I’m not sure how you feel about this, is that this is not just Republicans.
Jeremie Greer:
No, I’m with you, yeah.
Nick Hanauer:
I was a huge Obama supporter, but that man was a straight up neoliberal, and he did not understand these problems, and his administration did not address them in the way that they should have. And it’s hard to persuade lots of Democrats that we have been at fault, and in many ways, more at fault for these policies than our opponents. So it’s extremely painful.
David Goldstein:
Okay. So let’s try to close up on a positive note. What’s working for you? Tell us where things are going right.
Jeremie Greer:
Well, I’ll start with something that feels negative, but I believe is positive. I believe a lot of this pushback around critical race theory, things like that, are actually demonstration of progress. I believe that it means that we are starting to move into a place where these people that are invested in the status quo are feeling the pressure. And I believe that they’re feeling the pressure because of grassroots movements that are pushing conversations into very uncomfortable places. I believe it’s-
Nick Hanauer:
That’s a great point.
Jeremie Greer:
I believe all the discussion about defund the police is pushing us into a place where we are forced to have conversations that are very uncomfortable, not just about race, but also what are the causes underneath the police violence and on topics like that. And those are the things that I think that we are… That’s what makes me and gives me a lot of life that we’re having movement because I do think that we’re pushing the bounds of where the conversations have been. And that is totally in my view… And I don’t take credit for this at all, but I believe that that is from the grassroots movements that are really pushing conversations.
Nick Hanauer:
No, that’s a really good point. It’s easy to get depressed about the pushback on some of these things, but there is a silver lining in all that, which is at least we’re having the discussions.
Jeremie Greer:
And we’re starting to think of solutions. I mean we did a guaranteed income pilot with the expanded child tax credit.
David Goldstein:
Right.
Jeremie Greer:
So we’re starting to see it come to life in policy.
David Goldstein:
And it worked fantastically well. Not that we continued it, but for when we had it, it worked great and was so much less expensive and brought more people into the workforce. It gets back to the idea that these things are pro-growth. You can’t get people into the workforce if they can’t afford to work, if childcare costs exceed their income. So it’s a great example to go back to. Do you want to ask the final question, Nick?
Nick Hanauer:
Yes, sir. Jeremie, why do you do this work?
Jeremie Greer:
I’ve listened to the podcast, and I was really excited about being able to answer this question. I’m going to say what a lot of your guests say. I grew up in a place where none of the ideas of the economic models fit. And I as a kid didn’t know that I was having this economic critique of neoliberalism. I grew up with some of the smartest people I’ve ever known that struggled economically. The meritocracy made no sense to me because why aren’t these people doing well? And that was a question that just was always in my head, and I’ve pursued throughout my career. I feel like I’m getting closer and closer to it the older I get. So hopefully, within my lifetime or within the generation, we’ll have those answers, and we’ll have a different kind of economy.
Nick Hanauer:
Well, thank you so much for being with us, and best of luck on your work.
Jeremie Greer:
Thanks for having me and allowing me to come talk about my work.
David Goldstein:
We’ve talked a lot about the impact of luck, path dependence, and compounding in the economy, how advantages and disadvantages compound over time. But my God, Nick, that statistic that Jeremie raised, that by sometime around mid-century net wealth for people of color will be zero, that’s just a stunning example of negative compounding.
Nick Hanauer:
And I was really struck by that too. And of course, as I said, in our conversation, I’d never thought of it in that way, but it completely aligns with the fundamental economics of neoliberalism. In a world where the rich continue to get richer and everyone else gets poorer, that fact or that claim that Jeremie made has to become true. It just can’t not.
David Goldstein:
Well, we’ve seen the math. As you mentioned, it’s a wonky thing to say, but this is the math of nonargotic systems like markets. Eventually, left to their own devices, if we could all live forever, Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk or some guy would end up owning almost everything and everybody else would be left with almost nothing. That’s the inevitable math of a market left to its own devices. And the only reason why it doesn’t happen is that none of us live long enough to finish the game.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, exactly. And that reasonable societies take steps and have always taken steps to moderate those dynamics.
David Goldstein:
The American middle class was not an inevitable outcome of market capitalism. It was an intentional creation of the New Deal, and the fact that it was mostly white people was also intentional. It’s very clear that that was the compromise. That was the deal that FDR had to make with the southern democrats to get his programs passed was intentionally leaving Black people out of many of its most important elements, such as the minimum wage, which excluded jobs that were predominantly held by Black people. As in the mortgage…. A lot of the provisions of the GI Bill where when it was passed, well, Blacks couldn’t go to most of the colleges, where you couldn’t get housing because of redlining of neighborhoods. They couldn’t get these federally subsidized mortgages, which built the suburbs, but those mortgages weren’t available to Black families.
This was not, “Oh, that’s a shame that happened.” That was all intentional. It was allowed to happen because they couldn’t pass those programs through Congress without those racist provisions. I think there’s one other issue that I don’t think we raised and talked about enough in our conversation with Jeremie, and that is it’s easy to look at what he and his organization are doing and understand that this is good for people of color, but it’s good for everybody. That’s the thing about our economic theory when inclusion is that golden rule include more people, it’s how you grow the economy.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s right. And that is the middle out point in all of this. The only effective way to build the economy is from the bottom up and the middle out, which is precisely what the folks at Liberation in a Generation are trying to do. It is a fairer approach, but it’s also the best way to make the economy larger and faster growing.
David Goldstein:
As we say, it’s not a big trade-off. Fairness and growth go hand in hand and in an economy where it’s people… I mean, it’s people-
Nick Hanauer:
That’s right.
David Goldstein:
… that contribute to the economy. It’s people that consume the economy. The only way to grow it is to include more people in it. And when you are excluding what will soon be a majority of Americans from full participation in the economy, you are crippling your economy.
Nick Hanauer:
Anyway, super interesting conversation. Sounds like they’re doing great work, and it’ll be fun to see how that all evolves.
Speaker 4:
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 at Pitchfork Economics. As always, from our team at Civic Ventures, thanks for listening. See you next week.