Nick Hanauer:

Question is not, “Should we raise the minimum wage?” The question is, “How high should we raise it?”

Michael Reich:

The conventional wisdom that we teach in introductory economics is that when something’s price has gone up, you buy less of it. Lots of economists used to think that higher minimum wages would mean declines in jobs, and we’re the first to find an actual positive effect.

David Goldstein:

When workers have more money, businesses have more customers and hire more workers.

Nick Hanauer:

Could there be a more obvious thing about economic cause and effect?

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. Nick, I thought we’d share with our listeners a little bit of our origin story. You and I, we first started working together due to our mutual interest in the $15 minimum wage.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah. In the before times.

David Goldstein:

In the before times. Right, you were a big backer of $15.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah.

David Goldstein:

And I was at the time writing for the Stranger, Seattle’s alt weekly. And I think it was one of my foul-mouthed take-downs of The Seattle Times’ editorial board on this issue that got us in touch with each other.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah, probably. Probably. Yeah. Well, they were and continue to be a certain extent the troglodytes of the time, the voice of the radical orthodoxy. “Raising wages kills jobs.”

David Goldstein:

That’s right.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah.

David Goldstein:

And throughout that entire battle in Seattle and elsewhere, that’s what we kept hearing, that, “If you raise the minimum wage, it’s going to hurt the people we’re trying to help,” that when you raise the price of something, people buy less of it so there will be a little fewer jobs. And that’s what happens when you mess with that perfectly rational market. And it turns out that in Seattle, we had studies here that ended up showing no, actually wages rose for the people we were trying to help. And no, there was no apparent job loss. And there were a lot of other studies that also failed to find that disemployment effect, that negative employment effect that the models predicted and the critics predicted.

Nick Hanauer:

Yes.

David Goldstein:

But there’s a new study out there that takes these results one step further.

Nick Hanauer:

So our old friend, Michael Reich and colleagues at the University of California at Berkeley have just published a study, the first ever done on the $15 minimum wage. In other words, a circumstance where the minimum wage wasn’t raised a dollar or 10% or something like that but raised significantly and found to the horror of neoclassical economists everywhere, that not only didn’t those big wage jumps kill jobs, they created them, a lot of them. And it is an astonishing… It’s not an astonishing result because-

David Goldstein:

Not to us.

Nick Hanauer:

Not to us, but it’s just such a vindication of all this work that we’ve been doing and effectively has dragged the economics profession into the 21st century. It’s really exciting. And with that, I think we should get right to talking to Dr. Reich about his study.

Michael Reich:

So I’m Michael Reich. I’m a longtime professor at the University of California at Berkeley and Labor Economist. I’ve worked on many different parts of labor economics in the past dozen years or so. Most of my work is focused on minimum wage policies and their effects. And some of these papers I’ve written have had quite an impact on the economics profession, and I’ve also testified in local, state, and federal legislative bodies and advised them on how high minimum wages can go.

Nick Hanauer:

So Michael, we’re so pleased to have you with us today to talk about this really important new study that you’ve done on… Really the first study on the $15 minimum wage and the impact that it had on the local economies in which it was introduced. And what’s really interesting about this study, of course, to us, is that it’s the first time, I think you say this in the paper, that anybody’s ever studied minimum wage increases this big, this dramatic.

Michael Reich:

Yeah. I can talk about the background, why the policies have become bolder, and then if you want me to talk about the study, I can do that. I’d break it up into parts.

Nick Hanauer:

I mean, I think the background people understand, because we talk about the minimum wage a lot.

David Goldstein:

Let’s start with the results and then we’ll get into the weeds a bit because it’s really exciting. It’s been quite a decade. You’ve spent a decade studying the minimum wage, and this is quite a result. What did you find?

Michael Reich:

In one or two sentences, we find that $15 minimum wages when we dig down deep enough do have very large, and what economists call statistically significant positive effects on the number of jobs in an economy. We find that for fast food workers who are very affected by minimum wages, and we also find large positive employment effects among teens who are the other group that these studies often look at because they’re so low paid.

David Goldstein:

And you also found that the larger the minimum wage increase, the larger the gain in employment. Is that correct?

Michael Reich:

Yes, that’s correct. The minimum wages in the areas that we looked at have been rising since 2014, or actually the end of 2013. And we stopped looking in 2022 because you have to close the date at some point, write the paper. And throughout that period, we are finding larger, more positive effects, especially in spite of the pandemic.

Nick Hanauer:

This study was brought to our attention when it was published by our friend, the economist, Marshall Steinbaum, who merely tweeted, “The sound you hear is people’s heads exploding.”

Michael Reich:

Yep, that’s right.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah. And for the listeners of our podcast, this result of course is a magnificent, “We told you so,” moment for us, Michael. But why don’t you explain in the simplest language that you can find what your methodology was, because that’s really interesting but complicated?

Michael Reich:

Yeah. Well, first of all, let me say heads explode because the conventional wisdom that we teach in introductory economics is that when you find something’s price has gone up, you buy less of it. And so lots of economists used to think that higher minimum wages would mean declines in jobs and actually recent studies more likely have found not much change in jobs. And we’re the first to find an actual positive effect.

Nick Hanauer:

And can I just interrupt for a moment and just point out that one of the reasons that the economists who have done all the best empirical studies on the minimum wage and show that there was effectively zero job loss, what’s important to remember is that all of that looked at very small increases relative to the $15 minimum wage increase that you looked at. Isn’t that true?

Michael Reich:

That’s right.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah.

Michael Reich:

Some of the best studies looked at increases at average about nine or 10%. And we’re looking at increases that, over seven and a half years, were over a hundred percent.

Nick Hanauer:

Right.

Michael Reich:

A much bolder set of policies.

Nick Hanauer:

Right.

Michael Reich:

That’s right.

David Goldstein:

I don’t want to play gotcha journalism here, but I want to put this in historical perspective and read you a quote you’re probably familiar with from a Nobel Prize winning economist. This is from 1996. He wrote, “No self-respecting economist would claim that increases in the minimum wage increase employment. Such a claim, if seriously advanced, becomes equivalent to a denial that there is even minimal scientific content in economics.” So I’ve got two questions for you out of that. Are you a self-respecting economist? And if you could follow up with, are you denying that there is even minimal scientific content in economics?

Michael Reich:

I think I recognize that quote. I think it went off to say that, “Finding an increase in employment would be akin to finding that water can move uphill.”

Nick Hanauer:

Uphill, yes. It’s a famous quote.

Michael Reich:

Famous quote.

Nick Hanauer:

“And there are people who believe that are camp-following whores,” and so on and so forth.

Michael Reich:

Yeah. Yeah. That ad hominem attack enraged David Card who was one of the targets of “your siding.” So the problem is that Buchanan and many other economists worked with an economic model that’s a perfectly competitive model. That means in practice, that employer can hire all the workers that they want at a given wage and that they pay their workers the value of what they produce, the additional value of what they produce, which in econ speak is the value of the marginal product. And so if the wage were to be raised above that value of marginal product, then employers wouldn’t want to hire any of those workers or hire anybody. They’d rather shut down because they’d be losing money. They’d be paying more than they’re getting from hiring the additional worker. And that’s a very strong principle that we teach in introductory economics, that markets are competitive.

Some markets are, but increasingly in the last 10 to 15 years, many economists of all stripes have been finding that employers actually have the power to set wages. It’s not given by a competitive labor market where wages are set. What that means in this context is that, say fast food restaurants, even though they tend to locate near where their customers are and they’re near each other, so workers have other options… It’s not like a isolated employer situation which you might find if you were working at the local hospital as a nurse and there’s no other hospitals nearby to work. In this situation, employers have been paying very low wages, but at the cost of having very high employee turnover rates, often more than a hundred percent a year. So in this situation, the employer’s constantly trying to fill their vacancies, therefore employee fewer workers than they really want to.

They’re not even selling as much as they could if they could fill those vacancies. So I like to say that a minimum wage doesn’t kill jobs, it kills job vacancies. Now you only have vacancies in the first place if you drop the assumption that we’re working in a perfectly competitive labor market and here’s how it works in this case. If the employer wants to save on those turnover costs, which are the costs of recruiting and retaining workers, if they want to attract more workers, they have to offer a higher wage to the new workers. But that would mean they would also have to raise the pay to all their existing workers or other workers. That’s a big disincentive to hire more workers. What a minimum wage increase does is it actually brings you to a situation that’s more like a competitive labor market, and therefore the cost of each additional hire is just the wage pay to the additional worker.

So employers then will hire more workers than they did before the minimum wage increase, provided, of course, that minimum wage is not above the value of the marginal product. Now, in practice, the value of the marginal product varies with the price of output, not just with the skills that the worker has. It’s a common error where people say, “Oh, someone’s productivity is a function of the skills and work habits and all those sorts of characteristics of the workers.” If the price goes up, then the value of each additional worker also goes up. So there are small price increases that occur. So in practice, we haven’t yet found the level at which a minimum wage increase is above the value of the marginal product, and therefore it would lead to the predictions of the competitive model. So that’s what that economist got wrong. They were making an assumption that was so native to them that they didn’t realize that they were talking about a model rather than the world.

Nick Hanauer:

Planet Earth. Yeah.

Michael Reich:

Yeah. On planet earth, we have a lot of imperfect competition, and not just for markets for nurses, but for software engineers.

Nick Hanauer:

Let’s be clear-

Michael Reich:

Certainly for low wage workers.

Nick Hanauer:

For everything. There is no such thing as a perfectly competitive market. And it should be somewhat embarrassing to the field that economists were the only people on Planet Earth who didn’t know that employers, particularly large ones, had more power than workers.

Michael Reich:

Right. Yeah.

David Goldstein:

So you realize, Michael, that what you’ve done is you’ve settled a philosophical argument that’s been going on. You’ve proven that we are in fact not living in a simulation.

Michael Reich:

Well, I’m not against models per se. We have to simplify what we see around us somewhat to be able to explain it to ourselves to perform a narrative. But it really helps to have the right model and to make sure that the model fits the reality. And that, I think, is what our paper will help a lot of economists to do.

David Goldstein:

I’ve got a pet peeve and I’m wondering what you think about this. In introductory econ textbooks, it’s in Mankiw’s economics, it’s even in Krugman’s, it’s in a lot of them, they use the minimum wage as an illustration of the relationship between price and demand. This is what they use to show you how it works. And yet in the real world, we don’t see the relationship that they chart out in the book. Should they stop using the minimum wage as their example?

Michael Reich:

I think they should use the monopsony model that I’ve been describing as the example. I taught it to my undergraduates all the time. But yeah, you’re right. My son who went to Harvard took Mankiw’s Econ 1 course and on the midterm, he had to make that argument, even though I had already taught him a monopsony argument. He’s now a full professor of economics at Harvard. So he survived, Mankiw. But yeah, we really just need to have a different model in that introductory class.

David Goldstein:

Because most of our policymakers and politicians and thought leaders, they’re not economists. They don’t get past that introductory textbook. This is all they get. And economists keep telling me, professors keep telling me, “Oh, we teach them it’s just a model. It’s just a useful…” But yet this is what most people believe. And so there’s going to be a lot of surprise amongst the lay public at your result.

Nick Hanauer:

But the implications of this research are astonishingly profound for policymaking. Because if you go from a world in which policymakers believe that there is this inverse mechanical relationship between the minimum wage and the number of jobs that we have, and that the more you raise it, the less jobs you have, to a world in which it now seems likely that within the bounds of reason, the more you raise it, the more jobs you create, it’s just astonishingly profound change. Because in the latter case, the question is not, “Should we raise the minimum wage?” The question is, “How high should we raise it?”

Michael Reich:

Right.

Nick Hanauer:

Right? You can’t raise it to $200 an hour.

Michael Reich:

And nobody’s talking about that.

Nick Hanauer:

That’s right. But you probably could pretty easily raise it to $25 an hour. And that would of course have significant implications to some business models that rely on exploitive labor practices to make things go. But what you can be very sure of is that the world will not run out of hamburgers.

Michael Reich:

You’re referring to a really interesting phenomenon that some economists have now observed, which is that when a minimum wage goes up, you could also have a reallocation effect. And it’s to say, firms that won’t survive on the minimum wage that high are replaced, or those jobs are replaced by more jobs in other sectors.

Nick Hanauer:

Correct.

Michael Reich:

Or in other firms. And so average productivity goes up. And that’s part of the way that these increases in minimum wages get absorbed. There is a very beautiful research paper in the American Economic Review about the establishment of the minimum wage in Germany that finds this reallocation is very strong. We don’t have the same kind of data that Germans have to test that. It’s likely to have some of the effect here too.

Nick Hanauer:

Right. Absolutely. And I just think that this is a moment for policy makers to take very, very seriously because a world in which you’re not making a choice about whether to do it or not, but how high it should be raised to optimize the kind of society that you want, these are transformationally different circumstances, and I just think it’s a really incredible moment and we just couldn’t be more pleased to have you here to talk about it. It’ll be fascinating to see what the sort of generalized reaction is from your field. Although the thing about economics is that it is different from other sciences to the extent that economics is a science, because so much of how humans operate in the world has to do with their status and how much people get paid affects their status and a result which implies that giant corporations who aren’t paying their workers adequately are simply not doing it because they’re greedy, not because they have the best interest in heart, there are big implications to that.

Michael Reich:

Yeah. Well, I’d like to offer two perspectives on how economics is changing or maybe just one perspective because I can’t hold two thoughts in my mind anymore after half hour of talking to you guys. The first one is that there’s more and more recognition that employers have this kind of power in the economics profession at the high level. Not at the introductory level, but certainly at the graduate education level. So for example, last year, David Card, my colleague and Nobel Prize winner, and one who really jolted the profession in the 1990s on the minimum wage, he wrote a presidential address, he was the president of the American Economic Association saying, “Who set your wage?” Basically reviewing all the studies that show employers have more power than the workers have, as one of you put it. And I certainly agree that hasn’t penetrated down to the introductory textbooks or the public at large, but the profession as a whole has changed or is changing in that direction there. And there are more and more of these studies in other contexts that find employer power every year.

So I actually think… This is my second thought. I think a large part of the profession is going to receive this very easily because they’ve become much more persuaded of the pervasiveness of employer power. But there’s also a part of the profession that is certainly still stuck on the idea that minimum wages have to have negative effects. Indeed, last week I was at a conference in Minneapolis organized by the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank and University of Minnesota with half a dozen studies that claim to find negative effects. And that’s kind of the bubble that they’re in. I spoke up at every one of these and told them what was wrong with their study methodologically. But I think it’s true that there’s a demand for studies to find negative minimum wage effects.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah. And that is because the economic policy and moral implications are so profound.

Michael Reich:

Well, even one of the studies that was presented in Minneapolis started looking at fairness issues and what people are willing to pay basically for labor conditions to be more fair, more for a living wage. And the polls, the opinion polls are very powerful. Most people are willing to pay a couple of cents more, 50 cents more even, to pay for better labor conditions. And that is for higher minimum wage. And you see that in the referendum at the state level, even the red states, minimum wage increases passed by overwhelming margins. And again, economists have been slow to take into account these redistributive preferences, if you want to call it, or just concerns for fairness. But there are some good work being done on that as well.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah.

David Goldstein:

Well, to quote once again from James Buchanan’s remarkably unselfconscious statement here, he says, “Economists can do nothing but write as advocates for ideological interests.” And I think he said that-

Michael Reich:

Wow.

David Goldstein:

Yes. Well, he says, “If you actually claim that the minimum wage increases-“

Michael Reich:

Oh, I see. Yeah. Yeah.

David Goldstein:

“Employment,” but of course, he was referring to himself.

Michael Reich:

Without knowing it. Yeah.

David Goldstein:

But I think that’s what you see. I mean, you can construct a model to prove anything. So you can construct your methodology… As we see in the budget models, the CBO and the Penn Wharton models, the answers you get depend on the models that you’re running the data through.

Michael Reich:

Yeah. But, Goldy, I think that’s true but only a part of the story, that there really has been an advance in the last 15 to 20 years in economics, and by the way, led by David Card, by people at many, many different universities on improving our methods to make them more credible as causal identifications rather than correlations. So it’s not just a question of the theoretical model, but also what does the empirical evidence show when you use a credible causal identification model? And we’re using one in this paper, and so it’s been a huge change in the profession. When I was in graduate school, almost all the articles in the American Economic Review had no numbers in them. They were just models. And as you say, clever people could come up with a variety of models. Now it’s the other way around. Almost all the papers are talking about empirical evidence and they can’t get published in a leading journal without using these credible methods. So I want to throw that out as something that I have benefited from myself.

David Goldstein:

Do you think that the methodology that you’re using could be predictive? Because again, thinking back to the CBO, the last time they analyzed a federal minimum wage increase, they predicted hundreds of thousands to a couple million job losses.

Michael Reich:

You want to get me started on the CBO report? Will Carrington, who’s been writing those reports for CBO for decades was at the Minneapolis conference and repeated a lot of the assumptions he makes. I was astonished. He just doesn’t know the evidence. So yeah, the CBO’s reports have drawn very heavily on the outlier studies that find big negative effects. There are a few of them, and some of them get past referees because you can do some referee shopping, journal shopping. But they are, I think at this point, well outside the conventional wisdom. University of Chicago, Booth School of Business has a opinion panel for elite economists. It’s called the IGM panel. I forget what IGM stands for, but the panel consists of maybe thirty to 40 kind of top economists at a whole variety of US universities. And in 2014 and 2015, they asked the question, “Do you think a $15 minimum wage would have substantial negative effects on employment?” And you’d be surprised. The answer was most of them thought that it would not. And so that’s already a major change in the profession compared to 20 years before that.

Nick Hanauer:

Well, Michael, thank you so much for joining us today, and thank you so much for your incredible work. Oh, we forgot to ask the final question.

David Goldstein:

Yeah, you have to ask the final question, Nick.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah. Why do you do this work?

Michael Reich:

I do it for a number of reasons, not just one. One is I’ve been interested in how to raise low wages ever since I was a grad student or even before that because my father worked in the garment industry. My mother did too in New York, which were low wage industries. So that’s one. And I went into economics… I started out in college going into physics. So I was the Sputnik generation. And I went into economics because I learned in my economics classes that you could use scientific methods, including the ones I’d learned in experimental physics, to not only test hypotheses, but to make the world a better place. And that’s why I do these studies. It’s really fun for me to do these scientific methods. I just really enjoy it. And I also feel like it’s going to help a lot of people get higher living standards, and I get attention for it, to be honest, from the media, from people like you, and from policy makers.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah. That’s fantastic.

Michael Reich:

What’s wrong with that picture? Nothing.

David Goldstein:

It’s weird, Michael, because we’ve asked this question of a lot of economists and so far, not one of them has replied that they do this work because their marginal wage meets their marginal product. So I thought these are the most rational people on earth.

Michael Reich:

Now I could make a lot more money working on antitrust cases or something.

David Goldstein:

My theory is you could make a lot more money if you were showing negative employment effects.

Michael Reich:

Well, it is true that the National Restaurant Association-

David Goldstein:

Yes.

Michael Reich:

Has paid for the work of some of those people who find negative effects in six figures. So there’s something to that. But I have the support of my university. I’m not going to say I’m low paid, so there’s no complaints from-

Nick Hanauer:

I love it.

Michael Reich:

Me about it.

Nick Hanauer:

Well, thank you again for joining us and great work and keep us appraised of the next big thing.

Michael Reich:

Thank you. Thanks for having me and for being so excited about my work.

David Goldstein:

I think, Nick, during the battle over Seattle’s $15 minimum wage, one of the most effective lines you used was essentially, “When workers have more money, businesses have more customers and hire more workers.”

Nick Hanauer:

Could there be a more obvious thing about economic cause and effect? It is stunning that it took so-called economic science this long to come to this common sense conclusion, that when you pay people more, all sorts of things happen. More people want those jobs and more people have enough money to buy the things that create jobs. It cannot not be thus. If no one has any money, who will buy the stuff that employment depends on? And it’s just stunning to me. I have a lot of friends who are economists, but it’s hard not to be mad at a field of study that can forget things like power exists. Professional economists could literally be the only people on Planet Earth who didn’t know that large employers have more power than working people.

David Goldstein:

And I think, Nick, what’s really exciting about this is of course, when you made, “When workers have more money,” line, that’s a rhetorical argument. It’s a political argument.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah.

David Goldstein:

It’s a good slogan that takes the old, “When you raise the price of employment, employers will buy less of it,” it flips it on its head, goes from a supply side argument to a demand side argument. And it’s useful for getting the general point across. But in fact, when you look at this study, it’s saying other things as well. It’s totally not as simple as that. If I understand Michael correctly, he found that raising the minimum wage, the substantial increases in the minimum wage made the labor market more competitive and efficient, that it actually reduced the marginal cost of adding more employees. And so it made it easier and counterintuitively, when you look at the total costs, including training and replacing, the cost of hiring, it actually in a way made it cheaper and easier to fill open positions.

Nick Hanauer:

High standards are good for everyone.

David Goldstein:

And good for the businesses because what it found was when you had those unfilled positions, these companies were not serving as many customers as they otherwise could have or would have. They were leaving money on the table. And so this high minimum wage, when you set this floor for the industry as a whole, and you’re not competing with other companies based on how little you can pay, when you’re removed from that race to the bottom, you’re suddenly running your business better. And that’s an astounding thought that-

Nick Hanauer:

That’s right.

David Goldstein:

A high minimum wage is good for businesses, not simply because when everybody’s higher wage, they’ll have more money to spend in those stores. It actually helps them run their business more efficiently. What’s heartening to me is that we talk about growing the economy from the middle out, and President Biden says this all the time, from the bottom up and from the middle out. And part of that is just damn paying people better, right?

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah. That’s it. Higher wages cure all ills. They do.

David Goldstein:

And this is more evidence of it. It’s not simply that it puts more money in the pocket of workers to be able to spend on themselves and their families and makes their lives a little easier. It grows the economy, it increases the number of people employed. And I’m saying it that way because to be clear, one of the problems in this economy right now with low unemployment is we have a lot of unfilled jobs. And so when you pay people more, you can pull more people back into the workforce. Women who can’t afford childcare when they’re paid $7.25 an hour would work at $18 an hour. They could now afford to get back into the market, into the-

Nick Hanauer:

That’s right.

David Goldstein:

Labor force. So all around good for everybody, just as we expect from middle out policies.

Nick Hanauer:

Exactly. And just a couple of concluding thoughts. The first is that when talking to Michael about the monopsony dynamic, of course some of this can come out in prices, but the problem in America is, and the problem for economics for at large is that because power is effectively the dark matter of economics, it’s 85% of what matters and very hard to see or characterize, and the other dirty secret of the American economy is that you can raise the minimum wage substantially and not raise prices, but simply lower profits and executive salaries and bonuses and eliminate stock buybacks. Stock buybacks, just from major public corporations last year, were about a trillion dollars. If you assume that equally nefarious things are happening in the other companies in the economy, maybe it’s a $2 trillion effective surplus within the economy of just money rattling around that is used by rich people to make themselves even richer.

$2 trillion is darn near $20,000 more per worker per year in income. That $2 trillion or trillion dollars or whatever it is, it doesn’t go into the pockets of rich people because it needs to be or has to be or should be, or that there’s some economic principle at play that makes that the best possible outcome for those dollars. That money goes into their pockets, my pocket, because powerful rich people prefer it that way. That’s it. This is just a preference that is government sanctioned in our country that is completely unnecessary. And the reason I think that this study is so important is that it shows a bunch of bad actors that there’s no place to hide. That old saw, “Well, we would raise your wages, but then we’d have to fire you,” is just bullshit. It’s just a lie. It was a way to fade the moral heat on raising wages for workers. It was a way to politely say, “I would help you, but that would be bad for you,” right? And that’s what I think is so significant here.

David Goldstein:

Very exciting news here.

Nick Hanauer:

Yeah.

David Goldstein:

Of course, we have a link to the study in the show notes as well as to a great piece on it in New York Magazine.

Nick Hanauer:

Yep.

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 Skunkworks 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.