Why do so many Americans feel powerless, lonely, and disconnected — and what does that have to do with our economy?
Senator Chris Murphy joins Nick and Goldy to discuss his new book, Crisis of the Common Good, which makes the case that America’s political crisis is inseparable from a deeper collapse of power, connection, and shared purpose.
They dig into the “cult of profit,” Market Humanism, AI, scarcity, corruption, and the limits of an economy organized around efficiency and extraction. It’s a conversation about what happens when profit becomes the highest measure of success, and what it would mean to build an economy rooted in dignity, connection, and the common good.
Senator Chris Murphy is the junior United States Senator for Connecticut
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Crisis of the Common Good: The Fight for Meaning and Connection in a Broken America
Watch Nick Debate Obama Admin Economist Jason Furman: NickHanauer.Substack.com
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Goldy: So Nick, before we start this episode, I’d like to have an hour-long debate with you about whether capitalism is broken.
Nick Hanauer: I just did that, Goldy.
Goldy: Really? With who?
Nick Hanauer: I debated Jason Furman, the former head of the Council of Economic Advisors under President Obama, Harvard economics professor, and friend of mine.
Goldy: A friend of yours. Oh no. It got a little spicy there.
Nick Hanauer: It did, it did, it did. We had a really fun debate over the question of whether capitalism is broken. I argued that it is. He argued that it isn’t.
Goldy: And where could people see this debate if they wanted to watch or listen to it?
Nick Hanauer: I would love for them to come to my Substack at nickhanauer.substack.com. Honestly, I think it was a really interesting discussion, really fun. Did get a little spicy in places. The moderator told us that he had never done less work in a debate. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.
Goldy: I think we’ve got a talent here for not letting somebody else have a word in edgewise. Anyway, we will put a link in the show notes. Again, go to nickhanauer.substack.com. And now, onto our conversation with Senator Chris Murphy.
Nick Hanauer: The rising inequality and growing political instability that we see today are the direct result of decades of bad economic theory.
Goldy: The last five decades of trickle-down economics haven’t worked. But what’s the alternative?
Nick Hanauer: Middle-out economics is the answer.
Goldy: Because the middle class is the source of growth, not its consequence.
Nick Hanauer: That’s right.
Announcer 1: This is Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer, a podcast about how to build the economy from the middle out. Welcome to the show.
Nick Hanauer: So Goldy, today, we get to talk to a pretty old friend of mine, Senator Chris Murphy from Connecticut, who I think is one of the most thoughtful political leaders in the country today. I’ve been talking to Senator Murphy about economics for a long time. For as long as I’ve known him, he’s always been like, “Yeah, but there’s deeper stuff going on.” It’s not just all dollars and cents.
Goldy: Right.
Nick Hanauer: There’s this moral rot at the center of things that I think is really a big problem. And he has this new book out, which is The Crisis of the Common Good, which I think is the expression of this feeling that he has had for a very long time that we are on the wrong track. And I’m very excited to talk to him about it today.
Goldy: I think, Nick, if I have a criticism of you and your approach to things, it is your, well, we’ll get into this, the use of the word cult with him, but your faith in how much of the problem is just economics-
Nick Hanauer: Yeah.
Goldy: … that if we fix the economy, we fix everything. And I think it’s a big part of the problem, obviously.
Nick Hanauer: Yeah. But you’re right, it’s not everything.
Goldy: Yeah.
Nick Hanauer: It’s definitely not everything.
Goldy: And to be clear, it’s all closely related, because our ideas about economics very intentionally in the neoliberal era, in this neoliberal cult, have seeped into all aspects-
Nick Hanauer: Yeah.
Goldy: … of our lives in terms of how we-
Nick Hanauer: Our culture.
Goldy: … interpret the world-
Nick Hanauer: Right. Our values.
Goldy: … how we see our place in it. Right.
Nick Hanauer: All that.
Goldy: And that is very intentional in that neoliberal ethos, that all of human existence can be reduced to just market interactions-
Nick Hanauer: Yes.
Goldy: … whether it’s actually in an actual marketplace or in the marketplace of ideas, et cetera, that very phrase, the marketplace of ideas. But when I hear Senator Murphy talk about these things, he’s obviously… I think he has a little richer, more nuanced stake-
Nick Hanauer: Yeah.
Goldy: … that is clearly focused on economics, but is not just economics.
Nick Hanauer: Yeah. Correct, correct. Well, with that, let’s talk to Senator Murphy.
Senator Chris M…: Chris Murphy, Boston Red Sox fan, United States Senator, author of Crisis of the Common Good.
Nick Hanauer: So you and I go back pretty far, and we’ve been talking about the economic and political issues that face the country for a long time. And I would say that our focus, by our, I mean mine and my team’s, has been very much on the economics of the problems. But you’ve gone further in your new book, and connected the economics to, I think, what amounts to a moral crisis in a really interesting way. And so, if you would, just lay out your thesis about what’s wrong or what went wrong, and how you’re thinking about it right now.
Senator Chris M…: Well, great to be with you, Nick and Goldy, thanks for including me in this. Yeah. Listen, I think it’s pretty amazing that we are celebrating this year 250 years of this revolutionary document that contains this revolutionary phrase, the idea that government should care about people’s happiness. GDP doesn’t show up in the Declaration of Independence, unemployment doesn’t show up, student test scores doesn’t show up. No, the word happiness shows up. And so what does that mean, that government should think about people’s happiness? Well, it means that we actually have to have a conversation about what leads to a happy, fulfilled, meaningful life, and we have to admit that less people than ever before in this country are waking up every day feeling happy, feeling like they are leading a purposeful, meaningful life, and government has a lot to do with the way that people are feeling.
So it sounds kind of soft that government should care about how people are feeling, but we’re literally celebrating 250 years of the document that tells us that we should do that. And the two things that I think more people than ever before are feeling today are a sense of powerlessness-
Nick Hanauer: Yes.
Senator Chris M…: … in their life and a sense of loneliness, that they just aren’t connected to people or to their community. And so this book is really about how we got to a place where so many people feel powerless, so many people feel lonely, and how that explains our politics. And so it’s not just you’ve got to run an election to get rid of Donald Trump. It’s that you have to really understand why we have structured both an economy and a culture that have left people feeling pretty miserable. And what I worry is that in particular, my party seeks to adjust the dials of the economy to impact unemployment, GDP, crime, but not happiness and purpose.
Nick Hanauer: Yeah.
Senator Chris M…: And those might be different dials, or you might have to turn them a lot farther than we’re turning them to actually make people feel better about their lives. That’s what this book is really about.
Nick Hanauer: Yeah. Interesting. In your book, you kind of decompose the problems into six cults.
Senator Chris M…: Yeah. I mean, I use this word cult very intentionally. It’s obviously a loaded word. But we have come to worship false idols that give you maybe an immediate shot of endorphins, a false sense of happiness, but underneath, you’re rotting spiritually when you end up worshiping these cults, worshiping these idols. And so, yes, that’s the way that I want to think about America today, that we just have our fundamental priorities about what we value misordered.
Nick Hanauer: Yes.
Senator Chris M…: And unless you shift those fundamental priorities about what matters in life, you are going to just fester in this sense of spiritual rot that I think the country’s in the middle of.
Nick Hanauer: Right. And the first cult is the cult of profit, which I suppose, in many ways, is the most obvious instantiation of neoliberalism, which is the thing that-
Goldy: Of economics as it’s taught. It’s the invisible hand, is the pursuit of profit benefits society at large-
Nick Hanauer: Yeah.
Goldy: … the individual pursuit of profit.
Senator Chris M…: Yeah. The cult of profit is this, that we’ve decided the point of the economy is to create profit instead of the point of the economy being to create a healthy community and fulfilled, happy individuals.
Nick Hanauer: Right.
Senator Chris M…: And what we are learning is that when the only thing you care about is profit, what occurs is the massive concentration of wealth and power in a handful of a very small number of people, and the vast majority of people in the country feeling out of control of their life, that they have no agency-
Nick Hanauer: Yeah.
Senator Chris M…: … and they get angrier and angrier and angrier. And so the question is, why are we worshiping that particular God, the God of profit? Yes, profit and return on investment should be a part of what-
Nick Hanauer: Correct.
Senator Chris M…: … an economy seeks to produce, but it’s not the only thing that an economy should seek to produce. And why do we choose to live in a world in which a good company, judged by current standards, is an economy where a company pillages the community in which it lives, that it creates a product of no social value-
Nick Hanauer: Or negative social value.
Senator Chris M…: Negative social value.
Nick Hanauer: Yeah.
Senator Chris M…: It treats workers really badly, but it makes a profit, and as long as it makes a profit-
Nick Hanauer: Yeah.
Senator Chris M…: … it’s a good company.
Nick Hanauer: Yeah. One of the things that I’m noticing or feeling right now is that we’ve had this cult of profit for a long time. It is reaching sort of surreal and comical levels, prediction markets being a great example of taking this to its logical extreme, where anything you can monetize, you should. If you can monetize harm, if you can monetize pain, great.
Senator Chris M…: Yeah. I mean, it does leave you feeling really cold and empty when everything in your life-
Nick Hanauer: Yeah.
Senator Chris M…: … exists just for somebody else’s financial benefit.
Nick Hanauer: Right.
Senator Chris M…: And we understand that there must be limits on that. So it’s not as if we’ve given up on the idea that certain things should be run just for the good of the country or our community. So for instance, we don’t accept that police and fire protection should be run for profit. We’re very comfortable with the purpose of police and fire protection being-
Nick Hanauer: For now.
Senator Chris M…: Well-
Nick Hanauer: For now.
Goldy: Actually, there are plenty parts of the country where fire protection is run for profit.
Senator Chris M…: Yeah.
Goldy: That’s a thing.
Senator Chris M…: I know it is. And obviously, it used to be a thing. And of course, there’s all sorts of supplemental security services. I mean, the number of houses in Connecticut that now have gates around them and private security is stunning and alarming. But I only bring that up because it’s not as if we have lost the entire fight over whether-
Goldy: Yeah.
Senator Chris M…: … certain things should be in the common goods, in the public commons. So yes, the example I use to start the book is this example of my kid’s hockey league. He’s a hockey player. He’s not going to the NHL. He’s a good athlete. But his hockey league is owned by private equity-backed for-profit company. And so he plays 60, 70 games a year, which is totally unnecessary for a kid who’s not going to play professionally. But even worse, all the rules of the league are designed not to make the product of youth sports better for him, but to extract money from him and his parents.
One terrible example is that we are not allowed to use our phones to livestream the games for the parent that’s not there. And often, the games involve hours and hours of travel, so one parent often is staying home. We can’t do that because there’s a streaming service built into the league in which you have to pay, I kid you not, upwards of $50 a month in order to see your little kid, these are eight-year-old, nine-year-old kids, play hockey. And that exists only to maximize the profit for the owners. It has nothing to do with the best experience for the family. And that just seems sick to me-
Goldy: Yeah.
Senator Chris M…: … that youth sports is not run only for the benefit of the kid and the family, that youth sports is now run primarily as an extractive exercise for people to make a profit. There’s still going to be tons of things to make a profit off of. Nobody needs the government to run the breakfast cereal industry, right?
Goldy: Yeah.
Senator Chris M…: There’s plenty of places where you can make a profit. It just feels like police and fire protection, youth sports, maybe even big parts of our healthcare system should just be places where the primary driver-
Goldy: Yeah.
Senator Chris M…: … is what’s best for people, not what’s best for the owners of the capital.
Goldy: Yeah.
Nick Hanauer: And so take us through the cult.
Senator Chris M…: Yeah. The cult of profit, which we’ve talked about, I call it the cult of everywhere, the sense that we are all global citizens today and we should just be happy about it, and we should just accept that we no longer have local, healthy, unique places to call our own.
Goldy: Yeah.
Senator Chris M…: The cult of consumption, this idea that you’ll feel better if you buy more stuff-
Goldy: Yeah.
Senator Chris M…: … rather than if you engage in making your community better.
Goldy: Yeah.
Senator Chris M…: The cult of credentialism, this idea that we’ve sorted the country into haves and have-nots based upon whether you have a college degree, and if you don’t have a college degree, you’re less worthy than everybody else. The cult of corruption, the idea that if you win in our politics, if you win in our economy, you should just use your power to grab everything that’s available to you, that there’s no value of modesty or restraint left, that if you have power, you maximize it.
Goldy: Yeah.
Senator Chris M…: That is a feature both of our politics and of our government.
Nick Hanauer: So we’re in violent agreement with your analysis. I mean, we’ve come at it in a slightly different way, but I think that your assessment is largely correct. The way in which we’ve commodified everything, we’ve reduced everything to a question of whether it creates efficient returns for capital, et cetera. What do we do to get out from under this?
Senator Chris M…: Well, I sort of come back to this question of how do you design an economy built for happiness? And there’s this false dichotomy in politics today, Nick, you see this very plainly, in which people think there’s only two choices. One choice is market fundamentalist profit-obsessed capitalism, basically what we have today, or socialism.
Nick Hanauer: Yeah.
Senator Chris M…: And that’s not the only choice. Scandinavia, those countries are amongst the happiest places in the world. They have fairly highly regulated economies. They have a very high floor.
Nick Hanauer: Yeah.
Senator Chris M…: You show up and you get a certain set of things, a dignified retirement, free public education and childcare. But they’re also pretty vibrant capitalist societies.
Nick Hanauer: Yes.
Senator Chris M…: In fact, those countries have the highest percentage of millionaires in the world, and so you can succeed and get rich in those countries. And so the question is, can you build an economy here where the floor for everybody is higher, that if you’re working full-time, everybody gets to lead a dignified life, where you feel more fulfilled because you have more power as an individual and the economy is less exploitative, and yet you can still become rich-
Nick Hanauer: Yeah.
Senator Chris M…: … that you can still do things that allow you to provide very well for you and your family.
Nick Hanauer: Yeah.
Senator Chris M…: I think that that’s possible. We can raise the floor, create more competition, still create a lot of wealth-
Nick Hanauer: Yeah.
Senator Chris M…: … but not have the economy feel so extractive.
Nick Hanauer: Yes. That sounds like market humanism.
Senator Chris M…: Yeah. Sounds like a book you wrote. Sounds like a book you wrote. And really, the only difference is that my book just adds on this layer of metaphysics, which is that-
Nick Hanauer: Yeah.
Senator Chris M…: … okay, how does that make you feel, right?
Nick Hanauer: Which I think is so important.
Senator Chris M…: Right.
Nick Hanauer: I think what you’ve done is very, very important, which is taking it beyond the dollars and cents, because being paid a wage that enables you to live a dignified life is table stakes, right? That’s the starting point. But in order to build a society in which people are generally connected and happy, you have to go beyond that. You do have to reach into all of these other dimensions that I think you outline really well.
Senator Chris M…: Yeah. Let’s talk for a second about something called the scarcity mindset.
Nick Hanauer: Yeah.
Senator Chris M…: The scarcity mindset is this idea that when you do not have enough to live, that you view those in your community not as neighbors, but as competitors.
Nick Hanauer: Correct.
Senator Chris M…: And so you wake up every day thinking, okay, I’ve got to compete, compete, compete in order to just get my pile big enough so that I can put food on the table, and everybody is a threat-
Nick Hanauer: Yes.
Senator Chris M…: … to take away from that pile. And so that means you don’t view them as potential friends. You don’t view them as potential collaborators in a block party. And what we know is that happiness comes actually not from the pile being big enough. You need the pile to be big enough to live. Happiness comes from connection, from friendship-
Nick Hanauer: Right.
Senator Chris M…: … from common purpose. And so when you live in an economy where the intentional design is scarcity, it is not just that you are living a life of permanent economic neglect, but you also are really antsy, really anxious, and unable to engage in the kind of metaphysical connection with your neighbors that you would be able to-
Nick Hanauer: Yeah.
Senator Chris M…: … if you woke up every day knowing that you had enough.
Goldy: We don’t use the word cult, but really, this podcast is about the cult of economics. And you just brought up that scarcity mindset, and it is absolutely fundamental to the way that economics is taught in the United States. The leading introductory textbook, Mankiw’s Principle of Economics defines economics as the study of how a society allocates scarce resources. That is literally how we teach economics. And my guess would be that most of your colleagues never got beyond Econ 101 because they’re not economists, right? A lot of them are lawyers, whatever. But they probably took an introductory textbook. Are they in that cult of economics? When they hear you talk about metaphysics, do they roll their eyes and think, oh, what are we talking about metaphysics when it’s actual physics, like economics, it’s a science, and you are disagreeing with the science? How do you communicate this to them, and are their minds open to breaking with that cult that they were raised in?
Senator Chris M…: There’s no easy answer to that. Yes, I think generally, we have been conditioned to believe that our job, as I said at the outset, is to just kind of turn the dials-
Goldy: Yeah.
Senator Chris M…: … on unemployment and wages, and then just accept that if things head in the right direction, people will be happy. But one of my very prominent colleagues often talks in small groups about the case study of the well-paid firefighter, somebody who is actually doing well, who is making a good living, who is able to provide for their family, but is still waking up every day feeling kind of angry about the world in which they live in, is the biggest supporter of Donald Trump, is a believer in this argument of scapegoats, and the question is, why is that?
It’s because when you create an economy, even for people that have enough, in which you don’t have a local downtown that feels unique any longer, that you have technology in your pocket that’s poisoning your kids, in which it just seems okay that people are becoming trillionaires, and that the only purpose of the economy is to make a handful of people more and more rich, where politics seem broken and you have to be a billionaire in order to have influence, that if you make a really good living, that you don’t have any place in our politics unless you’re filthy rich.
So even for people that are making triple the minimum wage, they are feeling like the economy doesn’t serve them, like the culture doesn’t serve them. And I think people are starting to understand that, that Trump didn’t get votes just from really, really poor people, he got votes from a lot of folks who are feeling adrift even as they make a living wage. And that’s because the rules of the culture and the economy around them are still pretty disempowering even for somebody that makes a decent wage.
Nick Hanauer: This is one of the big problems with inequality, is that in a highly unequal society, everybody is a loser, except the 2,000 people at the very top, right? That’s the problem. I just remember, I went to a public high school in Bellevue, Washington in the olden days of the middle class, and two of my best friends, one went off to run a gas station and the other went off to become a diesel mechanic, and they viewed those choices as legitimate choices. The guy who went off to be a diesel mechanic, he explained to me… Because I was like, “Why aren’t you going to go to college?” He was like, “Why would I do that? I can go to diesel mechanic school for two years and make…” I don’t know, some absurd amount of money at the time. I mean, but by today’s standards, nothing.
Senator Chris M…: Right.
Nick Hanauer: But it was triple what the median wage was or something like that as a diesel mechanic, or double what the median wage was. And today, those options really aren’t available, because even doctors and lawyers can’t afford to live in big cities anymore, or they certainly are not part of the upper crust, because we’ve created a society where if you don’t have half a billion dollars or a billion dollars or a hundred million dollars, you’re not in the game, in that sense, and it’s incredibly corrosive.
Senator Chris M…: Listen, all those jobs that you talked about that today provide for a viable living wage, a dignified life, may be short-lived, because the biggest metaphysical and economic challenge to the world is artificial intelligence.
Nick Hanauer: Right.
Senator Chris M…: And I missed the third cult, the sixth cult as I was listing them, the cult of technology.
Nick Hanauer: Yeah.
Senator Chris M…: And part of what is making a lot of people in this country increasingly anxious, even those who have a decent pile, is that government isn’t taking seriously the oncoming job threat of artificial intelligence-
Nick Hanauer: Right.
Senator Chris M…: … because only a handful of people have influence in this country, and they are the ones that are going to profit-
Nick Hanauer: Yeah.
Senator Chris M…: … off the massive dislocation of jobs in this country. And so if all you care about is profit, well, those AI companies, unregulated and unchecked, are going to be massively profitable, i.e. successful. But that’s the kind of success that will lead to political disintegration in this country, and that’s what’s on people’s minds a lot today too, even people who have good jobs.
Nick Hanauer: Right.
Goldy: And do your colleagues see an alternative? Because what that means is, again, if you understand economics, the way it’s been taught to them, is that they’re going to make that profit because it’s going to be massively efficient to eliminate these jobs and replace it by technology, by AI. And efficiency, more productive, productivity, that’s what we want out of an economy, and yeah, there’ll be some winners and losers, but in the long run, in the aggregate, everything will be better. Do they see the existential threat, or do they just think, eh, economics says it’ll work out in the long run, so let’s let it happen?
Senator Chris M…: I think it’s much more frequently the latter. I do think the cult… I mean, it’s still a cult. Just because I wrote the book, didn’t mean the cult broke.
Goldy: If only.
Senator Chris M…: Yeah. If only. Yeah. I mean, I went to Wesleyan University this spring, and I gave a speech that was on the general theme of the book, but called The Value of Inefficiency, about how marvelous inefficiency is, how necessary inefficiency is, and how you should actually strive to create a world that involves inefficiencies. And that idea in the political world today is heresy-
Goldy: Yeah.
Senator Chris M…: … because we have been conditioned to believe that it’s not just profit that matters, it is the incessant maximization of efficiency. And yes-
Nick Hanauer: Which, by the way, in our parlance, just means capital efficiency. That’s all it means, just to be clear. When we talk about-
Senator Chris M…: But also, I mean, why are these AI friendship bots becoming so popular? It’s because they’re really efficient friends. They never let you down. They tell you exactly what you want to hear all the time.
Nick Hanauer: Yeah.
Senator Chris M…: And increasingly, people are being drawn to them, even though they are poison.
Nick Hanauer: Yeah.
Senator Chris M…: I mean, friendship is so wonderful in part because it isn’t efficient, because it does let you down. That’s what living is. And so it is capital efficiency, but it is also all sorts of other kinds of efficiency that we’re driving to, that sound good in the abstract, but ultimately, I guarantee you, will rot you out from the inside.
Nick Hanauer: So what should we do? What’s your plan?
Goldy: Yeah. Let’s say that you were a powerful US Senator-
Nick Hanauer: Or President of the United States, for example.
Goldy: … or President of the United States. Obviously, and by that, we mean you have no political constraints whatsoever because the courts have decided that the President has no political constraints.
Senator Chris M…: I’ll give you two things, and I’ll bring us back to, I think, the first time that, Nick, you and I met. You came, and you and I have talked about this, you came and gave a lunchtime talk to the Senate Democratic Caucus maybe 10 years ago, and you were right at the beginning or right in the middle of the experiment to dramatically raise wages in Seattle. And you came and just said, “I want you to imagine what’s going to happen here.” And what you’ve described was this idea that once you pay everybody more money, they have more money to spend, and so they spend it. I mean, you’ve given the speech a million times. But you blew the minds of people in that room because people just had never really thought that that’s how an economy actually works, that you pay people more and they spend more, and then everybody can afford to pay people more. And then, you went and you did it and you proved it to be true.
And so the first thing I think we need to do is not accept that every single solution is going to come from the federal government all at once, that I think we are going to have to have a lot of local experimentation, state-based experimentation when it comes to some radical ideas on how to put power back in people’s lives. The second thing is nothing’s going to happen until we unrig our democracy. The corruption of our economy is downstream of the capture of our politics by billionaires and corporations, and I would like my party to be almost singularly focused on the things necessary to rid corporate influence from our politics. That probably involves a constitutional amendment. That’s really hard. But we’ve amended our Constitution before, and I’m just worried that our vision is too small right now. So I think we’ve got to prioritize cleaning up and un-rigging democracy to get anything else done.
Nick Hanauer: Okay.
Senator Chris M…: And in the meantime, I think we’ve got to put a lot of resources behind states and localities that are going to try out different models.
Nick Hanauer: Yeah. No, I think that makes good sense. But I also think we may be seeing some of the green shoots of this kind of thinking. What comes to mind is James Talarico, his campaign.
Senator Chris M…: Yes.
Nick Hanauer: I mean, we don’t know whether he’s going to win. I am not a religious person, but I find his approach to be incredibly compelling and he’s really onto something. I think there are other people who are talking about this a little bit more too, but I definitely think… I mean, what do the kids at Wesleyan think?
Senator Chris M…: The reception was really good. I mean, I was just giving them some specific advice-
Nick Hanauer: Yeah.
Senator Chris M…: … like don’t order your coffee ahead of time all the time. Just go and stand in line-
Nick Hanauer: Yeah.
Senator Chris M…: … and see what happens in line. After I gave the speech, somebody forwarded me this Kurt Vonnegut quote, which I won’t remember specifically, but he was talking about a friend telling him to buy stamps online or through the mail or something like that, and he said, “No, I’m going to go to the post office, because you never know what will happen on your walk to the post office. I might see a dog.” He’s like, “A fire engine might ride by.” He’s just like, “Yeah, that’s life that happens. Life happens in the inefficiency and in the waiting.”
Nick Hanauer: Yeah.
Senator Chris M…: I got a lot of great response, probably more so from the parents, who I think worry at this point that they’ve taught kids that all that matters is that efficiency. They’ve let them come to believe that that’s true, more so from the parents than from the kids. But the parents could wake up and decide to want a different world, and those parents are in charge right now. They’re very powerful parents, and they could make a difference too. It’s not too late.
Goldy: I don’t know that paying Wesleyan tuition is the most efficient use of those parents’ money anyway, so you might have had a favorable audience to begin with.
Senator Chris M…: The cult of credentialism is right in that book and it challenges that idea.
Goldy: Yeah.
Nick Hanauer: Well, congratulations on this. We’ve known each other a pretty long time, and I know you’ve been thinking about this stuff for a really long time. You have been mumbling about these things-
Goldy: Mumbling?
Nick Hanauer: … for as long as I… No. I mean-
Goldy: He’s out there… I mean, honestly, I have to say this-
Nick Hanauer: No. Every time I meet with him, he’s like, “Well, if you thought about it like this or that.”
Goldy: See, you meet with him. I’ve met you a couple of times in a small room with Nick, said hello, whatever. But I see you out there, I see clips of you, and I honestly don’t know that there’s another politician out there who is speaking more forcefully and more thoughtfully about these issues-
Nick Hanauer: Yeah.
Goldy: … and I appreciate that in a politician.
Senator Chris M…: But I mean it sincerely, I mean, a lot of this book is around not accepting the way that things are. That’s why I use this very strong word cult.
Nick Hanauer: Yeah.
Senator Chris M…: And it really was one of the aha moments for me in my metamorphosis sitting in that room with you, Nick, and just realizing, wait a second, I’ve been thinking entirely wrong about the world. I’ve been under an influence of this cult of economics. And so my journey that gets me to this book intertwines and intersects not inconsequentially with your work and your team’s work.
Nick Hanauer: Yeah. Thank you so much. Thank you so much.
Senator Chris M…: Thanks, guys.
Goldy: You want to do the final question?
Nick Hanauer: Yeah. Final question.
Goldy: We haven’t done it.
Nick Hanauer: Yeah. Why do you do this work?
Senator Chris M…: I mean, I do this work because I just don’t take for granted that I live in this wildly revolutionary country. It’s wild that the United States of America, 250 years into self-governance in a multicultural nation, nobody’s ever, ever done that for 50 years, nevermind 250 years. And I just feel like the price of admission is participation-
Nick Hanauer: Yeah.
Senator Chris M…: … that it is really, really fragile. It should be fragile. We’re different from each other, and yet we’ve figured out a way to govern ourselves. And so I woke up one day and realized that I liked people and I liked solving problems, and that maybe the way that I could participate was to be in politics. I think politics is a noble profession, and I think right now-
Nick Hanauer: Yeah. Great.
Senator Chris M…: … it’s more essential than ever, because this experiment, this quarter-of-a-millennia experiment is at risk of dying. And so I do this work because I think it’s worth continuing, and I think that people like me who have some ideas and have some energy should step up.
Goldy: Nick, there’s so many things I could go into on what he said, but I’m going to focus on one particular phrase because it really speaks to something that you and I both believe in, and that is when he talked about the value of inefficiency.
Nick Hanauer: Yeah. This is one of your favorite things.
Goldy: It is, because one of my phrases is, and we’ve written this, I don’t know if we’ve published this line yet, but it’s the best things in life aren’t free, but they are almost always inefficient.
Nick Hanauer: Inefficient, correct.
Goldy: When you actually think of your life, I mean, you don’t play with your children efficiently. You don’t have sex efficiently.
Nick Hanauer: Yeah.
Goldy: You don’t go out to dinner with friends efficiently, walk your dog efficiently. That’s not what life is about. Life is not about efficiency. And maybe hundreds of years ago, when capital was scarce and food was scarce and most people lived in a subsistence economy, where if you weren’t efficiently raising the chickens and attending to your garden, you might starve in the winter, efficiency might’ve been more important. But one of the benefits, if you believe in capitalism, as a lot of people do, if you believe in markets, one of the benefits of the past couple of hundred years of capitalism and industrialization is that we don’t live in that scarcity world anymore.
Nick Hanauer: Yeah.
Goldy: We have plenty of stuff to adequately feed, clothe, house, educate, and give healthcare to all eight billion people in this world.
Nick Hanauer: Yeah.
Goldy: We should let the machines do the boring stuff and the tedious stuff and the dangerous stuff, and allow ourselves to enjoy the inefficiency-
Nick Hanauer: Yeah.
Goldy: … that we have accumulated, this opportunity to enjoy inefficiency.
Nick Hanauer: Yeah.
Goldy: And that is just anathema, both to economics, orthodox economics as it is taught, and if you want to go… He was talking about metaphysics. If you want to go to the old idea of the Protestant work ethic in America, the idea that we should all be hardworking and save all our pennies and reinvest it in the future, it’s not the American way.
Nick Hanauer: I mean, I think that neoliberalism has a bunch of moral dimensions that are not explicit, but are nevertheless incredibly powerful, right?
Goldy: Right.
Nick Hanauer: Because once you reduce everything to effectively capital efficiency, there are such profound social, moral, and cultural ramifications to that-
Goldy: Right.
Nick Hanauer: … that we end up in this society where all the social ills that Chris points out become inevitable. It is inevitable that we’ll have prediction markets. It’s inevitable that you will not be able to film your own kids’ hockey game, right?
Goldy: Right.
Nick Hanauer: Because just the inevitable march of monetization never ends.
Goldy: Yeah. But I think also, if you want to go deeper into neoliberalism, Friedrich Hayek was not just an economist, he was a philosopher.
Nick Hanauer: Yeah.
Goldy: And absolutely fundamental to his ideology is that it is about individual freedom. It’s about maximizing individual freedom. I mean, that is the road to serfdom. It’s either Soviet-style or Nazi-style totalitarianism or it is free markets.
Nick Hanauer: Yes.
Goldy: There’s no in between-
Nick Hanauer: Yes.
Goldy: … that if you take a little step down that road, you’re going to end up subjugating people to some authoritarian state.
Nick Hanauer: Right.
Goldy: And so there’s this idea that both Hayek and Friedman have, where Friedman [inaudible 00:37:06] capitalism and freedom, this idea that the only way to ensure individual freedom is to ensure economic freedoms.
Nick Hanauer: Yeah.
Goldy: The freer the market, the freer we will all become. And that’s true for somebody like you.
Nick Hanauer: Yeah. But it’s not true for anybody else, right, yeah, yeah.
Goldy: Right? If you have a shit ton of money, if you’re Elon Musk, you’re really free.
Nick Hanauer: Free. Correct.
Goldy: Most people are not in America, because we have debts and-
Nick Hanauer: Yeah.
Goldy: … we have jobs where we have to do what the boss tells us to do, and we have healthcare expenses and rent or mortgages and tuition and all that other stuff, and it’s a hard life because you’re constantly going month to month, paycheck to paycheck, and that is not freedom.
Nick Hanauer: Right.
Goldy: And I think that is the most disappointing thing about the neoliberal era. It’s not just the slower economic growth and the slower productivity growth and the radical inequality it’s created.
Nick Hanauer: Yeah.
Goldy: It’s also, it’s made us less free.
Nick Hanauer: Yeah.
Goldy: It has not delivered on its core promise of freeing people to live the type of lives they would like to live.
Nick Hanauer: Yeah, I agree. Well, Chris wrote a good book, I think.
Goldy: Yeah. It’s the Crisis of the Common Good. You can get it at your favorite local independent bookstore, you can probably get it out of your local library, or if you want to, you’re always free to get it from that big online monopolist.
Announcer 2: Pitchfork Economics is produced by Civic Ventures. If you liked the show, make sure to follow, rate, and review us wherever you get your podcasts. Find us on other platforms, like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Threads @PitchforkEconomics. Nick’s on Twitter and Facebook as well, @NickHanauer. For more content from us, you can subscribe to our weekly newsletter, The Pitch, over on Substack. And for links to everything we just mentioned, plus transcripts and more, visit our website, pitchforkeconomics.com. As always, from our team at Civic Ventures, thanks for listening. See you next week.