In a recent report, The Roosevelt Institute called for a new set of policies to mitigate the economic suffering caused by the pandemic. Taken all together, these policies are as sweeping as the New Deal was—but unlike the New Deal, they’re truly representative of America’s race, class, and gender diversity. Attorney Bharat Ramamurti, the incoming Deputy Director of the Biden administration’s National Economic Council and a co-author of the report, joins Nick and Goldy to make the case for a True New Deal.
Bharat Ramamurti is the incoming Deputy Director of the National Economic Council. At the time of our interview, he was the managing director of the Corporate Power Program at the Roosevelt Institute and a member of the COVID-19 Congressional Oversight Commission. He was previously an economic advisor to Senator Elizabeth Warren.
Twitter: @BharatRamamurti
A True New Deal: https://rooseveltinstitute.org/publications/true-new-deal-for-the-covid-19-era/
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Nick Hanauer:
Hey Gang, since we recorded this conversation… our guest, Bharat Ramamurti, has been appointed by the Biden administration to be the Deputy Director of the National Economic Council which is super cool. And I wanted to give you that update so you know as you listen to this episode you’re listening to the new administration. And congratulations to Bharat! Let’s get to it.
Nick Hanauer:
Today, we get to talk to one of the authors of Roosevelt’s True New Deal.
Bharat Ramamurti:
The idea behind the True New Deal is essentially let’s reconceive of the rules of our economy and then swing the pendulum back that we’ve seen basically since the Reagan era where there’s been a smaller and smaller role for government.
David Goldstein:
It is a very comprehensive proposal.
Nick Hanauer:
It is. We’re going to cover it all in 30 minutes.
David Goldstein:
Well, I think we’ll cover some of it.
Speaker 3:
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 Hanauer:
Goldie, today, we get to talk to a really, super interesting person, Bharat Ramamurti, who is the managing director of the Corporate Power program at the Roosevelt Institute and is one of the authors of Roosevelt’s True New Deal, which is really exciting and really interesting.
David Goldstein:
Yeah, and they’re not using that term lightly.
Nick Hanauer:
No.
David Goldstein:
It is a very comprehensive proposal. Just to outline, Nick… and some of these topics, we’ve talked about before in Halloran Park. But, it lists nine essential policies for this True New Deal, canceling student housing and medical debts, creating a federal jobs guarantee, federalizing and expanding unemployment insurance, building a modern reconstruction finance corporation, that’s a callback to the old New Deal, guaranteeing universal childcare, mandating sectoral bargaining, ensuring corporate accountability through federal chartering, reinvigorating antitrust law for real trust busting, and rebalancing political power through institutional reform, that is a lot.
Nick Hanauer:
It is, it is. We’re going to cover it all in 30 minutes.
David Goldstein:
Well, I think we’ll cover some of it. Knowing us, we’ll probably get bogged down on the first one, but we’ll make our best effort.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, and I think that the really exciting thing about this proposal is that a lot of these ideas are not as outlandish as they would’ve been in 2016. A lot of these ideas actually are, in some ways, reflected in what the Biden Administration ran on and what we know his economic advisors are currently discussing. It speaks to the recognition that the neoliberal era was a disaster and that we need to, in deep structural and ambitious ways, replace those ideas and that policy framework with something new. It’s just cool to see how far we have come in not that many years, if not in policy, at least in the ideas we’re willing to discuss.
David Goldstein:
Yeah. In that way, it’s exciting. On the other hand, you don’t get a New Deal absent a catastrophe. It does speak to the current catastrophe that we’re facing right now.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s right. With that, let’s talk to Bharat.
Bharat Ramamurti:
My name is Bharat Ramamurti. I’m the managing director of the Corporate Power program at the Roosevelt Institute and also a member of the Congressional Oversight Commissions for the CARES Act.
David Goldstein:
I just read through the Roosevelt report calling for a True New Deal. We hear the word New Deal thrown around a lot as in a Green New Deal. But, my God, this really is a New Deal, this is as ambitious as the old New Deal. Tell us a bit what went into putting this together.
Bharat Ramamurti:
The Roosevelt Institute’s view has long been that we need structural change to the economy, right? We need to reorient the role of public power in the economy, reassert that role, and, in doing so, change the way that money flows through the economy in a fundamental way. To give you an example of that, a lot of federal policy focuses on what I think of as redistribution, tax programs, spending programs, essentially taking the initial distribution of money in the economy, taxing the wealthy and big corporations, and then reinvesting that money into programs that help lower income and middle-class families, that is very important obviously, but there’s a whole set of other changes that you can make to the economy that affect the initial distribution of all that income, right?
Bharat Ramamurti:
An example that I like to use is allowing workers to elect a significant chunk of corporate board members. If workers of a company have a real voice in corporate decision-making and decisions about wages, and benefits, and outsourcing, and political spending, that initial distribution of money, the percentage of corporate revenue that goes to workers is likely to go up, which means that the need for the redistributive policies on the backend lessens. One thing that we’ve learned is that, while redistributed policies are tremendously important and often quite popular, those policies that affect the initial distribution of income are even more popular.
Bharat Ramamurti:
Putting workers on corporate boards is extremely popular. Changing the antitrust rules so that smaller businesses have a better opportunity to compete against bigger businesses, that’s really popular and opens up opportunities not only for consumers but also for workers who have more potential employers to go find. The idea behind the True New Deal is essentially let’s reconceive of the rules of our economy, and put in place these structural changes, and then swing the pendulum back that we’ve seen basically since the Reagan era where there’s been a smaller and smaller role for government and where this idea that corporations exist solely to maximize the returns that they send to their shareholders rather than having any obligations to their workers or their community starts to reverse as well.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, you’re definitely singing out of our handbook. To say nothing of the fact that if you get it right… it is a primitive way to put it. But, if you get it right the first time, you need a lot less of the ameliorative programs that we tend to rely on.
David Goldstein:
I was just thinking about that, Nick. I don’t know that we’ve ever used the term on the podcast, but we used to refer to ameliorcrats.
Nick Hanauer:
Yes, that’s right.
David Goldstein:
The Democrats that just want to ameliorate all the bad things about the current economy without doing anything to fix it. This True New Deal you’re proposing, this is all about fixing the economy so we need less amelioration.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah.
Bharat Ramamurti:
Yeah, exactly right. One way I like to think about it is pre-distribution versus redistribution, right? There’s a whole set of pre-distributive policies where, quite frankly, the right has made a concerted effort in that area, right? Why do you think that there’s such hostility towards unions and unionization? That’s all about pre-distributive stuff, right? The decline in private sector unionization, for example, is highly related to the wage stagnation that we’ve seen over the last 20 or 30 years for lower income and middle income workers where a smaller and smaller share of corporate revenue and corporate profits go to the people who work at those companies and help generate those profits. It’s my view that Democrats should start fighting on that battlefield, too, more aggressively because I think not only is it critically important and necessary, it’s also politically very appealing. I think it has an opportunity to speak to a really broad set of people who understand and have a feeling that there’s something fundamentally unfair about the economy that they’re living and working in.
David Goldstein:
It’s interesting, looking at your list of nine essential policies, some of them are clearly focused on addressing some of the structural problems, the symptoms of the current economy. But, the others, these reforms, now, the heart of them all seems to be rebalancing power in the economy. You see that in proposing a federal jobs guarantee, in mandating sectoral bargaining, in reinvigorating antitrust law. How important is power in terms of what’s wrong in the economy today?
Bharat Ramamurti:
I would argue that it’s the single, biggest problem and, in fact, is the main problem for which all the other problems flow. The fundamental distribution of power in the economy is what ends up affecting wages, and benefits, and corporate profits. It’s what affects corporate decisions on moving jobs overseas and so on, right?
Bharat Ramamurti:
I think what you’ve seen historically is this interesting trend where basically, in the post-World War II period, where, I should be clear, there were obviously significant issues in the labor market, there was a significant discrimination against minorities, against women, and so on. But, what you see, during that period, is that when corporate profits go up and when worker productivity goes up, workers’ wages go up in tandem with it, right?
Bharat Ramamurti:
There’s basically a one-to-one correlation between those things. Then, starting in the 1980s with Reagan coming to office, with Milton Friedman and the idea that corporations should only exist to maximize shareholder value, you see a huge disjunction between those things where corporate profits continue to rise sharply but wages basically level off and remain stagnant in real terms for the last 30 or 40 years. I think that the disjunction that you see then is fundamentally about the reallocation of power during that period, the decline in labor power to the decline in unionization, the shift in focus from corporations, a view that the role of government is to simply facilitate the market rather than to set the terms for the market so that there’s more equitable distribution. I think that the combination of changes that we’ve seen, which you can shorthand as the Reagan Revolution, has, in many ways, colored the way that both Republicans and Democrats think about the economy for the last 30 or 40 years. What we need to do, I think, is move beyond that perspective to understanding that the opposite of a less active role for government isn’t more freedom for people.
Bharat Ramamurti:
The alternative for a less active role for government is more power for corporations, right? Instead of the government setting the rules, the corporations are setting the rules and dictating how the game is played. Frankly, for all the flaws in our democratic system, I’d much rather have the people at least be the ones trying to set the rules rather than big corporations being the ones trying to set the rules.
Nick Hanauer:
Absolutely. I think that what’s so clear is that the consequences of both Republicans and Democrats being swept up in this neoliberal view, that if you just get out of the way of the market, all will be well and everyone will do well, has resulted in this just an absolutely catastrophic failure of governance. As we’ve seen, the rich and only the rich do better and almost everyone else in the society do worse. It’s going to take a big lift to reverse that thinking and those policies.
Bharat Ramamurti:
Yeah. I completely agree with that, though I’m more hopeful than I was five or 10 years ago about people recognizing that problem and starting to propose an act on solutions that are more structural in nature. I think that that’s a hopeful sign. I think that, even during the general election, President-Elect Biden campaigned on a platform that included a lot of these types of ideas. I think just to go back to the True New Deal point, I think it’s not just directly empowering workers by things like allowing them to elect corporate board members. There are things like universal childcare where there’s an indirect but important relation to that because costly childcare is such a limitation for parents who are trying to exist and participate in the workforce. As a result, it really limits their ability to look for new work, to take on new work, to try to go back to school, to potentially get another degree so that they open up more job opportunities for them.
Bharat Ramamurti:
Providing universal free or at least affordable childcare to parents creates basically a new form of freedom, right? It allows them to enter the workforce more on their terms. Of course, if they choose to stay at home, they can. But, at least, it gives them the option of entering the workforce with more comfort that their children are going to be well taken care of and that it won’t bust the budget to do so.
Nick Hanauer:
Right. Definitely, one of the cruelest jokes that neo-liberalism played on American families was suppressing wages in a way that required both parents to work and then saddling the family with childcare expenses, which, in many families, exceed the costs of the extra income. It’s just-
Bharat Ramamurti:
Yeah, exactly. Right. I didn’t mention this at the beginning, but, of course, for the last seven years before I moved to the Roosevelt Institute, I worked as an economic advisor to Senator Elizabeth Warren. She wrote a book about this, I think almost two decades ago at this point, called The Two-Income Trap, which provided a lot of data on this point, which is that, even as women entered the workforce and created a second stream of income for families, the cost of the necessities, childcare, education, housing, healthcare went through the roof, and, in many cases, exceeded even the additional income that was being brought in by the second earner. Families were actually in a more precarious financial position after all of that than they were before when there was only one income. As you said, it’s a cruel joke where what seems like an empowering option that is providing more flexibility to families has actually been disempowering and limiting because it used to be, in the old days, that the existence of that possible second income was a good safety net for families. But, now, even that’s off the table because they’re already getting two incomes.
Nick Hanauer:
Right.
David Goldstein:
Right, and you titled this report A True New Deal: Building an Inclusive Economy in the COVID-19 Era. You’d think a lot more Americans are aware of the need for universal childcare after having to work with their children at home for the past year.
Bharat Ramamurti:
Yes. I will personally vouch, at having a four-year-old, that my own interest in affordable and high quality childcare options has increased substantially over the course of the last several months. But, yes, I think that it’s important to recognize that the COVID era, both the emergence of the pandemic, the public health implications, and the economic effects of it, I think, have heightened the awareness of the need for these types of reforms, right?
Bharat Ramamurti:
Number one, it demonstrates that you need a robust, well-managed, competent government in order to address these types of threats, whether it’s a global pandemic or climate change, and that the idea that you can just let the market handle these types of problems is ridiculous, right? Number two, my concern has always been that, in many ways, COVID has accelerated some of the negative trends that we saw pre-COVID. There’s been a lot of discussion about this K-shaped recovery where higher income families, wealthier families have made it through the crisis just fine because it’s easy for them to work from home and they’re not in the types of service sector jobs that have been the most affected by COVID.
Bharat Ramamurti:
The flip side is that lower income families have been hit harder because they’re more subject to layoffs, they don’t have the type of wealth to draw upon to make it through a few tough months. I’m concerned that we’re going to come out the other side of this pandemic with maybe the top line numbers of the economy looking okay. But, underneath the surface, there’s going to be much more inequality. Lower income families in America are going to be in even worse shape, relatively speaking, than they were a year or two ago.
David Goldstein:
Very quickly, though, on that topic, could you just comment on how this proposal overlaps with your work on the CARES Act?
Bharat Ramamurti:
Sure. On the CARES Act Oversight Commission, we are responsible for overseeing actually just one part of the March CARES Act, which is the portion that set aside about $500 billion for the treasury department and the federal reserve to use together to provide loans to businesses and to state local governments. My concern about how that money was set aside and then subsequently how it’s been administered by the Trump treasury department and the fed is that it has deployed that money in a way that has been much more beneficial for Wall Street and the wealthy than it has for everyone else.
Bharat Ramamurti:
Just to give you an example, some of the money in the program was explicitly supposed to go to help state and local governments. State and local governments disproportionately employ lower income, middle income workers. They disproportionately employ black workers and female workers. This money was supposed to provide a critical lifeline for state local governments that have seen these huge revenue losses because of COVID. The way that they created that program, it hardly helped anybody. As of today, which is nine months basically since the CARES Act passed, literally, two entities have taken advantage of that lending program, the New York Subway System and the State of Illinois, that’s it, even though all of these state and local governments are facing serious problems. The reason for that is that the program was designed in such a way that the loans were so punitive that it hardly made sense for anybody to take advantage of them. At the same time, some of that money was set aside for purchasing corporate bonds in an effort effectively to lower the cost for big companies to borrow money and that program was wildly effective.
Bharat Ramamurti:
Actually, it was cheaper, a few months after the CARES Act passed, for a company to borrow money in the bond market than it was before COVID. What we’ve seen is that the way that this program was administered has actually exacerbated some of the inequality that we’ve seen in other aspects of the CARES Act and in other aspects of the public health crisis. What I’ve been trying to do over the last several months is arguing for fundamental reforms to the way these programs are designed so that they provide more help to small businesses and more help to stay in local governments while not being so generous to the big corporations that can issue bonds that are traded on Wall Street..
David Goldstein:
Could that money be used to purchase municipal bonds?
Bharat Ramamurti:
Yes. In fact, that’s one thing that me and my democratic colleague on the Oversight Commission, Congresswoman Shalala, have called for. Just like the money is being used to buy corporate bonds, there’s nothing stopping the fed and the treasury department from using it to buy municipal bonds that are traded on the secondary market, which would have the effect of lowering the cost of borrowing for state and local governments. So far, the fed and the treasury have resisted that. I think it’s been a mistake.
David Goldstein:
Is that something that the incoming Biden Administration could change without Congressional approval?
Bharat Ramamurti:
Well, actually, the debate that’s happening right now in Congress about the relief bill contains some language that would affect the way these programs operate, that language is still being negotiated. I don’t know where it’s going to come out at the end of those discussions. But, as of right now, if there are no changes to that language, then, yes, I think the next administration, the Biden Administration, and the next treasury secretary could push for changes to the way these programs are operated so that they buy municipal bonds in the secondary market, so that they offer lower rates and longer repayment terms to state and local governments. At the end of the day, they do need the cooperation of the fed because both the treasury and the fed have to agree on the terms before they’re finalized. But, replacing the Trump treasury department with the Biden treasury department, at least, in theory, removes one of the obstacles to that type of change.
Nick Hanauer:
One of the nine essential policies is canceling debt. We’re huge fans of canceling student debt. But, you guys also have your sights set on housing and medical debts. Can you explain a little bit more about that?
Bharat Ramamurti:
Yeah. Just a quick word on student loan debt, which is an area that I’ve spent a lot of time on, I think there’s about north of $1.5 trillion of debt outstanding. Canceling all or some of that debt would be incredibly helpful for the economy. The nice thing about it is that all of that debt is on the government’s books. It’s actually very straightforward for the government to go about and cancel the debt. Medical debt is a slightly different story in that the debt is in the hands of private actors and that makes it a little bit more complicated. But, the idea that there are people who, through no fault of their own, of course, get sick or their child gets sick, and they incur these massive medical bills, and it follows them around for the rest of their life, and they can’t do anything about it, it prevents them from buying a home, it prevents them from starting a business, it prevents them sometimes from getting married, it prevents them from moving to a different part of the country and taking a risk like that.
Bharat Ramamurti:
I think, in the scheme of things, the amount of medical debt outstanding is relatively small. If you compare it to the amount of student loan debt outstanding, it’s about 3%, or 4%, or 5% of that amount. For a relatively small cost, you could eliminate the medical debt in this country and just fundamentally transform some people’s lives.
Nick Hanauer:
How many people? Do you happen to know?
Bharat Ramamurti:
I need to go back and look at the data. I don’t have it offhand. But, I think it’s hundreds of thousands of people, I think, it’s safe to say, and potentially more than that.
Nick Hanauer:
How about housing?
Bharat Ramamurti:
Yeah. Look, one of my frustrations about what happened in the post-financial crisis period was that there was effectively massive debt relief for banks.
Bharat Ramamurti:
The federal government ponied up a ton of money to remove toxic assets from the books of financial institutions. Meanwhile, a lot of Americans had their own toxic assets, which were their mortgages that they had been essentially tricked into in many cases. The government did very little, at the end of the day, to try and help those folks when one of the tools that it had available to it was to basically force financial institutions to reduce the principal on the mortgages that were outstanding, essentially a debt reduction deal. I think that we have emerged from that housing crisis now.
Bharat Ramamurti:
But, there still remained tools available to the government, especially through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored enterprises that are currently in government conservatorship, to at least do some more targeted things to help people who are struggling with their mortgages. I think that’s especially the case right now, during the COVID crisis, where you have this interesting set of economic trends where a lot of folks are struggling on their mortgages because their income has gone down because they’ve either been laid off or their hours have been cut. But, at the same time, if you look nationally, housing prices are up, and so that’s a scary and toxic combination if you think about it because if you’re a bank, if you foreclose on somebody because they are struggling to make their payments, you’re actually getting access to an asset that’s gaining in value.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s right. You’re making money.
Bharat Ramamurti:
Yeah. Whereas during the financial crisis in ’08, obviously, there was a housing crisis and home prices were going down, so actually banks have less of a financial incentive to foreclose and more of an incentive potentially to modify mortgages and try and keep people in their homes. Now, they obviously didn’t do a very good job of that. But, think about how bad that was when housing prices were going down and now think about what it would look like if housing prices were actually going up pretty sharply, and so that’s one thing that I’m worried about going forward is just that the elements are in place for a serious foreclosure problem going forward.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, I think you’re right.
David Goldstein:
I wanted to talk about… one of the things that really stood out in this report is the emphasis throughout on addressing structural racism in the economy. Obviously, you’re the Roosevelt Institute. It comes out of, I think, your Roosevelt Library. Roosevelt passed the New Deal and you point out that the New Deal was racist. It excluded African-Americans and other people of color. Obviously, in FDR’s defense, he could only pass that… he needed Southern Dixiecrats to pass that. If you could talk a bit about how many of the problems we face today, basically a result of the structural racism that was baked into the American economy 80 years ago, and how important it is to address that if we’re actually going to have inclusive growth?
Bharat Ramamurti:
Yeah, I think it’s critically important. It has to be at the center of all of this economic policymaking. One thing that I’ve always found remarkable is that the gap between the white home ownership rate and black home ownership rate today is actually bigger than it was in 1960 when the federal government was actively discriminating in housing, right? We have stopped that kind of active discrimination by the federal government. But, it’s like, if you give one person a huge headstart in the race and you say, “You know what? We’re going to stop giving you such a big headstart. But, now, you guys have to start running,” and you don’t help the other person catch up, it’s not going to be a fair race, and so that’s why I think trying to take steps with the view of addressing the racial wealth gap in America and the power structures in America that date back to their racist origins, whether they were in the New Deal or before, I think, is really important.
Bharat Ramamurti:
Just to go back to student loan debt, one thing that’s fascinating about student loan debt is the racial implications of it. Black students, they’re more likely to have to borrow to go to school, they’re more likely to have to take out a bigger amount of debt to go to school, they’re more likely to graduate with debt or with more debt when they leave school.
Bharat Ramamurti:
I think the most remarkable data point of all, 20 years after graduating, the median white student loan borrower has paid off 95% of their loan, the median black borrower still owes 95% of their loan, and that’s-
Nick Hanauer:
Wow, that’s an amazing statistic.
Bharat Ramamurti:
Yeah. It’s, in large part, because labor market discrimination means that the value of that degree is less valuable for a black graduate. It’s because, in large part, white students can rely on some white family wealth to help pay off their loans, which may not be available to black students. If you do student loan debt cancellation, and there’s obviously various permutations of it, you can actually take a significant step towards trying to close the racial wealth gap in America.
Bharat Ramamurti:
In housing, like I said, there was systemic discrimination against black families in housing with redlining in the 1960s where essentially the federal government was providing subsidies for white families to buy homes and wasn’t providing that to black families, and, that wealth, that compounds over generations where that first family that was able to buy that house is able to pay off their mortgage by the time they retire.
Bharat Ramamurti:
They pass that along to their kids. All of a sudden, their kids have a valuable asset that they can rely upon that wasn’t available to black families, a lot of them. It’s not enough to say, “We’re going to cut it out with the discrimination right now.” I think it’s important to say, “We need to do more to help specifically black families, especially maybe black families from redlined areas, to help purchase homes so they can start building wealth, too.” I think, again, thankfully, the Biden Campaign did center this type of racial equity in a lot of the proposals they’ve talked about, from housing to childcare, to small business, right? Their childcare plan, I found it very gratifying that they not only said, “We’re going to provide universal childcare for people, but it’s important to raise wages for childcare workers.”
Bharat Ramamurti:
The overwhelming majority of childcare workers are women and women of color. Again, I think it’s a hopeful sign that we’re more focused on these types of issues now. I think that, as we make these types of structural changes to the economy and try and rebalance some of the power dynamics that exist in society and in the economy, it’s important to recognize that we do that in a way that empowers black, Hispanic families and communities that have too often been cut out of those power structures before.
Nick Hanauer:
We always ask our guests one question, which is, why do you do this work?
Bharat Ramamurti:
I’ll tell you a quick story, I’m a lawyer, I graduated from law school back in 2007, I was a huge baseball fan, I grew up in Boston. I had the opportunity in 2007, right after law school, to go work for the Red Sox, which was a dream come true for me. I worked in an office, I helped them do data analysis. As a baseball stats nerd, it was really fun. At the end of the day, we’d go up to the general manager’s box and watch the game if the Red Sox were playing at home. Now, actually, the Red Sox won the World Series that year in 2007.
Nick Hanauer:
Because of your work, no doubt.
Bharat Ramamurti:
Yes, I’m sure. Anyway, that was a dream come true, like I said. But, at the end of the season, even though it had gone great and it had been a fun time, the feeling I had was, “Is this what I want to dedicate my life to?” I think I realized that, at the end of the day, what I wanted to do was try to make the economy, the society work better for more people. I eventually ended up with Senator Warren in 2013 and spent seven years working for her because I think she very much had the same view of what she wanted to do with her life, what her view of what government should be trying to do to help people. It’s been very gratifying, so it’s a long slog. For a long time working in the Senate, Senator Warren and the Democrats were in the minority. A lot of the work we did was just trying to stop bad things from happening and try and build public support slowly and surely for new ideas that we could use when we did have some power and control. It can be draining and feel like you’re doing one step forward and two steps back. But, at the end of the day, it’s invigorating to wake up every morning and feeling like you’re trying to do something to make the world a little bit better. I’ve really enjoyed it.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s fantastic. Well, thanks for your work and thanks for joining us on the podcast.
Bharat Ramamurti:
Of course. Thank you, guys. This has been a lot of fun.
David Goldstein:
Nick, a True New Deal. What do you think, a pipe dream or something we can accomplish?
Nick Hanauer:
Well, I think it would be hard to get all of these things done in one four-year administration. But it does seem, to me, that this a huge step in the right direction because at least, I think, we’re beginning to talk about the right things but brought… I thought, in our conversation, was centered on, I think, the most important thing, which is pre-distribution, not ameliorating the problem, actually fixing the fundamental problems because you obviously… as we’ve discussed on the pod a million times now, if wages for working and middle-class people had actually tracked productivity gains and were, at the median, instead of 50, 100,000, a lot of our problems would fall away. The focus on pre-distribution, I think, is essential, making sure that people get paid enough and that the economy is structured in a way that leads to success rather than hinders success. I think that’s super important.
David Goldstein:
Right, yeah. We’ve talked about this before, Nick, if you’re a big fan of market capitalism and you’re focused on fixing all of the problems it creates, doesn’t make much of a case for market capitalism. The better approach is to actually fix market capitalism so it doesn’t create so many problems.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s right.
David Goldstein:
I think what’s interesting about this is that all together, these nine policies, it looks really big, and comprehensive, and ambitious. But, when you break it down and you look at the individual proposals, a lot of it isn’t new, and a lot of it is done elsewhere in the world, and a lot of it is really very doable.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, absolutely. Well, it was a fascinating conversation, cool guy doing great work.
David Goldstein:
Just so you know, we’ll provide a link to this report in the show notes. Please click through, read it. We’d love to hear your feedback on online policy proposals.
Nick Hanauer:
In the next episode of Pitchfork Economics, we’re going to talk to Idrees Kahloon who is the US Policy Correspondent at The Economist about the economic challenges that the Biden Administration faces.
Speaker 3:
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