Pitchfork Economics Podcast

05/06/2026

Who benefits when policymakers say the economy is becoming more “efficient”?

Nick Hanauer explains why that word may be hiding a much bigger story about power, profits, and who gets left behind in the economy.⬇️
https://bit.ly/MarketHumanism

05/06/2026

The damage done by decades of trickle-down economics will not be fixed with ideas that fail to meet the moment.

This week, The Pitch explores a genuinely ambitious agenda for building an economy that works for working people.

Meet the Good Life Agenda. ⬇️

The Pitch: Economic Update for June 4th, 2026

04/06/2026

The most damaging lies in American politics are often disguised as economic common sense.

Nick Hanauer explains⬇️

03/06/2026

We talk a lot about the minimum wage. Beyond just being good economic policy, this is why.

02/06/2026

For decades, mainstream economics told us that raising wages would kill jobs.

But what happens when the foundational assumptions of that old model are not just wrong—but backward?

In this week’s episode, Goldy and Paul put Nick Hanauer on the other side of the mic for a conversation about Market Humanism: a new economic paradigm rooted in a simple idea. Markets should be built to serve people, not the other way around.

Listen now: https://bit.ly/MarketHumanism

02/06/2026

Our current economic paradigm functions as a protection racket for the rich. To solve our economic problems, we must replace it.

If we fail to do so, the rich will continue to get richer and everyone else will get poorer.

01/06/2026

We spend a lot of time talking about lowering prices to make life more affordable.

It's time to match that level of ambition on raising wages.

28/05/2026

For decades, progressives have been told they had to choose between fairness and growth.

Raise wages, and you’ll kill jobs. Strengthen unions, and you’ll hurt competitiveness. Invest in people, and you’ll distort the market.

That was always the trap.

In Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, our co-host Nick Hanauer and University of Oxford professor Eric Beinhocker argue that the old neoliberal paradigm got the economy exactly backward. Fairness is not the opposite of growth. Fairness drives growth because a fairer economy is a stronger economy.

Market Humanism offers a new economic story: prosperity comes from cooperation, broad participation, strong institutions, democratic accountability, and markets designed to solve human problems.

You don’t have to choose between an economy that is fair and an economy that grows.

The fairer the economy, the stronger the economy.

Progressives have been fighting on the neoliberals’ terms. Market Humanism flips that—and provides a winning and more humane narrative. Oh—and a far more prosperous country.

27/05/2026

Markets aren’t natural forces. They’re human-built systems.

So the real question is not whether markets work.

It’s who they’re built to work for.

This week, we’re sharing Nick Hanauer and Eric Beinhocker’s Washington Monthly conversation on market humanism, inequality, and how to build an economy wired for human flourishing. ⬇️
https://buff.ly/QpuosW5

22/05/2026

For 50 years, the old economic paradigm told us that prosperity comes from the top down.

Cut taxes for the rich. Deregulate the powerful. Keep wages low. Weaken worker power. Let the market work its magic.

The result was not broad prosperity. It was a massive upward transfer of wealth, a squeezed middle class, and an economy that works spectacularly well for people at the top while leaving everyone else fighting for scraps.

In The Atlantic, Nick Hanauer and Eric Beinhocker argue that the old paradigm is broken — and that we need a new one.

They call it Market Humanism: an economic framework built around human flourishing, cooperation, worker power, and the simple but radical idea that a fair economy is also a more prosperous one.
https://bit.ly/49j7k3n

Minimum-wage increases were expected to kill jobs. The fact that they didn’t should make us rethink a lot of assumptions.