Back to Basics Series: Is Economics Moral? (with Heather McGhee)

Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer

Civic Ventures

Business, Government, News, Politics

4.8 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 29 July 2025

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

For decades, orthodox economics has treated morality as irrelevant—as if economic decisions happen in a vacuum, separate from our values and social bonds. But that approach has failed spectacularly, giving cover to policies that divide and exploit us. In this episode, Heather McGhee joins Nick and Paul to argue that morality must be central to how we think about the economy. They explore how racial division has been weaponized to undermine collective action, why “structural racism” can’t be addressed without naming the powerful actors behind it, and how inclusive economic policies lead to more prosperity for everyone. Part of our Back-to-Basics summer series—essential listening for anyone ready to reject trickle-down and reimagine the economy as a moral system built on trust, justice, and cooperation. This episode originally aired April 2, 2019. Heather McGhee is a policy expert, author, and advocate for economic and racial justice. She is the former president of the progressive think tank Demos and currently serves as a Distinguished Senior Fellow. Heather is the author of the New York Times bestselling book, The Sum of Us, and her work has appeared in outlets such as The New York Times, The Nation, and NBC News. Further reading: The Moral Burden on Economists The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together Website: http://pitchforkeconomics.com Instagram: @pitchforkeconomics Threads: pitchforkeconomics Bluesky: @pitchforkeconomics.bsky.social TikTok: @pitchfork_econ Twitter: @PitchforkEcon, @NickHanauer, @civicaction YouTube: @pitchforkeconomics LinkedIn: Pitchfork Economics Substack: ⁠The Pitch

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, pitchfork listeners, Goldie here. We've been doing this podcast for a long time now, so we thought we'd take a little break this summer.
0:08.4	But we don't want you to miss us too much, so we thought we'd revisit some of the most essential episodes from early in our history with a back-to-basic summer series.
0:19.0	And if you've ever been turned off by the cold, hard math
0:22.7	of economics, you will enjoy our conversation with Heather McGee about is economics moral?
0:32.4	An economy that systematically takes advantage of some people will eventually take advantage of everybody.
0:39.3	I think that we have to tell a different story about race and the economy.
0:43.3	One that recognizes that we can't operate in a zero-sum paradigm of racial competition.
0:51.3	Since morality is basically the most important thing to humans in human societies, any economic
0:57.4	theory that doesn't sort of intrinsically address those concerns has to be sort of by definition
1:04.0	insufficient.
1:09.0	From the offices of civic ventures in downtown Seattle, this is Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer.
1:16.8	In honest conversation about how to make capitalism work for everyone.
1:30.7	I'm Nick Hanauer, founder of Civic Ventures.
1:33.7	I'm Paul Constant, and I'm a writer at Civic Ventures.
1:48.2	So in this show, we do a lot of talking about how neoliberalism and neoclassical economics have failed over the course of the last 40 years or so we haven't done a whole lot of talking about why they've failed and that's going to involve a word
1:55.2	that you i don't think have heard yet on this podcast which is moral morality yeah allality, yeah, all that, all that messy stuff.
2:02.9	Yeah. So, Paul, you know, one of the ways, I think, that most defines and signifies the failure,
2:10.8	in particular of neoclassical economics, is its assertion of sort of in the behavior model of homo-economics, that economics is both
2:20.7	asocial, which means that social relations are all transactional, and that it's amoral in the sense
2:27.5	that moral considerations are outside the bounds of economics.
2:32.3	And so, you know, basically what that means is that morality and economics,
2:36.3	they have nothing to do with one another. And economics is a science like physics and has nothing
	...

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