The rising inequality and growing political instability that we see today are the direct result of decades of bad economic theory.

The last five decades of trickle-down economics haven't worked. But what's the alternative?

Middle-out economics is the answer.

Because the middle class is the source of growth, not its consequence.

That's right.

This is pitchfork economics with Nick Hanauer, a podcast about how to build the economy from the middle out.

Welcome to the show.

You know, Goldie, when I think about points of leverage in terms of shifting the kind of economy we have to the kind of economy that we want and would benefit more people

in more ways. I just don't think that there's anything more important than the definition of

the social purpose of the corporation. I just don't think that there's any change we could make in the structure

of the economy that would reverberate more than moving from this shareholder value primacy

definition that we have today to something else, some kind of stakeholder version of it or,

you know, something more evolved.

Because, you know, we live in a commercial society and like it or not, corporations, companies

are the dominant sort of topological feature of the economy and how they think about what they should do

and how they should do it is an extraordinarily important thing. And, you know, it gets to, I think,

one of the core principles in the way we understand economics and understand the market that

the, you know, market competition is really important. We view it

as an evolutionary system, and if you're not competing, you're not getting innovation. But it is

competition between firms, between corporations, largely. The economy is largely happening

inside these firms. And so it is what an evolutionary

theory is called group selection or multi-level selection. It is competition between these highly

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