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.

I don't know if you've been paying much attention, Nick,

but there's been a lot of talk about tariffs.

Yes.

In news recently.

And, of course, they're just kicking in and it takes a while for the stuff we buy to cross the pacific out of our office if you look out the window

uh you can see the very empty port of Seattle these days.

Yeah.

And that suggests that we're going to have a supply chain crisis.

We're going to start having shortages.

And that suggests, as everybody predicts, that we should be preparing for prices to go up. Yes. And I remember during COVID and coming

out of COVID, you insisting, Nick, that we did not have inflation. It was not inflation.

Yeah. Inflation is, inflation is a wage price spiral. We had higher prices as a consequence of a global supply chain shock. That's what we had. But we had something else in those prices, which brings me to our guest. We also had margin expansion during the pandemic. And by margin, we mean profit margin.

Much higher profits. That's right. So costs definitely went up because of the global supply chain shock.

But our friends who run America's largest companies used that as cover for raising their prices

more than their costs because consumers were so confused and because the norms changed.

And what's relevant about that is that our guest today is an economist named Hal Singer, who specializes in these sorts of things.

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