How U.S. policy was designed to suppress wages (with Larry Mishel and Josh Bivens)

Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer

Civic Ventures

Business, Government, News, Politics

4.8 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 1 June 2021

⏱️ 38 minutes

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Summary

Radical and rising economic inequality is no secret — and now, thanks to new research from the Economic Policy Institute, neither is its price tag nor its cause. There’s never been a study quite like this — one which places specific, real dollar amounts on every trickle-down policy American politicians have embraced. The study’s authors, Larry Mishel and Josh Bivens, explain how their work reveals that the massive upward redistribution of income our nation has suffered these past four decades can largely be attributed to policies intentionally designed to suppress the wages of American workers. Lawrence Mishel is a distinguished fellow at EPI after serving as president from 2002-2017. In the more than three decades he has been with EPI, Mishel has helped build it into the nation’s premier research organization focused on U.S. living standards and labor markets. Twitter: @LarryMishel Josh Bivens is the director of research at EPI. His areas of research include macroeconomics, fiscal and monetary policy, the economics of globalization, social insurance, and public investment. Twitter: @joshbivens_DC Middle-class pay lost pace. Is Washington to blame? https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/13/business/economy/middle-class-pay.html Identifying the policy levers generating wage suppression and wage inequality: https://www.epi.org/unequalpower/publications/wage-suppression-inequality/ Website: http://pitchforkeconomics.com/ Twitter: @PitchforkEcon Instagram: @pitchforkeconomics Nick’s twitter: @NickHanauer

Transcript

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0:00.0	Although the Rand research showed us how much inequality has increased, it didn't explain
0:07.6	why it increased.
0:08.9	What Rand found is that over the past 40 years, had inequality remained the same levels
0:13.7	of inequality, the bottom 90 percent would have earned 50 trillion dollars more.
0:19.5	Basically, we found that the Y was the direct and measurable effect of a bunch of very specific
0:25.1	policy decisions made along the way in recent decades.
0:32.9	From the home offices of civic ventures in downtown Seattle, this is pitchfork economics,
0:38.0	with Nick Hanauer, the best place to get the truth about who gets what and why.
0:48.9	I'm Nick Hanauer, founder of Civic Ventures.
0:52.0	I'm David Goldstein, Senior Fellow at Civic Ventures.
0:59.6	All right, so Goldie, anyone who has a beating pulse or who has listened to our podcast,
1:08.0	knows that inequality is a thing and that there's a lot of it.
1:13.5	We've gone over, for instance, the Rand Report, which showed this giant gap between
1:20.5	what the median worker does earn and would have earned if they had been held harmless
1:25.7	by the last 40 or 50 years of neoliberal economic policy.
1:30.5	But what we've never really done a great job of is explaining why that is, like what happened
1:38.5	to create that giant sort of hole in everybody's pocketbooks?
1:43.9	And to reiterate, what Rand found is that over the past 40 years, had inequality remained
1:49.5	at the same levels of inequality between distributions remained the same.
1:55.0	The bottom 90% would have earned $50 trillion more over the past 40 years, and they did,
2:03.4	in 2019, it would have been $2.5 trillion more income going to the bottom 90%.
2:12.0	And so a lot of the inequality we've seen, this radical rise of inequality, is due to
	...

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