How do we organize human societies to maximize the good stuff and minimize the bad stuff?

We have to go back to the simple insight that what you assume in each other is what you get out of each other.

If you believe that most people are fundamentally selfish, then you'll start designing your whole society around that idea.

If we tell this story that you can't trust anybody, that increases transaction costs in society.

The more trusting people are, the lower the

costs of running that economy and the better off everybody is.

From the offices of Civic Ventures in downtown Seattle, this is Pitch Fork Economics with

Nick Hanauer, where we explore everything you wished you'd learn in Econ 101.

I'm Nick Hanauer, founder of Civic Ventures.

I'm David Goldstein, Senior Fellow at Civic Ventures.

So Goldie, you know, one of the things that I think is just so wrong about neoclassical economics, and we've talked

about this a million times, is the behavior model Homo economicists, which asserts that people are perfectly reliably

selfish and that we can base all our thinking and our models on that and the

fundamental problem with that isn't that it's just

descriptive, it's also prescriptive in the sense that if you teach people that people

are fundamentally selfish and then they look around the world at all of the

prosperity in it, then they must conclude that

we're selfishness is the cause of prosperity and the more selfish we are, the more prosperity we create.

And that view has radically affected our culture and our policy and our politics and is at the

core of all a lot of the neoliberal stuff that we hate the most.

Right, anything goes, Nick, you know, it's the invisible hand.

It is, it is.

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