The $79 Trillion Price of Inequality (with Carter Price)

Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer

Civic Ventures

News, Business, Government, Politics

4.7 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 24 March 2026

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Over the last 50 years, nearly $79 trillion that could have gone to the bottom 90%…didn’t. Where did it go—and what did that cost you? Nick and Goldy are joined by Carter Price, senior mathematician at the RAND Corporation, to break down how rising inequality reshaped wages, growth, and even the federal budget—and why the economy feels so disconnected from everyday life. Because this isn’t just about who got richer. It’s about what everyone else lost. Carter Price is a Senior Mathematician at the RAND Corporation and Professor of Policy Analysis at the RAND School of Public Policy Social Media: @CarterCPrice Further reading: Measuring the Income Gap from 1975 to 2023 RAND Budget Model: Groundbreaking insights into the everyday impacts of federal policy Unlocking the Tax Code with RAND's Tax Code Analysis Tool Preliminary Strategies for Reducing the Burden of Federal Debt Impacts of the Retirement Savings for Americans Act Website: http://pitchforkeconomics.com Facebook: Pitchfork Economics Podcast Bluesky: @pitchforkeconomics.bsky.social Instagram: @pitchforkeconomics Threads: pitchforkeconomics TikTok: @pitchfork_econ YouTube: @pitchforkeconomics LinkedIn: Pitchfork Economics Twitter: @PitchforkEcon, @NickHanauer Substack: ⁠The Pitch⁠

Transcript

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0:00.0	The rising inequality and growing political instability that we see today are the direct result of decades of bad economic theory.
0:10.6	The last five decades of trickle-down economics haven't worked.
0:14.7	But what's the alternative?
0:16.3	Middle-out economics is the answer.
0:18.6	Because the middle class is the source of growth, not its consequence.
0:23.2	That's right.
0:28.7	This is pitchfork economics with Nick Hanauer, a podcast about how to build the economy from the middle out.
0:36.9	Welcome to the show.
0:43.8	One thing I know about the last 50 years, Nick,
0:47.3	is that it has been a tremendous half century for people like you and your friends.
0:53.2	I know.
0:53.6	And nobody has been more
0:56.8	effective at demonstrating the breadth and size of that than our guest today, Carter Price.
1:03.0	That's right. Yeah, Carter did was one of the lead authors of really a seminal study about five years ago,
1:14.7	that, to be fair, we helped instigate. Your money helped pay for it, which showed the,
1:22.5	essentially was a counterfactual, which tried to take a look at what would have happened if the level
1:30.3	of inequality that we had in the mid-1970s, in 1975, when the economy was far more equal
1:39.1	than it is today, what would have happened if that level of inequality had remained constant?
1:47.1	How much better off would the bottom 90% of Americans be?
1:53.5	And it turned out, I think the technical term, is a lot?
1:58.3	Yeah, it's almost inconceivable how different the country would be if we hadn't
2:04.9	screwed it up so bad. You know, like it just... There's some updated, updated numbers as of
	...

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