Why conventional wisdom is finally pushing for higher wages (with Binyamin Appelbaum)

Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer

Civic Ventures

Business, Government, News, Politics

4.8 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 15 December 2020

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Six years after the beginning of the Fight for $15 movement, conventional wisdom is finally waking up to economic reality. How do we know? Because the New York Times recently published an editorial titled ‘Let’s Talk About Higher Wages’ calling on the incoming Biden administration to focus on higher wages for everyone. They couldn’t be more right on. Binyamin Appelbaum, the lead writer on business and economics for the Editorial Board, helps us understand the change in consensus on wages. Binyamin Appelbaum is the lead writer on business and economics for the Editorial Board of The New York Times. From 2010 to 2019, he was a Washington correspondent for the Times, covering economic policy. His book, ‘The Economists’ Hour: False Prophets, Free Markets, and the Fracture of Society’ is a Wall Street Journal Business Bestseller. Twitter: @BCAppelbaum Nick on Marketplace: https://www.marketplace.org/2020/12/08/new-rand-study-quantifies-cost-of-rising-us-inequality/ Binyamin has been a guest on our show before! Here’s our episode with him and George Monbiot, ‘How neoliberalism happened’, from October 2019: https://pitchforkeconomics.com/episode/how-neoliberalism-happened-with-george-monbiot-and-binyamin-appelbaum/ Show us some love by leaving a rating or a review! RateThisPodcast.com/pitchforkeconomics Further reading/listening: Let’s talk about higher wages: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/28/opinion/wages-economic-growth.html Do higher wages kill jobs? (with Mayor Eric Garcetti and Alan Krueger): https://pitchforkeconomics.com/episode/do-higher-wages-kill-jobs/ The top 1% of Americans have taken $50 trillion from the bottom 90% - and that’s made the U.S. less secure: https://time.com/5888024/50-trillion-income-inequality-america/ And as promised by Annie and Ashley, you can find the last 100+ years of New York Times Editorial Board pieces on the minimum wage here: https://pitchforkeconomics.com/episode/why-conventional-wisdom-is-finally-pushing-for-higher-wages-with-binyamin-appelbaum Website: http://pitchforkeconomics.com/ Twitter: @PitchforkEcon Instagram: @pitchforkeconomics Nick’s twitter: @NickHanauer

Transcript

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0:00.0	The New York Times published this new fantastic piece on wages and I think it's a really huge deal.
0:08.6	In the piece it emphasizes the importance of rewriting our stories.
0:13.4	I think the beginning of that story is that a strong economy requires a strong distribution of
0:18.9	income that means that many people are in a position to consume and to spend and strong economy
0:23.8	begins with wage growth it begins with workers having more money in their pockets.
0:31.6	From the home offices of Civic Ventures in downtown Seattle, this is Pitch Fork Economics with
0:37.8	Nick Hanauer, the best place to get the truth about who gets what and why. I'm Nick Henauer, founder of Civic Ventures.
0:49.0	I'm David Goldstein, Senior Fellow at Civic Ventures.
0:56.3	So Nick, today we're going to talk about a New York Times editorial titled Let's Talk
1:05.2	about Higher Wages, which as folks know is one of our favorite subjects, but
1:09.6	before we get into that on the topic of wages, you actually talked to another podcast slash radio show recently.
1:18.0	Yeah, that's right. I was on Marketplace with David Brancaccio talking about the Rand report and the, you know, the 45 years of wage suppression that we just lived through with the economist Carter Price from Rand who actually did the analysis.
1:35.5	David is a very good interviewer and it went I think it went super well and if people
1:39.5	are interested they should just check out marketplace. And we'll provide a link to that episode in the show notes.
1:44.8	Yeah, awesome.
1:46.8	But today we get to talk to one of our heroes, Binya Applebaum,
1:52.4	who is a member of the New York Times editorial board.
1:56.8	He's the economy and business writer for the editorial board and the author of I think a really important recent book called
2:05.4	The Economist Hour and Binya is not an economist but he is an expert on time and the reason we're having him on is that the New York Times published this new
2:26.7	fantastic piece on wages called Let's Talk about Higher Wages a couple of weeks ago and I think it's a really huge deal.
2:35.8	We could really just shut down the podcast here and just read that editorial out loud every week because it's a great summary of a lot of what we've been talking about
2:47.5	over the past couple years, not just in terms of economics and policy, but also the importance of telling a better story.
	...

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