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.

Goldie, today we get to talk to my friend Sebel Raman,

who is a legal scholar, policy expert,

and he was a senior advisor in the Biden administration. He ran

something called OIRA, which is the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, which means

they sort of administer how the federal government deals with regulation.

And it won't surprise you to know that the structure of that approach had been very neoliberal

for a very long time.

Right.

It basically was massively.

It was designed that way in the Reagan administration to basically make it hard to regulate.

Yeah. And, you know, care a lot more about corporate profits and anything else and so on and so forth.

Yeah, under the, but by the way, pretended to be all about openness and process and, you know,

democracy and all that. Yeah. What was interesting about the process that we, as you may know, had a big part of,

and by we, I mean the team at Civic Ventures and some of our allies were both extremely

involved and extremely supportive of this process to fix how we regulated. It was also an exercise in how painstakingly slow

and difficult it is to make sensible progress in government. So you're telling me, Nick, that it's hard to reform OIRA

...