Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer
We are living through a paradigm shift from trickle-down neoliberalism to middle-out economics — a new understanding of who gets what and why. Join zillionaire class-traitor Nick Hanauer and some of the world’s leading economic and political thinkers as they explore the latest thinking on how the economy actually works.
Episodes
February 3, 2026 • 45 mins
If democracy is going to survive, it has to deliver.This week, Goldy and Civic Ventures president Zach Silk are joined by Hannah Garden-Monheit, a former senior official in the Biden-Harris administration, for a conversation about one of the most urgent questions in American politics: why our government so often fails to produce visible results for working people—and what that means for what comes next.At a time when public institu...
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January 27, 2026 • 31 mins
As inequality deepens, democratic institutions strain, and climate risk accelerates, it’s becoming impossible to ignore a basic question: What is capitalism actually for?
This week, we revisit our conversation with Harvard Business School professor Rebecca Henderson who argues that today’s economic crises aren’t the result of isolated failures, but of an economic system designed around the wrong goal—maximizing shareholder value a...
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January 20, 2026 • 46 mins
Every era runs on an economic story. For the last half-century, ours has been neoliberalism — the belief that if you free markets from constraints, prosperity will follow.
This week we revisit a bracing conversation with historian Gary Gerstle about how neoliberalism took hold, why it once felt inevitable, and why it’s now breaking down in plain sight. Drawing on his book The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, Gerstle joins Ni...
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January 13, 2026 • 46 mins
Americans have been told that working harder is the path to dignity, security, and success. But what if that promise was hijacked?
This week, we’re revisiting our episode with Professor Elizabeth Anderson, where she exposes how neoliberalism weaponized the “work ethic” — transforming a moral tradition that once honored workers into a system that blames them, exploits them, and rewards extraction over contribution. Drawing from her...
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January 6, 2026 • 60 mins
Most people buy the fiction that markets are “natural,” inequality is inevitable, and government should step aside — but where did that idea come from?
In this episode from 2019, Nick and Goldy talk with English journalist George Monbiot and American journalist and author Binyamin Appelbaum about how neoliberalism was deliberately built and sold — not stumbled into.
They unpack how economists, funders, and institutions rewrote th...
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December 30, 2025 • 39 mins
For more than a century, economists have told us they’re simply “describing the world as it is.” But what if their theories aren’t neutral — and are quietly doing enormous harm?
This week, we’re joined by economist George DeMartino, author of The Tragic Science, who makes a devastating case that modern economics has helped legitimize policies that shattered communities, fueled inequality, and even cost millions of lives — all whil...
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December 23, 2025 • 40 mins
America has never been wealthier—so why does it feel so hard to get by?
New York Times economics reporter Talmon Joseph Smith joins Nick and Goldy this week to unpack the growing gap between economic headlines and the lived reality of most Americans. With nearly $200 trillion in national wealth and half the country holding just a sliver of it, they explore why GDP and aggregate growth keep telling a story working families don’t r...
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December 16, 2025 • 43 mins
Extreme inequality and democratic decline aren’t separate crises—they’re the same crisis. This week, Osita Nwanevu joins Paul and Goldy to explain how America’s constitutional design, corporate power, and decades of upward redistribution have eroded both political and economic freedom. He outlines what real democratic governance would mean inside government and at work, why the concentration of wealth threatens stability, and how a...
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December 9, 2025 • 31 mins
This week, Paul and Goldy look back at the most notable economics books of the year. They discuss Ezra Klein and David Thompson’s Abundance, Cory Doctorow’s blistering Enshittification, Thomas Piketty’s new works on inequality, Diane Coyle’s fresh take on GDP, and the overlooked history behind the Garland Fund. Whether you’re hunting for a holiday gift for the wonk in the family or looking to understand the ideas driving today’s po...
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December 2, 2025 • 36 mins
Econ 101 shapes how millions of people understand the economy—but what if the textbooks are teaching a worldview that’s outdated, oversimplified, and in some cases flat-out wrong?
This week, Nick and Goldy talk with economists Wendy Carlin and Suresh Naidu, leaders of CORE Econ, the global project rewriting introductory economics to reflect the real world. They explain why the old curriculum failed during the 2008 financial crisi...
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November 25, 2025 • 48 mins
Law professor Mehrsa Baradaran joins Nick and Goldy to reveal how neoliberalism wasn’t just a misguided economic theory—it was a “quiet coup” that rewired our laws, courts, and institutions to elevate capital above democracy. Drawing from her new book The Quiet Coup, Professor Baradaran explains how this ideology became like the air we breathe: a pervasive worldview that shapes our politics, our markets, and even the way we underst...
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November 18, 2025 • 36 mins
For nearly a century, GDP has been the world’s go-to measure of economic success—but what if it’s been telling us the wrong story? It treats cigarette sales and cancer treatments as equally “good” for the economy, while caring for your kids, volunteering, or creating art don’t count at all. This week, economist Diane Coyle joins Nick and Goldy to discuss her new book, The Measure of Progress, and explain why GDP increasingly fails ...
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November 11, 2025 • 32 mins
Actor and author Ben McKenzie didn’t set out to become one of crypto’s fiercest critics—but when the pandemic hit and Hollywood shut down, his curiosity turned into a full-blown investigation. The result was the bestselling book, Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud, a blistering exposé of the crypto craze as “casino capitalism” at its dumbest.
In this episode, McKenzie joins Nick and Goldy to...
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November 4, 2025 • 39 mins
Corporations are on track to spend more than $1.3 trillion on stock buybacks this year—money that could have gone toward higher wages, innovation, or community investment. That’s the real-life Trillion Dollar Heist at the center of our new comic from Civic Ventures, which follows Marta, a janitor who interrupts a corporate board meeting just as executives plot their next billion-dollar buyback spree.
This week, we’re resharing o...
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In the final episode of our Trade series, Nick and Goldy talk with Thea Lee, former Deputy Undersecretary for International Affairs at the U.S. Department of Labor, to challenge the core assumption behind decades of U.S. trade policy: That trade is about efficiency, not power.
Lee explains how past trade deals were written to protect capital while ignoring worker exploitation abroad—a model that suppressed wages overseas and under...
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October 21, 2025 • 30 mins
In the sixth episode of our trade series, Pitchfork Economics producer Freddy Doss talks with Mexican economist Juan Carlos Moreno-Brid about how NAFTA — and now the USMCA — reshaped Mexico’s economy in ways that those of us north of the Rio Grande almost never hear about. Yes, exports skyrocketed. But wages stagnated, domestic industry hollowed out, and Mexico became structurally dependent on the United States — even as political ...
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October 14, 2025 • 30 mins
In the fifth episode of our series on trade, journalist and author Luke Savage joins Pitchfork Economics Producer Freddy Doss to unpack how decades of “free trade” between the U.S. and Canada have reshaped both economies—entrenching corporate power, hollowing out manufacturing, and weakening democratic control over economic policy. Savage traces how policies sold as mutually beneficial instead fueled inequality and deindustrializat...
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October 7, 2025 • 49 mins
What if global trade isn’t really a fight between nations—but between classes? In the fourth episode of our Trade series, Nick and Goldy talk with economist and writer Matthew C. Klein, co-author of Trade Wars Are Class Wars: How Rising Inequality Distorts the Global Economy and Threatens International Peace. Klein argues that the real story behind trade imbalances isn’t about countries “winning” or “losing”—it’s about how elites h...
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September 30, 2025 • 41 mins
Tariffs won’t save America’s economy—but knowledge might. In the third episode of our Trade series, Nick and Goldy sit down with physicist César Hidalgo to explore how prosperity really grows—not through tariffs or trickle-down promises, but through the accumulation of knowledge and know-how. Hidalgo explains why digital exports don’t show up in trade data, why tariffs fail, and why the future belongs to countries that invest in re...
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September 23, 2025 • 41 mins
In the second episode of our Trade series, Nick and Goldy talk with author Nat Dyer about his book Ricardo’s Dream: How Economists Forgot the Real World and Led Us Astray. Dyer reveals how David Ricardo’s famous theory of comparative advantage—long touted as proof that free trade is always a win-win—was built on unrealistic assumptions and a false history.
They trace how this elegant but misleading model fueled globalization, mask...
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