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.

Hey, Pitchfork listeners, Goldie here.

I recently came back from our nation's capital for our second annual middle out conference.

This year's was titled, Looking Forward, Looking Back, where middle out economics goes from here. And as it was last year, it was hosted

by our friends at Democracy, a journal of ideas. I have to say, last years was a bit more fun and a bit more optimistic,

what with us not having a lunatic in the White House. But despite the broadly realistic

assessment of the shit show we're in, there was still a lot of thought-provoking commentary

and even, dare I say,

a little bit of optimism from our panelists and keynote speakers. All in all, the event was a

great success and while I apologize in advance for the audio quality, we thought we'd share

a little bit of it with you anyway. To start with, here's a brief

excerpt from Nick's keynote address. I've been working on the overtime threshold since

2014, and what the labor department did was small, and if I may use this phrase, chicken shit, they chose to, you know,

attempt to raise the overtime threshold to include a few million workers when their option

was to include 30 million workers, if they had merely raised the threshold back to where

it once was. And I highlight that because I think that's the central

problem. This is emblematic of the central problem of the Democratic Party is that we don't know

...