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.

Today, Nick, we're going to talk about, for one, of a better term, the poverty industrial complex, the way private corporations, often extremely large monopolistic corporations,

make billions off of anti-poverty programs in the United States.

Yeah, and it'll be a really interesting conversation.

We're talking to Ann Kim, who has a new bookout, Poverty for Profit, How Corporations Get Rich

Off America's Poor.

And I'm going to be very interested to hear about it.

I definitely am sympathetic to this argument, but on the other side, you know, there's a lot of moving parts to

the economy and, you know, these intermediaries who are doing this stuff, I mean, it'll be

interesting to see what the practices actually are. Right. I mean, I think a lot of us are familiar

with how, you know, and we've talked

about it a lot, how very, how exploitive and extractive various industries are. You know, we've

written about what we call the parasite economy, these parasitic companies that don't pay

their workers enough that they can get by without food stamps and Medicaid

and housing vouchers and so forth.

And we've been critical of that.

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