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.

It's a new year, Nick, and what better way to ring it in than a conversation about neoliberalism.

I know, I know. And we've got just this killer guest today. We're talking

with Gary Gersel, who is the author of the rise and fall of neoliberal order. But what's cool

about Gary and is a little bit different than our usual guest is that Gary is not an economist.

He's an historian. And so he comes to us with that perspective, which I think is a little different. He's an historian. You know, and so he comes to us with that perspective, which I think is a little different.

He's the Paul Mellon Professor of American History at the University of Cambridge and a professor

of history at Vanderbilt University as well.

Absolutely fascinating guy.

Let's shout with him.

I'm Gary Girstoll. I am a historian of the United States,

19th and 20th and 21st centuries, but increasingly I'm writing about the most recent period.

And that encompasses my most recent book, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, America and the World, in the free market era, which is really a history, tries to be a history of our

time, beginning in the 1970s and carrying through to the Biden presidency, actually covers almost

100 years if we include the rise of all of the New Deal order from the 1930s to the

70s before then, trying to use my historical skills to make sense of what is a very volatile

and uncertain political moment that we're living in.

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