← Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer
Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer
From Abundance to Enshittification: 2025’s Must-Read Economics Books
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A
The rising inequality and growing political instability that we see today are the direct result of decades of bad economic theory.
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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.
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This is Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer.
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A podcast about how to build the.
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Economy from the middle out.
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B
Welcome to the show.
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David. Goldie Goldstein. How are you?
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Paul? Bobby Constant. How am I? You know, I'm inshitified. We'll get to that a little bit later. I'm feeling a little inshittified. The whole world is feeling unshitified to me right now. But happy holidays indeed.
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A
Happy holidays to you. And you know, we didn't do a summer reading episode this year because we were doing the Back to Basics series. And so I thought it would be fun to do a sort of Best of year in economics books episode for the end of the year. Maybe give people some book buying ideas because I think that books are the best holiday gift imaginable. So are you down to play this game, Goldie?
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B
Sure. I actually read a book with my eyes this year because it wasn't available as an audio book. Yeah, why not? Sure, you're the book person. We'll let you lead this, we'll let you lead this show today, Paul, and guide us through are there best books on economics in this and shittified field?
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A
Yeah, I think it's been an interesting year in terms of economics books. I think there's been some things that have really broken through into the, into the mainstream conversation. So even if we don't necessarily all agree with the contents of all of these books on this list, I think that, you know, it's important to know them, to talk about them and maybe to warp those ideas into our own malicious middle out ways. So.
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B
Well then why don't you start, Paul? You're the book person. You're the person with the. Who actually goes to bookstores, who writes a book column, who believes that it's a medium that has a future.
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A
So here we go. You know, we can't start any list about economics without talking about Abundance by Ezra Klein and David Thompson. That was the book that I was referring to earlier in terms of breaking through into the political conversation this year. We have talked about it this year a whole lot and it's something that I think that a lot of candidates are going to have to reckon with next year during the midterm elections. The premise of the book is that America doesn't build things anymore. And it opens with sort of a bold sci fi imagination of what, what the world could be if I guess what we stripped all regulations or something. It's, it's, it's not strictly anti regulation, but it is, it has started a robust debate about regulations. It reads a little bit differently now. I think now the President has demolished the east wing of the White House without any permits or anything. It's kind of like that's abundance writ large. But still, I think it's a book that dominated the year conversation wise. And I think that it's a book that will continue to dominate the conversation next year when it comes out in paperback.
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B
Yeah. So let's make a distinction here right from the start. I want to make a couple distinctions here in talking about abundance. First of all, this distinction between best books and important books, right? It's not a best book. It's a collection of lazily argued essays repurposed into a book. It's also not, I would say it's not a book about economics, it's a book about politics. And that is one of my big critiques of it. I mean, what's frustrating about this book for me is that as I'm reading it, I agree with a lot of what they're saying. We have made it too difficult to build. But they don't actually have an economic argument. What they have is a political argument. And it's really a political narrative argument. And one of the things that gets me the most about this book is this idea that we agree with to some extent, to a large extent, that Democrats focus too much on distribution and not enough on abundance. On growth. We always say we've been arguing for a decade, we want Democrats to pivot from fairness to growth. They're the pro fairness party and Republicans are perceived as the pro growth party. And our argument is that in fact these policies that are more fair are also pro growth. And you need to pivot to that. Where I think Thompson and Klein are completely wrong is that distribution is the heart of the problem that they're talking about, especially on housing. Our housing has become unaffordable, not just because we're not building enough, but because our economy has grown so unequal. They cite authors of a book that we had on, on the pod last year. I think it was Homelessness is a housing Problem. And they, they cite this book and they point out that the homelessness correlates with the price of housing. And so when you have the absolute prices of housing are Very high. You're gonna get more homelessness. What they don't go on to tell you is that absolute housing prices correlate with incomes. And so one of the reasons why cities like Seattle are unaffordable and have a homeless crisis is because we are vastly unequal and very affluent. And so if you want to fix these main issues that they're talking about, if you want a more abundant economy, you need a more fair economy. A lot of these problems are the consequence of unequal distributions, and you can't ignore distributions if you want to solve this problem. And so I think I really kind of hate that Abundance has become such a talked about book, and I hate you for bringing it up.
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A
And Goldie is very cleverly here demonstrating the kind of dinner table conversations you could have this holidays if you give abundance as a gift. But I think that Goldie has another book along the same themes that he would like to recommend.
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B
Right. We did not have Klein or Thompson onto the pod to defend their book. And I don't know why they would want to come onto our pod. It would just. It'd be nasty. Maybe more so from me than maybe so. But we did have Mark Dunkelman on to talk about his book, why Nothing Works, which is Abundance adjacent. There's more data in there. It's less anecdotal. It makes a more serious argument for how, you know, essentially what we did was we swung too far. We went from an era in which you could just knock down a classic building and replace it with garbage because, you know, with no environmental review, with no design review, you could do urban renewal that plowed down neighborhoods. All this stuff that was wrong. In the 1950s and 60s, we built up this regulatory framework to try to empower communities to determine what gets built around them. And the result is we went too far and we've made it too difficult to build. And that's. These are powers that are often seized by the other side to prevent good things from happening. It's interesting. One of the anecdotes he used was New York City trying to rebuild the skating rink in Central Park. And they had all of these contracting problems and it was over budget and it was done wrong and not being done. And eventually this builder comes in, leave it to me, I'll do it, and for this price, and it'll get done. And it got done. This is in the early 80s, and that was Donald Trump. And he, like, shows how, look, Donald Trump was able to do it when the city couldn't. Of course, probably knowing Donald Trump, he was able to do it so cheap because he didn't pay any of his contractors.
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Six people died on the rink that year.
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Right. They're buried. They're underneath those soft spots in the ice. That's where their bodies are decomposing. But it got done. I'd say his book makes a clearer argument for it. I still disagree with. Where a lot of this is taken is that progressives are responsible. This is a disease of progressivism. Again, my big issue with abundance is that it's not an economics book, it's a political book. And that he has a politics of abundance, but he doesn't have an economics of abundance. And it's economic ideas that inform policy, not the other way around. You don't cut taxes and then say, hey, I just cut taxes. We should have a theory that says that cutting taxes increases growth. No, you cut taxes based on the theory that it increases growth.
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A
Sure. Well, we always say that a budget is a moral document. And I think that abundance is an important work of political economy because it at least directs the conversation more towards the idea of growth. Like we can we all agree growth, and if so, then how do we do it? How do we fund it and all that. That stuff's not in the book, but I think it leads off some interesting conversations. We did have another book that I wanted you to talk about a little bit that is also economics adjacent. I would call it more like corporate economics. But Goldie, do you have anything to. I know you like to swear, so.
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I wanted to say, you go, you say the name of the book. I've already used the word in.
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Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and what to Do about it by Cory Doctorow.
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That's right.
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Cory Doctorow, of course, has been a guest on the show for a different book. He's very prolific.
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Look, Corey's great. I mean, great insight, great writer who's a great guest on the show. We'll provide a link in the show notes. You can listen to him there. Yeah, I think we've all seen this. How much worse the Internet has gotten and how much worse a lot of things have gotten over the years as you have concentration of power in the hands of monopolists who really care about maximizing profits. We see it like Google is useless as a search engine anymore. Now we're all supposed to use AI, which just makes up shit. Look, I gave up Facebook. I never really liked Facebook. I never got why people liked Facebook. I thought it was a terrible interface and was noisy and. And whatever. But I gave it up. After I learned it helped Trump win in 2016, the only social media I had left was Twitter. It was really the only media I had left. And after going to Civic Ventures, because I wasn't blogging or writing in an alt weekly anymore. And I love Twitter. Twitter was great at what it did. And even before Elon Musk took it over, it was. They started to insertify it through its algorithms where you weren't getting like. I purposely followed a small group of people who were quality. They were. They curated news for me. And then suddenly I'm getting this shit in my feed, and even though I'm choosing just to get chronological from people I follow, suddenly all this shit starts going into my feed. And then of course, once Musk buys it, it's Nazi shit. And I stopped using it the minute Musk acquired it because I knew where it was going. And now it's this shitty Nazi hellhole. It's something you see with platforms. And this is what happens in the modern economy. You gain a large enough share, you have this platform, and now you no longer need to it useful anymore. You can just squeeze all the profit out of it algorithmically and, you know, create a worse online experience because where else are people going to go?
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A
Exactly. I think this one is an interesting one because it's sort of an output of economics without actually directly, you know, going into all of the mechanics of monopolization and monopsony and all that. It just. It just talks about why things are getting worse and who is responsible, and also just lets you know that you're not alone, like in noticing that everything is actively getting worse. I wanted to touch on a little bit of inspiration for you here, Goldie, because I know you've been working on a book for most of this year, and I wanted to let you know about a very influential author who's published three books this year in the time that it's taken you to write 65% of one book.
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No, I have a whole book written.
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You may only like 65% of it, but there's an entire book written.
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Well, Thomas Piketty, our old friend, has put out 300% of books this year. He, of course, is the author of capital in the 21st century, which was a very influential book for us here at Civic Ventures.
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The first book that Nick had me, he had me read two books. One was that Giant Capital in the 21st Century, and the other was his Tiny Gardens of Democracy. Those are the first two books I had to read for this job.
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A
Yeah. And of course, Piketty is one of the leading authors on, on economic Inequality. And all three of his books this year touch on that. And they're all kind of different. One is called Equality is a Struggle and that one is the most sort of book like book of all of them. And that is a collection of his essays for the French newspaper Le Monde. And it touches on everything that's happened basically that he's been interested in from 2021 until early this year. And so if you're looking for an update on his ideas of inequality and his, his thoughts on on the Right of the World in terms of politics, this is a good one. It's sort of an update in little newspaper sized chunks. The second one is called Nature, Culture and Inequality. And that one is a little 90 page book that is an adaptation of a lecture that he gave that touches on inequality's effects on education, inheritance, the climate crisis, taxing wealth and gender disparities. And this one I think would be a good little stocking stuffer for anybody who you're interested in getting sort of economically activated because it's a brief book writing about the importance of inequality and how it shapes everything in the world in a really accessible format. And then the third book is Equality what It Means and why It Matters. And that's actually in the form of a dialogue between Piketty and Michael Sandel, a previous guest. And they are talking about global inequality and they tend to agree on a lot of the problems and even some of the solutions, but they, they start to disagree on how far and how fast we can make these changes in order to curb inequality and, and where we should prioritize our efforts. And so I think this one is an interesting one because it's in the form of a dial. And so it's sort of a useful way to bone up on having political and economic conversations with people who you may not agree with. And so all three of these books, you know, none of them are the horse choking sequel to Capital that people are dying for, but they're all three coming at the problem of inequality from three very different ways.
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B
I have not read any of them yet, Paul. I didn't even know about two of them until you put that list in front of me. You know, the fact that he's focusing on equality, that word is not in the main title to capital in the 21st century, but it really is, you know, a giant book about how really through most of history, vast inequality is the norm and is inevitable. And we had a brief period in the 20th century where we went the other way due to policies. So he is, you know, the leading voice on why we need to address inequality head on.
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A
Yeah, for our younger listeners, he kind of took the rage of the Occupy Wall street movement and gave it an intellectual heft and sort of direction in a way that like the timing of the book, I think was purely coincidental, but it really felt like it was a continuation of that on a sort of a grander scale.
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B
And while his books, you know, capital in the 21st century in particular is immense and filled with citations and data and very well supported, he also has this literary bent to his writing, both in how he writes and in capital, using literature as part of his historical example. So he's not an unreadable economist, though he can be locked.
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A
Well, these three books I think are more accessible for readers in particular Nature, Culture, Inequality.
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So speaking of economic books, maybe this one is more for the, for, for the wonks out there. Also a, I think a two time guest, certainly we had her on recently is Diane Coyle's new book, the Measure of Progress Counting what Really Matters. And it is essentially another book about gdp, gross Domestic product, which she is an expert on and which is an issue of great derision between.
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Me and Nick because it. Well, there's so many ways to go here. There is the old joke about the drunk, you know, looking for his car keys under the street light because that's where the, the light is. And that's kind of what GDP is. It's this thing that we can measure and so we pay attention to it even though we don't measure it well and it's not really meaningful. I think what's interesting is that she makes an additional argument in this book that I hadn't really thought about before. It's not just that we're measuring growth wrong, it's that when we decide to measure something like gdp, GDP doesn't exist. It's not this objective thing that exists. It's this intellectual construct. And so the very idea of, of fabricating this thing called GDP and giving it importance in terms of how we understand the world and how we manage it is powerful in it of itself and needs to be examined that we've created it. And in fact, as she points out in the book, the whole idea of there being an economy is a 20th century idea. You've used the term political economy a couple times here. That was the old 18th, 19th century word. We have this idea of economics and even once that was coined, we still didn't think of this, of an Economy as separate from politics and culture. And that is part of the problem of GDP is that it measures the price of things that we produce and sell as opposed to things that really matter. And we measure it that way because it's really hard to measure and quantify the things that matter.
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For the last book on the list, I wanted to talk about a historical book that I think it kind of ends us on a nice up note. We've done a lot of talking on this show about how trickle downers rigged the game in the mid 20th century and it was literally a vast right wing conspiracy to institute trickle down economics in our politics, in our system. But I don't think we've really explored the subject of this book. It's called the Radical How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America. It's written by John Fabian Witt and it is the story of the Garland Fund, which I don't think I even knew about. Were you familiar with the Garland Fund?
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I've, I've seen the name mentioned in other things, but I haven't looked into it. It's certainly not like some of the other well known funders.
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So in 1922, Charles Garland, he received an inheritance of a million dollars and he tut tutted it, he refused it and he instead invested it into ideas like working class power and free speech and equality. And basically over the next two decades he turned that million dollars into what would eventually become known as the New Deal, you know, and sort of reshape American history for the, for the next four decades or so, really empowering the middle class and making America more inclusive. Not perfect, but more inclusive. And it's an idea that I just have not heard. And you know, at times like these I'm really desperate for sort of a blueprint of what to do next. And I think as we're going, if.
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B
Only we knew a really rich person who could invest in.
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A
For the low, low cost of a million dollars, you could have a whole new deal. It's amazing. So anyway, this.
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Well, I am definitely, I'm definitely putting that on my list. I hope it's an audiobook. Is it? Is there an audio? Oh great. This sounds like future pitchforks guess to me here, Paul. We'll have to look into it. We couldn't end this episode, Paul, without me mentioning a few other books. As I mentioned, there is one book that I read with my actual physical eyes this year, Humble Brag.
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So I read Ricardo's How Economists Forgot the Real World and Led Us Astray By Nat Dyer. We had him on the pod. I recommend the episode. I recommend the book. It hit a sweet spot for me because it's really a book about economic history. We talked to him during our trade series because David ricardo was the 19th century economist who came up with the theory of comparative advantage, which is essentially the main argument behind free trade. And the globalist free trade was used to justify the free trade of the up until really Trump came along and just started willy nilly doing tariffs because is Canada insults him or something. But it's much more important than that because I always had this intuition that this was the beginning of the end of economics, that a lot of what's wrong in economics is basically economists trying to reproduce what Ricardo did, which was to synthesize this idea out of some sort of model where the math actually works on paper. And comparative advantage, you've probably learned it in college or in high school, this idea that if Portugal and England, this is his classic example of Portugal and England both make wine and textiles and Portugal is better at wine than it is at textiles, and England is better at textiles than it is at wine. It's in both their interests to trade wine for textiles, even if Portugal is better at both than England is. And that's this counterintuitive idea that turns out to be true on paper, it's inarguable, it's beautiful, it's elegant. As long as your example is just two countries and two products and you have a whole bunch of other unrealistic assumptions. And all of economics, since that has been this, oh, I want to be like David Ricardo and come up with, with this simple theory that works on paper and you can do the math and it's irrefutable. And that's the economics we have today this economics that. Actually I think it was Milton Friedman who said something to the effect that the more unrealistic the assumptions, the better it is. There's an argument behind that which probably works on paper. That's why our economics is so unreal. And what's fascinating about this book.
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And I'm really inspired by it, is that it actually goes through the history. It tells you a lot about Ricardo and where he came up with this example. And in fact it was based on like a treaty from 100 years, 150 years before between England and Portugal that actually did this. England would import the wine and Portugal was forced to import English textiles. And it had these horrible real world consequences that involved the international slave trade and centuries of impoverishment for Portugal as England developed into an industrial power and Portugal remained this agriculture and resource based economy, which you wouldn't.
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You wouldn't.
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You thought it was just an idea that popped into his head. But no, he was actually modeling it on a very bad example from the real world and just simplifying it down to a beautiful, elegant theory. And then there are some books I reread this year, Paul, which are not new books.
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Okay, honorable mentions, Honorable mentions.
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B
Little, little books. Let me, I'm going to pander to our plutocratic overlord and mentioned that I reread Gardens of Democracy by Nick Hanauer and Eric Liu. And you know, a lot of it still holds up and a lot of the core ideas we work with, we've refined it a bit. But, you know, the core insights were there way back, what, in 2012, when they wrote that book. And it's a little book and it's got illustrations, it's an easy read. I highly recommend it. I reread the Communist Manifesto.
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A
Again.
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Well, so I had, I reread it like five years ago and was surprised at how well it held up. Look, I'm not talking about in terms of the economics of Marx and Engels. That's in capital. This is a critique of capitalism. But it's fascinating to see how much of what is happening now they predict it.
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There's some clear insight into the future of capitalism. I'm not saying you should become a Marxist. I just say it's an interesting thing to read as a historical document. I also reread, or rather re listened to, what I think is the most influential economics book I ever read, and it is by a guest of our podcast, Cesar Hidalgo's why Information Grows. It is a little book. It is not an easy book. It is a difficult book, but endlessly fascinating. And Hidalgo is a physicist and complexity theorists, not an economist by training. But really, I think it's one of the most important economic books I've ever read and it explains a lot about why the world is the way it is and how to make it better.
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A
That's great. That's a positive note, Goldie. And so for my honorable mentions, which are things that maybe don't necessarily fit strictly within the economic standards of this list, but are things that I think might be good gifts for people or something to buy for your winter break if you're lucky enough to have one. Coming up Short, which is Robert Reich, former head of the Department of Labor under Bill Clinton, very influential economics professor. His memoir, coming up Short, which is about his journeys through politics and economics. I think that's something that any Pitchfork Economics listener would find interesting. And also Liz Pelly's Mood Machine, which is a corporate biography of Spotify, and it's about how Spotify became the biggest worldwide streaming service and it's basically by stepping on artists. Hi, if you're listening, listening to this on Spotify, we still love you. But it's a really interesting book that is not, maybe not strictly about economics, but it's a really great example, test case of how economics works in the real world to sort of take from the people who, you know, actually do the labor and turn it into profits for the CEOs. So that is a massive list. And maybe this is why we do a summer one, to sort of let off some of the excess steam in the old brain pan.
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B
Well, maybe we'll, we can do this again next summer then. Paul so maybe I'll actually read some books this year.
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A
You know, audiobooks totally count. I'm saying it now. Audiobooks count. You might not remember them the same way as a print book, but I think that audiobooks are totally count as reading books. And I think that it's regressive to say otherwise.
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B
Yeah, and my dog agrees with you because she much rather be out walking with me while I'm listening to a book than just to sit there at my feet while I'm on the couch.
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A
Happy Holidays, Rita.
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B
And of course we will provide links.
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A
In the show notes to all of these books. If you can't pick them up at your local independent bookstore, we have links to bookshop.org, which is a great service that also shares profits with independent bookstores. If you can't make it out to one in your community.
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C
Pitchfork Economics is produced by Civic Ventures. If you like the show, make sure to follow, rate and review us. Wherever you get your podcasts, find us on other platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and threads. Pitchfork Economics Nick's on Twitter and Facebook as well. Ickhanhauer for more content from us, you can subscribe to our weekly newsletter, the Pitch over on Substack Deck. And for links to everything we just mentioned, plus transcripts and more, visit our website, pitchforkeonomics. Com. As always from our team at Civic Ventures, thanks for listening. See you next week.