The Story That Built Today’s Economy (with George Monbiot and Binyamin Appelbaum)

Summary

Podcast Summary: Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer

Episode: The Story That Built Today’s Economy (with George Monbiot and Binyamin Appelbaum)
Release Date: January 6, 2026
Host: Civic Ventures (Nick Hanauer with co-host)
Guests: George Monbiot, Binyamin Appelbaum

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Overview

This episode explores the origins, intentions, and impacts of neoliberalism on modern economies. With incisive commentary from journalist George Monbiot and New York Times editorialist Binyamin Appelbaum, the conversation dissects the “story” we've lived inside—how neoliberal ideas were consciously crafted and spread, how economists shaped (and justified) public policy over recent decades, and why telling a new economic story is essential to building a fairer society.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. What is Neoliberalism? Its History and Narrative Power

(08:06 – 18:17, Monbiot segment)

• Intentional Ideology, Not Natural Law:
  Monbiot traces neoliberalism to the mid-20th century, starting with thinkers like Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. From the outset, it was a deliberate ideology meant to counteract socialism (11:16 – C).
• Core Beliefs:
  “Competition is the defining feature of human life... we are fundamentally selfish and greedy... society should really be governed by buying and selling.” (08:06 – C).
• Freedom for Whom?
  The neoliberals stressed “freedom” – but “they were very careful not to specify freedom for whom.” (12:00 – C). For example, the freedom of bosses to avoid labor regulation reduces workers' freedoms.
• Strategic Dissemination:
  Neoliberalism spread through networks like the Mont Pelerin Society (1947), thinktanks, and academics—all backed by wealthy benefactors (13:50 – C).
• Narrative as Power:
  Neoliberalism was refined over decades into an apparently “natural” way of seeing society, erasing the sense of it being ideology (15:40 – C).

2. The Role of Story and Narrative in Economic Life

(18:17 – 26:39, Monbiot segment)

• Humans Are Storytelling Animals:
  Monbiot: “…we use shortcuts. And those shortcuts are what we call stories. We tell ourselves stories…to try to work out what's happening.” (18:21 – C).
• Restoration Story Structure:
  All successful political transformations rely on the same plot: disorder is introduced by a villain, the hero overcomes it, harmony is restored. Neoliberalism’s plot: the villain is the state, the hero is the entrepreneur, the solution is the free market (21:20 – C).
• Why Neoliberalism Succeeded:
  When the Keynesian social-democratic model faltered in the seventies, neoliberals had a compelling, easily disseminated story ready; others did not (23:35 – C).
• Need for a New Story:
  The financial crisis (2008) exposed neoliberalism’s failures, but no new grand narrative has yet replaced it (24:10 – C).

3. Human Nature: Selfishness vs. Cooperation

(16:32, also at 26:39; Monbiot)

• Monbiot disputes the Hobbesian/Neoliberal idea that selfishness dominates human nature. Recent science shows our dominant traits are “community feeling, empathy, altruism, kindness.” (16:32 – C).
• “We are a society of altruists governed by psychopaths” (17:45 – C, Monbiot).

4. Economists' Hour – The Ascendance of Economics in Policy

(32:34 – 36:49, Appelbaum segment)

• Policymaking Revolution:
  Binyamin Appelbaum lays out how, starting in the late 1960s–70s, economists convinced governments to withdraw from active management of the economy in favor of “letting market forces work” (32:34 – E).
• Examples of Shifts:
  Abandoning the draft for a paid Army; deregulation of airlines and trucking; the end of currency controls; steep tax cuts for the wealthy; diminished antitrust enforcement (34:34 – E).
• "Rising Tide" Argument:
  Economists asserted that maximizing growth would naturally benefit everyone, disregarding inequality (36:58 – E).

5. Neoliberal Myths and Their Debunking

(38:00 – 40:43, Appelbaum segment; also 51:11 – E)

• Empirical Evidence Lack:
  Many neoliberal ideas, like “a rising tide lifts all boats,” were based on scant evidence and grand extrapolations from thin data (39:02 – E).
• Economics as Science—Or Not?
  “Economics was a much more theoretical enterprise in the mid-century...nothing like the data that economists have to work with today.” (39:02 – E)
• Self-Fulfilling Policies:
  Economists argued their views were apolitical, but in practice, research often aligned with their political preferences (40:59 – E).

6. Consequences: Inequality and Reduced Public Policy Scope

(36:49 – 38:00, Appelbaum; 57:06 – episode wrap-up)

• Policies justified by neoliberal logic led to exploding inequality and societal divisions.
• “The fundamental tenet of neoliberalism, that inequality is fine and you should just shut up about it, turns out to have been deeply, deeply wrong.” (57:33 – A, Hanauer)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Monbiot on Neoliberalism’s Disguised Power:
  “The cleverest trick the devil ever plays is pretending he doesn't exist. And this is what neoliberalism has done to great effect over many years…” (08:06 – C)
• On Freedom:
  “They started talking about freedom, but they were very careful not to specify freedom for whom.” (12:00 – C)
• On Human Nature:
  “We are a society of altruists governed by psychopaths.” (17:45 – C)
• On Economics as Narrative:
  “Economics is a narrative which affects much more than just economic policy, and it shapes society itself.” (59:32 – B)
• On Markets and Government:
  “Governments create markets. Markets don't exist without government... We've got to get that premise out of our dialogue.” (51:11 – E)
• Appelbaum on Policy Impact:
  “One of the main arguments I make in my book is that economists really came in and said to the government: you shouldn't worry about inequality. ... And the result was that inequality absolutely exploded.” (36:58 – E)
• Appelbaum, why he writes:
  “I just think that economics plays a really important role in our lives. Economic policy really shapes our lives, and people don't understand it… I just think of my job as being to try and illuminate that for people.” (55:34 – E)

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Timestamps for Significant Segments

• Defining Neoliberalism (08:06 – 11:16)
• Narrative Power – Restoration Story (18:21 – 22:10)
• Human Nature is Not All Selfishness (16:32 – 17:45)
• How Neoliberalism Spread (13:50 – 15:58)
• Economists’ Takeover of Policy (32:34 – 36:49)
• Rising Inequality, and Policy Choices (36:49 – 38:00)
• Evidence, or Not, for Neoliberal Claims (39:02 – 40:59)
• Economists’ Blind Spots and Power (40:59 – 43:13)
• How Markets Are Made and Framed (51:11 – 52:05)
• What Should Be Done (52:08 – 52:38)
• Episode Conclusions: Why Story Matters (59:32 – 60:12)

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Conclusions and Takeaways

• Neoliberalism wasn’t an accident—it was crafted as an ideology and spread by powerful interests through a compelling, simple narrative.
• This paradigm shift to “let the market decide” not only rewrote economic policy but shaped beliefs about human nature, power, and fairness.
• The myth that the economy runs on natural laws like physics must be challenged—economies are social constructs, and the rules can be rewritten.
• Telling a better story—one that centers cooperation and justice over greed and competition—is crucial for returning democracy and fairness to economic life.

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Tone and Language

The conversation is sharp, irreverent, and passionate, with guests and hosts challenging conventional wisdom, puncturing myths, and advocating for bold new narratives. The hosts use humor and candor (“we are a society of altruists governed by psychopaths”), and never shy away from calling out the real-world stakes of economic ideas.

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Recommended Listening Order

1. George Monbiot – for the philosophical and historical/theoretical grounding in narrative and ideology.
2. Binyamin Appelbaum – for the political and practical consequences, and the insider’s look at how economic “common sense” is shaped.

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For more on the topics and to join the effort to “tell a better story about who gets what and why,” find Pitchfork Economics at pitchforkeconomics.com.

Transcript

[A]

The rising inequality and growing political instability that we see today are the direct result of decades of bad economic theory.

[B]

The last five decades of trickle down economics haven't worked. But what's the alternative?

[A]

Middle out economics is the answer because.

[B]

The middle class is the source of growth, not its consequence.

[A]

That's right.

[B]

This is Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer, a podcast about how to build the.

[C]

Economy from the middle out.

[B]

Welcome to the show.

[D]

Hey Pitchfork listeners, I'm Freddie, producer at Pitchfork Economics. If you opened your podcast app expecting a new episode today, don't worry, you didn't miss one. As we kick off a new year, I wanted to take a moment to talk directly to the people who make this show possible. You Pitchfork Economics exists for a simple reason. For decades we've been told the story about the economy that if we just cut taxes for the wealthy, deregulate markets and get out of the way, prosperity will magically trickle down. And time and again, that story has failed working people. This podcast is our attempt to tell a more honest story about how the economy actually works and how it could work better. One that centers workers, families and communities instead of abstract models and corporate talking points. And and quick side note, the reason we can do that without ad breaks, sponsored segments, or someone trying to sell you a mattress halfway through a conversation about inequality is because of the incredible following this show has developed. Pitchfork Economics is proudly ad free, and that's very much by design. If that resonates with you, or if this show has helped you make sense of the economy, given you better language to push back on shitty ideas, or simply made you feel a little less alone in your frustration, I have a small ask Please take a minute to rate and review Pitchfork Economics wherever you get your podcasts, especially you, Apple and Spotify listeners who make up 60% of our audience. It may not feel like much, but those reviews are one of the biggest ways new listeners discover the show. And if you've already left a review or you'd rather support the show in another way, consider sharing your favorite episode quote or takeaway on the social media platform of your choice. Seeing what resonates with you helps shape where the show goes next and helps deliver new ideas to more listeners. Pitchfork Economics isn't just a podcast, it's part of a broader effort to challenge a failed economic paradigm and imagine something better. Thanks for listening and for helping us tell a better story about who gets what and why in our economy. This week we're revisiting an episode from 2019 called How Neoliberalism Happened A thoughtful conversation that explains where the economic story we've all been living inside actually came from and why it didn't have to be this way.

[B]

So, Nick, in your recent TED talk, you used the word neoliberalism a lot. And this was a point of contention. We kept removing that word from.

[A]

We argued about it a lot.

[B]

And you kept putting that word back in. Why was it so important to you?

[A]

Well, we have to find a way to describe what we're pushing off against if you can't fight something unless you can name it. And neoliberalism, as imperfect a word as it is, is the best thing we've been able to come up with to describe where economic policy and political economy went wrong over the last 40 or 50 years. And so there's definitely, among insiders, a big argument over whether we should be using the word neoliberal or market fundamentalist or neoclassical. It's, you know, we go back and forth, but, you know, we landed on neoliberalism. And I think, you know, for a lot of reasons, it makes good sense.

[B]

So really, throughout this podcast, this has been the elephant in the room. That neoliberal elephant has been there lurking behind us the whole time.

[E]

Right.

[A]

We've used the word and referred to this meaning system a million times and.

[B]

We'Ve gotten some criticism for it because for sure, some people say it's meaningless, usually the neoliberal liberals. It's often tossed as an epithet against Democrats by more left leaning Democrats. It's a way to kind of do that, try to describe. But it actually has meaning. And it's important because. And this gets to a core point of our theory of change, which is we believe that the most effective narrative is a counter narrative. And what we've been building in this office and what we've been trying to explain throughout the series of this podcast is a new narrative, a counter narrative, which we are constructing consciously and intentionally in opposition to this neoliberal narrative, which.

[A]

Was consciously and intentionally created. And in this episode, we're gonna talk to two really interesting people, George Monbiot, about what neoliberalism is and where it came from. Where it came from. And also Binya Appelbaum, whose new book, the Economist's Hour, details a lot of the intentionality of it and the history of that, but also the impacts, the real world impacts on tax policy, on wage policy, on a variety of other things. And the pair of those interviews, I think, paint a really good picture of the history of neoliberalism and what it is and where it Came from.

[B]

Right? And how it helped create the world we have today.

[A]

Exactly. I'm super excited today to talk to my new friend, George Monbiot, who I got to meet in Europe last summer at the TED conference, where he gave a speech on neoliberalism. I've always been an admirer of his because his writing is so sharp and interesting, but when you get to know the guy, you're really blown away. I mean, he's just a remarkable character with an amazing history and has done some crazy shit in his life. You know, he snuck into Iri and Jai as a young man to report on the atrocities there and almost got killed. He's been beaten up, thrown in jail. I mean, he is a warrior and has written a ton of really interesting books about political economy issues, but about environment and so on and so forth. In his newest book, out of the A New Politics for an Age of Crisis, is really pointed very sharply at this issue of neoliberalism. But when he's not writing books, of course, he's a very important reporter and commentator for the Guardian in merry old England.

[C]

I'm George Monbiot. I'm a journalist and campaigner, professional troublemaker, or so I'm told. I write about a wide range of subjects, particularly environmental, political, economic subjects. Really, all the stuff which I find fascinating, and I think it's important I write a few books. The latest one is called out of the Wreckage, which, as the name suggests, tries to navigate a way out of the multiple messes and chaos that we currently find ourselves in.

[B]

So, you know, I actually came across your writing, helping Nick with a book he's working on, and we had a chapter on narrative and a piece of yours. You had the best definition of neoliberalism that we'd come across. This idea of reducing everything to competition. If you could go in, I guess, starting point, tell us from your perspective what neoliberalism is, and then we want to get into where it came from.

[C]

It's an extraordinary thing. The cleverest trick the devil ever plays is pretending he doesn't exist. And this is what neoliberalism, liberalism has done to great effect over many years. When the doctrine was first hatched, particularly in the 1930s and 40s and 50s, people were quite happy to call themselves neoliberals, but gradually that name disappeared, and they almost pretend that there is no such thing. And yet it has become the dominant doctrine that governs our lives. And we call it other things. We call it Reaganomics or we call it Thatcherism, depending which country we live in, we just think that sort of spontaneously emerged, but it's not. It's a very deliberate and well crafted ideology that's been worked on by many people over a long period. Started with the work of people like Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises and basically the doctrine which says that competition is the defining feature of human life and that we are fundamentally selfish and greedy, that these are good things because our selfishness and greed can be harnessed to make us all richer, that society should really be governed by buying and selling and our interactions should more or less be reduced to commercial interactions. And by that means we can, it claims, make the best decisions. Because what buying and selling does is to create a hierarchy of human worth. We can determine who are the best and most, most worthy people. And there's a very easy way of determining that because they are the richest people and the people at the bottom of the heap, the poor, well, they are inherently undeserving. How do you know? Because they are poor. Because they have failed in the great human competition. And anything that tries to interfere with the discovery of that natural order through buying and selling, such as government intervention, regulation, taxation, trade unions, that must be stamped out to allow the whole of society to become a kind of market. That's the theory. That's how it's supposed to work. And apparently that is supposed to deliver us from bureaucracy, from red tape, from chaos, and create a kind of utopia in which the invisible hand of the market ensures that we live in the best of all possible worlds. The reality is that it doesn't quite work out like that.

[B]

And to be clear, this is not a narrative that emerged organically. It was intentionally designed as a counter narrative to what they feared was this scourge of socialism, either the kind in Stalinist Russia or the democratic socialism that we were seeing in Europe.

[C]

Yes, that's correct. I mean, when Friedrich Hayek wrote his book the Bullet Road to serfdom in 1944, he basically considered any attempt to intervene in markets or to create welfare systems, Social Security systems, was the slippery slope towards totalitarianism. And that even such apparently mild interventions as the US New Deal or the beginnings of a social democratic welfare state in the UK would inevitably lead to Stalinism or Nazism or other forms of totalitarianism. And this sort of slightly extreme and crazy belief, which was really very marginal to begin with, attracted a lot of extremely rich people because they thought, well, you know, a world in which there's hardly any tax, hardly any regulation, no trade unions, that's a great world for millionaires, that's a great world for corporations, because we can be free. So they started talking about freedom, but they were very careful not to specify freedom for whom. Now, there are many kinds of freedom which we can exercise without intruding on anyone else's freedom. Freedom of speech being a classic example. If I speak freely, it doesn't stop you from speaking freely. Well, at least if I ever shut up, it doesn't. But there are other freedoms which intrude on other people's freedoms. So, for instance, if I say I want to be free from labor regulations, I don't want my workers to impose on me with their demands for holidays, for sick pay, for weekends, for contracts, for pensions, then that freedom which I've acquired is actually a massive cost and an imposition upon my workers, who then find themselves without economic freedom, without security, without a lot of the good things in life. Their freedoms have been restricted. If I am free to pollute the river or to pollute the atmosphere, other people are not free from the impacts of that pollution. In fact, that pollution can be a terrible imposition on the lives of other people. If you pour your toxins into the groundwater, we are not free from poisoned water. So your freedom detracts from our freedom. And it's a zero sum game in cases like that. But they were very careful not to say whose freedoms they were talking about. They were just saying freedom, as if it makes us all free. And so, with the support of some of the world's richest people, Hayek and von Mises and many others started to get together to form what has been described as a sort of neoliberal international. The Mont Pelerin Society in 1947 was where it began, but it quickly proliferated into a massive network of think tanks, of academic departments, of journalists, all sponsored by these immensely rich people to promote these rather wacky ideas and to bring them slowly towards the mainstream. And not only were they promoting them, they were refining them and finding new ways to tell the story so that it became more acceptable to people. It sounded more like common sense and less like something completely crazy. And gradually this completely wacky idea becomes more and more accepted within mainstream media, within mainstream society, until people say, oh, well, yes, maybe that's sensible. And then when Keynesian social democracy starts to run into big Trouble in the 1970s, the neoliberals were able to come forward with this massive network they'd created, this sort of international network and say, we've got the answer. We've got this whole news story, which you can adopt. And people like Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan immediately pounced on this and said, yes, this is the answer. And by then, it wasn't called neoliberalism. It wasn't really called anything.

[E]

It was just.

[C]

It was as if it were a description of a natural process like Darwinian evolution. This is just how society works, and that explains its great power. They make it sound as if it's not a doctrine at all, as if it's not an ideology at all, as if it's a description of society.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Itikon 101. That's what they tell us here.

[A]

Our friend Yuval Harari has, I think, quite rightly pointed out that the iron law of history is that these meaning systems, these narratives, what he calls these intersubjective realities, are always anchored by one of two claims. Either God says or it's a law of nature.

[E]

Yes.

[A]

And neoliberalism and neoclassical economics adopt the latter. They basically assert that these are immutable natural laws, that this is just the way it is.

[C]

And it's highly misleading. I mean, they take a basically Hobbesian view of humanity, which is that we are fundamentally selfish and greedy. But what we've had in recent years, there's been a vast amount of science investigating just those questions. You know, what are our fundamental values? What are our dominant values? And it's been in neuroscience, in social psychology, in anthropology, in evolutionary biology, and remarkably, all those different disciplines have come to very similar conclusions that while the majority of people do have some selfishness and greed in us, those are not, for most of us, our dominant values, our more dominant values, our community feeling, our empathy, altruism, kindness towards others, kindness towards our family, kindness towards our neighbors, kindness towards people in general. And actually, we think very poorly of people whose values are primarily selfishness and greed. But there are outliers. There are some people whose values are dominated by selfishness and greed. And unfortunately, a lot of them are in charge.

[A]

Yeah. Yes.

[C]

Broadly speaking, we are a society of altruists governed by psych.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Sociopaths make up about 3% of the general population. About what percent of corporate boardrooms get.

[A]

Was like 25%, wasn't it? It's just so depressing. George, let's turn to narrative. You have this amazing new TED Talk out where I think you do this wonderful job of characterizing the existing narrative and suggest a new one. And maybe for our listeners. Can you do that?

[B]

Well, I guess start with the importance of narrat.

[E]

Yeah.

[C]

So, yeah, the first thing to say is that we are fundamentally creatures of narrative. You know, when we try to interpret the world, we don't do so as scientists. You know, we like to think of ourselves as having these rational, empirical minds, and we analyze the data and use it to try to work out what's happening. But you can't actually live like that, you know, I'm speaking as someone who tries to be an empiricist. I've got a science degree. I love science. I love facts and figures. But, you know, I recognize that I don't live and nor does anyone else, because if we tried to do so, the complexity of the world would simply overwhelm us. So instead, we use shortcuts. And those shortcuts are what we call stories. We tell ourselves stories, and we listen out for other people telling stories which tell us where we are, how we got here, where we might be going, which give us a sort of rough approximation of what's going on in the world. Because otherwise, it's just like these massive data streams coming at us every moment of the day, day. And our brains cannot process the amount that's coming at us. We have a sort of predisposition to listen for stories. But not just any story. There are a number of basic plots that appeal to our minds with particular force. And remarkably, there is one that has worked again and again in politics and religion to the extent that I think you can quite comfortably say that a political or religious transformation is unlikely to happen unless it can tell a new and gripping story with this narrative structure, with this basic plot line. And the plot line is what I call the Restoration story. And it goes like this disorder afflicts the land, caused by powerful and nefarious forces working against the interests of humanity. But the hero or heroes confronts those powerful and nefarious forces against the odds, overthrows them, and restores harmony to the land. That's the basic structure of the Restoration story. And we all know these stories. If you read the Bible, if you've read Harry Potter, if you've read the Lord of the Rings, Narnia, again and again, that plot line comes up. It's a very powerful and very common plotline. But it's also the plotline of just about every successful political or religious transformation there has been across millennia. And it's a plotline which was used extremely effectively by the neoliberals. And that was a big key, I believe, to their success in dominating so much of the world's thought and action. The story the neoliberals told, it went like this disorder afflicts the land caused by the powerful and nefarious forces of the overwhelming state, which by intruding into our lives and taxing and regulating, crushes individualism and opportunity and therefore diminishing the scope of our lives. But the hero of the story, the freedom seeking entrepreneur, confronts those powerful and nefarious forces. And against the odds, by creating markets where none existed before rolls back, the state overthrows those forces and restores harmony to the land in the form of the universal free market. We're creating opportunity and freedom where there was none before. That's the story, and it's very effectively told in many different forms. In long form, in short form, in books, in pamphlets, in videos, in political speeches, again and again and again, it's that narrative which comes up. And so when people were listening for a new story after the Keynesian narrative began falling apart, after the Trente Glorieurs, as the French call it, from 1945 to 1975, when everything seemed to be going right, there was high rates of economic growth and everyone had a job and there was lots of investment in public services and this sense of no one being left behind. And then after 30 years of that, it all started to fall apart a bit. Things went badly wrong. Inflation and capital leakage and many other issues afflicting that Keynesian model. People started listening out for another story. And the neoliberals had spent that 30 years working up their story until it was ready to be told very simply, very powerfully. They knew exactly what they were doing and they knew. They almost created a sort of algorithm for political transformation because they had those vast resources, they had so many people working on it who were paid to work on it through the think tank, through the academic departments within the neoliberal newspapers. They refined it and refined it until they knew that they were going to succeed. You know, then neoliberalism hit the buffers big time in 2008, where it basically just collapsed intellectually. It was exposed as intellectually bankrupt, as social bankrupt, environmentally bankrupt, and above all, plain bankrupt. And you would have thought, right, this is the moment at which the new narrative takes over. So we all said, right, we need something completely new. And it is, oh, oh dear, you know, we don't have a new story. And so we face this extraordinary situation where, you know, it's now 11 years since the collapse of Lehman Brothers and we're still stuck with that failed catastrophic ideology, and we're stuck with it because we haven't replaced it with a new story.

[A]

Yeah. And the best alternatives are either a kinder and gentler form of neoliberalism.

[B]

Or.

[A]

Trying to go back to Marxism or. Right, exactly.

[C]

And one of the rules of politics is unless you're a fascist, you can't go back. For some reason, the fascists can keep reinventing fascism, I don't want. But you can't excite and galvanize people unless you've got a news story.

[B]

Well, we got half the story. They've identified the villains. I mean, I think that's why Occupy Wall street captured the imagination. It's where Bernie Sanders has gotten a lot of his support to some extent, even. Even Trump when he ran. You're identifying the villains. They just don't have the second part of the story, which is how we're going.

[E]

Half the story.

[C]

You are right. But of course, you know, it is meant to be a restoration story. It is meant to put things right. It is meant to bring restore harmony to the land, but in a new way, in a way which hasn't been done before. And in fact, I think we got more than half. We got other little fragments of that story. There's been so much fascinating new work on economics, mostly critique, but also some good new ideas. Really interesting stuff on social transformation, on rebuilding community, Some really great deep thinking about how we frame the way we live, metaphors we live by. Amazing work above all, I think, by Jeremy Lent in his book the Patterning Instinct. So we got sort of fragments of the story. We're sort of part of the way there.

[A]

Yeah. I mean, I think the heart of the new story, and George, I think you rightly identify this, is in a reimagination around the fundamental nature of human behavior. But the new story has to start with an acknowledgement that the defining feature of human beings and human society is cooperation, not selfishness.

[C]

That's right.

[A]

Well, George, thank you so much.

[B]

We have our final question. We always have to ask this. Okay. We ask this of all our guests. Why do you do what you do?

[C]

That's a very good question. I couldn't live any other way. A few years ago, I wrote down what I felt were the activities that made life meaningful and purposive. And they were to love and be loved. That, of course, is fundamental to a good life. They were to learn and to teach, to create and to try to do good. And you can do all that for entirely selfish reasons. Now, I don't know which of my reasons are selfish and which might be altruistic, but all of those things make me feel like I've got a fulfilling life so it's a sort of selfish, hedonic reason for that. But it feels fulfilling because it happens to align with what I think is the sort of a map for creating a better world. If I were to stop doing what I do, I would be miserable because I would feel that my life had lost much of its meaning and much of its purpose and much of its delight. And actually doing all those things filled my life with meaning every day because I have to basically roll in the shit of humanity. I mean, that's my job. I write a column for the Guardian about all the terrible things that we're doing and what we might do about it. My life could be really miserable. You know, I have to confront a lot of things that other people can turn their faces away from. But actually, you know, my life is quite wonderful. It's fulfilling and rich and delightful because I'm engaged every day in these questions.

[A]

That's a fantastic answer. Well, we're going to give you an A for that answer.

[B]

Yeah. Thank you for being so engaged.

[A]

Yeah. Yeah. Well, George, it was wonderful to catch up with you. Thank you again. Take good care and we'll talk soon.

[C]

Thanks, Nick. Thanks, Goldie. Real pleasure to talk to both of you. Really brilliant.

[E]

Thank you.

[A]

Thank you.

[B]

Bye.

[A]

Bye.

[E]

Bye.

[A]

So, Goldie, what have we learned from our friend George Monbiot?

[B]

It was all a plot, Nick. It was all a plot. It was. It was really all a plot. I mean, it was a bunch of rich men and economists in a room together, basically devising a strategy and a narrative for changing the world in a way that served rich men and economists.

[A]

Yes, correct. That's true. It is so true. You know, in my more generous moments, I like to remind myself that this was happening at a time when there were legitimate outside threats to an open society.

[B]

Right. You have to understand this as being formulated in the years immediately following World War II, where we had this confrontation with totalitarianism in Germany, and we're in the midst of the Stalinist era, in the middle of a Cold War in Mao's China. Right.

[A]

Yeah. And so they were reacting to that, but they did end up sort of building a meaning system, an ideology that.

[B]

Benefited the few, and that was, well. And was funded by billionaires. And they didn't have billionaires, the equivalent of billionaires. Right. And conveniently served the interests of billionaires because a lot of what they were looking for practically on the ground in the United States, was to overturn the New Deal.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

Was to reduce taxes, reduce regulation, and reduce the social safety net, which was paid for by taxes.

[A]

Yes. On them.

[B]

Right.

[A]

And in our next conversation, we get to talk to this amazing author and journalist, Binya Applebaum, about his new book, the Economists Hour. And this is a really interesting book because it highlights not just neoliberalism.

[B]

He doesn't actually use the word in the book.

[A]

He does not. He does not. But what he shows, I think, really, really clearly and persuasively is the rising role of economists in public life.

[B]

Right.

[A]

That one of the really insidious things that neoliberalism represents is this idea that these are just the facts, that this is not a deliberately created ideology. This is science. This is a description of the way the world is, not an effort to remake it in a particular way. And if you can persuade people that it's just a description of reality, that is a very powerful way of getting people to comply with the circumstances that you create for them. And it'll be really interesting to tie Binya's thinking and work back to George's. Binyamin is also the lead writer on business and economics for the editorial board of the New York Times.

[E]

My name is Dania Applebaum. I'm a member of the New York Times editorial board and the lead writer on business and economic issues. And I'm the author of a new book called the Economist's Hour.

[B]

It's a pleasure to talk to an editorial board member. I'm not angry at. We're not as fortunate in Seattle. Folks are in New York.

[A]

So, Binya, why don't you start off by telling us a little bit about how you chose to write the book, the Economist's Hour. What was the ideas that came together to persuade you to do that?

[C]

Yeah.

[E]

So the book is the story of a revolution that begins in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, when economists begin to play a much larger role in shaping public policy and fundamentally reshaping public policy and as a consequence, really changing all of our lives. And I just got. I hadn't known too much about that story. I cover economic policy in the Here and Now, and I became interested in the history of how we came to be here. And I found it to be a fascinating story, and I wanted to share it with people.

[A]

Yeah, well, it is a fascinating and incredibly consequential story. And so, to the best of your abilities for our listeners, can you just sort of describe the arc of the argument in your book?

[E]

So basically, the idea is that beginning in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, economists begin to reshape public policy Specifically by arguing that the government's hands on approach to managing the economy is misguided and that it will be better for the economy and better for everyone if the government steps back and basically allows market forces to play a larger role. So an example of this which may be helpful, really the first place that public policy is transformed is that economists convince President Nixon that instead of drafting young men to fill out the ranks of the army, the federal government should instead pay young men. It should offer a wage that is sufficient to convince people to enter the armed forces and in that way decide who goes into battle. And that same idea then informs changes in regulation, changes in tax policy, changes in trade policy. Really across the board, the way that the government manages the economy shifts fundamentally.

[A]

Can you elaborate a little bit more on the dimensions of the changes in policy? What changed over that 40 years?

[E]

So it really is kind of incredible how much changes. So if you sort of go back to the mid-1960s and think about how the government agreement operated at that time, there was a group of bureaucrats in Washington who literally decided where airlines could fly, how much they could charge, what kinds of sandwiches could be served during the flight. There was a different board. If a truck carried undeveloped film across a state line, they needed a license from a board in Washington, if it carried that same roll of film after it was exposed. So back across that state line needed a totally different license from a board in Washington. The government tightly controlled the financial industry. The government regulated the exchange value of the dollar. So today exchange rates are set by currency traders in an open marketplace. Back then, they were governed by an international set of agreements called the Bretton woods system. Tax rates were much higher at that time. The government took more than half of the annual income of the wealthiest Americans who stayed to the government in the form of various taxes. And so sort of throughout American life, the government just played a much larger and more hands on role in managing the economic affairs of the country. And over this period, this 40 year period that I call the Economist's Hour, that all changes. The government fairly systematically pulls back from that role. So it allows the dollar to float. And for markets to determine the exchange value of the dollar, tax rates are sharply reduced. Economic regulation substantially comes to an end. We still have health and safety regulation, but this idea that the government is setting prices in the marketplace really goes out of favor. The government stops enforcing antitrust laws, and so it allows corporations to grow big and strong. It stops trying to raise the minimum wage, so it allows the marketplace to decide how much workers will be earning across all these areas. Basically, the same pattern takes hold, which is that the government is pulling back and saying, we're going to let market forces sort this stuff out. And Americans are to a greater extent, thrown on the mercy of the marketplace, and that determines how they fare.

[B]

And it's no coincidence that this is the same 40 years that we've seen this dramatic rise in inequality.

[E]

Yeah, indeed. So one of the main arguments I make in my book is that economists really came in and said to the government, you shouldn't worry about inequality. You shouldn't worry about it in the first place, because trying to prevent inequality is bad for economic growth. They argued that if you tried to level the playing field, if you tried to redistribute the rewards, the economy would grow more slowly as a consequence, and government should instead focus on making the economy grow as quickly as possible and everyone would benefit. And secondly, they argued that inequality wasn't that big a deal as long as you were eradicating poverty in absolute terms, as long as everyone's vote was rising, you shouldn't worry about how much more some people were making than others. And the government indeed stopped worrying about that. And the result was that inequality absolutely exploded. There were other factors driving the trend, but I think one really important factor was the indifference of public policy to the rise of inequality.

[A]

If I can just tease out a couple of, I think, important strands of your argument. It was not just that economists suggested that the government should recede and the market should replace it as sort of the institutional cornerstone of the economy and the society. The bigger part of the argument was, and if we do that, all citizens will be better off. Right. That was the basic argument. Obviously, it's easy to make that argument from the point of view of a business plutocrat, but that wasn't the argument. They weren't saying, make the rich richer for the rich's sake. They basically argued a rising tide lifts up. That's right. That if the rich got richer, everyone would benefit.

[E]

Yeah, that's right. They argued that the best way to do that. Right. Was just to focus on maximizing growth. And that would be best for everyone. Absolutely.

[B]

Was there ever any empirical evidence to support the rising tide argument?

[E]

So it's really interesting. Economics was a much more theoretical enterprise in the mid century. They had some data, but nothing like the data that economists have to work with today. So when the Great Depression happens in the United States, the Senate looks around and says, well, how big is the economy? And it turns out that no one knows at that point. In time, no one is measuring the size of the economy. And so the federal government actually commissions an economist, a guy named Simon Kuznets, to measure the American economy for the first time. And he comes back two years later and says, well, it used to be a lot bigger and here's how large it is now. And that's the beginning of what we call gdp, the formal measurement of the size of the economy. So data on the macro economy was very new. There wasn't that much of it. And there were people, including Kuznetsk himself, quite famously, who thought that they could see patterns in the data. And Kuznets specifically argued that what you saw is that as societies reached economic maturity, the level of inequality tended to decline. His basis for saying that was just that inequality was declining in America in the mid century. But he sort of drew a grand theory out of a very specific set of facts. And then as time moved on and it turned out that that wasn't actually any kind of natural law or rule or pattern, he was proved wrong. But yeah, these theories, to the extent that they had evidence at their foundations, it tended not to be a lot of evidence. And one of the things that's now fundamentally transforming economics is the availability of more data.

[B]

Right. So the difference is back then economics was theoretical and had very little evidence. Today it's theoretical and they ignore all the evidence. I guess my question for you about these economists is were they self aware of the power they had?

[E]

So the main character, probably the most important character in my book is Milton Friedman, who I think had a greater influence on American life than any other economist, certainly in the 20th century. He is the guy who sort of most powerfully and successfully argues for a lot of these turns toward free market policy. And Friedman was famous for insisting that his economic work was apolitical and indeed that you couldn't tell the politics of an economist by looking at their work. And it amuses me that his wife, who also was a trained economist, always insisted that this was nonsense and that she could absolutely predict the politics of an economist just by knowing what kind of work they did. And this is at best a blind spot of Friedman because obviously you really can predict the politics of an economist by looking at the work that they do. And I do think that Friedman, it's hard to know whether he understood that he was misleading people or whether he genuinely believed what he was saying. But there was this insistence among Friedman and among many of his allies that they had found the truth and that the truth happened to lead them in this direction. And it was consistent with their politics, and wasn't that wonderful? And it was nonsense. And so you had guys like. Friedman's best friend was a Chicago economist named George Stigler who spent years insisting that regulation didn't work and then went out and did a series of studies in which he purported to prove that regulation didn't work. He looked at electric regulation and found that it didn't hold down prices. He looked at the SEC and found they weren't preventing fraud, and then sort of looked surprised and said, wow, isn't this amazing that I found evidence for my beliefs? Well, it turned out his math was wrong, for one thing, but for another, these papers were obviously in the service of his beliefs. And that's true of a lot of economic work.

[A]

Yeah. And anecdotally, a bunch of economists at Oxford, in an effort to memorialize Milton Friedman's work for a project, went back and looked at his math recently and discovered that he had fudged it.

[B]

This was on his monetary.

[A]

That's right, yeah. That some of his most impactful findings were based on statistical approaches that he had derided and disproved in other places, that he had essentially fudged the math to make the arguments work. It's absolutely fascinating, but I do think it's really important to underscore how profoundly effective and important this bit of intellectual jiu jitsu was, this way of persuading people that economics is a science like physics, and that a proposition like the principle of marginal utility is, you know, somehow this immutable description of the objective world, and you are absolutely paid what you're worth, and that's that. And when you peel back the layers of the onion, as we have on the podcast before, and discover that this is just a ruse to keep people docile, it is sort of shocking, but it has been monstrously effective as essentially an intellectual protection racket to make the rich richer over the last 40 years.

[E]

And it's important to understand why it's been so. A great example of this, I think, is in the antitrust space. The economists advanced this argument that the government should focus solely on the issue of whether a given corporate activity was causing prices to go up or down. And if you couldn't prove that consumer prices were rising, then you shouldn't get in the way. You should just assume that everything was okay. And so they threw out all their concerns with the political power of business, with the loss of small businesses, with the impact on workers who had fewer choices of employers, and they just said, this is all about Consumer crisis. And when they brought this reasoning into the court, judges found it tremendously appealing. And there's this amazing quote from Stephen Breyer, who at the time was a district court judge and later became a Supreme Court judge, where he said basically that what he liked about it was that it provided certainty, it provided a clear means of judging cases. And so you basically had the substitution of reality is uncertain and complex. And here was this alternative that gave clear answers, and that just proved irresistible.

[A]

Absolutely. And another thing, it's not just that it. It makes it simpler. It also makes it psychologically and emotionally easier to decide, because if it absolves.

[B]

The courts of making these very difficult decisions, you know, which.

[A]

You know, balancing competing interests. Right, right. But if there's just an objective fact, which is the less you do, the better off everyone will be, well, then it's quite clear and easy, and everybody can just go home and feel good about themselves. And that has been very, very corrosive.

[E]

Yeah, I absolutely agree.

[B]

Yeah. So you wrote a detailed economic history here. I'm wondering if you've considered an alternative history, what our current economy might look like had Milton Friedman and his theories not become ascendant. What would this world look like today if we continued more in the Keynesian realm?

[E]

So I think that that obviously is always a difficult question to answer, but I'd say a couple of things about it. The first is that I think it is important to understand that there were real problems with the prevailing approach to economic policy by the late 1960s and the early 1970s. The Keynesians, for example, had placed a lot of faith in their ability to control inflation by raising taxes when the economy overheated. And when President Johnson's economic advisors actually walked into the Oval Office and told him it was time to raise taxes in the late 1960s, they discovered that the politics of that system were going to not work as well as they had hoped.

[A]

Yeah, he was.

[E]

And similarly. What's that? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And similarly, airline deregulation brought some real benefits with it. I think people are flying a lot more often. It's cheaper. So I always tell the story. There was a woman who worked Jimmy Carter's commerce secretary was a woman named Juanita Kreps. And she was also professor of economics at Duke University. And she resigned from the administration in the late 1970s because she'd become really frustrated with their inability to confront the nation's economic problems. And she also resigned as a professor at Duke University because she said she no longer knew what to teach her students. So you know, there was, and she was a Keynesian and. And like other candidates, she'd reached a point of sort of, she was at a loss. There was this real frustration with the way things were. And so I don't think that should get lost. There's a nostalgia for that era that, you know, I don't think it can be as simple as just going back to the things we were doing back then. There were problems and they needed to be fixed. But with that said, I think that the rise of inequality has happened in large part simply because we weren't trying to prevent it. The absence from public policy of a discussion of the distribution of economic gains, of making sure that people have the opportunity to prosper in this country, that we're taking seriously these issues has had enormous consequences. And it's easy to imagine in alternate history in which those issues have remained at the forefront of public policy and we were in a different place today. And you don't even need to imagine. You can actually just look at other countries that are struggling with the same issues of globalization and mechanization that are confronting the US but still have done better on these metrics. And the one that I always find striking is France, because every American knows that our economy grows faster than France. And we find it very validating that that's true. It's the victory of our economic system. But if you exclude the top 1% of people in each country and just look at income growth for the 99%, income growth has been much faster in France for the 99%. They have less growth overall, but they're doing a much better job of distributing it.

[A]

I do believe that markets and capitalism is the greatest social technology ever invented for creating prosperity in human societies. But it comes in as many flavors as pie and dirt. Pie tastes terrible and cherry pie tastes great. And you can can have a market economy that is structured to reasonably distribute the value created within it. And that won't be bad for that market economy. It actually will be good for it. The real pernicious part of neoliberalism was persuading people that anything that moderated the accumulation of capital by the few or the concentration of power at the top harmed the system overall. And that turned out to be the opposite of true, that in fact, raising the minimum wage isn't bad for capitalism, it's good for it. Reasonable regulation of industries doesn't preclude competition. It increases it in constructive ways. That raising taxes on rich people doesn't kill economic growth, it actually creates economic growth by providing the capital Necessary to make the investments that make real economies actually thrive. I don't think we should be less committed to markets, but we should be unambiguously committed to constraining them in ways that benefit the broad majority of citizens and enable and provide the, you know, the enfranchisement that creates the social cohesion that democracy depends on.

[E]

The only bone I think with that is I just think like sometimes the language we use when we're talking about this set of very important ideas tends to suggest like government is intervening in markets and it's an outside force that's coming into the market to constrain. Governments create markets. Markets don't exist without government. They don't exist without human rules that got lost track of in the mid century. People started to talk about markets as if they were these organic entities and government was some foreign substance that was intruding on their operations for the worse. And we've got to get that premise out of our dialogue. It needs to be understood. It's so important that people understand that markets are created by people and governed by rules created by people. And those rules are really important. And what we need to be talking about is how to write better rules so that our markets produce the kind of results that you're talking about.

[B]

So we should be focusing. It's okay for us to focus on outcomes rather than outputs?

[E]

Absolutely, yeah.

[A]

So what should we do now?

[E]

I mean, I don't want to sound too simple, but I really do think on some very basic level, the answer the problem is that we were not attempting to treat inequality as a first order concern of public policy. And the solution, or a big part of the solution, is to start treating inequality, the reduction of inequality as a primary goal of public policy. It ought to be the case that in evaluating our economic policies, we are actively seeking policies that are going to reduce inequality.

[B]

I'm wondering what the reaction has been to the book. Have you gotten a lot of pushback?

[A]

Yeah, a lot of love letters from economists.

[E]

There definitely are economists who are upset about it for a couple of big reasons. One argument I've heard frequently, and that I don't really take all that seriously, is the sort of protest that economists weren't actually that influential and that, that I'm blaming the weathermen for the weather. Or if policymakers had only listened more carefully to their advice, things would have worked out better. Listen, if anybody doesn't believe me that economists were influential, they should read the book, which is 300 pages long and has 100 pages of footnotes and I think documents that pretty clearly. The place where I take the criticism more seriously is economics is a really diverse profession. Karl Marx was an economist. Milton Friedman was an economist. Any group that includes both of those people, you're going to struggle to define it ideologically. And it is true that there were economists who never subscribed to these views, who were criticizing and deposing them from the outset. There were always heterodox thinkers on the fringes of the mainstream. And it is true that many economists had legitimate beefs to various aspects of public policy over the last half century. So there certainly are economists whose critique is basically like, not all economists. That wasn't me. I didn't believe that. Okay. The mainstream of economics in the United States substantially did. That's the thrust of this book, and I stand by that part. And then the final critique I just mentioned quickly is there are economists who insist that they always did care about inequality. It's just that their approach to inequality was to just pursue maximum growth. Well, fine. That's fine. We've run a half century of that experiment. It didn't work. So we need to do something else.

[A]

This is why your book is so important. Why these issues are so important is that the country has been captured by the set of ideas that have massively constrained what it felt common sense to do. And as those ideas change, the consensus around policy and politics is going to change radically with it, I think for the better.

[E]

Yeah. You know, the New York Times editorial page, my employer editorialized in the mid-1980s that we should get rid of minimum wage laws because. And this is what it said, but economists agreed that it was bad, and that was indeed the consensus. And it's remarkable to watch that changing and to see people grappling with real evidence and real data and arriving at different conclusions.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So I guess our final question for you is, why do you do this work?

[E]

You know, I just think that economics plays a really important role in our lives. Economic policy really shapes our lives, and people don't understand it. They don't understand how it works. They don't understand how important it is. And I just think of my job as being to try and illuminate that for people, to try and help them understand how these decisions are made and by whom. Because that is what we need to be doing, is to shift some of this power from technocrats back into the political process, to empower voters to participate in these decisions, to understand these decisions. That's how we get better outcomes.

[B]

You make an argument, it seems, for Democratizing the economy a bit.

[E]

I would like to see that happen.

[B]

Will that save democracy?

[E]

I don't know. Those are big questions. But it can't hurt, I'll tell you that. I mean, the way I end my book is by saying, listen, we're straining the system. Our use of markets, our dependence on markets is straining our ability to operate as a democracy. I don't know how long it holds, but I'm confident that if we can do a better job, it will reduce the strain and increase our chances.

[A]

I agree with that. Well, Binya, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us.

[B]

And thanks for doing all the work to write that book.

[A]

Yeah, it's a fantastic book, and everyone should read it. Anyway, thanks a lot. It was great to meet you on the phone, and we'll talk soon.

[E]

Great, thank you.

[B]

I think one of the core takeaways from our conversation with Binya is the way economists over the past 40 years have told us, hey, don't worry about inequality. It's not a problem.

[A]

Exactly. You don't have to worry about inequality because the world is getting unequal. That's creating incentives for everybody to work harder. And, you know, it'll make the economy grow faster. And a rising tide will float all boats. Right.

[B]

A rising tide lifts all boats.

[A]

Lifts all boats.

[B]

Right.

[A]

You know, fundamental tenet of neoliberalism, that inequality is fine and it doesn't matter and you should just shut up about it turns out just to have been deeply, deeply wrong. And so this is not to say that we should all be equal. Shouldn't be equal, but we should all feel like, or the majority of us should feel like we have an economic arrangement where people are reasonably rewarded for their contributions. And it simply cannot be true that, you know, a person who trades bonds on Wall street should be worth a thousand times what a person who teaches algebra should die for that.

[B]

You should make a thousand times more than me.

[A]

Exactly.

[B]

That's just not fair.

[A]

It isn't fair, but we are learning to live with it around here.

[B]

The other takeaway from this book is kind of the pushback that Binya got, which is from economists kind of denying their power, saying, oh, it's like. It's like blaming the weatherman for the weather. And I got two responses to that. First of all, unlike economics, meteorology is actually a science. And second of all, predicting the weather doesn't change it.

[A]

It does not. It does not. And that I think this is a really, really important point, that the weather is an objective system based on physics. And the economy is a reflexive system based on beliefs, right? And so when you tell someone that raising wages kills jobs, you definitely affect their behavior and the outcomes of the system. And this is the fundamental difference and something that most professional economists that I have met struggle to either comprehend or admit. They simply don't want to admit that when they do economics, they are shaping the economy. Right. They want to believe that they are describing the economy. They're not describing the economy. They are shaping it.

[B]

Right. And that gets, you know Paul Samuelson's great quote about I don't care who writes the laws, as long as I get to write the economics textbooks. He understood it. He understood the role of economists in shaping norms and law. And this all gets back to our conversation with George about narrative. Because in the end, economics is a narrative which affects much more than just economic policy, and it shapes society itself. And that's why it's so important not just to understand the role of economists in all this, but also to tell a better, more compelling story.

[A]

Yep. And that's, that's what we're trying to do on the podcast.

[D]

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. And for links to everything we just mentioned, plus transcripts and more, visit our website, pitchforkeconomics. Com. As always, from our team at Civic Ventures, thanks for listening. See you next week.