What makes a company good—and who gets to decide? Economist Lenore Palladino joins Nick and Goldy to dismantle the myth of shareholder primacy and explain how our current system of corporate governance has warped innovation, deepened inequality, and undermined democracy. Drawing from her new book Good Company: Economic Policy after Shareholder Primacy, Palladino outlines a bold vision for how we can redesign the rules of the game—so corporations serve workers, communities, and the public good, not just wealthy shareholders.
Lenore Palladino is an assistant professor of economics and public policy at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, a senior fellow of the Roosevelt Institute, and a research associate at the Political Economy Research Institute.
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Nick Hanauer:
The rising inequality and growing political instability that we see today are the direct result of decades of bad economic theory.
Goldy:
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.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s right.
Speaker 4:
This is Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer, a podcast about how to build the economy from the middle out. Welcome to the show.
Nick Hanauer:
Goldy, when I think about points of leverage in terms of shifting the kind of economy we have to the kind of economy that we want and would benefit more people in more ways, I just don’t think that there’s anything more important than the definition of the social purpose of the corporation. I just don’t think that there’s any change we could make in the structure of the economy that would reverberate more than moving from this shareholder value primacy definition that we have today to something else, some kind of stakeholder version of it or something more evolved, because we live in a commercial society and, like it or not, corporations, companies, are the dominant topological feature of the economy, and how they think about what they should do and how they should do it is an extraordinarily important thing.
Goldy:
It gets to, I think, one of the core principles in the way we understand economics and understand the market, that the market competition is really important. We view it as an evolutionary system, and if you’re not competing, you’re not getting innovation. But it is competition between firms, between corporations largely. The economy is largely happening inside these firms, and so it is… What an evolutionary theory is called group selection or multilevel selection, it is competition between these highly-cooperative groups of people, because that is what is going on within the corporation. People are cooperating, a mix of voluntary and involuntary cooperation. It depends on the company you’re working for, and your job, and how much you like it, and how much you like the people that you’re working with.
But for a corporation to be successful, people have to cooperate because that’s where all the value is created. That’s where all the innovation comes from. That’s where all the productivity comes from. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have these corporations, just be a bunch of individuals fighting with each other in the market. It’s weird that economics loses sight of this, that it talks about this market of producers and consumers setting prices and all that, when really, most of the economy is not happening in the market. It’s happening before you come to market. It’s like viewing farming as selling vegetables in a farmer’s market, when in fact, most of your year is spent growing and harvesting vegetables.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s right, which is what makes it all the stranger and sillier, that that governing framework that we use for managing corporations is shareholder primacy. This idea that the only people who count are shareholders, not the community, not the employees, not the customers, nothing else. Again, I think of all the bad things that neoliberalism brought, probably nothing is worse than this idea of shareholder primacy, that the only purpose of the corporation is to enrich shareholders.
Goldy:
To maximize value for shareholders, this twisted idea of what the economy is for.
Nick Hanauer:
It’ll be really fun today to talk to our friend Lenore Palladino, who has a new book out called Good Company: Economic Policy after Shareholder Primacy, where she discusses how to redesign corporate governance to shift power away from shareholders and towards other stakeholders like workers or the public good, because I don’t think that there’s a more important, again, point of leverage available for policymakers.
Lenore Palladino:
I’m Lenore Palladino. I’m an Associate Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and I’m the author of Good Company: Economic Policy after Shareholder Primacy.
Nick Hanauer:
Let’s start with, if you don’t mind, defining shareholder primacy. Obviously, we have spoken about this on the podcast before, the social purpose of the corporation, but take a whack at it and let’s expand from there.
Lenore Palladino:
Yeah. Well, first, let me just say thanks for having me, and I use so many of your podcasts in my teaching, so let me just also plug that this is such a great teaching tool for people teaching economics and public policy.
Nick Hanauer:
Thank you.
Lenore Palladino:
I’m happy to be here. Shareholder primacy is this idea that the purpose of the corporation is to make as much money as possible for shareholders, and it really works two ways. It’s this idea that profits should flow as much as possible to shareholders and that shareholders should be in charge. It is the law of the state of Delaware, which is where, for plenty of odd reasons, the majority of large U.S. corporations are chartered. Corporate law in the United States is state law, not federal law, and it’s based on this idea that shareholders are the main group within a corporation that takes the risks. But I see it as something that really contributes to the problems we have in the U.S., of wealth inequality, of declining innovation, and so that’s why I got really interested in writing about both the idea of shareholder primacy, but more concretely, policies that we could put in place that would move us away from this framework and towards a better way of operating corporations.
Goldy:
I’m curious, when did it become the law in Delaware, and is it different in other states?
Lenore Palladino:
Yeah. It’s been the law in Delaware for quite a long time, and it is, with some variation, the way that corporate charter laws are written for for-profit business corporations in most states in the U.S. We do have, of course, also other options like public benefit corporations, nonprofits, et cetera, but this is the framework that governs most for-profit businesses that are incorporating across the United States for decades and decades. But in the late ’70s, ’80s, as you all have talked about so many times, we’ve had this major shift in our political economy in the United States, and we also had major shifts in terms of who were shareholders. We had the rise of large institutional shareholders in the form of pension funds, endowments, other major pools of financial assets, and we had legal changes that enabled these big pools of assets to start investing in or purchasing corporate equity, whereas before they had been limited to government bonds or other more safe financial assets.
We had a lot of changes in the ’80s that really gave shareholder primacy its power, and we also had a whole intellectual revolution that supported these transitions. People love to talk about Milton Friedman’s article in the New York Times about the purpose of the corporation is to maximize shareholder value, but we had lots and lots of other leading academics in the law, and economics movement really push this idea forward in a way that it just wasn’t dominant in the post-war era in the same way.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. There’s so many ways to go in this conversation, but I think let’s start with the idea that shareholders are the only ones who take risk, because that’s just obviously not true.
Lenore Palladino:
Yeah. It’s a fascinating issue when you really get into the academic literature, because what they’re basically saying is that a shareholder who holds a share, because in the legal process of bankruptcy, they’re the last one who’s going to get a claim, that they’re the only group that takes risks. But for most of us, especially today in the 21st century, those of us holding equity with publicly-traded companies, we hold through an index fund or some other major. We buy our equities in big baskets. We don’t know what companies were even holding. We face risk if the financial markets broadly go up and down, but our risk doesn’t really come from one particular company or another. In contrast, most workers, hopefully, have just one job, and so in my view, they’re the ones actually taking the most risk in terms of what happens with any given corporation. But the way that the academic law and economics works out who takes risks, workers are paid a fixed claim, and putting that in air quotes, and so they’re not the ones taking any risk at all in these models. It’s very weird setup.
Nick Hanauer:
Well, yeah, it’s just a setup designed to benefit owners of capital. But the other thing is that it seems intuitively true until you start to think about it, and I’m just… In my head, I’m drawing a contrast between real risk capital, which is sort of what people who start early stage companies do.
Goldy:
Like Nick.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, like me. When I write a check to a couple of people who are starting a company, I’m taking a lot of risk, most particularly, and this is the key thing, is that if things go poorly, I can’t get my money out. It’s gone. If you own shares in a public company, depending on how you manage yourself, you take almost no risk, because if something bad happens, you can just sell the stock the next day. You’re not going to lose all your money unless you’re an idiot.
Goldy:
Another big difference here, Nick, is that when you put money into Amazon when it was starting up, they used that money to start up Amazon, the money went to Amazon. If I buy a share of Amazon, they’re not getting that money.
Nick Hanauer:
No.
Lenore Palladino:
Exactly, exactly.
Goldy:
It means nothing to them. I’m not investing. I’m speculating that the price will go up. I’m gambling.
Lenore Palladino:
Right, and that’s where I think that so much of the cultural misunderstanding of the purpose of the stock market is really, really important in propping up shareholder primacy. I have another book that I’m working on right now called The Myth That Shareholders Are Always Investors. Our laws, the way we talk about shareholders, we call them investors, because as you said, Nick, there are certain cases where equity going into an early-stage company is necessary for that company to grow, to learn how to innovate, et cetera. But for our public markets today, we call shareholders investors, but most people don’t actually realize that, as you said, trading is happening on the secondary markets. That means when I buy stock, that money is never going to the company at all. It’s going to the person or financial institution that sold the stock. Our language problems, the way that you see the Larry Finks of the world talk about the importance of shareholding and index funds to American prosperity and innovation, we have these cultural myths that really support this legal framework that I think are also incredibly important to break down and understand.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. It is true that the capital markets are a good thing. It’s just not also true that everything should be subordinated to them. Right?
Lenore Palladino:
Absolutely.
Goldy:
Yeah, right. Lenore, I have this argument with people all the time, and they just can’t wrap their mind around it, where I say that I’m not investing. I’m not investing. For me, it’s not like Nick. I mean, it’s just my retirement accounts. If I buy into a fund or I buy into a stock, that’s not investing. It is speculating that things will go up.
Lenore Palladino:
Right, and buying for financial asset appreciation is something necessary these days for retirement security. It’s not a bad thing in and of itself, but the problem is that the SEC calls shareholders investors. Our laws are called the Investment Company Act, the Investment Advisors Act, and so we’ve just got this confusion that I think causes a lot of these issues to persist.
Nick Hanauer:
In your book, you talk about what makes a company good. What’s your definition?
Lenore Palladino:
A good company, I think, produces goods and services and reduces its negative impact on the world. It innovates through respecting its workforce and its customers, and it doesn’t fight regulation, doesn’t fight to have a sort of decent democratic political system. I also think that there are some activities that shouldn’t be done by large private corporations. I talk a little bit in the book about just sort of a caveat, that activities like education, healthcare, the basic needs we have as a society, I actually think those are better done through having either public options and large private entities or through the public sector itself. But I think good companies, essentially what I’m focusing on in the book, is private companies and their focus on innovation rather than simply financial extraction.
Goldy:
Again, people push back to me, “Well, companies aren’t supposed to be good. They’re supposed to just make money. It’s about making a profit, not about being good.” But in fact, corporations don’t have natural rights. They’re creations of law and we charter them for a reason, and that is to improve the public good. Isn’t it?
Lenore Palladino:
Exactly. Yeah. We are in a democratic society, which I hope we remain one. In a democratic society, we give a grant of a charter to a corporation that gives that entity the legal right to exist forever, perpetual existence, and gives the shareholders and other humans who are interacting with it some protection from if it goes bankrupt or has other financial challenges, and so for companies to have these benefits, we should also have the public power, public right, to regulate them. There’s a lot of, I think, talk that’s maybe died down recently, but over the last six or seven years, about the changing purpose of the corporation towards paying attention to multiple groups of stakeholders. The Business Roundtable, one of the leading corporate trade organizations in the U.S., changed its statement on the purpose of the corporation back seven or eight years ago, to say that stakeholders matter, including workers, customers, the natural environment.
I think that’s important, but I actually think, at the end of the day, corporations… It still doesn’t focus enough on the actual production process. It’s the production of goods and services and innovation over time that I think is what both the shareholder primacy framework and even the stakeholder governance framework miss. There’s just a black box in the way we teach mainstream economics, even starting at the 101 level. We teach the production process as this black box. There’s this mysterious alchemy by which inputs turn into outputs, and that’s just been a real failing of economists and others who study the corporation. I think that has to be at the center of how we understand what is a good corporation.
Goldy:
An analogy I use, it’s like trying to understand biology, the biological world, without ever looking inside the cell. It’s like saying that, “Oh, the economy is all this competition between corporations,” when in fact, that’s the market. Most of the economy is going on inside the corporation, and that is happening outside of the market.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s right. Our friend, César Hidalgo, the physicist, says that the original sin of economics is starting with trade, because all the interesting bits come before you trade. It’s in the making of the stuff.
Lenore Palladino:
Yep, exactly. That’s what’s so interesting. I think that’s where, in some ways, I get jealous sometimes of people in business and management schools because they’re actually studying the guts of what’s happening. This used to be a part of institutional economics in the United States. It’s part of our historical understanding of what corporations do and what happens in the economy, but it’s just been totally lost in the last 50 years.
Goldy:
How did that happen? How did economics get so disassociated from things like business, finance, and accounting?
Lenore Palladino:
That’s a great question. I don’t know that I have a short answer. Economists clearly carved out a space for themselves of acting as if we could organize our economic life into models, into models that had to solve for optimization so that we would find some sort of perfect equilibrium, so we left out the messy stuff. We left out the actual process by which things are produced. We left out the ways in which consumers actually face their decision-making around what they buy, what they need, what they want. We just left it behind, and these other disciplines really took up the space.
Goldy:
Right.
Nick Hanauer:
You use General Electric as an example in your book. Tell us about that.
Lenore Palladino:
It’s a personal example. My grandfather, Arthur Palladino, worked at GE, was a factory worker at the Lynn, Massachusetts factory for many years after he came back from World War II, and so I grew up hearing some of those stories about what it was like to be. He didn’t get a college education, sort of a classic white ethnic success story really in that era of the ’50s and ’60s when you could come from a very poor immigrant family and raise a family into the middle class through a factory job. I saw in his retirement, he was one of the last sets of workers who managed to hold on to the pension that they had been promised. GE is the paradigmatic, I think, American corporation of the 20th century. We saw the rise of its innovative capacities in many ways, and then we saw it really be the leading corporation in the transition to shareholder primacy with Jack Welch.
There’s great books out there telling the story in detail, but he is the one that a lot of people credit with training a whole generation of corporate executives to stop paying attention to innovation and really put their attention towards maximizing that share price at all expenses. We saw what happened. We saw what happened to the workforce at GE, we saw the disintegration of the company and its reconstitution. I was really fascinated when Pat Gelsinger came in to GE and said, “No more buybacks. We’re not going to do stock buybacks anymore.” That had been one of the biggest tools of the last 20 years of GE of keeping its stock price up. It’s just, I think, a really interesting example to tell this broader story, although certainly, it’s not the only company that’s gone through this process.
Goldy:
It’s a great example also just because of its long history. I mean, to go from Thomas Edison to Jack Welch. I mean, the Edison, horrible person but certainly the icon of innovation in American history, and-
Nick Hanauer:
Jack Welch, also an awful person.
Goldy:
Right. That’s what they have in common, but still very different ways of thinking about how you run the corporation and what the purpose is.
Lenore Palladino:
Absolutely.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. Again, one of the things that you mentioned in your book is the companies are net destroyers of investment capital, because they spend more on stock buybacks than they raise in equity. Just explain that and describe how we should respond to it. It’s kind of funny.
Lenore Palladino:
I mean, I’ll say two things. One is that, specifically, I think the fact that companies that offer their equity to be traded on the open financial markets and the public stock markets, they are repurchasing more of their own equity than they’re issuing. Again, it’s like we’re so confused about what happens in the public stock markets, and that’s a really surprising fact to people. I got really focused and learned from one of my mentors, [inaudible 00:23:40], you’ve had on a bunch, learned from him about stock buybacks and just became fascinated by the fact that they are this legal form of the manipulation of a company stock price by the company. We don’t allow that in so many other ways, but we allow it in this form, in the open market share repurchases that companies do, and we don’t regulate it at all. I’ve written, and testified, and done a lot of policymaking work in the last administration trying to get limits put on stock buybacks, but I think it’s indicative of this broader confusion that we have about the open stock markets.
The other thing I’ll say is that, actually, a lot of my work right now is studying the private financial markets. Lots of people have been studying, and writing, and organizing around private equity. I’ve become really interested in the private credit funds, and their rapid, rapid growth, and how pension funds and others are shifting more in that direction. I think we have to also remake our mental models for the second quarter of the 21st century in terms of how corporations are financed in general. There’s going to be more and more non-financial corporations that are taking on debt and equity in the private financial markets. They don’t have to disclose what’s going on. It’s really very opaque to most people, and it means that there’s a lot of potential risk building up in that sector, so we don’t know there how the flows are necessarily moving in terms of net equity issuance. They’re certainly moving very differently, but I think there’s also the potential for a lot of risk and a lot of negative effects on innovation building up in the private financial markets as well.
Nick Hanauer:
What could go wrong, right?
Lenore Palladino:
Right. I mean, I try to not be a Cassandra, but I am a little bit, and I think the similarities that we see in private credit and their entanglement with non-financial corporations have a lot of similarities to 2007, 2008, maybe that’s for another episode, but it’s scary.
Nick Hanauer:
Great.
Goldy:
Hey, Nick, it’s capitalism. It’s the best of all possible worlds, and if something goes wrong, it’s because it’s for the best. It’s the invisible hand. It’s just squeezing the inefficiencies out of the economy. We should probably get to a more positive take on this. What are the things we can do to prevent things from going wrong? What might corporate governance look like after the shareholder primacy era?
Lenore Palladino:
Yeah, I think that there was actually some great green shoots in the Biden administration around industrial policy in particular, and many of the people who worked in the Biden administration really recognized that we needed to push our corporations. We needed to structure regulation and industrial policies so that corporations would focus on innovation and production and not financial extraction. I think going back to that, going towards an understanding of the corporation as the site of production and innovation for most activities in our economy leads us to a very different policy framework. I think we need a federal chartering system. This was something that Senator Elizabeth Warren proposed way back in 2018, the Accountable Capitalism Act, so that we can actually have the framework to regulate corporations at the federal level, and not pretend anymore that they operate at the state level when we live in a multinational economy, and not allow them to choose just their site of incorporation when we don’t allow them to choose where they operate, what labor laws they operate under or what environmental laws they operate under.
One of the first necessary but not sufficient proposals that’s in my book is just a federal chartering system, which has a whole history in the U.S. that I won’t go into here, but it’s really interesting, and then I think we need to look at corporate boards. We need to think about who actually has a voice in the main decision-making practices of the corporation. There’s lots of ways you can do this. There’s models around the world that I think we can learn from but not adopt, because we have a very unique setup in the U.S., in the intersection between our corporate and labor laws, but we can have worker voices on corporate boards. We can have boards be responsible for looking at the compensation across the company rather than focusing solely on C-suite compensation. We can have boards’ fiduciary duties, their responsibilities be towards the corporation itself rather than simply towards shareholders.
There’s another whole range of policies, ways, you could do this, but really change what the corporate board is responsible for. You can then limit different types of corporate extractive financial practices. I focused a lot on stock buybacks because they’re just fascinating and totally unregulated, but tax policy comes in here. Lots of other ways in which we can focus corporations on using their resources, their retained earnings, to invest in the innovative process. There’s other approaches that I think are necessary to make corporate governance effective. We also need, I think, a strengthening of the right to organize. We need environmental laws to be stronger. We need a whole other ecosystem around it. But I’ve tried to focus on corporate governance really, honestly, in part because it’s something that I thought progressives weren’t paying enough attention to.
Before I was in academia, I was a union organizer. I worked at MoveOn for a long time. I was a political organizer. I was an economist at the Roosevelt Institute, and so I’ve seen the conversations that we’ve been having for lots and lots of years around what a progressive economic vision looks like. I felt for a long time, corporate governance, how corporations actually work and are regulated wasn’t enough part of that conversation, and so that’s why, in this book, what I’m trying to do is not necessarily put forward the end all be all set of solutions, but say we actually have the power. We can regulate corporate governance in a different way. Shareholder primacy is not… You didn’t come down on stone tablets from Moses. It’s not the only way. Hopefully, the book provides a little bit of a opening of the aperture in terms of how we think about corporate governance.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s awesome.
Goldy:
Any ideas on how to change norms? Because in fact, when Friedman published, was it 1970
Lenore Palladino:
Yeah, yep.
Goldy:
In the New York Times. He was widely ridiculed. It was a very fringe idea. That was not the norm in American business back then. Now it is, and to suggest otherwise is ridiculed. How do we reset our norms on this?
Lenore Palladino:
It’s fascinating too because people don’t realize that he wrote that article in response to Ralph Nader’s campaign GM. It was a moment when there was a civil society movement towards recognizing I think some of the harms of corporations, and this was a response, a way to say, “No, we can’t actually have the corporation have any set of social responsibilities,” although some people argue that he actually had a much narrower vision of what he meant than how it’s been interpreted over the last 50 years, or 55 years, I guess. I think that norms shift over the long term through people understanding the harms that shareholder primacy has been created.
That’s really what motivates me, through people becoming more educated about how the system is set up and how it impacts the larger issues we care about, like economic inequality, climate change, and it’ll take some brave political leaders to make this an area where they want to plant a flag. We’ve seen certainly different politicians over the last five or six years really focus on this along with focusing on market power during the Biden administration, and I think that has an important effect of making people wake up and see what the impacts of shareholder primacy have been.
Nick Hanauer:
Final question. Why do you do this work?
Lenore Palladino:
Why I do this work in particular is because, as I said, I was a union organizer. I was a labor organizer. I come from a union family. For a long time, in working on corporate power issues and fighting so hard for dignity and respect at the workplace, you have to ask, where is the money going? That was, for me, just always the motivating question. Where is this money going and why? I became focused on shareholder primacy as a place where I felt that I could help bring some more light to the system and hopefully give tools and resources to people who are doing workplace organizing and doing organizing to improve the economy, give them some more tools and frameworks to understand and hopefully change this larger system.
Nick Hanauer:
Awesome. Great. Well, thank you so much for being with us, Lenore.
Lenore Palladino:
Yeah, definitely. Thanks so much for having me.
Goldy:
A couple takeaways, Nick. One is, and this is something we repeat a lot, which people lose sight of, is that economics is a choice, that corporations aren’t structured this way, governed this way, because that’s the only way to do it. It’s a choice we’ve made both legally, morally, politically, socially, that it’s okay, and in fact, preferable for corporations to just focus on maximizing shareholder value, the public good be damned. It is a choice, Nick, to actually believe that managing corporations this way will transubstantiate investor selfishness into the public good. We choose to believe that because it’s convenient for the people who own the shares.
As Lenore does, when you look at the history of corporate law and how we got there, we talked about that example with General Electric, from Thomas Edison to Jack Welsh, two very different ways of understanding how you run a corporation and where innovation comes from, both equally bad people in different ways. But still, it really is a great illustration of where we’ve gone wrong in this country, and why we’re not nearly as innovative as we used to be, and why productivity has slowed over the past four or five decades.
Nick Hanauer:
Yep, no, and why a few people are rich and everybody else is poor too.
Goldy:
Right. My other takeaway in that is we brought up the idea of risk, that the reason why the owners of shares should be rewarded is because they’re taking the risk, that if the company goes bankrupt, they’re the last ones who get paid off. They lose everything. I mean, any person who’s worked in the real world knows that that’s not true. I’m going to use my daughter as an example. She’s 28 years old. She’s in the industry of her choice. She was applying for jobs recently, and she had to make this decision which one to take. Should she take the job that takes her out of the city, that she has to move someplace and take that risk, which is potentially a better job but is isolated more from the rest of the industry, so if it doesn’t go well, she’s got fewer choices but move back?
Does she take the job at this company, which seems like the better job but it pays less and she knows it’s more short term because the project she’s would be working on is coming to an end? Or should she hold off and take neither of those jobs and wait for something else, which probably is coming along in another month but might not happen, she doesn’t know? People are making these choices all the time, and that’s one of the reasons why wages tend to stagnate, because it’s risky to switch jobs. People make decisions all the time based on what they’re promised by the new employer, and then a few months in, that’s reneged upon, and because very few people have a contract, they’re just at-will employees, they can change the terms on you. They can cut your wages.
Nick Hanauer:
Again, it’s so easy to sell stock in a public company. It’s so hard to quit a job and find a new one. The difference is so profound. By the way, customers take risk too. When you buy a product from a company, you assume that you will get what you paid for. You assume that it won’t create harm. There’s all sorts of risks in any supply chain, and it’s just not true that the only people who take real risk are shareholders. I think, in many ways, the shareholders and public companies are the ones taking the least risk because they’re in the position that’s the most liquid. You can change your mind at any moment. You can just wake up in the morning and sell your whole position and you’re out, but customers can’t do that and employees can’t do that. Right?
Goldy:
Right. You buy a-
Nick Hanauer:
It’s just hard.
Goldy:
You buy a GE fridge, and one day out of warranty, the compressor breaks. You’re shit out of luck, right?
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, right.
Well, interesting subject.
Goldy:
Yep. Again, you might not think there is such a thing as a good company, but we will provide a link in the show notes to Lenore’s book, Good Company: Economic Policy after Shareholder Primacy.
Speaker 5:
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 at Pitchfork Economics. Nick’s on Twitter and Facebook as well at Nick Hanauer. For more content from us, you can subscribe to our weekly newsletter, The Pitch over on Substack. 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.