The Pitch from Civic Ventures
A free weekly newsletter about who gets what and why.
Every week, Civic Ventures president Zach Silk walks you through the week’s most important economics news, providing context that reveals the meanings and motivations behind the numbers.
Mainstream economics is broken. It’s time for a new story.
For the last 40 years, the wealthiest people in America have used the three pillars of trickle-down economics—tax cuts for the rich, deregulation for the powerful, and wage suppression for everyone else—to hoard their wealth while screwing over everyone else. There’s a reason why you feel like you’re working harder and earning less than your parents’ generation—it's because the rich and powerful have used trickle down economics to hold you back and keep the riches for themselves.
Now income inequality has skyrocketed to dangerous levels, and our society is in crisis. But it doesn’t have to be this way. As Civic Ventures founder Nick Hanauer said, “the inequality that our economy produces is not reflective of our relative talents or contributions, but more of deep, embedded, structural dynamics that create this winner-take-all result.”
Trickle-down policy decisions from politicians on both sides of the aisle created this outsized inequality, which means that smarter policy decisions can create an economy that works for everyone. Civic Ventures upends the trickle-down paradigm by promoting policies that center ordinary people as the real job creators.
As early supporters of the $15 minimum wage, restoring the overtime threshold, and a new set of labor standards for rural and gig economy workers who have been frozen out of economic growth, Civic Ventures is at the forefront of middle-out economics.
The economy is more than a set of numbers in an Excel spreadsheet, or a series of arrows in a quarterly earnings report. Economics is the story of power—who has it, who uses it, and who is deprived of it. In clear, straightforward language, The Pitch demystifies economics and charts a course to a better future—one in which we all do better when we all do better.
