Markets Built for Humans: Nick Hanauer on Why Trickle-Down Broke America

Nick Hanauer joins The Bigfoot Manifesto for a conversation about Markets Built for Humans, his new co-authored work with Eric Beinhocker, and why America needs to abandon trickle-down economics once and for all.

For fifty years, Americans were told that if we cut taxes for the rich, weakened labor, deregulated corporations, let monopolies grow, and trusted markets to magically fix everything, prosperity would eventually reach everyone else.

But the magic never came.

Instead, wages stagnated, the middle class got squeezed, corporate power exploded, Wall Street extracted more and more from the real economy, and democracy started to rot from the inside.

Nick's argument is both radical and obvious: the economy should serve human beings.

In this episode, Dave and Nick talk about why trickle-down economics became the dominant myth of American life, why "rich people are job creators" is such a powerful story, why workers and customers actually drive growth, and why fairness is not anti-growth — fairness is how growth happens.

They also dig into Market Humanism, middle-out economics, labor power, overtime protections, unions, antitrust, shareholder primacy, AI, GDP, the stock market, and why a hollowed-out middle class is not just an economic problem — it is a democratic crisis.

Bigfoot may be blurry, but trickle-down is invisible for a reason: it was never really there.

Read Markets Built for Humans:
https://www.marketsbuiltforhumans.org/

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