Pop quiz: What does “GDP” stand for? And now, quickly: what the hell does “gross domestic product” even mean? It turns out, the way we measure the economy changes the way we manage the economy, so if we want to broadly improve the lives of all Americans we need to measure the things that really matter.

Diane Coyle: Bennett Professor of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge. Former advisor to the UK treasury. Author of numerous books, most recently GDP: A Brief But Affectionate History, The Economics of Enough, and The Soulful Science. Founder of the consultancy Enlightenment Economics, specializing in the economics of new technologies.

Twitter: @DianeCoyle1859

Further reading:

(1) https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/the-kennedy-family/robert-f-kennedy/robert-f-kennedy-speeches/remarks-at-the-university-of-kansas-march-18-1968

(2) https://democracyjournal.org/magazine/31/capitalism-redefined/

 

Recording: What is GDP? We collectively believe the stock market goes up, that’s good, but it’s just simply not true.

Dangers are on strike again this morning, their protest low wages and cuts in school funding.

A new study says the number of uninsured children in the United States rose for the first time in nearly a decade.

And I am thrilled to announce that the United States economy grew at the amazing rate of 4.1%.

From [00:00:30] the offices of Civic Ventures in downtown Seattle, this is Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer. An honest conversation about how to make capitalism work for everyone.

David Goldstein: I’m David Goldstein, senior fellow at  Civic Ventures.

Nick Hanauer: I’m Nick Hanauer, founder of Civic Ventures.

David Goldstein: [00:01:00] So Nick, last episode we learned how the middle class has essentially been getting screwed for the past 40 years. And I’m confused because when I look at all the economics statistics right now, things seem to be going great. I mean we have near record low unemployment. We have near record high corporate profits. What’s going on? What are we measuring?

Nick Hanauer: Yeah. And I think that you raised one of the fundamental questions, [00:01:30] is you get what you measure essentially. And for a long time, since the 1940s or 1950s, we’ve measured the economy, we’ve measured growth, prosperity characterized welfare in some pretty funky ways. And I think a lot of those mistakes are coming home to roost today. The GDP, gross domestic product, as the fundamental measure of prosperity [00:02:00] and economic growth being sort of the best example of where we went wrong.

David Goldstein: So let’s talk about what is GDP?

Nick Hanauer: So GDP is gross domestic product. It’s basically the monetary measure of the market value of all goods and services produced in the economy like in a year or a month or whatever it is. So you basically add up the value of everything you make and that’s your GDP.

And in some [00:02:30] ways that measure makes some sense, although to be clear that people who invented GDP, Simon Kuznets among others in the 40s, were very, very clear that it was a terrible measure of the overall welfare of the economy. And insisted that it shouldn’t be used as the final full measure of the economy.

But because it’s so simple to measure and because it [00:03:00] defines more as good unambiguously and because that way of measuring unambiguously benefits a lot of people who make things, we locked onto it and today it is the foundational way in which we measure everything. But as we’ll learn from our guest, Diane Coyle, later, it is a deeply flawed measure of human welfare [00:03:30] for a variety of reasons.

David Goldstein: So more is better. If we have more cigarettes, that that’s good for GDP, right?

Nick Hanauer: Yeah. So for a bunch of different reasons, Goldie, GDP, as Robert Kennedy so beautifully explained so many years ago …

Recording: Yet the gross national product does not include the health of our children, the quality of their education or their joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry [00:04:00] or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence or our public debate for the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither or wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country. It measures everything [inaudible 00:04:18], except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America, except why we are proud that we are American.

Nick Hanauer: GDP and [00:04:30] aggregate can go up every year, but all the benefits of those increases can accrue to the top 5% of the people in the society. Everybody else gets screwed. But the number still looks great. And so the problem you have in America is that people open up the newspaper every morning and it says GDP is going up, but reading that number is not how you experience a better life, right?

David Goldstein: And this is the difference between median and mean, or average. [00:05:00] GDP per capita is a measure of average GDP per family, per person. But that doesn’t mean the people in the middle are doing any better because you rich people just distort everything.

Nick Hanauer: Yeah, exactly. You’re welcome again. yeah. So it’s a very inadequate measure in that primitive way. And there’s another easy way to understand why it is inadequate, which is to think about in an economy in which people are consuming fewer [00:05:30] things and more services, how do you measure GDP on services?

So primitive example is a society with fewer teachers per student, a better society based on GDP or a society with more teachers per student. How do you capture learning and the rate at which kids learn and who’s learning in those statistics? [00:06:00] Well you don’t. And so standard productivity measures, standard GDP measures miss entirely what’s happening in the economy.

Also, if you’re measuring output, how do you measure the difference between the old computer that can’t do very much with the new computer that can do these fantastic transformational things?

David Goldstein: It’s much better at measuring quantity than it is quality.

Nick Hanauer: Exactly.

David Goldstein: And again, this is part of the problem that’s a rather subjective idea.

Nick Hanauer: It is. But [00:06:30] to be clear, we live in a society as an advanced to relatively prosperous society where we are generally not so interested in quantity but very interested in quality. Lots and lots of people have computers. The question is how good are they and are they improving quickly is a bigger issue than going from zero computers to a bunch of them. Or zero cars in the society to almost everyone having one.

David Goldstein: So not only as welfare [00:07:00] a subjective idea, it’s also relative, right? Because we are these highly social, status conscious creatures. We don’t simply feel better because we’re doing better. It also is related to how well we’re doing compared to everybody else.

Nick Hanauer: Absolutely. And this is one of the most misunderstood parts about how we have characterized how we’re doing, which is this idea which [00:07:30] is linked to the neoclassical idea of home economists. That we’re all rational calculators of our self interest. The idea that we judge our circumstances in relation to our communities, and there’s a lot of people who think that people are just being envious and greedy when they say well, I’m not doing very well compared to that person and that’s unfair. In fact, human societies are held together by these moral [00:08:00] norms and reciprocity norms.

And so what matters to us and what rightly matters to us is how we’re doing in relation to others. And again, none of our current economic measures make sense of that.

David Goldstein: So when critics say that the poor have never had it so good, look, they’ve got that electricity [crosstalk 00:08:19].

Nick Hanauer: Let them eat iPhones.

David Goldstein: And the funny thing is, of course yes you’re right. A cell phone, a smartphone is something that the richest person in the world [00:08:30] couldn’t imagine having 40 years ago, just 40 years ago when we were growing up, they didn’t exist. But now you can’t be a functional member of society without a cell phone. You can’t get a job. You can’t maintain a job. You can’t keep your daily schedule together. This is as much a necessity as clothes and housing.

Nick Hanauer: Yes. But while poor people may be able to afford smartphones, what they can’t afford are positional goods, like housing [00:09:00] and a high quality education. And these are the things that define welfare in human societies.

And so again, none of these measures really relates to the lived experience of the typical family. The stock market at 25,000 is awesome for the few people in the country who own most of the stock, obviously. But the median family actually doesn’t have a stake really in [00:09:30] the stock market. And when it goes up, not only doesn’t it materially benefit them, it massively benefits a tiny minority of people who are living lives that are less and less like theirs.

And so it’s sort of this double whammy effect. I’m not getting ahead and my life is, on a relative basis, getting worse than these other people. And that just appropriately makes people angry.

Diane Coyle: [00:10:00] Hi, how are you?

Nick Hanauer: Good. Nice to talk to you.

Diane Coyle: Yeah, likewise. I’m Diane Coyle. I’m the Bennett Professor of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge in the UK and also the author of a book called GDP, A Brief But Affectionate History.

The way we think about the economy now is always in terms of GDP. It’s got a very specific historical origins. It was [00:10:30] created in its current form with the definitions that we use now in the period during and after the Second World War. Now, of course, people have been thinking about how to measure the economy as a whole before that, and they were actually all the way back to the 17th century. And most often people refer to Simon Kuznets as the father of GDP. He had done some early work putting together an aggregate of national income, as had somebody call Colin Clark in the UK doing very similar work.

[00:11:00] But there was a key difference between pre war efforts and what became GDP. And that difference is so important because it’s come back to life now. And it’s one of the reasons people are not so happy anymore with using GDP.

So what GDP does is it measures final demand in the economy. You add up all the different goods and services and essentially it’s what businesses do and what the government does. And including the government [00:11:30] was one of the key differences between what Kuznets wanted to do and what actually happened during the Second World War. Because the war time imperative was just to measure how much the economy could produce in terms of supporting the war effort. And there was no way that the authorities are going to show that fighting the war was making people worse off. Something that Kuznets would have said if you want to measure how well off people are going to be, then making bombs [00:12:00] isn’t making them better off. We should exclude that. That was not going to happen with the measure that was constructed during the Second World War. So that was one key point.

Another was that all the valuable activity people do in their home was not included in our definition of the economy, all the caring activities that go, cooking cleaning, are not counted.

Nick Hanauer: Raising children.

Diane Coyle: Raising children. Because they have no market price. They’re done for free. And [00:12:30] so what governments and business do is the economy, what households do is not the economy. And that too is something that has sort of come back to bite us because it’s not just that feminists like me think that is inappropriate. It’s that actually policy gets shaped depending on these definitions. And the great increase in productivity in the decades after the Second World War, well part of that was women not working in the home and going out to work [00:13:00] in paid employment and buying ready made food and paying other people to do their cleaning. All of that added to GDP, but it’s not obvious that it led to being better off in some fundamental economic sense or good economic policies.

And so the point is that GDP is a particular definition of how to think about the economy and it was created in a particular set of circumstances that helped shape it the way it is now.

Nick Hanauer: So let’s deconstruct it a little [00:13:30] bit further. So one of the deficiencies of GDP is that it measures the economy in aggregate. So isn’t it possible for GDP to be going up, but for the lives of people not to be tracking with that? I mean, it measures an average, not a median in a sense.

Diane Coyle: That’s right. I mean, it’s even worse than that in a way because the headlines figures that we see, they are always total GDP, never in per capita [00:14:00] terms. Since the population is growing you’d really want to adjust that to being a per capita figure anyway. But it’s also an average that so it tells you nothing about the distribution of income growth. And you’d get the same GDP figure if it were very unequal as if it will much more evenly spread.

And that can be across different kinds of groups of the population or it could be across different regions as well. And many economies are very regionally divided in the upstate overlaps [00:14:30] with people’s incomes in terms of their skills or the kind of jobs that they have. But these, as you’re alluding to with the question, has really played into electoral politics of late haven’t they? Because we know that the gain in GDP in more recent decades has been very unevenly distributed.

Nick Hanauer: So the other thing that’s interesting about the evolution of this measure is its relationship to the changing nature of what [00:15:00] our economy produces. Like counting up the number of cars, for instance, that the economy produces is quite a simple thing. But how do you account for the quality of care a nurse provides or the skill of a teacher or services? Or how do you account for the fact that the equipment that we are presently using [00:15:30] to do a podcast with you, us being in Seattle and you being in England, cost a few hundred dollars, not hundreds of thousands of dollars, which is what it would have cost 10 years ago if we had done this. Isn’t that another part of the problem?

Diane Coyle: Yeah, it’s great question. And it’s my favorite question because a lot my research now is about how we should be measuring these to catch up with how the economy has changed. Because as we were discussing, GDP was created for [00:16:00] the economy is the 1950s. There was a mass production, much less differentiation of products, less of the economy in services. And so the character of economists like America and Britain has changed dramatically over time. And we have many more services like medical care where the quality of the care and the way you even measure productivity, it’s just not obvious how you’d measure that.

And if you’re talking about a nurse in your experience, you don’t measure [00:16:30] productivity by how quickly you can get through all their patients. It’s the quality of the care that fundamentally methods. Or a management consultant, you don’t measure their productivity by the number of pages in the report. The quality of what they say is what matters about it.

Nick Hanauer: Can you tease out for us a little bit the relationship between how we think about productivity in GDP?

Diane Coyle: Yeah. And as you probably know, the background to this is that productivity performance has been disappointing around [00:17:00] the rich Western economies since the financial crisis. And it’s called the productivity puzzle because nobody’s quite sure why it happened. And at the same time you see these fantastic technical gains in some parts of the economy.

And GDP is the numerator in productivity calculations. Productivity is really broadly speaking, given the resources that you put in, labor, capital, any [00:17:30] intangible capital that you can think of and what are you getting for those for a given amount of resources? And the easy way to calculate it is just looking at GDP adjusted for inflation divided by the number of hours worked in the economy. A more sophisticated one called total factor productivity adds in the other factors as well, the capital and so on. Or adjust for different skill levels in the labor force.

And the idea is that you try to [00:18:00] explain as much as you can in the output in terms of what’s going in and anything that’s left over is the technological progress due to how we apply ideas to the resources that we have essentially. A great example is aspirin, which is an old medication and it’s been used as a painkiller for a long time. And then at some point the same [00:18:30] formulation and we realized you could use that as preemptive medicine against cardiovascular disease. So nothing changed in resources, but the output was very much improved. And that’s a total factor productivity gain, a technology game. And so it’s about the power of ideas fundamentally.

David Goldstein: So just in my own life, one of my recent investments was in a company doing immunotherapy for cancer, which has found a way [00:19:00] to take some cells out of somebody’s body that has stage four terminal cancer, re-engineer them, stick them back in the body, and in 95% of the cases that people are cancer free. And what’s striking about that is that for a few tens of thousands of dollars, you can essentially cure someone of a disease that presently costs literally millions of dollars to treat in the current system the other way.

And so [00:19:30] it’s just this really stark example of a circumstance in which people’s lives are immeasurably improved, but giant amounts of economic activity is destroyed in the process. And so in aggregate, GDP is going down. So if you looked at the figures, you’d be like oh.

Diane Coyle: Yeah, the medical pharma market has gone down.

David Goldstein: It’s gone down by a factor of 100 or 1000. [00:20:00] It’s such an interesting example of the conflict between, or the inconsistency, I’m not sure what the word is exactly, between what’s good for people and how we measure whether the economy is improving our lives.

Diane Coyle: It’s a great example and as the economy changes, there are more and more examples of these because there was such exciting developments in technology. But there’s actually quite a fundamental split among economists about this at the moment. There is a [00:20:30] group of economist, Robert Gordon at Chicago at Northwestern is one of the most prominent, saying the innovations we have now over hyped and they’re going to improve economic wellbeing in the way that’s the innovations of the 1920s and 30s did.

So he’s talking about things like the spread of electrification or the spread of indoor plumbing in people’s houses, the introduction of automobiles and so on.

And then there’s another group of economists who point out as you do, and I’m in this category, [00:21:00] that there are things that we are just not measuring because they don’t fit into the conceptual framework that we have at present.  And it’s quite [inaudible 00:21:11]. And we haven’t got to the bottom of this yet. So a lot of my work is trying to think about what are the frameworks we might want to apply that would better reflect the kinds of things that you’re describing.

David Goldstein: So what other frameworks might we apply? What would be a better alternative [00:21:30] to GDP?

Diane Coyle: I have two ideas in mind. One is that we’re also thinking about monetary transactions. We think about what assets people have access to to lead the kind of life that they want to. And then what they do with them is up to them is up to them. And the assets would include their financial capital and physical capital they can access and can they, is there a good infrastructure, what kinds of equipment they have in their job. [00:22:00] But also natural capital and social capital.So the quality of the institutions and the communities in which they live, which we know has important economic effects.

And so you would then ask what assets do people access and the distribution is an inherent part of that framework. And what’s attractive about thinking about assets to kind of balance sheet for the economy is that you then automatically think about sustainability. And we never do that with GDP. It’s only about today’s consumption [00:22:30] and today’s income.

And so if there is a natural disaster, that’s great for GDP because of the construction that happens and we don’t account for the loss of the assets that it causes.

And the other ways think about it in my mind is thinking about how people spend their time and what value they get out of spending their time. So I think your immunotherapy example might fit into that because it’s a big extension of the time available to somebody. [00:23:00] And we do have, we’re tarting to have some insight into the value that people place on different kinds of activities.

And this is something that’s also been changed dramatically by digital technology because the past and how people spend their time is being changed in some quite fundamental ways.

David Goldstein: Fascinating. So one of the interesting things that the people listening to this podcast might appreciate is your advice to [00:23:30] non economists and lay people about how they should incorporate these new ideas in their lives, in their personal and public lives.

Diane Coyle: That’s a really interesting question. As you referred to earlier, people do know what’s happening in some sense. They do know that their incomes haven’t gone up or was it the job opportunities for their kids or the possibility [00:24:00] of buying a house to live in, they’re not what not what they used to be. So people understand that very well in their personal lives.

My sense is that a lot of policy makers do understand that. They kind of feel trapped in the GDP story. And I’ve talked to politicians who will say we’d love to stop talking about the quarterly increase in GDP because we know this is meaningless and they go up and down over time. You can’t read anything into a quarter. It [00:24:30] doesn’t tell you anything fundamental? But what can we do because that’s what the statisticians publish. And if we try to do something else our opponents are just going to say well that’s only because he can’t deliver.

And then you talked to the statisticians and they say but we can’t change because this is an international standard that was set by the United Nations [crosstalk 00:24:49]. It takes 20 years to change it and besides, this is what the politicians want. We’re just giving them what they want. And the journalists report what the statisticians do and they all [crosstalk 00:24:58] politicians to account. So they’re all trapped [00:25:00] in this GDP standard.

But I think it’s very interesting that the interest in the measurements has become so intense. Who would’ve thought that anybody’s interested in economics statistics? But there’s been probably a dozen books about this published for a general audience in the past three, four years. And I go to literary festivals to talk about my book [crosstalk 00:25:23] Sunday morning to hear me talk about GDP. It’s just bizarre.

[00:25:30] But it suggests that there’s an opportunity to try and break out of, break out of trap. There are a lot of economists now working on this and I hope that between the ideas from the economics community and engagement with the statistics community and having a public debate about it, we somehow get some shift away from the tyranny of the quarterly GDP number.

David Goldstein: Yeah. And for my own part, I think what, understanding the weaknesses of this approach to [00:26:00] measuring human welfare is useful for, is that it gives me confidence and I hope it gives the public confidence that pushing back against Orthodoxy is not an irrational act. And that despite the fact that we do not have agreement about what a perfect alternative to GDP is, it does not follow that we should allow [00:26:30] the economic orthodoxies and policies based on GDP to terrorize us.

Diane Coyle: Yes, that’s absolutely right.

David Goldstein: Yeah. I think that knowing that these figures are inadequate, gives you social, political and sort of psychological permission to call into question the policy frameworks that depend on it. And I think that that is very, very powerful and useful in civic society.

Diane Coyle: The [inaudible 00:26:56] now, we know, as you say that something isn’t [00:27:00] working. And one of the reasons that it’s great to have people pushing back in this way is for that a long time GDP was part of the furniture. Nobody paid much attention to it. When I was young as an undergraduate student studying economics, you were taught some of the basics of national income accounting and the kinds of judgments that went into constructing the figures. And then that drops off the curriculum. So younger economists don’t [00:27:30] think about it, they just don’t know the statistics from the Internet because that’s so easy now we’re [inaudible 00:27:35]. And so having this debate and this pushback I think is really healthy.

David Goldstein: Yeah, that’s fantastic. Are you working on any new books?

Diane Coyle: I’m writing a textbook, which is based on a public policy economics course that I teach.

David Goldstein: Oh fun.

Diane Coyle: And I’m hoping that will be out in 2019. And then after that I’m already planning the book about all of these measurement questions, which are really, [00:28:00] it’s really a book about what makes us better off and how do we know it.

David Goldstein: I love it. I love it. Well, we can’t wait to read that one.

Diane Coyle: Give me time to write it.

David Goldstein: You know, I think this has been a fantastic conversation. Super useful. And we just want to thank you again for taking the time to chat with us. Okay. Thank you.

Diane Coyle: Fantastic. Thank you.

David Goldstein: Bye Diane.

Diane Coyle: Thanks very much.

David Goldstein: Bye bye.

Diane Coyle: Bye.

Sarah Leibovitz: [00:28:30] So we’re measuring the economy wrong. Great. Perfect. Who wouldn’t want to hear that that’ve been doing something wrong for 50 plus years? Hi, my name is Sarah Leibovitz and I’m a producer here at Pitchfork. I’ve got to admit that part of me is like, so what? It will be such a pain fixing the entire economic system. And how can you know that it’s actually worth it? That switching something that seems both as complicated and as seemingly [00:29:00] unimportant as metrics will really make a difference?

Well, as weird as it may sound, coming from a wonky podcast about economics, let’s take a look at baseball

Recording: From Forbes Field in Pittsburgh, this is Chuck Thompson along with Jack Wetland, welcoming to a seventh and deciding game of the 1960 World Series between the New York Yankees and the [crosstalk 00:29:23].

Sarah Leibovitz: If you’re an American, you probably know at least the basics of how baseball works. People hit things, they run around some other things, [00:29:30] do it enough times and you win. But behind those basics is a way, way more complex system.

Recording: Your goal shouldn’t be to buy players. Your goal should by wins. In order to buy wins, you need to buy runs.

Who are you?

I’m Peter Brand.

First job in baseball?

It’s my first job anywhere.

Sarah Leibovitz: You might remember this movie if you’re a baseball aficionado or just really like Brad Pitt. It’s called Money ball and it’s based on a true story. And that [00:30:00] story changed what is essentially the backbone of baseball, how you build your team and why. This wasn’t a long time ago. If you’re a baseball fan, you might remember these changes. In 2003, Michael Lewis published the book that the movie is named for, Money ball. In it, he argued that the conventional wisdom, baseball insiders like scouts and captains and managers followed was wrong. That these supposed experts were using [00:30:30] flawed metrics and because of that they were getting shoddy results.

As you might imagine, those insiders hated Money ball because as Michael Lewis said on PBS, it proved them wrong.

Recording: That in something as whorey and traditional as baseball, it was possible for there to be innovation and new knowledge. They’ve rethought everything from on-field strategies, what you do during a baseball game to the valuation of of baseball players. I mean they [00:31:00] have taken …

Sarah Leibovitz: To create the best team possible, the metrics you use to evaluate baseball players had to change and when teams change those metrics, they saw results.

Recording: He said this to me, a couple of columnists in the, I think it’s the Journal of Econometrics, published a study about the value of the price of on base percentage before Moneyball and after Moneyball. It changed dramatically. It was undervalued before it and it was actually overvalued afterwards. The [00:31:30] market for players became more efficient.

Sarah Leibovitz: Baseball figured it out, teams added statisticians, things changed because it was proven that you could win more games by doing so. So if we can change baseball after doing it the same way for over a hundred years, why not the economy? We can keep holding onto GDP because it’s comfortable and already here. Or we can evolve, can welcome new forms of measurement and redefine the game [00:32:00] for everybody.

Nick Hanauer: So today because we have all persuaded ourselves that the stock market going up is an unalloyed good, we have done a lot of stuff in policy to make that happen. The best example being stock buybacks. They used to be illegal, now they’re illegal. And so in this year, essentially 5% of GDP [00:32:30] will be devoted, 55-60% of corporate profits will be devoted to stock buybacks that do nothing for the broad economy, in no way touch the lives of most Americans, but absolutely make the sock market go up.

And so we collectively believe that the stock market goes up, that’s good, but it’s just simply not true.

David Goldstein: Right. So at one level, Nick, it seems that this is all really simple. We should be measuring what [00:33:00] matters, which is improving people’s lives. So what actually improves people’s lives?

Nick Hanauer: Well, peanut butter and chocolate ice cream improves people’s lives. Antibiotics improves people’s lives. I just a really cool new electric bike and I think that’s going to improve my life.

David Goldstein: I hope as much as that standing treadmill desk.

Nick Hanauer: To my left that I haven’t used [00:33:30] very much. Yeah. So what improves people’s lives, what increases living standards in a billion forms are technological innovations that solve human problems. That’s really what makes lives improve over time, is going from sweltering in the heat to air conditioning, walking to work versus riding a bike, riding a bus, dying from a head [00:34:00] cold to getting antibiotics and being fine, right? It is the evolution of solutions to human problems that defines progress in human societies.

And the more solutions to human problems we create and the more widely we distribute those solutions to human problems, the better human societies are.

David Goldstein: And I think, Nick, that if people listening to that answer come away a little dissatisfied because we haven’t given you a [00:34:30] an alternative to GDP, well, I want you to just wait. Tune in next week because we’re going to talk about how you actually get more solutions. And the answer is complexity.

Nick Hanauer: That’s right. It’s a complex world out there.

Sarah Leibovitz: Pitchfork Economics is produced by  Civic Ventures. The magic happens in Seattle in partnership with LARJ Media, that’s [00:35:00] L-A-R-J Media and the Young Turks Network. Find us on Twitter and Facebook at Civic Action and follow our writing on Medium at Civic Skunk Works. And you should alow follow Nick Hanauer on Twitter at Nick Hanauer.

As always, a big thank you to our guests and thank you to our team at Civic Ventures, Nick Hanauer, Zack Silk, Jasmine Weaver, Justin Feral, Stephanie Urban, David Goldstein, Paul Constant, Nick Casella, and Annie Faithly. Thanks for listening.