Corporations are on track to spend more than $1.3 trillion on stock buybacks this year—money that could have gone toward higher wages, innovation, or community investment. That’s the real-life Trillion Dollar Heist at the center of our new comic from Civic Ventures, which follows Marta, a janitor who interrupts a corporate board meeting just as executives plot their next billion-dollar buyback spree.

This week, we’re resharing our 2019 conversation with Senator Cory Booker, who explains how stock buybacks went from illegal market manipulation to one of the biggest drivers of inequality. 

Read the Trillion Dollar Heist Comic: https://bindings.app/read/7mINYO2H

This episode originally aired February 26, 2019. 

Senator Cory Booker is a Democratic lawmaker from New Jersey who has served in the U.S. Senate since 2013. A Rhodes Scholar and Yale Law graduate, he began his career on the Newark City Council before serving as mayor from 2006 to 2013. In the Senate, Booker has focused on criminal justice reform, economic opportunity, climate action, and protecting civil and LGBTQ+ rights.

Social Media:

Marta 

Paul Constant 

Sarah Star Litt

Alan Robinson 

Pippa Bowland

AndWorld Design

Mary P. Traverse

Further reading: 

Trillion Dollar Heist Comic

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In the final episode of our Trade series, Nick and Goldy talk with Thea Lee, former Deputy Undersecretary for International Affairs at the U.S. Department of Labor, to challenge the core assumption behind decades of U.S. trade policy: That trade is about efficiency, not power.

Lee explains how past trade deals were written to protect capital while ignoring worker exploitation abroad—a model that suppressed wages overseas and undercut American workers at home. She also makes the case that worker-centered trade isn’t hypothetical anymore by pointing to the US–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA), where labor rights were finally enforced with the same seriousness as intellectual property, resulting in real wage gains and democratic union elections in Mexico.

This conversation lays out the choice clearly: Trade can strengthen middle classes, democracy, and supply chain resilience, or it can deepen inequality and instability. This episode makes the argument for choosing the first option on purpose, not by accident.

Thea Lee is an economist and longtime advocate of pro-worker trade policy who most recently served as Deputy Undersecretary for International Affairs at the U.S. Department of Labor,  where she focused on global labor protections, including enforcing labor rights under trade agreements and combating forced and child labor worldwide.

Todd Tucker is a political scientist, author, and the Director of Industrial Policy and Trade at the Roosevelt Institute and Roosevelt Forward, where he leads work on how national and global institutions shape economic transformation. He’s the author of Judge Knot: Politics and Development in International Investment Law.

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@TheaMeiLee

@toddntucker.com

@toddntucker

Further reading: 

The New US Trade Agenda: Institutionalizing Middle-Out Economics in Foreign Commercial Policy

Judge Knot: Politics and Development in International Investment Law

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In the sixth episode of our trade series, Pitchfork Economics producer Freddy Doss talks with Mexican economist Juan Carlos Moreno-Brid about how NAFTA — and now the USMCA — reshaped Mexico’s economy in ways that those of us north of the Rio Grande almost never hear about. Yes, exports skyrocketed. But wages stagnated, domestic industry hollowed out, and Mexico became structurally dependent on the United States — even as political rhetoric in the U.S. grew more hostile toward Mexican workers. Moreno-Brid explains why the promised “shared prosperity” never arrived, why Mexico got stuck in an export-without-development trap, and what a truly fair and resilient U.S.–Mexico trade relationship would actually require. It’s a perspective rarely heard in Washington, and an essential one for understanding the real stakes of North American trade.

Juan Carlos Moreno-Brid is a professor of economics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and one of Latin America’s leading experts on trade, industrial policy, and economic development. A former Deputy Director of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) office in Mexico, he has spent decades analyzing the impacts of NAFTA and Mexico’s transition to an export-led model. His research focuses on inequality, industrialization, and the structural challenges facing emerging economies.

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In the fifth episode of our series on trade, journalist and author Luke Savage joins Pitchfork Economics Producer Freddy Doss to unpack how decades of “free trade” between the U.S. and Canada have reshaped both economies—entrenching corporate power, hollowing out manufacturing, and weakening democratic control over economic policy. Savage traces how policies sold as mutually beneficial instead fueled inequality and deindustrialization—eroding the livelihoods of working people. He argues for a new kind of trade built to serve the interests of workers and communities, not multinational corporations. 

Luke Savage is a Canadian journalist, author, and political commentator whose work examines the failures of liberalism and the possibilities of democracy. A staff writer at Jacobin and co-host of the podcast Michael and Us, Savage has written for The Atlantic, The Guardian, The Washington Post, and The New Statesman. He is the author of The Dead Center: Reflections on Liberalism and Democracy After the End of History and co-author of Seeking Social Democracy with the late Ed Broadbent. 

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@LukewSavage

Lukewsavage

Further reading: 

Luke Savage | Substack

The Dead Center: Reflections on Liberalism and Democracy After the End of History

Seeking Social Democracy: Seven Decades in the Fight for Equality

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What if global trade isn’t really a fight between nations—but between classes? In the fourth episode of our Trade series, Nick and Goldy talk with economist and writer Matthew C. Klein, co-author of Trade Wars Are Class Wars: How Rising Inequality Distorts the Global Economy and Threatens International Peace. Klein argues that the real story behind trade imbalances isn’t about countries “winning” or “losing”—it’s about how elites hoard profits while workers everywhere pay the price. From China’s suppressed wages to Wall Street’s endless appetite for financial assets, this conversation exposes how the true conflict in trade is between labor and capital—and what it would take to build a more equitable global economy.

Matthew Klein is an economist, writer, and co-author of Trade Wars Are Class Wars: How Rising Inequality Distorts the Global Economy and Threatens International Peace. He writes The Overshoot, a publication focused on global economics and financial markets, and his work has appeared in the Financial Times, Barron’s, and The Economist.

Social Media:

@M_C_Klein

Further reading: 

Trade Wars Are Class Wars: How Rising Inequality Distorts the Global Economy and Threatens International Peace

THE OVERSHOOT: Making sense of the global economy and financial markets

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Tariffs won’t save America’s economy—but knowledge might. In the third episode of our Trade series, Nick and Goldy sit down with physicist César Hidalgo to explore how prosperity really grows—not through tariffs or trickle-down promises, but through the accumulation of knowledge and know-how. Hidalgo explains why digital exports don’t show up in trade data, why tariffs fail, and why the future belongs to countries that invest in research, strategy, and human talent.

César Hidalgo is the director of the Center for Collective Learning, with offices at the Toulouse School of Economics and Corvinus University of Budapest. A physicist by training, he is also the founder of Datawheel, a company specializing in data visualization and distribution systems. Hidalgo is the author of Why Information Grows, a groundbreaking book on the relationship between knowledge, innovation, and economic prosperity, and his forthcoming book, The Infinite Alphabet and the Laws of Knowledge, explores the dynamics of how knowledge evolves and diffuses globally.

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@cesifoti.bsky.social 

@cesifoti

Further reading: 

Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, from Atoms to Economies

The Infinite Alphabet and the Laws of Knowledge

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In the second episode of our Trade series, Nick and Goldy talk with author Nat Dyer about his book Ricardo’s Dream: How Economists Forgot the Real World and Led Us Astray. Dyer reveals how David Ricardo’s famous theory of comparative advantage—long touted as proof that free trade is always a win-win—was built on unrealistic assumptions and a false history.

They trace how this elegant but misleading model fueled globalization, masked exploitation, and locked nations into centuries of stagnation. From Trump’s tariff tantrums to Biden’s “small yard, high fence” strategy, their conversation challenges the myths of free trade and asks: when does trade strengthen societies, and when does it doom them to decline?

Nat Dyer is a writer and researcher specializing in global political economy and author of the book Ricardo's Dream: How Economists Forgot the Real World and Led Us Astray. He is a Fellow of the Schumacher Institute and the Royal Society of Arts. He has worked for Global Witness and for Promoting Economic Pluralism, and his stories have been reported on by the BBC, the New York Times, and Bloomberg.

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@natjdyer.bsky.social

@natjdyer

Further reading: 

Ricardo's Dream: How Economists Forgot the Real World and Led Us Astray

Escape from Model Land: How Mathematical Models Can Lead Us Astray and What We Can Do about It

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In this kickoff to our special series on trade, Nick and Goldy unpack why trade policy isn’t just about tariffs and treaties—it’s about people, power, and priorities. For decades, the prevailing narrative has been that trade benefits everyone by lowering prices. But the real question is: who does it help, and who does it hurt? From the false promises of globalization to the overlooked damage in hollowed-out communities, this episode sets the stage for exploring a fresh way to think about trade—one grounded in power dynamics, democratic values, and middle-out economics.

David Autor is a labor economist and professor of economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studies how technological change and globalization affect workers. He is also co-director of the MIT Shaping the Future of Work Initiative and the National Bureau of Economic Research Labor Studies Program.

Marc-William Palen is a historian and senior lecturer at the University of Exeter, specializing in the history of international relations, U.S. foreign policy, and political economy. He is the author of Pax Economica: Left-Wing Visions of a Free Trade World. 

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@davidautor.bsky.social

@davidautor

@mwpalen.bsky.social

@MWPalen

Further reading: 

Places versus People: The Ins and Outs of Labor Market Adjustment to Globalization

Pax Economica: Left-Wing Visions of a Free Trade World

Recovering the Left-Wing Free Trade Tradition 

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Political economist Mark Blyth joins Nick and Goldy to unpack the myths and realities of rising prices, from pandemic supply shocks and corporate profiteering to central-bank missteps and decades of bad economic theory. Drawing from his new book Inflation: A Guide for Users and Losers, Blyth explains why some narratives fall flat, why others reveal deeper truths about power and inequality, and what smarter, more equitable policies could look like in the future.

Mark Blyth is a political economist and professor of International and Public Affairs at Brown University, where he studies the political power of economic ideas. He is the author of several acclaimed books, including Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea and Angrynomics, and most recently Inflation: A Guide for Users and Losers.

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@mkblyth.bsky.social

@MkBlyt

Further reading: 

Inflation: A Guide for Users and Losers

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What if the relentless drive to maximize personal gain isn't human nature, but just a flawed model we built? In this Back-to-Basics episode, behavioral economist Samuel Bowles helps us lay homo economicus—the myth of the perfectly rational, self-interested actor—six feet under. He shows how this caricature not only misrepresents human behavior, but underpins an economic system that ignores cooperation, community, and ethics. If we're hoping to reclaim our society from greed-driven oligarchs and neoliberal policy, we need a better model—which starts with recognizing that humans are more than economic robots.

Samuel Bowles is an economist and Professor Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, currently serving as Research Professor and Director of the Behavioral Sciences Program at the Santa Fe Institute. He is also the author of The Moral Economy: Why Good Incentives Are No Substitute for Good Citizens. 

This episode originally aired May 7, 2019.

Further reading: 

The Moral Economy: Why Good Incentives Are No Substitute for Good Citizens

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