Great Compression

government procurement.

Because we just did an episode on the Great Compression where we talked about sort of the hidden role of defense procurement in driving the Great Compression, right? So it's very Keynesian, but it worked, right? So what do you think of those? Is it a combination of those things? What do you think it's going to take to build that missing middle?

I think the good news is we have a lot of experimentation going on.

So I think we have a number of exciting experiments going on in both the public and private side.

We used to boost unions so that workers had leverage and could bargain for living wages and less of an insane ratio where a CEO of a company makes three, four hundred times what the average worker at the company makes.

We used to have a period that economists called the Great Compression, the aftermath of World War II, when we had the least amount of income and wealth inequality in pretty much any country at any time.

And that's when this country really boomed and we had shared prosperity.

The Scandinavian countries that have higher taxes and higher benefits, but also are doing extremely well.