Market Humanism with Nick Hanauer

Are you still seeing the world through an old paradigm?

In our recent xChange Paul Skinner interviews Nick Hanauer, billionaire entrepreneur and Amazon’s first investor, who is campaigning to replace Neoliberalism with Market Humanism, a new economic paradigm designed to increase human flourishing.

In this conversation

Nick describes the two forces that are holding back change:

1) Rich shitbags - the self interest of people who will not benefit from higher wages

2) And everyone else who thinks they are right

Nick says that Neoliberalism has infiltrated our thinking on almost everything, from how we run our businesses to how governments believe they can respond to our greatest challenges, and yet, the ideas that make up neoclassical economics were developed a hundred years ago or more and have no evidence to support them.

Together with Oxford Economist Eric Beinhocker, Nick advocates for Market Humanism as a new full stack paradigm that integrates the latest thinking and research on human behaviour, economics and public policy.

Part of Market Humanism is Middle Out economics, which shows that growth and job creation originate from a strong, thriving middle class rather than from tax cuts or wealth concentration at the top.

As Paul Skinner eloquently states in his introduction: “If you wanted to assemble a dream team to champion the new economy, you’d likely want an investor, a successful business leader, an agent of social change, an eloquent advocate and a curator in chief to bring people together. Nick appears to be the entire team.”

Our superpower

Nick points out that our superpower as humans is our ability to cooperate at scale, not our ability to compete. "Lions are very competitive, but they can’t build guitars. That is why humans dominate the planet."

Nick describes prosperity as the accumulation of solutions to human problems.

With Market Humanism, Nick says, we are uniting moral and economic concerns.

The most harmful idea of neoliberalism is that there is the trade off between a fairer society and a more prosperous one. 

Justice enables trust, trust enables cooperation and cooperation is where prosperity comes from. And trust is the best predictor of how prosperous a society will be.

There will always be some bad actors, but if you have a paradigm that works for the majority, then bad actors can be isolated. 

Our economic paradigm influences how we see the world and our ability to meaningfully address our challenges as a result.

More from Nick

Download your free copy of Markets Built for Humans here.

Follow Nick on Substack here.

Listen now

You can listen to the full xChange on our podcast here or watch the replay below.