Why Everything Feels Rigged, with Dean Baker

Everyone says the economy is broken — but economist Dean Baker thinks almost everyone, left and right, is misdiagnosing why. In one of our wonkiest and most fun conversations yet, Nick sits down with the co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and author of Rigged to take the whole thing apart. They start with a word you can't escape right now: affordability. Is it even real, or just a new way to say "I feel poor"? Baker walks through why wages actually outpaced inflation for years, why the squeeze people feel now is real anyway, and the surprisingly simple metric he uses to track it — how much people are spending at fast-food restaurants. From there it opens up: why prescription drugs that cost a few hundred dollars to make sell for tens of thousands (and how patents, not "the free market," are the reason), why finance is largely "parasitic," how private equity is built to strip and walk away — and Nick's favorite thread, why blaming everything on "late-stage capitalism" might be the laziest thing the left does. As Baker puts it, there was a book called Late Capitalism fifty years ago. It's been late for a while. Plus: the AI bubble, why nationalizing the AI companies makes no sense, and what the fight over data centers reveals about who the rules really get written for. Dean's book Rigged is free to download.