Nick Romeo, a journalist featured in The New Yorker and author of 'The Alternative: How to Build a Just Economy', shares compelling insights on transforming our economic landscape. He discusses the urgent need for a new definition of living wage and the power of cooperative ownership models. Romeo critiques traditional economics for oversimplifying human needs and explores innovative gig work solutions that prioritize fairness. The conversation also highlights sustainable business practices and the potential of collaborative ownership in reshaping societal norms.
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insights INSIGHT
Beyond Math in Economics
Economics education needs expansion beyond neoclassical market assumptions to include history, behavioral economics, and philosophical questions about fairness.
Economics is not just math; it involves normative issues like resource distribution and societal obligations that math alone cannot resolve.
insights INSIGHT
Living Wage is Political Issue
The definition of a living wage has shrunk over time from enabling a middle-class life to barely covering immediate expenses.
Defining what a living wage means is a political and moral question, not just a mathematical one.
question_answer ANECDOTE
Well-Paid Maids Success Story
Aaron Sayedian runs Well-Paid Maids, a cleaning service paying higher-than-living wages consistently.
His motive was to demonstrate that businesses can succeed and grow without exploiting workers' wages.
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How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
James C. Scott
In this book, James C. Scott examines the failures of centrally managed social plans and the destructive consequences of high-modernist ideologies. Scott argues that states often impose simplistic visions on complex societies, ignoring local, practical knowledge and leading to disastrous outcomes. He identifies four conditions common to all planning disasters: administrative ordering of nature and society, high-modernist ideology, authoritarian state power, and a prostrate civil society. The book critiques various utopian projects, including collective farms, compulsory villagization, and urban planning, and advocates for a more nuanced approach that respects local diversity and practical knowledge.
The Alternative
Mauricio Miller
As a journalist, Nick Romeo has interviewed people doing remarkable things, from running worker-owned companies to redesigning gig work as public infrastructure. These experiences shaped his new book, The Alternative: How to Build a Just Economy, and led him to one big insight: a better economy isn’t just possible—it’s already here. In this episode, Nick and Dart talk about the difference between market wages and living wages, why mainstream economics underestimates people, and how everything from co-ops to experiments in building gig work platforms as public utilities are reimagining the role of work in society right now.
Nick Romeo is a journalist whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The New York Times. He writes about policy, power, and the systems that shape how we live and work.
In this episode, Dart and Nick discuss: - Why we need a new definition of a “living wage” - The power of co-ops, trusts, and employee ownership - How gig work can be redesigned to serve workers - What it means to design an economy around fairness - How ownership models shape the future of work - Why traditional economics misses what really matters - And other topics…
Nick Romeo is a journalist and author who covers bold ideas in economics, policy, and philosophy. He’s reported for The New Yorker on everything from Austria’s job guarantee experiment to Spain’s Mondragon cooperative and Nicholas Humphrey’s theory of consciousness. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, and Scientific American. He teaches at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. His latest book, The Alternative: How to Build a Just Economy, offers a roadmap for a fairer, more sustainable economy. Praised by The Guardian as “enlightening and inspiring” and called “brisk and sensible” by The Washington Post, it showcases real-world models that are already changing how we think about work, wages, and ownership.
Work with Dart: Dart is the CEO and co-founder of the work design firm 11fold. Build work that makes employees feel alive, connected to their work, and focused on what’s most important to the business. Book a call at 11fold.com.
Work For Humans 
