This is a lightly edited transcript of the April 10 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.
Perry Bacon: So I want to start by talking about—taking us back to about a year ago. I think last March, the book Abundance was released by Derek Thompson, then of The Atlantic, [and] Ezra Klein of The New York Times. This book really caught a lot of attention because they’re left or center people, very thoughtful in terms of economic policy. And the book basically argued that the problem for the left was that things are not being built fast enough, and it really detailed how we need to reduce regulations on housing and things like that to have more abundance—was the phrasing.
And at first that book really took off. You heard a lot of Democratic senators and governors talking about it. But I think over the last year, I’d say another word—affordability—has taken the lead. So I wanted to talk to you about that, because you followed these economic policy debates. And I think one factor is obviously the Zohran campaign—we should get into that a little bit. But talk about maybe how, if there’s a zero-sum compass—and I’m being a little silly about this—how affordability got ahead of abundance.
Lindsay Owens: Yeah, it’s a really interesting question. You’re right—Abundance just had such an incredible moment as a book, as a policy project, a set of policy ideas. And there was a large—and still is a large—kind of policy movement around the book. Some of it predated the book, some of it was buoyed by the book. These are YIMBY organizations all across the country, new think tanks and policy shops at the federal level as well as at the state level—the Inclusive Abundance Institute, right—this whole sort of cottage industry of new players. So it had a really big moment.
And importantly, it was also the first big new idea on the left after our big loss in the general election. And the party is reeling after losses in the general election, Trump’s reelection. We have been hemorrhaging the working class, right—there are a lot of people asking questions about how this happened, who’s to blame, and what the path forward should be.
And one thing we knew is Democrats were wildly unpopular, right—we have got to do something different, we have got to shake up the status quo, we can’t support the same old stuff, we have got to be change agents. Abundance is really the first offer of how we can change things. My organization was really interested in understanding not just Abundance as a policy project—although I think we have a lot of interest in it as a policy project, there are pieces of it that we find very agreeable, we’re also interested in boosting the supply of affordable housing in the United States, for example—but we were more interested in whether or not Abundance could hang as a political project.
And so we teamed up with some really smart political people to help us answer that question. So we hired Geoff Garin of Hart Research, who’s a top pollster for the Senate Dems and has been doing polling on the economy for a long time—he was Harris’s pollster, for example. And then we also hired Brian Fallon, who advised on our project and has worked for Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris and others, and is just a really smart political thinker and communicator. And we teamed up with some other folks—brought Rama Murty on the project, and some great folks at Groundwork. And we just said: let’s put Abundance to the test. Can Abundance get working-class voters engaged with the Democratic Party again? Is the Abundance agenda resonant as a political project? Does it address voters’ top concerns, top priorities? And can Abundance compete with some other leading ideas—economic populism, fighting oligarchy, other candidate ideas that Democrats might put forward in a future election?
And look, the data was very clear. The first thing that came through in the data—and this is just anodyne to say at this point—but the first thing that came through in the data is everyone is focused on affordability, cost of living, prices. That’s your top concern, right? And so any economic agenda you put forward has to be responsive to that concern and you can’t even get in the arena if your policy agenda can’t meet Americans where they are. And where they are is: stuff is fucking expensive. And I need my Democratic lawmakers and my candidates to offer me a way forward. So that was the test—like, how does Abundance do on its own merits, then stack it up in a horse race against populism?
Then I think because we were really devoted to, frankly, quite a serious empirical exercise here—like, it was the first horse out of the gate and the first big idea, can we use this one?—we even gave it various advantages and then saw if it could hang.
Bacon: In polls or in focus groups, or both?
Owens: We actually did focus groups—yes, we did quite a few focus groups on it. And then our qual boards, it’s like an online version of a focus group. And then we did the polling. And in the polling we not only tested Abundance against a straightforward populist approach, but we also tested a hybrid. Because the truth is you don’t have to—it isn’t zero-sum. Candidates can run on a whole variety of ideas, and they can take a little bit from column A and a little bit from column B, and they can take the best ideas from every set of intellectual theorists, or advocacy groups.
Bacon: Explain what a test might sound like. So Abundance, sentence or two—you described Abundance as X and economic populism as Y. Give a short sentence of how those things might sound.
Owens: Yeah, I brought a few examples so that I could read them. Okay. So for example, in asking voters whether or not they thought Abundance-style policy solutions were responsive to the affordability problem, we would say things like: which would address the high cost of living more—cutting red tape and regulation, like a very abundance-style approach, or cracking down on price gouging? And that’s a 60–30, right—60 for price gouging, 30 for cutting red tape and regulation.
Bacon: Is that all voters, swing voters, working-class voters? What is the sample?
Owens: That one was everybody. That one was all voters—that 60–30? Yeah.
Bacon: Who’s the 30—just curiously, do you know, like who’s in—what’s in—who’s in the third?
Owens: Great question. So I’ll give you another one, which will answer that one more definitively. So when we say: look, which approach do you think is better for rebuilding the middle class—this more populist solution, or this more abundance-style solution? Fifty-nine percent want the more populist solution, 41 percent want the more abundance-style solution. All subgroups, except for Republicans, prefer the populist solution. So Democrats prefer it by 42 points, independents prefer it by 20 points, working-class voters prefer it by 26 points.
Yeah, so we really took a kind of forensic look at this policy agenda. And look, it has some appeal—it is absolutely the case that there are elements of the Abundance agenda that majorities of voters like, building more affordable housing. It’s just that when stacked up against alternatives, it’s really an inferior choice. And more importantly, when put through the test of: can it be resonant with voters’ top concern, which is affordability—can it appeal to the coalitions that we’re trying to pull back into the party, the working class?—it does particularly poorly.
And to answer your question of where did it go, I think it faded from the political conversation because ultimately it couldn’t compete as a political project on the merits. That isn’t to say that it’s not a viable and important policy project—Abundance adherents right now are interested in the housing bills that are moving through the Senate, Senator Warren wrote the housing bill, and there’s plenty of room for the policy project. But I think as a political one, it just can’t—it’s a horse that can’t really run. And I just think it is interesting that people do tend to try to run on winning and popular messages.
Bacon: So the one thing I remember, when they were talking about the book—Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein—one thing they said was essentially the idea you framed. The question is: does the agenda help with affordability? I thought part of their framing was that people perceive Democrats as not governing effectively—yeah, just affordability was second. And if we have—and if housing can be developed as fast in California as in Texas, that’ll show that Democrats govern well, and that’ll help the party nationwide.
How do you view that argument—it’s a little common, but how do you view that argument, which is a little bit separate from affordability?
Owens: Yeah, it’s a really important one. It is absolutely central to their thesis. And if you remember, their book came out at a really interesting time in the country last year, when Elon Musk had the keys to the castle and was prosecuting this larger DOGE agenda, right? He was going to cut all the fat in the government and come in and bring the kind of technologist CEO approach—make stuff faster, bring in the Geek Squad, sit them in the office with their own laptops. And so it was like a kind of very resonant conversation in that respect as well. And they positioned themselves as an alternative to Musk, a different form of approach. But I think they agreed with Musk’s premise that there was room for more efficiency in the government, et cetera.
We also did a separate project with Jeff Geoff Garin about Musk and DOGE, and I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but it is similarly a two-to-one margin. Now, when you ask Americans why government isn’t working for them—broadly speaking—the biggest impediment to government working for them is that the government is working for the wealthy and corporations. Not that it’s just an inefficient, outdated place, and that’s the biggest problem with it.
There is a sort of analysis that most Americans have of government and efficiency and effectiveness—or slowness—that actually stems from an analysis of power. And similarly, when you test abundance-style focuses on housing, for example—this is a great one. So you ask people why their rent is too high. They’ll tell you it is greedy landlords, they will tell you it is like private equity’s footprint in the rental market. And they do not think that the reason their rent is too high is red tape.
So there are these, I think, additional common threads related to your question, which is: I think most Americans don’t really think it is just red tape and bureaucratic inefficiency that is standing in the way of government working well.
Now, that being said, there is—there’s no one in the poll—and this is, I think, just a really important point, we really tried to be even handed. And in our Interested Parties memo we talked about this: there is some appeal to the Abundance agenda. There are not Americans who are lining up for red tape, they’re not Americans who are lining up for more bureaucracy, to be sure. It’s just that the diagnosis of the problem and the potential solutions for the problem just aren’t resonant with Americans’ theories of why these problems exist. And Americans don’t think that if you fix those problems, they’ll get as much as they need on the flip side.
Bacon: Jumping back to 2024 a little bit. I know the Harris campaign had a lot of things going on, but there was a period where she was talking about price gouging, and then she stopped doing that—where she was talking about we’re going to build several million more homes. I’m not opposed to that. And so it was clear that they had gone from a more populist approach to a more abundance approach even then. Yes, campaigns are out there to win elections—I think—so in that sense I was confused. So your data says that price gouging is a more salient issue for voters than maybe development of houses is. But why did an actual campaign trying to win—what am I missing here, and why did they also lean into this sort of abundance—
Owens: Yeah. I will say, without disclosing too much inside baseball—I do think one of the reasons why it didn’t take me very long to persuade Jeff and Brian to come onto this project is they understood the potency of the more populist argument, and they understood the lack of resonance of the more abundance-style argument. And Perry, I’ll just say—this is one of my favorite hobby horses which I’ll borrow from Chad Maisel —they actually didn’t propose two million homes. It was two million units. And just, what is a unit? And—
Bacon: Oh, unit—housing, meaning an apartment.
Owens: I’m just saying like, it was—there was just this kind of… It was very austere and it just lacked—as a communications tool, as a policy that would resonate with Americans, it really lacked—it lacked a lot. It left a lot unsaid. And I think people didn’t see themselves in that proposal. Where will the unit be? How big will the unit be? Will it be a nice unit? How much will it cost? All of these questions left unsaid. We’re just going to build two million—
Perry Bacon: The reductive answer is Kamala stopped talking about price gouging because the donors didn’t want her to? Is that what you think too?
Owens: I don’t know that it was just the donors. I think—my understanding is there were a couple of particularly vocal folks from the economics class who called her directly and pled their case.
Bacon: You mean like policy people not just donors?
Owens: The sort of more neoliberal or conservative economists—they were very upset with it, they thought it was a problematic proposal. But look, the largest kind of independent expenditure PAC activity that was spending on her behalf—they were running price gouging ads, because it was the top-performing ad. And when they finished analyzing the cycle, it was the top-performing ad, right? Yeah.
Bacon: So moving to 2026 to 2028—I guess in a certain sense, I’ve always thought the Abundance agenda—you frame it as populism versus abundance, and I think that’s probably correct. But if you are—I’ll just use the names—if you’re Josh Shapiro, if you’re Pete Buttigieg, there are people who are not going to run on a populist economic plan because they don’t agree with that. You don’t have to agree with the names I gave. But in a certain sense, if Abundance is an agenda, is it the agenda for—I’ll call them—center-left Democrats who don’t like populism? That would seem like a regional project, and kind of does—is that where we’re headed? Where Abundance will be spoken of by the non-populist candidates and the other candidates will speak about the way you talk—is that where we’re headed, right?
Owens: No, I don’t. Not to be too bullish. I think everyone is going to run on populist economics. I just don’t think—
Bacon: Like, okay, Josh is not going to run on the wealth tax. So what do you mean by that? You mean public economics then?
Owens: Look, I think a more populist-oriented economic platform is a necessary but not sufficient condition to winning a presidential. I think the data is really clear on that. And the political class, by the way, is really clear on it. The softest audiences for our economic policy work that is populist are—you know, staff, operatives, campaign consultants, people in the political class—
Bacon: How are they defining it—I guess what I’m saying is, if they’re saying the public is for economic populism, then yes, everyone agrees with what they’re saying. What are they saying when you test versus price gouging, taking on corporations? I don’t know that a lot of Democratic leadership people are for that. Maybe I’m missing something—maybe I’m not in the right meetings.
Owens: I think the bigger—I think there are two things. There’s what do people run on, and then what do they do when they get into office? And that gap—I still believe that’s huge, that is wide as the day is long. And I think you’re right that there are a lot of candidates who may run on populist economic messaging who may govern in more conservative ways. But I don’t think it’ll be viable for a candidate not to lean in on economic—what do I mean here?
First of all, obviously taxing the wealthy and corporations. Second of all, centering—taking on corporate power—as primary in your analysis of what has gone wrong with the economy and how to get it back on track.
Bacon: Like that one is the one I’m—you’re confident even the sort of centrist candidates will say things about corporations. Okay. That’s interesting.
Owens: Yes. Look, I look at how Pritzker is doing that.
Perry Bacon: Yeah, Gallego is
Owens: He led the surveillance pricing bill in the Senate to take on the role of big tech in price gouging. Pritzker is saying, hey, these AI companies are using a lot of residents of Illinois’s data—like, maybe they should have to give us some money for that, like we should get a little something for the effort. So yeah, I do think—I don’t think it’ll be enough. I think there are a whole host of other issues that are complex, and I stay mostly out of that space because I focus solely on the economy all day long, which is a pretty big job in and of itself. But I don’t think you’re going to see a lot of veering from a [00:17:00] pre-[filled] populist approach to the economy.
And look, Obama ran on populist economics, right? Ran against Mitt Romney and Bain Capital and private equity. So I do think actually that is likely to happen.
Bacon: You define economic populism—you said taking on corporations and corporate power, you said raising taxes on the rich. Is there anything else you want to list? And people—when people think about this term—yeah, that term can become ambiguous. So—
Owens: I think on affordability, I think you will have to be in favor of some guardrails on price. Okay—whether that’s like a certain price for insulin or a certain price for a certain class of drugs, whether that is a certain maximum price that we’re comfortable with people paying for healthcare, whether that is a certain price for energy. So I think much more aggressive posturing around pricing will be a big part of how folks will approach the affordability agenda.
I don’t think it will be viable to say, we’re going to build a bunch more stuff, we’re going to make markets more efficient, we’re going to get rid of red tape. Yeah. So I think—and look, I think Zohran did that well, right? It was universal childcare—that’s free. What is the price? Zero dollars, free. And fast buses—also zero dollars, right? Yes. So I think—and then obviously public grocery stores, which, the assumption being that they would have more price-setting power for essentials.
Bacon: So we’ve seen an early round of what I think are affordability policies, but they’re not what you’re talking about. They are Chris Van Hollen, Cory Booker, Katie Porter, Keisha Bottoms—actually, there’s a long list of Democrats calling for various tax cuts on various groups, very large tax cuts on various groups—basically on the working and middle class, basically saying you’re exempt from taxes. That will put money in people’s pockets to some extent. So talk about that—it’s not taking on corporate power or anything else. So talk about that as a policy vision, because they’re clearly aiming it at affordability.
Owens: Yeah. Look, it’s interesting to look at those policies through the affordability lens, because at the end of the day there are like a couple of different ways to square the circle, right? You can make stuff cheaper. Or you can put more money in people’s pockets and then they feel like they can cover the basics and have a little extra left over for a vacation or a baseball game. Which, by the way, is like the number one thing people are looking for—when we look at economic messages and what, how people define success in the economy, what they’re really hoping government can deliver—they’re like, I want to afford the basics and just have a little bit left for some extracurriculars, a family outing, a big moment, a Disneyland trip, whatever—whatever that moment is for you. A concert, attending the World Cup once in a generation, right? That’s what people are looking for.
And I think these tax proposals are saying, at least in the context of the proposal, we’re agnostic about the price of everything. We don’t have a plan to take on healthcare and bring down healthcare pricing within the context of this bill. We don’t have a plan to make childcare more affordable. What we’re going to do is just mechanically remove the amount of your paycheck that goes to the federal government in taxes—you’ll take home more of what you earn, and that is how we are going to make your life more affordable.
Yes, they’re not actually addressing or bringing down the price of anything that is unaffordable. And the problem, of course, is we don’t do anything to address the underlying cause of the affordability crisis—this stuff is going to keep getting more and more unaffordable, right? Healthcare costs are going to keep going up, and you aren’t going to have the fiscal space—or more importantly, the political space—to take on the big healthcare challenges if you burn all your political capital and all your revenue on a big tax break.
And look, companies aren’t stupid—they see that the middle class has more disposable income, these are not perfectly competitive markets, they’re going to plan to capture some of that surplus. I think you could expect corporations to take a large portion of the surplus after these tax bills are passed.
Bacon: You talked about polling a few minutes ago. I have seen some of the polling I’ve seen is just—people, and my brain suggests people like the idea of tax cuts. I think—yeah, if you make less than $90,000, or what have you—the sort of—one easy thing Zohran did is his ideas were easy to understand.
And some of these tax proposals are basically saying: if you make less than $90,000 as a family, you pay no federal taxes—easy to explain, easy to implement. Are we sure this is not going to be politically salient, even if it’s not the best idea in a sense?
Owens: Oh, I think it has a real strong chance of being politically salient. I think the reason that these bills are on offer right now is that there was a strong belief from many in the Democratic Party that Trump’s tax proposals were really important to his victory—his no-tax-on-tips, his no-tax-on-Social-Security-income, his no-tax-on-overtime—those—
Bacon: Do you believe that or not? Because you said “some people,” as if—oh, or you’re not sure.
Owens: They’re popular. They poll—I think, do we like—deciding how central it was for a swing voter—how many swing voters were no-tax-on-tips voters? I don’t know. Maybe somebody has done the analysis and I missed it, but I guess I’m open to being persuaded that it was.
Bacon: I talked to Bharat last week. He was very confident this was a big swing, this was a big issue in Nevada.
Owens: Yeah. I think that’s what I would say. There’s some regional—that’s what I would’ve guessed too, that it was central in Nevada. And I think that’s why the Nevada Democrats moved quickly to put forward a similar proposal.
Yes, broadly speaking, if you ask Americans who are working-middle-class if a policy that results in them having a lower tax burden—they’ll say, yep, like you’re not going to find a lot of disagreement there.
Interestingly, if you ask Americans what the biggest problems with the tax code are, and what the biggest needs are in tax policy, what they should be addressing—their own tax burden doesn’t come up at the top. They’re really worried about how lopsided the tax code is, how corporations don’t pay enough, how the wealthy don’t pay enough. They think the tax code is overly complex, right? There are a lot of things that stack up higher. So I guess my concerns are—there’s a sort of straightforward political case, but the question is: it’s popular, but it’s not very high salience. Maybe that’s not great, and maybe it doesn’t matter as much electorally.
But I think the bigger concern I have on the politics of it is: we actually do have a pretty good body of research about the political benefits of tax cuts—not on the campaign side, but once they are enacted. And what we know from people like Vanessa Williamson is: you don’t get a lot of credit for your tax cuts. People bank them and move on to the next thing they are grumpy about. So in the sort of world where you’re doing political things to gain political benefit, neither party historically has gotten a lot of juice from tax cuts—Democrats or Republicans—when they’ve implemented them.
Bacon: Let me switch to tax increases for a second. Yeah, I think you’re going to hear next year—you’re already hearing—a lot [about this]. The governor of California—he happens to not—he doesn’t really oppose a wealth tax, he just thinks they don’t really work unless they’re national. The governor of New York is saying she’s not opposed to taxing the rich as such, she just thinks it doesn’t work for the economy. I think we’re going to have a lot of versions of that next year.
And so how is it—I’m just curious, from you—is it better to debate sincerely with Gavin Newsom about the wealth tax, or is it better to call out the sort of—you’re saying this because the donors want that? Is it better to talk about this in terms of morals or in terms of economics? I’m just curious what you think. Maybe both, or maybe neither.
Owens: I’ll just say: this is exactly what’s happening in New York right now with Zohran. He has put forward a budget to balance the giant, insane shortfall that Eric Adams left him. The more I started digging into this when I learned about it, the more stunned I was—just, what a mess he was handed. And he’s put forward this budget that does some important cuts and makes some needed reforms, but also fills the shortfall with new revenue—a tax on millionaires, some changes to corporate income tax in New York. And the legislature has basically passed a version of this, and Governor Hochul is a no on it.
Bacon: Yes—for reasons. But she’s not saying—she’s not Republican about it. She’s more of a—it happens—going to take away businesses in New York. Yeah, that’s what she says.
Owens: Yeah. The big thing that you get when you do a tax policy like this—and we’ve seen this over and over again, whether it was in Massachusetts or in New York the last time, or New Jersey or California—you get a big scary conversation about millionaire migration. This is like one of my all-time favorite topics, because my dissertation advisor is like the world’s foremost expert on millionaire migration.
And when I was in grad school, he was refining his magnum opus. And so I listened to him present this like 7,000 times. So I feel like I’m the second world expert on it because I’ve heard the expert talk about it so many times.
But there’s no evidence of it. Look—who moves to New York? People move to New York for economic opportunity. Who leaves New York? Retirees who go to Florida. The millionaires’ networks in New York are actually really stable, right? They have particular social networks they like in New York, they have particular schools they like for their families in New York, and their jobs are particularly New York-based—people in finance who work within a certain social network. So millionaire migration is much lower than migration of other income classes. It’s actually people who are seeking economic opportunity who move, not people who are already in good stead.
So yeah, you’re going to hear all of these arguments about migrating economic opportunity, these arguments about it being bad for business. But businesses are still going to be going to New York, businesses are still going to locate in the U.S., because there are a whole host of other factors about the U.S. that are still really great for businesses—including our wonderful, educated labor force.
Bacon: Let’s close with an issue Groundwork’s worked a lot on recently. I don’t know if it’s—surge pricing—I think the dynamic pricing—you can tell me the right term for that when you’re answering.
But I’ll be honest: I got more personally interested when I learned that where I used to work, The Washington Post, is now trying to charge people different prices for their news service subscription depending on how much money they have, which I had never thought was possible before. So talk a little bit about what is happening on this dynamic pricing, and then secondly, what people can do about this.
Owens: Yeah. The way pricing works—how companies set prices—has completely changed in recent years. For almost 150 years we have had a price tag in this country. For thousands of years before that we haggled—there were no price tags. The Quakers thought haggling was super discriminatory. We thought all men should be equal, pay the same amount for the same item. They got rid of haggling, instituted a standardized price. Wanamaker takes that, puts it in his department store in Philadelphia—the price tag is invented. For 150 years we see a price tag, and you and I pay the same amount for the same item.
In the last decade or so, that has quietly—without really a lot of warning—completely changed. And now, increasingly, companies are not just looking at how much something costs to make—the labor costs, the input costs, whatever. They’re also finally calibrating exactly how much you’re willing to pay, and they’re figuring out the price based on that assessment, and they’re charging you and I a different price. And of course in e-commerce it’s really easy to do, because you and I don’t realize we’re paying different prices—we’re not standing in line next to each other at the grocery store or picking up lipstick at Wanamaker’s.
So it’s really taken off in e-commerce, and a place like The Washington Post is a place for doing surveillance pricing. But oh, by the way, The New York Times does it too, right? This is not unique to the Post—they’ve been pretty tech-forward, they haven’t been shy about their interest in bringing more AI to the newsroom, and that obviously is true for the finance desk as well.
Bacon: Sure.
Owens: And basically they’re looking at how interested you are in the content, and where you’re logging on from—your location—and what kind of device you log on from, if it’s a computer or a phone, an iPhone or an Android—all of these things.
Bacon: Oh, they’re trying to analyze. So if you live in Manhattan and have an Apple computer, you might have lots of money. Is that the idea?
Owens: Yeah, that’s—we don’t know exactly how the Washington Post algorithm works. We should be honest about that. But these are the types of inputs.
Bacon: Yeah. That’s what I’m trying to—
Owens: And then they also were analyzing your taste and your—for the content. If you’re someone who—you’re a real news monger and you’re just like crushing stories—they’re like, oh, this person seems like they’re really on the line, let’s double their price. If they think you’re addicted to the Wordle at The New York Times, like the bundle price is going to go up. So this is—this is just—
Bacon: This is countywide—where journalism is a small part of this. I’m sure it happens countrywide. That’s what you’re saying, right? Yeah.
Owens: Look, in journalism I think it’s been changing since—again, since the sort of print newspaper gave way to the digital subscription, right? Because of course, with the print newspaper, the price of it was printed on the newspaper, right—you knew exactly how much you were going to pay for it.
[Going up in price based on who you are] is something that Americans hate. I think it should be banned. I don’t think companies need to set individual prices based on spying on you. I think there are plenty of ways to do business without it. It undermines transparency—
Bacon: How would that work?
Owens: So there are proposals in Congress right now. Greg Casar has a bill in the House, Ruben Gallego has a bill in the Senate. New York actually passed—part of the reason we know about what The Washington Post is up to is New York passed a law requiring companies who price algorithmically based on your data to disclose it. And when you log on and buy something in New York, if it’s priced according to an algorithm set using your data—
Bacon: Some fine print somewhere, probably.
Owens: Yeah. Yeah.
Bacon: Little better than nothing. Okay.
Owens: But yeah, the disclosure is better than nothing, honestly. The best part about the disclosure from my perspective is it helps people like me blow the whistle, know where to spend our research hours, things like that. I just finished a book on this topic, so you can see I’m very passionate about it.
But I think there are a lot of states that are moving forward with bans on surveillance pricing. We haven’t seen any reach governors’ desks yet, but there’s very active movement in Colorado and Illinois and Hawaii and Maryland and New York and Pennsylvania and New Jersey and California and Tennessee. So I think this is the intersection of two things. Americans hate being ripped off, overcharged, gouged—and being spied on, having their privacy invaded. And that combination is something that will get folks pretty frustrated with you if you’re a company.
Bacon: Last question. I was reading your bio for this and I realize you’re a sociologist—is that right?
Owens: Yeah.
Perry Bacon: So talk—because most people who do economic policy are economists or lawyers—’cause lawyers run government, apparently. But I’m just curious: does that training help you in any sense? Or how does it make you see this world differently, perhaps?
Owens: I think—yeah, it’s a good question. I think there are two things that I get from my sociological training—and it’s always hard to know if I had them, and that’s why I became a sociologist, and then the sociology degree honed them.
There are two things that I focus on a lot when I look at the economy. The first is power. I’m a little less interested in just the price signal, and I’m a little more interested in the structures of power that underlie how the economy works and who it works for. And the second thing I’m really interested in is what sociologists call stratification, which is really just this: there are unequal societies, and inequality in societies is problematic for a whole host of reasons. And I have a very materialist-focused—I care a lot about the wellbeing of Americans, their pocketbooks—not just because I think material wellbeing is important in its own right, but I think it’s also important to a healthy democracy. That’s the lens that I bring to the work.
There are a handful of us in town, actually. The chief of staff for Senator Warren is a PhD sociologist. There aren’t many of us, but we’re in some interesting corners of the world, and we’re focused on the economy, just like economists are—but with a slightly, I think I would argue correct—a slightly more correct lens, but really a broader lens, and a more particular and keen interest in the role of power in shaping economic outcomes.
Bacon: Finish up—where can people find you? You mentioned a book, so talk about that. And where can people find Groundwork’s work more broadly?
Owens: Yeah. You can look Groundwork Collaborative up—we’re groundworkcollaborative.org. We’re also on Twitter and Bluesky and TikTok and Instagram—we’re everywhere. And yeah, the book is called Gouged: The End of a Fair Price and What That Means for Your Wallet, and it’s out in September with Penguin Viking, and it’s available for pre-order wherever you order your books.
Bacon: All right, great place to end. Great to see you. Thanks for joining us.
Owens: Thanks for having me, Perry. Bye.
