We have created a financial monster in which Wall Street is effectively running most of American industry, pushing companies to reduce payrolls, replace people with machinery, outsource jobs abroad and fight trade unions—while collecting a big share of savings from Main Street. It sounds like you’re calling for a new legal framework to rein in that monster. Yes, we certainly need a new approach to corporations. What was the most important lesson you took away from your experience as secretary of labor in the Clinton administration? What I learned most profoundly during those years was that we no longer have countervailing power in this country. Big business, Wall Street and wealthy individuals run our politics, our government and, thereby indirectly, our economy in terms of the rules by which that economy runs. For most of the 20th century organized labor was one of the most important countervailing forces. Other countervailing forces included local and state banks, cooperatives, retailers and small businesses. But now our entire political-economic structure lacks countervailing power, which means most workers have been stuck with stagnant or declining pay adjusted for inflation, and jobs that are less and less secure.

You can come up with great policies and great ideas but they mean nothing without countervailing power. The Democratic Party is nowhere near as bad as the Republican Party in terms of these issues, but the Democrats have too long been drinking at the same campaign trough as the Republicans. The huge populist wave we experienced this year, with Bernie Sanders on one side and Donald Trump on the other, is the logical outcome. What thinkers do you turn to today? I continue to read and re-read Thorstein Veblen, John Kenneth Galbraith and some of the great institutional economists of the 20th century and even the 19th century. One of my continuing frustrations is that we have two disciplines, economics and politics, which should be considered two halves of exactly the same system. It’s not possible to understand one without understanding the other, and yet our public intellectuals, and the books and analyses that we are provided, rarely ever expose these deep relationships.