Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff

Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff is a weekly nationally syndicated program produced by Democracy at Work and hosted by Richard D. Wolff. The program explores complex economic issues and empowers listeners with information to analyze not only their own financial situation but the economy at large. Beyond focusing a critical eye on the economic dimensions of everyday life - wages, jobs, taxes, debts, interest rates, prices, and profits - the program also explores systemic solutions to our economy's problems including alternative ways to organize production and distribution of the goods and services we all depend on.

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Globalization from Celebration to Condemnation

Dec 23, 2025

On this week’s episode of Economic Update, Professor Wolff provides an analysis of "globalization" as a fancy slogan to hide a profit-driven, profit-boosting period (1970-2015) that saw US capitalists move factories abroad. It destroyed so many well-paid factory jobs (especially of white, male Christians) that...

Marx Was Right

Dec 16, 2025

This week’s episode of Economic Update is an adaptation from a talk Professor Wolff gave at Yale University on December 2, 2025, to the Yale Political Union. In this presentation, he discusses the significance of the title "Marx was Right," which Yale offered, and points out that, over the last 75 years, such a topic...

The U.S. Military's Role in Ecological Crisis

Dec 9, 2025

On this week’s episode of Economic Update, Professor Wolff delivers updates on the internal struggle inside the U.S. Teamsters Union between O'Brien leadership and Hooker challenge group (pro- vs anti-Trump), Trump-McMahon attack on the nursing profession in the U.S., and Trump's own reduction of tariffs and thus...

Christianity Split: Love VS Hate

Dec 2, 2025

This week on Economic Update, Professor Wolff delivers updates on the nationwide Starbucks strikes and on the results of Trump's tariffs: facts and fakery. The second part of the show features an interview with journalist and podcast host John Fugelsang about his new book: Separation of Church and Hate: A Sane Person's...

The Key Concept of 'Surplus' in Economics

Nov 25, 2025

On today's episode of Economic Update, Professor Wolff delivers an introduction to the key economic concept of “the surplus." He explains economic structures as ways of organizing the production and social distribution of the surplus. Then he briefly applies this concept to the economies of slavery and feudalism...