Who stands to gain in today’s economic system, and who gets left behind? And could a grassroots community help flip that dynamic on its head, where more people benefit than just the wealthy and powerful? One professor is investigating those questions.

Clara Mattei is a professor of economics at the University of Tulsa. She's president of a new grassroots organization in Oklahoma called the Forum for Real Economic Emancipation, or FREE. It aims to reimagine economic and social institutions. She’s also the author of the 2022 book “The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism.”

She joined “Marketplace Morning Report” host David Brancaccio, and below is an edited transcript of their conversation. They started their discussion on austerity, which Mattei argues is where the U.S. is at now.

Clara Mattei: Austerity is a word that is not used a lot, but it really cuts to the bone of what is happening in our economic system, which is the fact that the poor are getting poorer because governments and state institutions are shifting resources away from working-class people. And it's not about balancing the budget, it's not about acting virtuously to live within our means, it's really about the fact that working people constantly lose because all of their services are taken away from them, while the few benefit.

David Brancaccio: But at a superficial level, I mean, it seems odd to be talking austerity at a time that we're supposed to soon see the stimulus effects of the big budget bill that provided the tax cut coming out of the summer. Are those austere times when this is going to end up in the pockets of some Americans?

Mattei: I think the issue here is that our current administration is very good at publicizing what seems to be actually in favor of people, while deep down, what is happening is that those who live off of dividends, rent, and interest pay far less taxes than those who are actually living off of a wage.

Brancaccio: I mean, President Trump the other day was talking about sending $2,000 tariff dividends out to people. There seems to be a sense in the administration of getting some money out to people that doesn't sound all that austere.

Mattei: This is a conversation Trump has to put out there to avoid losing completely its base, a base that is clearly struggling economically like never before. You know, [more than] 77% of American workers are in trouble if their paycheck is delayed by one week. If people did get a lot in their paychecks — like the COVID money, we know, were enough to get people kind of empowered a little, they resigned, they were unionizing. So social resources may empower people to a degree by which they might not want to participate in wage labor and exploitation.

Brancaccio: Give us a sense of this newish grassroots organization that you're part of — the Forum for Real Economic Emancipation. It's early days. Are you like listening to the grassroots now, or are you emerging with a kind of plan of action yet?

Mattei: You know, I'm here in Tulsa, Oklahoma. People in this city that really represent the hardship, right, feel the thirst for knowledge that's actually critical. So what the FREE does is provide a space for dialogue through council meetings and also public events. And we're doing one a month; our next one is going to be on food sovereignty, so who controls the food, I think, is — more than ever — a timely question, and hopefully start a pilot program to say, "Let's see if we can actually break from market dependence and pressure, potentially." Also, the local institutions to switch the logic once more in favor of need, not of profit.