economics

Homo economicus never existed but we still build policy like it does, and people keep getting hurt.

The word meritocracy was coined as satire, and we built an entire economic theology around the joke.

We treat healthcare like a consumer product when it functions like a road or a power grid.

You bought it but you don't own it. Repair restrictions aren't a consumer inconvenience; they're a property rights crisis.

The entire internet runs on software maintained by exhausted volunteers. That's not a feature; it's a crisis.

The 'attention economy' metaphor gets it wrong, and the error isn't academic.

Universal basic income has gone mainstream, and that should make you suspicious of what it leaves untouched.

We have been steering the economy by staring at the wrong dashboard for sixty years.

Most wealth in America is not created but extracted, and the economy is increasingly about controlling gates rather than building roads.

The self-made billionaire is a myth that serves a political function, and it is time to retire it.

Local food looks expensive because industrial food is artificially cheap, and somebody is paying the hidden costs.

Third places are disappearing because we priced out the conditions that made community happen for free.

Your grandparents repaired everything. You throw everything away. This isn't a generational virtue difference.

Most American suburbs cannot pay for their own infrastructure. The math has never worked. We just kept building anyway.

Higher education stopped being about knowledge long ago. It's a sorting mechanism for employers, and the content is incidental to the credential.

Worker-owned businesses survive longer, pay better, and don't require exploitation. The barriers are political, not economic.

Common-pool resources exist everywhere. We just stopped seeing them. The tragedy of the commons is a myth that served enclosure.

You can have modern medicine and less stuff. These aren't contradictory. Degrowth targets throughput, not quality of life.

You cannot consume your way to sustainability. The market will not save us. Green capitalism is an oxymoron that delays real solutions.

Housing costs aren't natural market outcomes. They're policy choices defended by people who benefit from artificial scarcity.

Historical and contemporary evidence that withholding labor is the most effective leverage workers have. Strikes aren't outdated; they're suppressed because they work.

Uber didn't invent precarity. It rebranded it. The gig economy is piece-work with an app, a return to pre-labor-law conditions dressed up as innovation.

Philosophy majors now have lower unemployment than computer science graduates. The data on humanities education contradicts everything you've been told.