The Next Things on the List
Industrial society retired its hazards one at a time.
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Economics essays
Essays on markets, incentives, labor, and the accounting that decides which costs get counted at all. 44 essays in this theme.
Essays on markets, incentives, labor, and the accounting that decides which costs get counted at all.
44 essays · the pattern that runs through most of them is Burden
Start with Bureaucracy Eats the Time People Have Left Together
Working as Intended
Alignment, efficiency, legitimacy, administration and design can each certify the same system.
Cover for a Failure Once and It Becomes Your Job
Show an institution you can cover for its failure and it starts planning on you.
Bureaucracy Eats the Time People Have Left Together
Clinics, insurers and landlords get their results out of unpaid hours, and the hours come out of dinners, friendships and a father's last lucid months.
Microcredit Worked. Poverty Mostly Stayed.
Microcredit found borrowers and got repaid.
Whole Industries Profit When Paperwork Stays Hard
Tax preparers, appeal services and benefit navigators fix errors institutions left for individuals to find.
Crackdowns and Task Forces Are One Policy
Three responses to homelessness in one budget cycle, and not one eligibility, zoning or lending rule changed.
The Rule Works. She Doesn't Fit.
Every rule drops some cases, from benefits claims to database fields.
A Great Metric Can Mean Someone Is Quietly Fixing It
The dashboard shows 94 percent of patients leaving with a follow-up booked.
This Did Not Have to Cost You This Much
People call avoidable hardship paying dues, and those who endured it longest resist fixing it, because the fix makes the cost look pointless.
Who Can Survive an Error Is the New Class Line
When an insurer or agency denies you instantly and the appeal takes months, you have the right on paper and a stamina test in practice.
What Happens to the Web When AI Agents Do the Clicking
Amazon's cancellation maze worked because people get tired.
Not All Maintenance Is Care
One kind of maintenance keeps people alive so they can keep changing.
You Can Hit Every Target and Lose the Point
Hospitals, platforms, universities, and economies all improve the metrics that define success while quietly eroding the conditions that make those metrics meaningful.
Survival Isn't Proof of Worth
Oil companies, banks and tech monopolies last by making themselves irreplaceable, not by doing anything right.
Career Ladders Are Just Filters
Careers do not reward the best work; they filter for whoever survives the rungs.
The Shock Is Natural. Who Absorbs It Is Political.
Illness, recessions and storms arrive everywhere. Budgets, benefits and labor law decide which bodies take the load.
The Stock Market Hates a Cure
Ten years ago, Gilead Sciences did what modern medicine says it exists to do: it cured a disease.
My Feminism Is Not Soft
Unpaid care, always-on pings, the buried checkbox that pretends to be consent: the extraction is built into the structure.
Fifty-Fifty Is the Wrong Test of Caring for Each Other
The juggling that keeps a household running is invisible to any arithmetic of equals. A quick “You good?”
American Culture Is Stored in the Tax Code
Sprawl, side hustles, December donations: national character or tax choreography?
I Hope You Stop Letting Work Spend You
I hope you count the unpaid fixes as labor, read defaults as choices someone made, and work where leaving is as easy as joining.
Frictionless for Whom?
Seamlessness isn’t neutral. It’s subsidized, by someone else’s time, attention, and emotional capacity.
Catastrophe Bonds: How Wall Street Prices Our Disasters
Catastrophe bonds pay out only when a disaster crosses a preset threshold.
Is Honesty an Expensive Hobby?
When the truth can cost your job, your housing or your coverage, honesty becomes something only the protected can afford.
Nobody Is Too Expensive
When healthcare and benefits systems label whole groups “too expensive,” paperwork, re-checks and waitlists apply the same cost valuation that drove past eugenics programs
Care Isn't Scarce. It's Gatekept.
A free fridge on the sidewalk can draw a fine, and handing out meals takes a permit. The shortage is in permission.
ABA Is a Capitalist's Wet Dream
When do "Standards of Care" tell us more about entrenchment than about efficacy?
Every Crisis Leaves Capitalism Stronger
The oil shocks of the 1970s brought neoliberalism and 2008 brought bailouts.
Nothing Is Hidden Anymore, So Exposure Fails
When the subtext is common knowledge and everyone sees the emperor is naked, yelling about his clothes does nothing.
Collapse Capitalism: How Investors Buy the Disaster
After a hurricane, a foreclosure wave or a pandemic, buyers pick up distressed homes at a discount while displaced families wait for relief that will pay the new landlords.
AI Is Being Built for Austerity
Insurers, benefit managers and hospital chains present AI as an efficiency gain and use it to cut costs, consolidate markets and discipline clinical labor.
What Grows Where Metrics Can't Reach
Systems compress time, care and land into units of value.
Time Is a Commons
Time is contested and political: fragmented for gig workers, compressed for caregivers, deferred onto the future.
Let Disabled People's Pace Set Everyone's
Grizzly Bear took years over each album and called the process democratic.
Feeds Now Shape Belief, Not Just Attention
Repetition, vague terms and ranking now move belief more than outrage does, often before anyone notices.
How Your Anger Gets Turned Into a Product
Disaffection is not apathy; it is fuel.
Take Basic Needs Off the Market
Should anyone be denied care, shelter, or education because they can’t afford it?
Why Alternative Media Depends on What It Criticizes
Nonprofit newsrooms and crowdfunded outlets reassure affluent readers with incremental reform while staying tied to the donors and platforms that fund them.
A Good Life Isn't a Résumé
Markers of success narrow what counts as a life well lived, and the weight feels personal because it is built into the economy around us.
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