How I Think About the Economy
Recurring frameworks, and the people who shaped them
These are recurring lenses I've developed across my essays to make sense of the economy.
Some I named. Others are frameworks I've built on ideas from people far smarter than me.
All of them started as observations that kept coming back.
None of this thinking happens in a vacuum. These are the writers, economists, and thinkers
whose work I return to constantly — the people who gave me the language and frameworks
that my own ideas are built on top of.
Economists & researchers
John Burn-Murdoch
Financial Times
His work on Baumol's cost disease, youth unhappiness, and the loneliness crisis shaped how I think about why prosperity can make things more expensive and why young people across the Western world are in freefall.
Paul Krugman
Economist, Nobel laureate
His Vibecession series reframed my original concept through three questions I now use constantly: Can you afford to participate in society? Are you one broken tooth away from bankruptcy? Are you being scammed?
Alex Tabarrok
George Mason, Marginal Revolution
His research on zero-sum thinking gave me the framework for understanding why the US retreated instead of rallied when China's DeepSeek surpassed GPT-4. The Sputnik comparison is his.
Hyman Minsky
Economist
Stability breeds instability. Comfort leads to complacency. Asset prices rise, people think it continues forever, they gorge on debt. The Minsky moment is the shadow behind almost everything I write about financial fragility.
William Baumol
Economist
Baumol's cost disease explains why the core ingredients of middle-class life — housing, healthcare, childcare, education — get more expensive faster than wages grow. You can do everything right and still feel underwater.
Dan Davies
Writer, economist
"Vibes might be like a supercooled fluid, just waiting for a random shock to change phase." That line crystallized what I was trying to say about the Vibecession better than I had.
Nancy Fraser
Political philosopher
Her crisis of care framework directly informs how I see the maintenance economy — an industry that props up the labor market but not the stock market, absorbing resources into upkeep rather than creation.
Greg Ip
Wall Street Journal
His "Most Joyless Tech Revolution Ever" piece captured something essential: we have all this technology, but we don't trust each other and we feel terrible. The push and pull between capital and labor across 40 years.
Media, culture & technology critics
Neil Postman
Amusing Ourselves to Death
The original diagnosis: what happens when public discourse becomes entertainment. The Great Entertainment is Postman's thesis applied to governance in the age of social media and AI-generated content.
Jean Baudrillard
Philosopher
Symbols of greatness circulating faster than the conditions that once sustained them. Baudrillard's America is the intellectual backbone of the Simulation Economy — performance without prosperity, image without substance.
C.S. Lewis
The Screwtape Letters
Lewis saw that evil creeps in through ease, not fury. Screwtape's playbook — nudge people toward passivity, let them smooth away all friction until they're hollow — is the operating system of the convenience economy.
Rose Horowitch
Journalist
Her "Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books" essay documented what I was seeing as the Simulation Economy in action — learning as interface management, credentials without the underlying work.
Jean Twenge & Jonathan Haidt
Researchers
The empirical foundation for understanding what smartphones and social media have done to an entire generation's cognition, attention, and social development. The compound crisis starts here.
Spencer Kornhaber
The Atlantic
His writing on zombie formalism — rehashed art optimized for shareability — helped me see the West Village Girl and curated friction as an economic phenomenon, not just a cultural one.
Samantha Rose Hill
Writer
"AI mirrors you. You're being sold back to yourself. It will only increase hyper-individualism and isolation." That line runs underneath everything I write about the simulation economy.
Toby Shorin
Life After Lifestyle
His work on how consumption and platforms drive identity formation helped me see financial nihilism and aspirational displacement as identity questions, not just economic ones.
Political economy & history
Mark Carney
Prime Minister of Canada
"You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination." And: "Nostalgia is not a strategy." Both lines run through the Great Entertainment.
Alexis de Tocqueville
Democracy in America
The original diagnosis of American loneliness as institutional and fiscal, not just personal. "The American was an individual first, nothing second." The compound crisis is Tocqueville's warning realized.
Robert Kagan
Political scientist
His framework of American hegemony as a trust arrangement — the world wagering that the US would not exploit its power to enrich itself at their expense — is what makes the Great Entertainment so dangerous.
Karl Marx
Philosopher, economist
Commodity fetishism taken to its logical endpoint: when Kalshi wants to financialize every difference in opinion, when every interaction is a transaction and every opinion is a tradable asset, solidarity becomes structurally impossible.
Nassim Taleb
Writer, researcher
The barbell strategy — defensive and aggressive at the same time — maps onto how young people are splitting between trades and crypto moonshots. Anti-fragility and the consequences of removing friction from complex systems.
Wendell Berry
Writer, farmer
"The world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children." The moral center of the invisible prosperity thesis — what we owe to the systems we inherit and the people who come after us.
Tanner Greer
Writer, historian
His synthesis of Tocqueville and Wang Huning on American loneliness — systemic, institutional, fiscal, engineered — shaped how I understand the compound crisis as something built, not accidental.
Viktor Frankl
Man's Search for Meaning
When the labor market tightens and the structure removes purpose, Frankl's warning becomes economic: people lose their sense of meaning, and that's when the real problems develop.
Last updated March 2026. Essays live on Substack.
Book: In This Economy? (Penguin, 2024).