Hello and welcome back, I sincerely hope the rest of your summers went according to plan. I did bit of pondering about this here newsletter over the short break. I need it to be a bit more sustainable than it was, I also want it to be a bit more personal and (hopefully!) less, shall we say, dour. So it’s going to be shorter and less formal and perhaps less biting but hopefully still on the thoughtful side of critical. Thanks so much for subscribing, it really does mean a lot.

Like most of you, I’m guessing, I remember being pretty fond of my classes in school, all the way through college. Some more than others, of course, but I recall a real sense of excitement to learn new stuff when classes started around this time of year. Naturally, some stood out as good or bad and directed me on a fairly winding course until I was spit out into the real world to do something with all that knowledge.

One of the negative standouts was the intro economics class we future journalists were required to take. I was almost morally opposed to the idea of economics, of submitting to the crass and cynical world of supply and demand. I muddled through, lazily, and managed a barely respectable grade in a 100-level class that should’ve been an easy A. I’m happy to report I’ve since come around, begrudgingly, and tried, in my own autodidactic way, to better understand how markets and incentives actually shape the world.

Naturally, in an era of ever more self-surveillance that seems to increase at logarithmic scale, the entire field of economics has experienced something of a renaissance. And the economists are decamping from academia to, where else, Silicon Valley. All of this data, much of it being collected by the newest breed of tech companies that are planting their virtual flags (and ideologies) in our very real worlds, must be like catnip to economists more accustomed to sifting through quarterly earnings and census data.

Want to know if humans are really rational? Uber has second-by-second charts that will tell you who decides to quit for the night, even when prices are surging.

The data is all proprietary, of course, which raises some pretty fundamental questions about how to do basic research when nothing is verifiable. When Airbnb claims home sharing is vital to the middle class, how is anyone supposed to respond if all the data is locked away. How should cities plan for, let alone regulate, Uber without knowing what the impact actually is? Predictably, the phrase “let the market decide” eventually surfaces.

Beyond the nuts and bolts of these sweeping changes to the world, it’s hard to ignore what this economics thinking imposes on our humanity. When Legalist, a Y Combinator backed “litigation financing” start-up launched, one of the cofounders referred to small lawsuits as “an explosive asset class”. Lawsuits are a bit inhumane by their very nature, and litigation finance has been around for a while, but an untapped resource that can be mined with some algorithms?

Most pernicious, to me, is the way market-thinking has flipped so much of the promise of all of this interconnectedness. Before Airbnb, there was couchsurfing, before Uber there was carpooling. The part of me that hated that Econ 101 class still resents how much these massively capitalized corporations have twisted these egalitarian ideas. But those same markets turn out to be a much better reflection of our true selves than our ideals.