Squeeze
1970 → 2024 · Productivity, Wages & The Cost of Actually Living
According to the 2024 BLS Consumer Expenditure Survey, the average household spent $78,535. Here's where that money actually went:
Housing: 33.4% · Transportation: 17.0% · Food: 12.9% · Healthcare: 7.9% · Insurance & pensions: 12.5%
That's 83.7% of the average household budget on things nobody calls vanity. Entertainment — the closest proxy for "convenience" — accounts for 4.6%. Apparel: 2.5%. Together: 7.1 cents on the dollar.
Meanwhile, the categories rising fastest are the ones households can't cut. Nobody cancels their car insurance because it went up 12%. Nobody stops eating because protein prices jumped 21.5%. The squeeze is concentrated in non-discretionary spending — by definition, the opposite of vanity.
This sounds like consumer sovereignty — the idea that demand drives supply and we get what we choose. But it inverts the actual causality at work in consolidated markets.
When a family health insurance premium costs $25,572 a year, that's not a preference. When median gross rent rose 36% between 2019 and 2024 while incomes rose 24%, tenants didn't "choose" to pay more — they paid because the alternative was homelessness. Markets only respond to demand when consumers have genuine alternatives. Remove the alternatives and you don't have a market. You have a toll booth.
The tell: the categories where prices have exploded the most — housing, healthcare, childcare — are precisely the categories where market concentration is highest and exit options are lowest. That's not consumer behavior. That's captive demand. Blaming the buyer for the price is the oldest misdirection in the book.
The system didn't fail. Wages grew a modest +29% since 1973. Productivity grew +250%. Home prices grew +1,045%. Family health premiums hit $25,572 a year. Corporate profits doubled as a share of GDP.
The system performed exactly as its incentive architecture demanded — extracting the surplus upward, while workers stayed just solvent enough not to riot. That's not a cultural problem. That's engineering.
It's called The Commons.
The data above describes a system structurally incapable of fixing itself from within — not because of bad people, but because the incentive architecture forecloses the action. The question isn't whether the market is broken. It's whether we can build something alongside it.
This episode maps out what that looks like: a parallel economy, The Commons, where necessities are removed from the profit motive. This is what we need to build.
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