Just a pair of eyes.

This site has one idea in it, and the name is the idea: it works both ways.

The story we get told about extreme wealth is that it’s sealed off. Self-contained. The people at the top earned their way out of the system the rest of us live in, and what happens down here is no longer their problem. I think that’s backwards. I think the money at the top is made of what happens down here — our rent, our groceries, our labor, our spending — and that you cannot keep taking a bigger slice of a thing while shrinking the thing.

If that’s true, then the people doing the squeezing aren’t safe either. They’re just further from the floor when it gives.

The fine printWhat I’m not

I am not an economist. I don’t work in finance. I haven’t read the literature and I can’t argue with anyone who has. I’m not running numbers, I don’t have a model, and I’m not going to pretend the stuff I write here is research.

Nothing on this site is financial advice. It would be an extremely poor source of it.

For the recordWhat I am

Someone who noticed a trend and couldn’t stop noticing it. Prices up, wages flat, record profits announced alongside layoffs, a generation that can’t buy a house doing the jobs that make other people rich. None of it is a secret. It’s just that everyone discusses it like it’s the weather instead of a decision.

So this is me asking the obvious questions in plain language, in public, as a person affected by the answers rather than an expert on them. Sometimes that means I’ll be wrong in ways an economist would find funny. I’d rather be wrong out loud than quietly agree to something that doesn’t add up.

CorrectionsIf you think I’ve got it wrong

Good — tell me, at discuss@itworksbothways.com. I’m not attached to being right about this. I’m attached to the floor staying under us. If there’s a piece I’m missing that makes the whole thing fine, I would love to hear it, and I’ll put it on the site.

Start with The Illusion of Insulation — that’s the argument in full. Then The Automation Trap, which is the same argument pointed at the machines, The Threshold of Desperation, which is about what happens when people run out of room, and The Arsonist Firefighters, which is about Big Tech handing everyone the crowbar.

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