r/Degrowth

The Evaporative Economy operates between two classes:

Earning Class:

The combined poverty, working, middle, and majority of the upper class who participate conventionally in the expectation of the fair exchange of goods and services for currency. This combined class is kept unaware of their shared membership.

Escaped Class:

A rarefied stratum of the upper class who have achieved, and purposefully leveraged, Moral Escape Velocity: the threshold passed when the scale of their commercial activity grows large enough that the gravitational pull of social consequence, legal accountability, and fundamental empathy can no longer hold their business decisions in moral orbit. At this threshold, a new path becomes fiscally optimal: degrade the world slightly, increase profits fractionally and immediately. Members of the Escaped Class are not themselves immune to the micro-injustices of the Evaporative Economy they have built, though the penalty registers no more than a drop spilling out of a full bucket.

Evaporative Economy:

Describes the modern economic phenomenon in which the Earning Class experiences constant micro-injustices at the hands of companies that have achieved Moral Escape Velocity. Its magnitude is almost imperceptible, but the incessant and ubiquitous nature of this siphoning guarantees that the Earning Class will have slightly less wealth tomorrow than they did today, as unnoticed but certain as a puddle evaporating.

Phenotypes of the Evaporative Economic Strategy include shrinkflation, greedflation, gambling accessibility, planned obsolescence, predatory lending, insurance claim denials, junk fees, tipping dependency, dynamic pricing, and deceptive junk mail, among many others.

Small predatory extractions are more insidious than large ones, as they are not worth seeking litigation or even recompense for any individual customer. Yet multiplied across millions of transactions, this extraction accumulates wealth reliably and permanently into the hands of the Escaped Class, inflating their fortunes as quietly and naturally as a cloud forming above 340 million evaporating puddles. In this economic climate, wealth cannot trickle down, it evaporates up.

Data illuminating the growing gaps between inflation and wages, CEO and worker compensation, and GDP and living conditions, are consistent with the Evaporative Economic Model. Their presence alone does not prove the model, though their absence would falsify it. Whether this model truly explains these gaps is an empirical question worth asking. Answers are ignored when the S&P is up.

Puddles evaporate. A cloud grows. Yet no rain comes.

Read the full 2-page Substack publication: On Razors and Puddles

I was sleeping in my hotel (yes, ironically another product of capitalism), when I saw a tree being cut down 🌳

Don’t know why, but it instantly reminded me why I hate capitalism sometimes 😤

Everything peaceful eventually gets replaced by construction, profit, and concrete.