Conversations around artificial intelligence have dominated the news cycle and culture at large for the better part of three years, with concerns becoming amplified more and more as time has gone on. These concerns focus mainly on regulation, safety, and environmental impacts.

Many policymakers argue that the scale of “Big Tech” threatens innovation, a claim often more motivated by political incentives than true economic analysis. More helpful than anecdotal assumptions, however, is the work of two twentieth-century Austrian economists, F.A. Hayek and Joseph Schumpeter. It seems the real threats to innovation may be less about Big Tech and more akin to bureaucratization and central planning by regulators. While critics fear capitalism’s excesses, both Hayek and Schumpeter warn that overreaction can stifle innovation. Overall, the two thinkers demonstrate that the danger is not “unregulated capitalism,” but the merger of large corporate bureaucracy with state planning impulses.

As Schumpeter describes in his magnum opus, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, the process of capitalism is a complex one. He describes the phenomenon of creative destruction, where an entrepreneur innovates a particular good or service. This eventually erodes the very entrepreneurial ambition that created the product, replaced instead by a large bureaucratized firm, drunk on its own success and unable to innovate with the same veracity as before, until the next innovative competitor comes along and the cycle continues. This is evident in Big Tech: Amazon, Apple, and Meta are no longer scrappy startups but what Schumpeter would call “perfectly bureaucratized industrial units.”  The innovation that led to their initial success becomes routine inside R&D departments, layers of middle management, and the firm ultimately becomes technocratic. This erodes the risk taking that led to the innovation in the first place, and risk taking becomes less commonplace. The public then interprets this slowdown as a “market failure,” opening the door to the appeal of government involvement. 

This slowdown is happening in the midst of the AI revolution, with massive tech company layoffs. The mantra of ‘move fast and break things’ has given way to a crisis of middle management, most visibly in Elon Musk’s decision to lay off over half of Twitter’s workforce. These firms are not “monopolies” preventing competition, as much as they are bureaucratic giants facing internal stagnation, an ironic product of their own entrepreneurial success. 

If Schumpeter shows why big firms ossify, Hayek shows why regulators cannot fix the stagnation, and often make it worse. Policymakers always assume they can design rules for “safe AI,” “fair algorithms,” or something of the like, and appeal to a populous afraid of change and often experiencing paralysis around technological development. Such regulatory interest may seem like “common sense,” but they each require information that no central authority can gather, even with hearings, white papers, and expert panels.

Hayek dubs this phenomenon “the knowledge problem,” a commonality in his critique of socialism and the “fatal conceit” of central planning. Hayek famously said, “The curious task of economics is to show men how little they know about what they imagine they can design.” The best opportunity for AI progress is decentralized, happening in small labs, and promoting innovation and development as much as possible. The “best” AI architectures, training data, or safety protocols cannot be known ahead of time, because the extent of the technology has yet to be explored. Regulation attempts to “freeze” innovation into one approved path, which amplifies the sclerosis Schumpeter describes and stifles incentives to innovate. There are several notable examples of these bad regulations, including the EU’s recent AI act which prohibits certain model categories and imposes heavy ex ante compliance. With regulatory capture comes tremendous barriers to entry for smaller firms. This means only large tech companies can comply with the regulation, entrenching the narratives around Big Tech by preventing new innovators from coming to the table. The more policymakers decide the future of innovation, the less room innovators have to discover what actually works.

With both of Schumpeter and Hayek’s concerns put together, managerial bureaucracy merges with managerial government regulation, forming what Schumpeter calls “the heir apparent to capitalism,” a hybrid of corporate technocracy and state regulation, akin somewhat to China’s current economic system. This results in lower entrepreneurial entry, less experimentation, higher regulatory moats, more political dependence of firms, a decline of economic freedom, and a decrease in innovation, already seen in non-AI sectors. The threat is not “monopoly power,” but policy-induced stagnation. Big Tech, combined with big government, creates a self-reinforcing cycle of bureaucratization.  

In order to prevent this vicious cycle of bureaucracy, there are Hayekeian improvements that could prove helpful, including reducing regulatory barriers that privilege incumbents, and allowing open entry, open-source experimentation, and competitive discovery. A system of stable rules rather than discretionary regulatory action prevents cronyism and the kind of corporate welfare involved with regulation.

From a Schumpeterian standpoint, solutions are less direct. Generally encouraging entrepreneurship—through lower compliance costs and reduced barriers to entry—fosters innovation and a more competitive market, which better serves consumers. At the end of the day, creative destruction should be recognized as a healthy feature of economic life, not a pathological one.

If policymakers treat Big Tech’s bureaucratic stagnation as a justification for more bureaucracy, the outcome will be a self-fulfilling Schumpeterian slide into managerial socialism. The path forward is not to plan innovation, but to let a new wave of entrepreneurs challenge bureaucratic giants. Big Tech does not need to be centrally managed, and AI does not need a planner. 

What it needs is competition, openness, and the freedom to discover what no regulator or executive committee can foresee. Hayek and Schumpeter help us see that innovation survives only when we defend the institutions that make creative destruction possible.

Markets have long been accused of lacking morality. On February 10, the Vatican decided to supply one. The Institute for the Works of Religion (IOR), commonly known as the Vatican Bank, partnered with Morningstar to launch two stock market indices designed to guide Catholic investors. The Morningstar IOR US Catholic Principles Index and the Morningstar IOR Eurozone Catholic Principles Index are “built following market best practices and in accordance with Catholic ethical criteria, and intended to serve as a global reference point for Catholic investing.” 

According to reporting by Business Insider, the US index is heavily anchored, with more than twenty percent of the portfolio concentrated in firms such as Meta, Apple, Tesla and Alphabet. The European index remains more geographically and sectorally diverse, with holdings including ASML, Santander, Hermes and Deutsche Telekom. 

The move marks a notable shift in tone from just over a decade earlier. In 2014 Pope Francis openly criticized financial markets and speculation. “It is increasingly intolerable that financial markets are shaping the destiny of peoples rather than serving their needs, or that the few derive immense wealth from financial speculation while the many are deeply burdened by the consequences.” 

The Vatican is not the first religious institution to enter the world of faith-based investing. As MoneyWeek notes, smaller religiously oriented products already exist, including the FIS Christian Stock Fund ETF (ticker: PRAY) and Global X’s S&P 500 Christian Values ETF (ticker: CATH). Still, it is striking to see one of the world’s oldest moral authorities step directly into modern capital markets, no longer condemning them from the sidelines, but attempting to navigate them.

This raises a more basic question: what is the stock market actually for? However noble the intention, the organizing principle of equity markets is profit, pricing risk, aggregating information, and allocating capital accordingly.

That uncomfortable truth was captured in the 1980s by Gordon Gekko in the film Wall Street. “Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works.” The sentiment was never seen as a sermon on virtue. It was a provocation about incentives, the truth about how markets discipline behavior not through moral judgment, but through the signals of profit and loss.

The most prominent episode in which the Catholic Church became directly entangled with financial mechanisms occurred during the construction of St. Peter’s Basilica, which was financed in part through the sale of indulgences in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. That episode blurred moral authority and monetary exchange in the service of a concrete institutional project, with consequences that extended well beyond Rome. Scripture itself draws a clear boundary between spiritual and worldly domains with the passage Matthew 22:21: “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.” 

Ironically, the Vatican Bank itself operates for profit. In 2024, it reported net income of €32 million (about $37.6 million), up seven percent from the prior year. Alongside this commercial reality, IOR’s investment policy for the new indices is explicitly moralized. The framework prioritizes the sanctity and respect for human life, environmental protection, and combating addictions, supplemented by an exclusion grid derived from social responsibility and sustainability criteria aligned with the United Nations Global Compact.

In practice, this approach closely mirrors Environmental, Social, and Governance investing. ESG frameworks place pressure on firms, and now religious institutions, to become vehicles for social objectives rather than providers of goods and services. While such an approach may appear more fitting for a moral authority than for a corporation, it still falls short of the profit-driven incentives that underpin capitalism’s effectiveness. Historically, broad-based capitalist growth has done more to improve human welfare than ESG programs have demonstrably achieved. As AIER contributor Russell Greene notes, “When it comes to results, the economic enlightenment enabled 128,000 individuals to escape abject poverty every single day. In contrast, it’s not clear if the ESG movement has accomplished anything of note.” 

Simple market participation such as investing in a broad benchmark like the S&P 500, with its long record and transparent construction, would have sufficed. For example, placing $1,000 into the S&P 500 twenty years ago would have quadrupled in value, “The index has grown by 448.7% since 2005, when you made your initial investment. So, your original $1,000 would now be worth $4,487, minus inflation adjustments.”

Writing in the same era that Gordon Gekko entered popular culture, economist Milton Friedman argued that the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits, not because profit is virtuous, but because it is accountable. 

“Only people have responsibilities,” Friedman wrote. “A corporation is an artificial person and in this sense may have artificial responsibilities, but ‘business’ as a whole cannot be said to have responsibilities, even in this vague sense.”

Given that the IOR operates for profit and has now entered public capital markets, the Vatican Bank would do well to remember that markets discipline behavior through loss and reward, not moral proclamation. Investors may act on conscience, but when markets are asked to serve moral ends, whether from the UN or the Vatican, price signals are replaced with certification and branding. 

Profit is not a moral failure; pretending it can be replaced is. Markets coordinate human activity through incentives, not intentions. Asking them to do otherwise misunderstands both economics and morality.

New York City’s new mayor Zohran Mamdani made housing affordability a big part of his campaign. On his first day in office, he signed three executive orders related to housing policy, and his subsequent housing ideas have mostly involved more regulation or more taxpayer spending. Mamdani may mean well, but government cannot fix the Big Apple’s housing problem.

Mamdani’s most recent setback is related to the City Fighting Homelessness and Eviction Prevention Supplement program, or CityFHEPS. Roughly 60,000 households participate in the voucher program, and its costs have exploded in recent years, rising from $176 million in 2019 to a projected $1.2 billion in fiscal year 2025. Mamdani promised to expand CityFHEPS eligibility but recently said his administration needs more time to evaluate its options given the city’s bleak budget outlook. But time will not solve Mamdani’s money problem.

New York City is facing a $2.2 billion budget deficit, and in addition to his housing dreams, Mamdani recently announced a plan to provide taxpayer-funded childcare for two-year-olds at a projected cost of $6 billion annually. The truth is that New York City does not have the money to provide the housing it needs.

The only way to make housing truly affordable is to build a lot more of it in places people want to live. New York City cannot do this without the private sector. One recent estimate of New York City’s housing shortfall finds it needs 473,000 more units by 2032. The average cost to build an affordable unit in big cities is around $500,000 per unit. Multiplying the two numbers together equals $236.5 billion, or $34 billion per year over seven years. New York City raised $81 billion in tax revenue in 2025, meaning it would take 42 percent of all the city’s annual tax revenue to build the housing it needs if it wants to go it alone.

Mamdani’s political philosophy will be his undoing. As a self-identified democratic socialist supported by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), he sees little use for private developers. The DSA wants housing to be expropriated from its current owners and given to the “working class.” They believe tenants should control housing. As they put it, “Social housing does not offer an equal seat at the table to developers, investors, or city councilors. Social housing prioritizes and makes real the collective will of tenants.” While their long-term vision is an end to “commodified housing”, in the short term they want state-provided and publicly owned free housing available to anyone.

Mamdani seems committed to realizing the DSA’s vision. On his first day in office, he revitalized the Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants and named Cea Weaver as its director. Weaver has come under fire for some past statements about treating private property as a “collective good” and calling homeownership “a weapon of white supremacy”. While these statements are alarming to people like me who value property rights and the prosperity they generate, they are consistent with how the DSA views housing.

This way of thinking exemplifies Mamdani’s problem. Fewer people will want to build or manage rental housing if the city makes it too hard to remove unruly tenants or those who do not pay. The landlords who do stick around will charge higher prices. New York City already has some of the strictest tenant protections in the country, and these laws contribute to the city’s high housing costs. One study analyzing tenant protections finds that stricter protections reduce the supply of rental housing and increase an area’s median rent by six percent. Another study also finds that good-cause or just-cause eviction laws increase rents by six percent to seven percent, with lower-income renters experiencing larger rent increases.

Raising taxes to generate more revenue is always an option for socialists like Mamdani, but his taxing power is constrained by people’s ability to move. From 2020 to 2022, over $38 billion of adjusted gross income and 485,000 people left New York state. Research shows people, especially wealthy people, move when taxes get too high. Dallas mayor Eric Johnson is already predicting financial firms would flee New York City if Mamdani raises taxes.

Mamdani and his DSA comrades may not like working with private developers, but if he wants to make housing more affordable in New York City he does not have much of a choice. And if he is open-minded, he might learn something, too: Competitive markets often generate amazing outcomes for all involved. New York City’s housing crisis is fixable, but only if Mamdani lets the private sector do its thing.

Kevin Hassett’s recent call to “discipline” Federal Reserve researchers over a New York Fed study on tariffs is not just a political swipe. It is a troubling signal about the growing willingness of policymakers to delegitimize economic analysis they find inconvenient or unsupportive. 

Disagreement with research is a normal, healthy part of scientific inquiry. But attempts to intimidate researchers because their findings conflict with a preferred narrative undermine the credibility of policymaking itself. At a moment when trade policy is already generating uncertainty across markets, this kind of rhetoric risks turning economic debate into a loyalty test rather than an evidence-based process.

The New York Fed study in question found that US firms and consumers absorbed the vast majority of tariff costs in 2025, with importers bearing roughly 94 percent of the burden early in the year and still around 86 percent by November. These findings are not outliers. Similar conclusions have been reached by researchers at the Kiel Institute, Harvard University, Yale Budget Lab, and the Congressional Budget Office, all of which point to high pass-through of tariffs into US import prices. 

The basic economic mechanism is well understood: when tariffs are imposed, domestic buyers often face higher costs because foreign exporters rarely slash prices enough to offset the duties. Hassett may disagree with the methodology or emphasis, but calling the research “an embarrassment” that would fail a first-semester economics course dismisses a body of evidence that aligns with decades of empirical trade literature.

Hassett’s principal criticism — that the study focused on prices rather than quantities —  deserves debate, not disciplinary threats. Economists have long examined tariff incidence through price movements precisely because they reveal who ultimately pays. Quantity adjustments, wage effects, and currency adjustments can matter, but they are separate channels that require rigorous modeling and time to evaluate. Simply asserting that tariffs will raise domestic wages or improve consumer welfare does not invalidate evidence showing that price pass-throughs are substantial. Policy analysis requires grappling with tradeoffs, not declaring victory by ignoring uncomfortable metrics.

More concerning is the broader context. The administration has repeatedly attacked institutions and analysts whose conclusions diverge from its messaging, from pressuring private sector economists to dismissing unfavorable labor statistics. 

Federal Reserve officials, including Minneapolis Fed President Neel Kashkari, have warned that such attacks risk compromising the central bank’s independence, a cornerstone of credible monetary policy. Although the Federal Reserve’s current credibility may be open to debate, deliberately undermining it further is imprudent. A strength of the Federal Reserve system lies in its decentralized research structure, where district banks produce analysis that does not necessarily reflect official policy positions. Demanding punishment for economists who publish data-driven findings erodes that institutional integrity and sends a chilling message to researchers across the policy landscape.

There is nothing wrong with policymakers arguing that tariffs could produce broader strategic benefits, whether through reshoring, geopolitical leverage, or sectoral wage gains. Those claims should be debated openly, supported by models and evidence, and tested against real-world outcomes. But dismissing empirical research as “partisan” simply because it challenges a policy narrative turns economic discourse into political theater where bully pulpits have the advantage. 

If policymakers want to persuade markets and the public, they should present competing analyses. Hassett could have assailed the Fed study on the basis of tradeoffs, methodological assumptions, or competing interpretations of the data, rather than resorting to vacant dismissal.

Ignoring the economic effects of tariffs in the face of strong empirical evidence risks veering into a form of modern economic Lysenkoism where political loyalty takes precedence over analysis and communal scientific review. (Trofim Lysenko was a Soviet agronomist who rejected established genetic science, instead promoting politically-favored agricultural theories that aligned with Stalinist ideology. Under his influence, dissenting scientists were silenced, imprisoned, or purged, illustrating how injecting ideology into research handily squelches scientific progress.) 

The issue here is not whether tariffs are good or bad policy, although the administration has already conceded the harms associated with them. It is whether economic research can proceed without fear of reprisal when its conclusions prove inconvenient. Undermining that principle will surely generate a measure of sycophantic political applause, but carries long-term costs — not only for American economic health, but for scientific inquiry itself.

Despite what you’ve heard, first time homebuyers are not getting dramatically older.

Statistics are like hot dogs — often juicy but with sometimes questionable ingredients. A recent example is a story racing around the country: first-time homebuyers’ median age is 40 this year, versus just 28 years old in 1991. This alarming trend was explored in a November 6 New York Times article, citing survey data from the National Association of Realtors (NAR). 

But I fell into a trap of my own making, by ingesting a “wow” statistic that reinforced my own experience —  I bought my first house in 1991 at age 29. Now I’m hearing this stat everywhere, in news stories and recent conferences I’ve attended. Statistics like this go viral, by simultaneously carrying “factual weight” and yet stirring emotions. 

Yet the statistic, as compelling as it seems, is likely wrong. Housing economists Edward J. Pinto and Joseph S. Tracy at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) have recently reported why. The two delved into the less-than-appetizing ways the NAR statistic was created. In July 2025, the NAR team sent out 173,250 surveys with 120 questions to answer online. 

Only 6,103 people bothered to answer, a response rate of 3.5 percent. Only 1,281 of that group were first-time homebuyers. 

Not only that, but the AEI team found that those under 35 were under-represented by 17 percent and those aged 45 to 74 were over-represented by 18 percentage points. 

The NAR economists claim their statistics have ninety-five percent confidence, plus or minus 1.25 percent, but statistical confidence for representing a US population of around 86 million homeowners collapses when the sample is no longer random. Fancy weighting techniques may give an aura of fixing the problem, but rely on subjective guesswork and hard-to-track biases. 

Pinto and Tracy at AEI instead used the New York Federal Reserve Bank Consumer Credit Panel (CCP), which uses a five-percent random sample of all credit reports tied to a Social Security number, and provides borrower age and home buying history.   

And guess what they found? The median age of the first-time homebuyer is approximately 33 years old — not 40 — and has been steady between 2001 and today. Research by The Cato Institute using the US Census Bureau’s American Housing Survey also “casts doubt” on the NAR data, revealing results similar to those reported by AEI researchers. 

The incorrect NAR fact nugget might rapidly dissolve if it didn’t carry so much emotional resonance with those who feel the housing market is “unfair.” But here’s the deeper problem: when a statistic feels true, because it fits in our narrative of how the world works, its power can rapidly sway public policies in the wrong direction. 

What Pinto and other housing experts agree upon (including the NAR economists) is a widespread housing affordability problem, but the larger lesson is that it is impacting people across all ages. Thanks to zoning restrictions on housing density and other challenges, we’re simply not building enough homes. 

What’s more, we make it very difficult for many to purchase homes in less-affluent areas, by making so-called “small dollar mortgages” less profitable for banks to issue. Dodd-Frank banking regulations in the wake of the 2008 Great Recession vastly increased the overhead for issuing these loans, resulting in a rapid drop in mortgage access at the lower end of the market, as The Wall Street Journal has previously reported.

My research with colleagues at New America shows that millions of inexpensive homes exist in the United States, but the financing is unavailable for many families. This leads to falling homeownership rates, and in some cases, property values. Only 23 percent of homes that cost below $100,000 (including condos) were purchased with a mortgage loan, according to a 2020 Urban Institute study. Cash buyers made up the rest.

Community banks, which are more likely to serve these customers, are particularly hard hit by the Dodd-Frank banking regulations. Since 2010 we have lost over 3,600 community banks, “a reduction of over 45 percent,”  according to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s remarks at a conference in October 2025. 

In other words, if we want to concentrate on improving homeownership across all ages, we need to base our policies on statistics that are built upon rigorous methodological foundations. Otherwise, repeating an appetizing but incorrect statistic around first-time homeownership could lead to chronic economic heartburn.

By the time Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning hit theaters last May, the marketing narrative had become as famous as the franchise itself. The studio made sure we knew that when Tom Cruise hung off the wing of a biplane at 8,000 feet, he was actually doing it. There were safety riggings, sure, but there were no pixels where the human should be.

Compare that to the reception of recent VFX-heavy blockbusters, where armies of digital artists are employed to create spectacles, at grand scale but without stakes. The audience disconnects. We know nobody is in danger. Audiences struggle to empathize with purely artificial characters, even when the visuals are flawless, because we connect emotionally to agency and risk. When everything can be faked, the premium on what is real skyrockets.

In a previous article, Rise of the Curators, I argued that as AI commoditizes the mundane — automating logic, logistics, and basic creation — humans would ascend the “economic value ladder” toward high-touch, curated experiences. 

But there is a second half to that prediction, one that is now unfolding with surprising economic force. We not only seek human curators, we are actively rebelling against the digital itself. An “authenticity recoil” is underway — a consumer-driven pivot back to physical, imperfect, high-friction experiences.

Combine this dynamic with the lingering cultural counterreaction to the isolation of COVID-era restrictions of the early 2020s, and you have a perfect storm for an explosion of deliberately offline human engagement. We won’t all become Luddites and burn our laptops in bonfires; but these tools will likely be increasingly reserved for work and utility, while our recreation and human connection return to the physical.

The Data of the Analog Renaissance

If this sounds too theoretical, the market data beg to differ. The economic indicators of 2024 and 2025 show a distinct capital flow away from screens and toward the tactile.

Take the music industry. Vinyl records now decisively outsell CDs, and that gap only widened through 2024 and 2025. This isn’t just Boomer nostalgia buying. The trend is driven largely by people under 40, who are rejecting the algorithmic “perfection” of streaming playlists for the deliberate, tactile ritual of dropping a needle on a groove.

Simultaneously, a deliberate “dumbphone” is no longer a niche choice but a measurable market segment. Global sales of basic feature phones — devices that call, text, and do little else — hit 1.1 billion units in 2024. Buyers are desperate to reclaim their time and attention from the slot-machine mechanics of the smartphone.

Mark Manson presciently captured this thinking in a 2014 article, when he wrote:

Limitless access to knowledge brings limitless opportunity. But only to those who learn to manage the new currency: their attention.

Even photography is regressing, beautifully. Film photography has come roaring back, prompting Kodak to bring Ektachrome E100 back from the dead to meet demand. AI can generate a hyper-realistic image of a sunset in seconds, but people are waiting weeks and paying dollars to see a grainy, imperfect photo they took themselves. Why? Because the film photo is proof of life. They were there, physically, in that moment, creating something real.

Why This Matters: The Loneliness Paradox

This turn toward offline life isn’t just aesthetic. It reflects a growing health concern.

Researchers now describe a loneliness epidemic, intensified by pandemic isolation but rooted in earlier technological shifts. In The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues that the move from a “play-based childhood” to a “phone-based childhood” deprived young people of the in-person social experiences that build emotional resilience and empathy. 

Beginning in the early 2010s, rates of anxiety and depression rose in close correlation with smartphone-centered social life. AI threatens to extend this pattern in adulthood. As interaction becomes easier to simulate, the temptation to replace embodied relationships with digital ones grows — even as their emotional limits become clearer.

Face-to-face rebounded quickly once COVID-era restrictions were lifted. Zoom spiked from 82,000 customers in 2019 to 470,000 in 2020, down to 191K in 2021, as soon as people felt free to gather again. That rebound to the real revealed something fundamental: digital tools can transmit information, but they struggle to reproduce the full emotional bandwidth of physical presence.

Our brains evolved in physical communities, not virtual ones. The current revival of in-person experience is not nostalgia. It is adaptation — a response to a world where efficiency has outpaced meaning, and where presence has become scarce.

The “Offline Premium”

Both social research and market trends show people are actively pushing back against digital saturation. Clear economic signals indicate people value presence more than ever.

Digital detoxing, or intentionally limiting or stopping the use of digital devices, has become a mainstream cultural phenomenon. One recent Harvard-linked study found a one-week break from social media was associated with improvement in depressive symptoms (24.8 percent), anxiety (16.1 percent), and insomnia (14.5 percent). Unplugging can protect our mental health. 

Hybrid work, even for tech-heavy fields, indicates leaders are considering how to maximize in-person, undistracted connections.

Communal dining is increasingly popular, as Gen Z patrons have embraced the awkwardness of connecting with strangers over a meal. In doing so, they’ll rediscover a depth of conversation that inherently requires presence. 

These are not retrograde moves; they’re economically rational responses to what machines can’t do. AI struggles to generate genuine surprise, nuance, empathy, or emotional resonance. Humans are wired to.

The Rise of High-Fidelity Spaces

This recoil from the digital is even reshaping the “experience economy.” We are moving beyond “curated experiences” (like a travel plan) to “curated restrictions.”

Consider the explosion of vinyl “listening bars” across the US and Europe over the last year. Modeled after the Japanese kissaten, these venues are dedicated to high-fidelity audio. They often have strict rules: no shouting, no flash photography, sometimes no phones at all. You are there to listen.

Similarly, the use of Yondr pouches — locking phone cases that create phone-free spaces — has exploded. The company recently celebrated facilitating over 20 million phone-free experiences at concerts, schools, and comedy shows. Artists are realizing that to create a “transformation” (the highest rung of the economic ladder), the audience must be severed from the digital tether.

Until recently, curators excelled by helping you find the best digital content. In the new economy, the curator’s job is (at least sometimes) to build a wall against the digital content, creating a sanctuary where genuine human connection can occur.

The Economic Pivot in Perspective

Any business relying solely on digital scalability and optimization is betting against a rising tide of human desire. AI will drive the marginal cost of derivative, re-combinatorial content creation to zero, which means the monetary value of digital content will also approach zero.

The value is in using AI and other tools to migrate and gain efficiency in core offerings of things AI cannot forge by itself: the heat of a crowd, the scratch of a record, the risk of a stunt, the silence of a phone-free room.

I use digital tools constantly and deeply in all of my work. But last weekend I woke up on Saturday morning and I didn’t log into a digital world. I built a fire. I listened to records — full albums, side A to side B. I read a book. I talked with my wife, while our girls cuddled up close with floor pillows and some musical instruments. We spent hours enjoying each other’s company with nothing digital in sight.

It was beautiful and refreshing. But more importantly, it felt expensive. It felt like a luxury that the digital world is actively trying to steal.

If you aren’t prioritizing putting yourself physically in a room, across a table, around a fire with people you love and enjoy, you may be missing out on a great gift. And if you are an entrepreneur or investor, you might be neglecting the only asset class that AI cannot inflate away: reality itself.

The finale of Stranger Things leaves viewers with an emotional cocktail: relief, nostalgia, bittersweet satisfaction — and perhaps confusion. What became of the military personnel and the compound? More puzzling, though, is a quieter moment near the end, when young adventurers Nancy, Robin, Steve, and Jonathan sit on a roof, reaffirming their friendship and readying themselves for adulthood. As a business professor and big fan of the show, I found myself frustrated when Jonathan shared his aspiration to make an “anti-capitalist” film. It is an odd note to strike in a series that has consistently portrayed markets and material progress in a largely positive light.

At its core, Stranger Things is a story about resisting control and reclaiming agency. Whether it is Vecna using people as vessels, government scientists exploiting children, Soviet agents operating through secrecy and force, or public-school systems enforcing conformity, the show repeatedly affirms the idea that no one has the right to commandeer another’s life. Free choice — and the defense of what one values — is treated as paramount. In the final episode, viewers are invited to cheer for better opportunities ahead for an unlikely band of friends.

Only a market-based system can enable progress, which is why Jonathan’s anti-capitalist stance feels so misplaced. Take Season 3, for instance, when capitalism was quite clearly on display. In “Chapter 8: The Battle of Starcourt,” Soviet agents operate in secrecy and with force in an underground base beneath a Midwestern shopping mall. The symbolism is unmistakable: a closed, authoritarian system hidden below an open commercial space. Above ground are voluntary exchange and decentralized activity; below ground are coercion and centralized control. The contrast could not be clearer.

Starcourt Mall itself is not depicted as a moral failing or cultural wasteland. It is where teenagers shop, socialize, and work. Steve’s friendship with Robin begins at Scoops Ahoy, their shared place of employment. Where we work, what we consume, and the process of an exchange or transaction often creates opportunities for human connection. Moreover, commerce facilitates responsibility, independence, and individuality.

Capitalism is featured throughout Stranger Things in the mundane choices that allow the characters to form identities and solve problems. From Nike sneakers and Members Only jackets to New Coke, cassette tapes, and record stores, the characters signal belonging, rebellion, and aspiration through what they wear and listen to. Max’s favorite song, “Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)” by Kate Bush, became a favorite of many Stranger Things fans and went viral globally 40 years after its 1985 debut.

Consumer choices are expressive, not imposed: markets supply options rather than dictate meaning. Actually, Eleven’s attachment to Eggo waffles is a particularly telling example. It is not trivial product placement, but a symbol of preference, comfort, and agency — the opposite of the sterile control she experiences in Hawkins Lab. And the trips the kids take to stores like Radio Shack underscore how decentralized markets provide the tools for experimentation and creativity. The kids do not wait for institutions to rescue them; they buy, build, and improvise.

The finale reinforces this theme through Jim Hopper and Joyce Byers (Jonathan’s mother). Hopper shares news of a new job opportunity that offers better pay, more stability, and closer proximity to Joyce’s sons. The optimism that Hopper and Joyce share in that scene is not abstract or ideological; it is material. Hopper splurges on caviar and wine to celebrate, taking pleasure in providing for the woman he loves. Joyce, who spent much of the series barely scraping by, can finally imagine a life with less struggle.

For years, Joyce worked long hours at a convenience store for little pay, while Hopper stagnated in a run-down cabin, bored by routine policing duties. In the finale, both choose differently. Their desire to flourish is about wages, mobility, and the possibility that the past need not determine the future. Capitalism does not guarantee success, but it does make advancement possible through skill, effort, and risk-taking.

Even Jonathan’s own future rests on this foundation. He plans to pursue film studies in New York City, one of the world’s most dynamic cultural capitals because of its long history of entrepreneurship and consumer-driven growth. The creative freedom he seeks exists precisely because the city tolerates experimentation, dissent, and failure — though recent political shifts may test that tolerance.

Jonathan’s artistic ambitions, in fact, are enabled by capitalism. Creative industries thrive where property rights are secure and exchange is voluntary. The freedom to make an “anti-capitalist” film is itself a market luxury — possible because capitalism does not demand ideological conformity. Markets are social institutions, coordinating human plans without centralized command.

After seasons of interdimensional monsters and Cold War paranoia, Stranger Things ends by celebrating ordinary wins: better jobs, safer communities, chosen relationships, and the freedom to plan a life worth living. That makes Jonathan’s anti-capitalist declaration all the more puzzling. The true villains of Stranger Things are not found in market-based systems, but in systems of enforced coercion, stagnation, and the denial of choice. In reminding us how precious freedom is, the series inadvertently reveals an uncomfortable truth: capitalism is not the obstacle to the lives its characters imagine — it is the condition that makes those lives possible.