The Extraction Economy

A meaningful share of what flows out of the average household's accounts every year isn't the cost of a product or service — it's the cost of not looking closely. Overdraft fees, idle cash earning nothing, a 1% advisory fee compounding away decades of returns, whole life insurance sold instead of bought: none of it is illegal, and all of it depends on inattention to work.

This track names the mechanisms one at a time — how credit card interest actually compounds, what a “free” app is really monetizing, how BNPL and payday lending price the true cost of easy payments, and where advisor incentives quietly diverge from client interest. It ends with a genuinely useful reframe: the people whose spending seems designed to impress others are, more often than not, impressing nobody in particular — the accumulation everyone assumes is happening usually isn't.