Something I'm continually fascinated by is the timelessness of economics - the exchange of goods and determining their value/utility in an environment of limited resources. Most of us understand this best through the sticker tags we see inside stores.
For the vast majority of history, selling goods was based on relations and understanding your customer, not unlike the bazaars and many shops I encountered in Egypt last week. I don't mean this abstractly: literally, attaching a fixed price tag to something you buy (no matter who you are) is a concept we invented as a species in the past ~150 years.
Before then, a shopkeeper could eye you up and down - how desperate do you look? Do you speak the local language? Are you a friend of a cousin? Are you from around here? And so on. These sorts of discriminators were used (and are used) to figure out how to price things.
Now, here's what's interesting. This very concept was created to give consumers a sense of stability and protection from discrimination - a trust factor, in other words. In 2026, however, this sort of price tag discrimination has returned.
It's called surveillance pricing, and it's personalized price gouging. Imagine the cousin example I used above, on steroids - especially when the seller in question knows what the last 100 reels you watched look like, where you live, and how emotionally distressed you are. It's essentially algorithmic discrimination, and this sort of behavior strikes me as a regression to the mean:
1000 years ago: locale and roughly personalized pricing (even if disadvantageous)
100 years ago: fixed pricing
1 year ago: locale and roughly personalized pricing (even if disadvantageous)
As social creatures with wiring dating back tens of thousands of years, the exchange of resources within your tribe is not unheard of at all - no matter what kind of pretty words we use, there is a timelessness and unspoken social wiring to it all.
It's the same reason I think some of the best products are the ones which tiptoe this carefully - offering personalized benefits while being roughly priced the same. If you pay $20 a month for ChatGPT, what you get out of your $20 may be very different than what someone else gets, in the same way that you can spend $50 on a dinner date with two different people, and get drastically different satisfactions from either.
There's a whole future edition buried in here somewhere that I bookmarked for later as well. Let me know what sparked in your mind reading this.
Be well,
Michael Kirsanov