Guides
Longer pieces on what prices actually measure: why a receipt from 1997 says something the official inflation figure doesn't, what the same phone costs in days of work around the world, and why almost everyone is carrying a mental price list that stopped updating years ago.
10 guides
How well do you actually know prices? Take the test.
Ten questions, real answers, no partial credit for vibes. Then the four documented reasons everybody fails — and the one-minute habit that fixes it.
2 August 2026 · 7 min read
Two incomes, no money: an autopsy of the modern family budget
$120,000 a year, and $350 a month left for everything else. A line-by-line look at where a dual-income budget goes, and why there is nothing left to cut.
1 August 2026 · 8 min read
Everything is more expensive, except the things that quietly became almost free
TVs fell 98%. Light fell 500,000-fold. Batteries fell 99%. Here is why the price collapses went uncelebrated — and why you still feel poorer anyway.
29 July 2026 · 8 min read
Where your money is secretly rich
The countries where $2,000 buys a $6,000 life — plus the two traps the geoarbitrage videos never mention, including the one where you become the price rise.
26 July 2026 · 8 min read
“Milk isn't $2 anymore”: everyone's mental price list is broken
Including yours. How your brain writes prices in permanent marker, why the update never installs, and the dinner-table quiz that settles the argument.
19 July 2026 · 7 min read
Your dad's salary bought a house, a car and a stay-at-home spouse
Yours buys rent. Same salary, one generation apart, wildly different lives — here is the line-by-line forensics of where the money actually went.
12 July 2026 · 9 min read
The iPhone costs 2 days of work in Switzerland and 6 months in India
Same phone, same factories, same keynote. Ranked by days of work rather than dollars, the iPhone becomes an X-ray of the global wage ladder.
5 July 2026 · 8 min read
Stop asking what things cost. Ask how long you work for them.
In 1919 an egg cost 12 minutes of work. Today it costs 2.4 minutes, even at panic prices. Time prices are the true price of everything — and they cut both ways.
28 June 2026 · 8 min read
Official inflation says 87%. Your receipt says 220%.
Someone is wrong about inflation, and it isn't your receipt. Four structural reasons the official number was never measuring your life in the first place.
21 June 2026 · 9 min read
A grocery receipt from 1997 made millions of people furious
122 items for $155 in 1997. The same cart today costs just over $500. Official inflation says it should be $312 — and that missing $190 is the whole story.
14 June 2026 · 7 min read