Outsider
Economics
Your community is the asset. Organization is the value multiplier.
This book explains how.
The Math Nobody Ran
Two years of arithmetic your city council never ran. Six ideas. That's all it takes to see the rigged game — and the exit.
Community Is the Currency
Get your community together. Real skills — plumbing, bookkeeping, carpentry, code — traded between people who trust each other. No bank. No grant. No permission required. The value stays where the work happens.
Read more →The Extraction Trap
You buy coffee at the chain. That dollar hits a server in Seattle by lunch. Multiply that by everything you buy and most of what you earn leaves your zip code before the month is out. You're not poor. You're being drained.
Read more →The Coordination Premium
A plumber alone bills one rate. A plumber who knows an electrician, a carpenter, and a permit expediter bills renovations. Same people. Same hours. The value multiplies. Coordination is the lever nobody pulls.
Read more →Time as Currency
Here's what kept bugging me: money leaves. Always. But your neighbor's Saturday? That stays. Your hour of welding doesn't get wired to a hedge fund. It can't leave town. That's not a limitation — that's a feature.
Read more →Federation over Scale
Every org that outgrows trust starts acting like the thing it replaced. So don't scale. Federate. Keep each community human-sized. Wire them together. Let the network do what networks do.
Read more →The Task Board
Not an app. Not a startup. Just a board — physical or digital — that shows who can do what and who needs what done. The simplest piece of infrastructure that turns a neighborhood into an economy. Most towns are one whiteboard away from not being broke.
Read more →Stop Asking. Start Building.
I grew up in the Delta. Nobody was coming to fix the roads, open a grocery store, or run the internet to our side of the county. So people built their own. Not activists. Just practical. This project is that same energy — with better math.
Route Around
The system isn't going to fix itself. Build a new one next to it and let people choose.
Network Math
Two people trading skills have one connection. Five have ten. Ten have forty-five. The value of a network grows faster than the number of people in it. That's just how math works.
Break-Proof
One income stream is fragile. One employer is a single point of failure. Stack skills, stack streams, and the next recession is just weather.
Keep It Local
Every dollar that circulates inside your community three times before leaving does the work of three dollars. Stop the bleed, multiply the value.
Read the Room
Things happening right now that should make you very uncomfortable if your entire economic life depends on systems you don't control.
AI Is Eating Jobs
ChatGPT can write your marketing copy but it can't fix your furnace. The skills that survive automation are local, physical, and coordinated. Build that network now.
Your Bank Got Bought
Third acquisition in five years. New fees, new app, same extractive bullshit. Credit unions still exist. Self-custody still works. Act accordingly.
Programmable Money
They're building currency with an off switch. Imagine your savings account doesn't work on Tuesdays, or outside city limits, or if you said the wrong thing online. That's CBDC.
The 30% Skim
DoorDash, Uber, Airbnb — every platform takes a third of your labor and calls it a "service fee." A local coordination board does the same job for zero. Nobody built one yet because nobody did the math.
The Ship Got Stuck Again
Global supply chains are a magic trick that works until it doesn't. The guy down the road with a welding shop and a vegetable garden? He's the supply chain that never breaks.
Nobody Can Afford a House
A developer charges six figures to frame a house a coordinated crew could build in two weekends. You didn't forget how to build. You forgot how to build together.
You Already Know Your Community
You don't need to recruit strangers. You need the people you already borrow a ladder from, the ones who text you when the power goes out. Could be two neighbors. Could be fifty. Get your community together. Swap some hours. That's not a revolution — it's a Tuesday.
The Weekly Dispatch
Once a week I break down something happening in the economy, run the numbers on it, and tell you what it actually means for people who build things. No paywall. If it's useful, throw a few bucks at it. If not, keep reading anyway.