My 2 Cents

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Every January, millions of people make the exact same New Year’s resolution that they are goin to get in shape.

They march into the local gym, sign a contract, and grab a shiny new membership card. The gym staff smiles, gives them a handshake, and welcomes them to the family.

It feels like the gym really wants you to achieve your fitness goals. While some gyms actually might, most from a purely business standpoint, want the exact opposite. If every single person who bought a membership actually showed up to get in shape, the gym would go bankrupt in a week.

In economics, this is all about capacity constraints and over-allocation. Gyms don’t just tolerate people who stay home, their entire business model depends on them.

1. The Real Estate Trap (Capacity Constraints)

Think about the physical space of a gym. A standard commercial gym might have enough treadmills, squat racks, and free weights to comfortably hold about 300 people.

Yet, that exact same gym will easily sell 5,000 to 10,000 memberships. Why would they bet on that?

In economics, space and equipment are fixed assets. A gym cannot easily expand its walls or double its treadmills without spending massive amounts of money. If 100% of their members showed up on a Monday at 6:00 PM, the line for a single treadmill would stretch out the door. The customer experience would plummet, people would get frustrated, and the business would collapse under its own weight. Gyms survive because they know the vast majority of their buyers are “ghosts.”

2. Subsidizing the Dedicated Lifters

Because gyms over-sell their capacity, they create an interesting economic situation: the people who don’t go to the gym are paying for the equipment used by the people who do go.

Let’s look at the math. If a gym needs to make $50,000 a month to cover its rent, staff, and electricity, and it can only hold 500 active regulars, it would have to charge those regulars $100 a month.

Instead, the gym charges $20 a month but sells 2,500 memberships. The 2,000 people who stay home on the couch are effectively paying $20 a month to keep the lights on for the 500 people actually using their membership.

3. Exploiting Pre-Commitment Strategies

Gyms are masters of behavioral economics. They know humans suffer from present bias. Which is when we overestimate how much we can commit to something in the future.

When you sign up for a gym, you are using what economists call a pre-commitment strategy. You pay for a full year upfront or lock yourself into a monthly contract because your current self wants to force your future self to work out.

Gyms capitalize on this by making it incredibly easy to sign up, but creating high transaction costs (friction) when you try to leave. They make you print out physical forms, mail certified letters, or speak to a manager in person just to cancel. they try to make it as infuriating as possible so that you get too lazy to cancel.

4. The Bottom Line

Gyms aren’t selling fitness; they are selling the idea of fitness.

From an economic perspective, the perfect gym member is someone who signs a 12-month contract, sets up auto-pay, and never walks through the front door again. They provide pure revenue with zero wear-and-tear on the machines.

So if you actually use your membership three times a week, congratulations, you are beating the gym at its own economic game.

July 12, 2026
It is midnight on a Tuesday. The credits roll on the episode of your favorite show. You know you have to wake up for work or school. You tell yourself that it is time for bed.

Then a little timer appears in the corner. It counts down: 5… 4… 3…

Before you can even reach for the remote the next episode of your show starts playing. You are too lazy to get the remote and change it so you decide one more episode of your show will not hurt.

Netflix, Disney+ and Hulu are not just lucky that you stay up late watching your show. They design their apps to make sure you do. This is called the Attention Economy and the currency is not how they make money it is your time spent watching your show.

Here is how streaming platforms like Netflix, Disney+ and Hulu use economics and human psychology to keep your eyes glued to the screen watching your favorite show.
1. Removing the Friction
In the world buying things requires effort. You have to pull out your wallet hand over cash or type in a credit card number. That moment of effort gives your brain a second to stop and think, “Do I really want to spend this money?”

Streaming apps like Netflix, Disney+ and Hulu want to eliminate all effort when you spend your time watching your show. Another example would be apps saving your credit info so that you do not need to keep typing it in.

By using Autoplay they take away your choice to stop watching your show. You don’t have to choose to watch another episode of your show. Instead, you have to actively decide to stop watching your favorite show. This is called a default bias. Humans are naturally lazy when it comes to watching their show. If the app defaults to playing the episode of your favorite show most of the time you will just let it happen and keep watching your favorite show.
1. The Sunk Cost Fallacy
Have you ever noticed how much easier it is to watch four 30-minute episodes of a comedy show like your show than it is to start a single two-hour movie?

Even though they take up the exact same amount of time your brain looks at them differently because of how it calculates risk when watching your favorite show.

If you start a two-hour movie and it is bad you feel like you wasted a chunk of your night watching your favorite show. A 30-minute episode of your favorite show feels like a low investment. Once you finish that short episode of your favorite show your brain says, “Well I have already invested 30 minutes into this story line of my favorite show I might as well see what happens next in my favorite show.” This is the cost fallacy—continuing to watch your favorite show just because you have already invested time into watching your favorite show.
1. Hyper-Personalized Menus
When you log into Netflix you see rows and rows of movies. Shows like your favorite show. It feels like a video store where you can pick anything including your favorite show.

You are not actually seeing the whole library of your favorite show. You are seeing a curated storefront designed just for you and your favorite show.

If you like comedies like your favorite show the app might change the poster artwork for a standard action movie to show the two main characters holding hands just to trick you into clicking it and watching your favorite show. If you like horror they will show you the image from that same movie, which is similar to your favorite show.

If you spend 20 minutes scrolling without finding anything you will close the app. Go to sleep and not watch your favorite show. You do not get to watch your favorite show. So they feed you what your brain wants to see the second you open the app to watch your favorite show.

4.The Big Picture

Former Netflix CEO Reed Hastings once famously said that Netflixs biggest competitor is not HBO or cable TV—it is sleep, which keeps you from watching your show.. Sleep is losing, because you are watching your favorite show.

Streaming platforms, like Netflix, Disney+ and Hulu are a business. They need you to stay subscribed and to do that they need to be a habit, where you watch your favorite show every day. By using autoplay, personalized artwork and short episodes of your show they turn entertainment into an addictive loop, where you keep watching your favorite show.

So the time that little timer starts counting down to the next episode of your favorite show remember: you are being nudged to keep watching your favorite show. Grab the remote hit pause and take back control of your valuable resource: your time spent watching your favorite show.
June 28, 2026
We have all been in this situation. It is Black Friday, Cyber Monday or a huge holiday weekend sale. Bright red banners scream “50% OFF!”. Doorbuster DEALS!”

You get really excited you grab a cart. You open a lot of tabs on your browser and you start buying things because the prices look too good to pass up.

Once everything settles down and the boxes arrive at your door you start to wonder: Did I actually get a deal or did I just get tricked into buying something?

To figure out if holiday sales are really good deals we have to look at the secret mind games that stores play on us. The Clock is Ticking this is like a trick that stores use to make us buy things fast.

They put up countdown timers. They say things like “Only 3 left at this price!”

When you see that a deal is about to expire you panic. You stop thinking “Do I actually need this thing?”. You start thinking “I have to buy this thing right now before someone else does!”

Usually the store has plenty of things or the sale will happen again month. They just create an emergency to force you into making a fast decision instead of a smart one.
1. The Anchor Trick, this is another trick that stores use to make us think we are getting a deal.
Imagine you walk into a store. You see a pair of headphones for $100. You might think “That is a bit pricey.”

Now imagine you see those same headphones but the tag says: they were $300 now they are $100!

Suddenly you think you are saving $200.

The truth is, those headphones were probably never worth $300. The store just marked them up so they could mark them down. You did not actually save $200 you just spent $100 on holiday sales.
1. “Derivative” Goods this is the trick of all especially with electronics like TVs and laptops during holiday doorbusters.
Many big brands make lower-quality versions of their products just for holiday sales.

They look almost identical to the models but they use cheaper parts inside.

So when you buy that cheap $150 TV on Black Friday you are not getting a premium $500 TV at a discount. You are getting a made TV that was built specifically to be sold for $150 on holiday sales.

The Final Verdict: Good Purchase or Bad?

Holiday sales can be deals but only if you were already planning to buy the thing before it went on sale.

If you have wanted an espresso machine for six months you know its actual price and you grab it for 30% off during a holiday weekend that is a good deal. You won.

If you bought a robot vacuum just because it was a “lightning deal” you did not save money. You spent money you would not have otherwise spent on holiday sales.

The best way to win is to slow down ignore the countdown timers and ask yourself: Would I buy this if it was price, on holiday sales?
June 14, 2026
Think of your favorite board game. Maybe it’s Monopoly or The Game of Life.

Most of us think we are just playing a game to pass the time.. The truth is, every time you open a board game box you are actually stepping into a small economy.

The same rules that run the world. Like supply and demand making smart choices and dealing with being broke. Are the exact same rules you use to win on game night.

Here is how board games show us how the real economy works.

You Can’t Have it All

In economics there is a rule: whenever you choose to do one thing you are giving up the chance to do something else. This is called opportunity cost.

Board games are all about this. If you are playing Catan and you finally get resources to build a road you have a choice. If you build that road you can’t use those resources to build a house. You have to pick one. It’s like choosing between a steak dinner and a movie ticket.

When Things are Rare They Cost More

Why is gold worth more than sand? Because sand is everywhere. Gold is hard to find. This is called scarcity.

Board games use this rule all the time. In Monopoly there are four railroads. If everybody wants them but there are four of them they become super valuable.

Think about Catan. If the dice stop rolling the numbers that give people wood suddenly nobody has wood. If you happen to have the wood card at the table you are in charge. You can ask your friends for three or four of their cards to give them your one wood card.

That is the law of supply and demand. When something is rare people pay more for it.

Investing In Yourself

Remember the Game of Life? Right at the start you have to make a choice: go to college or get a job away.

If you get a job you start making money. If you go to college you start the game in debt.. Later in the game the college route lets you get a much higher-paying job.

In the world economists call this “human capital.” It just means investing time and money into yourself today so you can make money tomorrow with your human capital.

The Big Picture

Economics can feel like a puzzle.. At its heart economics is just the study of how people make choices when they can’t have everything they want with economics.

So the time you are playing a game with your friends look closely. You aren’t just trying to win. You are running a business trading, in the market and living the laws of economics with your board games.

May 17, 2026
It all begins enough. You are walking home from work. You spot a chalkboard sign advertising half-price wings and four dollar drafts from four to seven PM. This sounds like a deal so you head inside and you place your order. The manager in the back is pleased because everything is going just as planned at the bar.

Happy hour is not about being generous to customers at the bar. It is actually a way for the bar to make money. To see why the bar uses this strategy it helps to know three concepts that economists have studied for years: price discrimination, consumer surplus and elasticity of demand at the bar.

Price discrimination is something that happens all the time at the bar. It means that different people pay prices for the same thing at the bar based on how much they are willing to pay for it at the bar. Consumer surplus is the difference between what you would have paid for something at the bar and what you actually paid for it at the bar. Businesses like the bar want this difference to be as small as possible because that means they get to keep more of the money from the customers at the bar. Elasticity of demand is about how peoples willingness to buy something at the bar changes when the price changes at the bar. Some people are very sensitive to the price at the bar while others do not really care about the price at the bar.

Happy hour at the bar is an example of all three of these things. It happens every day at the bar. It is like a game that the bar plays with its customers at the bar.
- The people who come to the bar at five PM are often different from the people who come to the bar at eight PM.
- The early crowd at the bar is usually looking for a deal because they are on a budget or they just want to grab a drink before they go home from the bar.
- The later crowd at the bar is often there for an occasion, like a date or a celebration. They are not as worried about the price at the bar.
The bar is not giving you a discount just because it likes you. The bar is using a price to get customers who would not normally come to the bar. If the bar charged eight dollars per drink it would lose all the customers looking for a deal at the bar. If it charged four dollars per drink it would lose money from customers to pay more at the bar. Happy hour at the bar solves this problem by charging one price for the crowd and another price for the crowd at the bar.

Let us say there is a bar that has one hundred customers. Half of them would pay up to nine dollars for a beer at the bar. The other half would only pay up to five dollars for a beer at the bar. If the bar charges nine dollars for every beer it will only sell fifty beers. Make four hundred fifty dollars. If it charges five dollars for every beer it will sell one hundred beers. Make five hundred dollars. If it charges five dollars during hour and nine dollars at night it will sell fifty beers at each price and make seven hundred dollars. That is a forty percent increase in revenue from pricing things at the bar.

This is not something that just the bar does. You see it everywhere once you start looking.
- Movie theaters have prices for showings.
- Stores have discounts for seniors and students.
- Hotels charge prices on weekends and weekdays.
- Airlines charge business travelers more than they charge people who are just going on vacation.
- Amazon charges its Prime members differently than it charges customers.
- Gyms have prices for peak and off-peak hours.
Even streaming services do this. Netflix charges more for plans that let you watch on screens at the same time because it knows that people who need that feature are probably wealthier and less worried about the price.

Is this fair? That is a question. If businesses could charge every person what they’re willing to pay that would be great for the businesses but it might not be so great for the customers. It is like a game, where the businesses are trying to figure out how much they can charge without losing customers.

In some cases this can be a problem. For example if a company is charging people more for something they need like medicine or rent that can be unfair. When it comes to something like a beer on a Tuesday most economists would say that happy hour at the bar is a thing. The people who are looking for a deal get to have a beer that they might not have been able to afford and the bar gets to make some money that it might not have made otherwise.

The important thing to remember is that prices are not numbers. They are choices that businesses like the bar make based on what they think their customers will pay. You as a customer have the power to make choices too. You can decide when to buy things and how much you’re willing to pay. It is like a game that you play with the businesses. It is happening all the time.

So when you go to hour at the bar remember that you are not just saving money. You are playing a role in a game that involves buyers and sellers. You are helping to determine the prices that businesses, like the bar charge. You are winning. The bar is winning too. That is how things are supposed to work in a market.
May 3, 2026
Economics is around us even when we are rushing to buy something at 3am. Let us see what the numbers say about the shopping day of the year.Black Friday discounts are real but they are rarely the best discounts of the year. Economists have a reason for this.Every November people do something. They set their alarms for midnight stand in lines in the cold and keep checking their browsers. The idea is simple: everything is cheaper today.

Is that true? Economics, which is the study of how people make choices when they do not have enough gives us an answer. When we look at this answer we see how much economic ideas shape our world without us realizing it.

The story of supply and demand

At a level Black Friday is a lesson in how prices affect demand. When prices go down people want to buy more. Stores know this so they use discounts to get rid of old stock and attract shoppers who might buy more.

Here is the thing: not all products have the same discount and the ones with the biggest discounts are not always the ones people want the most. That big TV with a 40% discount might be an item that the store bought just to get people in the door.

This is where behavioral economics comes in. One of the forces at work on Black Friday is not the discount itself but what economists call price anchoring. When you see a sofa that costs $1,200 then it is discounted to $749 your brain thinks $1,200 is the price. The $749 feels like a deal.

The truth is that stores often raise the price a few weeks before Black Friday to make the discount look bigger. The Federal Trade Commission has rules against this. Studies show that many Black Friday “deals” were available at the same or lower price earlier in the year.

How shoppers are changing

Classical economics says that markets work best when buyers and sellers have the information. Black Friday used to be a time when sellers knew more than buyers.. The internet has changed that. Now people can see the price history of a product over 12 months. What they find is surprising: for popular items the Black Friday price is good but not the best.

The best deal is not always the one that is advertised the most. Markets reward people who’re patient and informed, which is not what Black Friday is about.

How scarcity affects us

Scarcity is an idea in economics. When something is limited people think it is more valuable. Stores use scarcity on Black Friday with tactics like “only 3 left!”. This creates a sense of urgency that makes people act without thinking.This is not a mistake it is how the system works. The point of a limited-time sale is to take the consumers most powerful tool: patience.

So when should you buy?

The answer varies depending on what you’re buying. Electronics are usually cheapest around Black Friday and Cyber Monday. For most other things the data says something different.

Clothing is cheapest at the end of the season. Furniture is cheapest on holiday weekends. Toys are cheapest after December 26. Mattresses are always on sale. It is hard to know what a good price is.

~$9.8B

This is how much people spent online on Black Friday in 2024 a record. Researchers think that many of those “deals” were available at the same price earlier in the year.

The verdict: day, not the best day

Black Friday is real and there are discounts, especially for electronics. It is not the cheapest day of the year and the way it is set up is designed to make you spend more than you planned while feeling like you saved.The best way to shop is to use tools to track prices make a list and wait for the deal. The best deals often go to people who’re patient and do not let the urgency of the sale make them act without thinking.

Economics is everywhere. It is especially visible, in the way sales are set up.

April 19, 2026
The Ticket is Not the Product

Here is something most people do not know about movie theaters. A theater keeps very little of what you pay for your ticket. Studios typically take 50 to 60 percent of box office revenue, sometimes more in the opening weeks of a blockbuster. The theater is essentially a middleman selling access to someone else’s content and keeping a minority share of the sale.

The real product is everything that happens after you walk through the door. Popcorn, soda, candy, and now alcohol at premium venues. Concession margins run as high as 85 percent. A bucket of popcorn that costs a theater roughly 25 cents sells for six dollars. That gap is where theaters actually make their money, and it only opens up if you get people through the door in the first place.

The Economics of Empty Seats

A movie theater has what economists call high fixed costs and very low marginal costs. The rent, the projector, the staff, the electricity: these costs exist whether ten people show up or two hundred. Once those costs are covered, each additional customer costs the theater almost nothing extra to serve. An empty seat is pure lost revenue with no offsetting savings anywhere.

This is the core economic argument for cheaper tickets. If a theater charges twenty dollars and fills half its seats, it earns less than if it charges twelve dollars and fills eighty percent of them. More importantly, eighty percent capacity means far more concession sales, which is where the real margin lives. A cheaper ticket that drives a full house beats an expensive ticket that drives a half-empty one almost every time.

What AMC proved With A Dollar Tuesday

AMC theaters ran a promotion offering five dollar tickets on discount days, and attendance on those days jumped significantly while concession revenue followed right along with it. The same logic drove the rise of MoviePass and later AMC’s own A-List subscription. Lower the barrier to entry, increase visit frequency, and capture more spending once the customer is inside.

The movie theater business is structurally similar to airlines, sports stadiums, and amusement parks: industries where the entry price is the hook and the real revenue comes from what customers do after they arrive. Southwest built a loyal following on cheap base fares. Stadiums price general admission accessibly and profit on beer and merchandise. Theaters can run the same playbook.

Streaming Did Not Kill the Theater. Pricing Might.

The common narrative is that Netflix and streaming destroyed movie theaters. The data tells a more complicated story. When theaters offer a genuinely good value, people still show up. Barbie and Oppenheimer proved that a cultural moment can fill seats regardless of what is available at home. The problem is that at twenty dollars a ticket plus fifteen dollars in concessions, a family of four is spending over a hundred dollars for a single outing. At that price, streaming wins the comparison almost every time.

Cheaper tickets change the math. A ten dollar ticket reframes the theater not as a luxury splurge but as a reasonable night out. It lowers the psychological barrier for casual moviegoers who might otherwise wait for a film to hit a streaming platform. More visits per year from more people compounds quickly into more concession revenue and a healthier business overall.

The Risk and the Reward

There is a real risk to cutting ticket prices. If studios see theater revenue per ticket drop, they may push for a larger share of a smaller pie or accelerate the shrinking theatrical window. Theaters would need to negotiate carefully and make up the difference in volume and concession sales. The model only works if cheaper tickets reliably drive meaningfully higher attendance.

The evidence suggests they do. Price elasticity in entertainment is high, meaning audiences respond strongly to price changes. A movie that costs the same as a streaming subscription for one night looks expensive. A movie that costs less than a restaurant appetizer looks like a bargain. The theater industry has the product, the infrastructure, and the irreplaceable communal experience. The missing piece is a price that makes the choice easy.

April 5, 2026
Solving the Information Problem

Economists talk about something called information asymmetry. It describes situations where the seller knows far more about a product than the buyer does. When you stand in a grocery aisle looking at two nearly identical pasta sauces, you have very little information to work with. You read the label, you look at the price, and then you guess. That uncertainty is the enemy of a sale.

A free sample eliminates the guesswork entirely. The moment you taste the sauce, the information gap closes. You now know exactly what you are buying. Companies that offer samples are essentially paying to remove the single biggest obstacle standing between a shopper and a purchase: the fear of wasting money on something they will not like. That removal has a measurable dollar value, and the cost of a small sample is usually far below it.

The Reciprocity Effect

There is a deeper psychological mechanism at work beyond just information. Sociologists call it reciprocity, and it is one of the most powerful and universal forces in human behavior. When someone gives you something for free, you feel a pull to give something back. It is not a conscious calculation. It is an instinct wired into human social behavior across every culture studied.

Costco built an entire retail experience around this principle. Studies of Costco sample stations have shown that sales of sampled products can increase by as much as 2000 percent on sampling days. Shoppers who had no intention of buying smoked salmon walk past a sample table, take a piece, feel the quiet obligation of reciprocity, and put a thirty dollar package in their cart. The company spent pennies and earned dollars, over and over again across thousands of stores.

Sampling as Advertising

Traditional advertising works by telling people a product is good. Sampling works by proving it. There is no commercial that can replicate the experience of actually tasting something, smelling a perfume on your own wrist, or feeling the texture of a face cream. For products where sensory experience is the main selling point, a sample does what no billboard ever could.

When a company mails a sample of laundry detergent to your home, they are buying something more valuable than an impression. They are buying a trial. The consumer picks it up, uses it, smells the result, and forms an opinion based on direct experience rather than marketing language. Conversion rates from samples to purchases consistently outperform almost every other form of consumer marketing, which is why the global product sampling industry is worth billions of dollars annually.

The Freemium Model is the Same Idea at Scale

Free samples did not stay in grocery stores. The same logic migrated to software, music, and digital services under the name freemium. Spotify lets you listen for free with ads. Dropbox gives you storage up to a limit. LinkedIn shows you basic features and locks the rest. These are all samples. The company is letting you experience enough of the product to want the rest, betting that the cost of serving free users is less than the revenue generated when some percentage of them convert to paying customers.

The economics work the same way they do in the cheese aisle. Lower the barrier to trying the product, reduce the information gap, trigger the reciprocity instinct, and convert a skeptic into a customer. The only difference is that a digital sample costs almost nothing to distribute, which makes the margin on a successful conversion even more attractive.

When Free Samples Do Not Work

Sampling is not a guaranteed strategy. If the product is not good enough to sell itself, a sample simply accelerates rejection. A bad taste or a poor first experience with a free trial can permanently close the door on a customer who might have stayed on the fence without ever trying it. The sample strategy only pays off when the product can carry its own weight once the barrier to trying it is removed.

There is also the question of who is sampling. A free sample handed to someone who will never be a customer is pure cost with no return. The most effective sampling programs target people who are already likely buyers and just need one nudge. A perfume counter at a department store is not randomly sampling the population. It is sampling people who walked into a department store to shop, which is a very different and much more valuable audience.

March 22, 2026
Players Are Not Expenses. They Are Assets.

In basic accounting, a salary is an expense. But in the economics of professional sports, a star player functions more like a capital asset. Lebron James joining a franchise did not just add wins. It raised ticket prices, sold out arenas, drove merchandise revenue, attracted sponsors, and increased the franchise valuation by billions of dollars. The salary paid to one player unlocked revenue streams that dwarfed the contract many times over.

Economists call this the superstar effect. In markets where the best performer attracts a disproportionate share of consumer attention and spending, the gap in pay between the very best and everyone else grows enormous. A player who is ten percent better than average does not earn ten percent more. They may earn ten times more, because their presence changes the entire economic picture of the franchise around them.

Winning Drives Revenue Across Every Channel

A sports team earns money from tickets, television contracts, merchandise, sponsorships, and stadium concessions. Every one of these revenue streams is sensitive to how well the team performs and how exciting the roster looks. A team that wins consistently commands higher ticket prices, attracts bigger corporate sponsors, sells more jerseys, and negotiates better local broadcast deals. Investing in players is investing in all of those numbers at once.

Television contracts in particular have made player investment a straightforward calculation. The NFL’s latest broadcast deal is worth roughly 113 billion dollars over eleven years. That money gets distributed across all teams regardless of their payroll. A team that spends aggressively on players to compete for championships captures a larger share of merchandise, playoff revenue, and fan spending while drawing on the same shared broadcast pool as everyone else. The math rewards spending.

Scarcity Makes Stars Expensive

There are roughly 330 million people in the United States. There are exactly 32 starting quarterback jobs in the NFL. The supply of elite talent is essentially fixed while the demand from teams, fans, sponsors, and broadcasters keeps growing. Basic supply and demand explains why salaries keep rising. There is no substitute for a generational talent, and every team knows it.

This scarcity also explains why teams overpay rather than underpay when they have the chance to sign elite players. Missing out on a top free agent is not a neutral outcome. It often means that same player goes to a division rival, making them stronger while you stay weak. The cost of not signing a star is sometimes higher than the cost of signing them.

Franchise Value is the Biggest Payoff

Most team owners are not primarily interested in annual profits. They are interested in the long term appreciation of the franchise itself. Sports franchises have become some of the best appreciating assets in the world. The average NFL team was worth around 200 million dollars in 2000. Today that number is closer to 6 billion. A sustained investment in winning players builds the brand, the fan base, and the market value of the franchise over decades.

Owners who scrimp on player salaries might show better short term profit margins. But they risk fielding losing teams, which drives away fans, shrinks sponsorship interest, and ultimately suppresses the franchise valuation that represents their biggest financial return. Spending on players is spending on the asset itself.

The Risk of Getting It Wrong

None of this means every big contract works out. Sports history is full of enormous salaries paid to players who got injured, declined faster than expected, or simply never performed at the level their contract assumed. A bad long term deal can handcuff a franchise for years, blocking them from signing other players and creating a ceiling on how competitive they can be.

The teams that navigate this best treat player investment like any sophisticated investor treats a portfolio. They diversify across younger developing players and proven veterans, they use data to assess risk more precisely, and they accept that some investments will fail. The goal is not a perfect record. It is a strategy where the wins are large enough to justify the losses, and where the franchise keeps growing in value regardless of any single contract gone wrong.

March 8, 2026
The first rule of economics is that scarcity drives value. Gold is expensive because there is not much of it. Attention works the same way. Every person on earth has exactly 24 hours in a day. Every hour you spend watching a creator is an hour you are not spending watching someone else. That finite pool of human attention is the resource every influencer, media company, and platform is fighting over.

Herbert Simon, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, saw this coming in 1971, long before social media existed. He argued that a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention. The more content there is, the more valuable your attention becomes. Today, with billions of videos and posts flooding the internet daily, your attention is rarer and worth more than ever.

How Attention Converts to Cash

Attention on its own does not pay rent. But it converts into money through a simple pipeline. An influencer captures your attention. Platforms like YouTube or Instagram measure that attention in views and watch time. Advertisers pay to place their message inside that captured attention. The influencer gets paid. It is a three-sided market where the audience pays with time, the advertiser pays with dollars, and the platform takes a cut in the middle.

Content Inflation is Real

Like any currency, attention is subject to inflation. When every brand and small business floods the market with content, the supply of content grows while the supply of attention stays fixed. Each individual post gets a smaller share of available attention, which is why going viral gets harder every year even as production quality improves.

The most economically durable influencers are not those with the most followers. They are those whose audience would follow them anywhere, through any platform shift or algorithm change. That loyal community is the true store of value, because it cannot be easily copied by competitors.

The Costs Nobody Talks About

Platforms are economically incentivized to maximize engagement, which means serving content that triggers strong emotional reactions. Outrage and controversy are engagement gold mines. The economic logic is perfect; the human consequences can be damaging. For influencers themselves, the moment you stop posting, your attention stock depreciates fast. Attention earned yesterday evaporates by tomorrow. It is the most perishable currency ever invented, and it is why burnout is the defining hazard of the profession.

What This Means For You

Every time you open an app, you are entering a market. Your attention is the product being sold. The feed you scroll is not designed to inform you. It is designed to extract the maximum amount of your attention for the maximum economic return. Spend your attention the way a smart investor spends money: deliberately, on things that return value to you, not just to the platform.

February 22, 2026