From June to July of 2026, the cost for “food at home” — the US Bureau of Labor Statistics’ phrase for groceries — dropped by 0.1%. The rest of the numbers in the monthly report ranged from not great to bad, so that drop was kind of welcome. NPR described it as, “the cost of groceries actually fell slightly.”

Digging a little deeper, though, the driver of that drop was a 16.4% decrease in the cost of lettuce. People stopped buying lettuce and leafy greens due to fear of Taylor Farms’ Cyclospora outbreak. To move the product already on shelves, suppliers and grocery stores dropped the price, thereby decreasing the cost of living.

Because shitting yourself to death is good for the economy.

In the first half of 2025, the biggest tech companies — Microsoft, Google, Meta, Nvidia, Oracle, OpenAI, you know the list — spent tens of billions of dollars on data center hyperscaling and infrastructure. That money accounted for just 4% of the total GDP (consumer spending + all investment + all government spending minus taxes + the value of exports minus imports), but it made up 92% of the GDP’s growth over the same period.

Which is weird, because the GDP wasn’t really growing — it increased by about 0.1%. Jobs weren’t being created. Unemployment was generally up. The economy as a whole wasn’t doing anything special. But our Big Tech saviors were single-handedly (well, several-handedly) propping up the entire US economy.

Except they kind of weren’t.

Microsoft invested $13 billion in OpenAI, but the majority of that money was in the form of credits for compute on Microsoft servers — Microsoft paid OpenAI to use Microsoft’s service. Nvidia promised $100 billion to OpenAI … that OpenAI promised to use to by Nvidia chips. Oh, and this week, they promised another $105 billion in the form of a data center in Ohio. Oracle invested $300 billion into OpenAI while it is building hyperscale data centers. Data centers that will be rented to OpenAI and packed full of Nvidia chips.

All of that money — all of that growth — was just a handful of giant corporations passing the same money back and forth between them and calling it profit. Nothing was created.

Both the Cyclospora deaths and the AI investment shell game are examples of the economy working as designed.

It's not supposed to make sense. It inherently doesn’t make sense. There are huge swaths of the economy that don’t even affect you or me.

The American economy is every single transaction every single person in America performs. Every time I buy a bag of Bit-O-Honeys for $1, I’m taking part in the economy (it took me forever to come up with a candy example that didn’t involve child slavery). Each new employee, the output of every Pepsi bottling plant, the local government paving a road, and farmers selling crops across national borders — those are all part of the economy.

Typically, consumer spending — people buying stuff — accounts for two-thirds of the GDP and is the primary driver of growth. In the first quarter of 2026, consumer spending slowed down. It was still about 68% of the economy, but Big Tech investment in AI infrastructure still contributed more to growth.

The most recent estimates put AI investment in 2026 somewhere around $725 billion.

And all of that brings us to the stock market — the stock market isn’t part of GDP, but it is a measure of the (perceived) health of the companies that contribute to the GDP. While something like 60% of Americans own stocks, that number isn’t evenly distributed. Almost 90% of people earning over $100,000 per year own stocks, while about 30% of people making less than $50,000 own any. And the vast majority of people who “own” stocks are actually talking about a tiny amount of stocks bundled up in retirement funds — if they’re lucky enough to have one.

The reality is that about 20% of Americans own stock directly. And of those, the top 1% own more than the remaining 99% combined. That’s about 700,000 people controlling roughly $28 trillion. That’s the population of two Pittsburghs or one-and-a-half Sacramentos. When was the last time you even thought about either of those cities, let alone considered pinning an entire economic structure on them?

When the Trump administration points to the Dow as an indicator of how well the economy is doing as a distraction from the atrocity of the day, it’s pointing to a subset of 30 companies. Which means that the Dow is only looking at about 1% of the number of companies listed on the NYSE. And those companies are not, like, a random, representative sample. They’re all massive companies like 3M, Boeing, Coca-Cola, and Chevron.

As a quick aside, a solid 50% of the companies listed in the Dow Jones are on the BDS movement’s list of companies complicit in the Palestinian genocide. I’m sure that’s nothing to worry about. Moving on.

The point is, all of the talk about the economy — about the Dow being higher than ever, about the stock market doing great — realistically affects two Pittsburghs-worth of people. Roughly 0.2% of the US population give or take.

And, again, that’s by design. It is, according to the theorists and thinkers who shared the current US economy, natural.

People like Adam Smith, the generally accepted father of economic study, had this weird sense that being a poor was this inherent state (and inherent failing) a human possessed: “in the poor the hatred of labour and the love of present ease and enjoyment.” Wealth inequality was just part of the system to him: “For one very rich man there must be at least five hundred poor, and the affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the many.”

To the discipline and its disciples, the free market and capitalism were just outgrowths of the natural world, something not to be interfered with. Wealth inequality was a feature, not a bug. Hell, to Adam Smith, wealth inequality was the only reason to bother with a government in the first place.

When the United States secured its independence from Britain, it was a pretty heady time (they wrote a rap about it). But as the new country settled into being — and a generation of politicians came and went — politics, political parties, and politicians evolved into something new. Democracy among landed, white, free males started to flourish. This was already a stretch because democracy was a pretty sketchy idea among the founders — mostly because it implied poors might have an equal say.

By the time Andrew “Never Met A Genocide He Didn’t Like” Jackson was elected in 1829, America even looked different. With the Louisiana Purchase and the super racist marketing campaign that was “Manifest Destiny,” the country was growing and our foundational myths were crystalizing. Add in the burgeoning railways and rapidly expanding capitalist markets both domestically and overseas, and the United States of the early mid-19th century was nothing at all like the colonies.

In his book, The Roots of American Individualism, Alex Zakaras argues that this is the era that gave us the image of the solely self-reliant pioneers and the myth of the self-made man. That neither of these things were true or accurate didn’t matter to America.

Those pioneers who bravely strode, unprotected and alone, into the wilderness to tame the continent were largely protected by the United States military, traveled in large groups, and were given literal government handouts via things like the Homestead Act(s) when they got there. Hell, the United States government published a guidebook for them to follow.

Even the great American cowboys, who, as Theodore Roosevelt said, “possess, to a very high degree, the stern, manly qualities that are invaluable to a nation,” were bored, corporate, wage-earners. Their deification as icons of rugged freedom is a much later development.

But none of that matters. The myth is what matters. The story is what we remember.

And America bought into its own line of bullshit to the point that, by 1887, then-President Grover Cleveland vetoed a bill that would’ve offered relief to Texan farmers’ suffering from a long drought. In his veto, he said, “I do not believe that the power and duty of the General Government ought to be extended to the relief of individual suffering which is in no manner properly related to the public service or benefit.”

Back to Zakaras:

Fast-forward a hundred years, and that myth becomes Ronald “The actor?!” Reagan’s, “the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help.”

There’s this idea in psychology and sociology called social distance (not the health practice). Very, very oversimplified, it’s the concept of “us versus them” but on an interpersonal level. Social distance relates to things like class and identity and race and power.

Power — things like wealth and influence — increases one’s social distance from basically everyone else — they end up in a smaller and smaller subset of society (the elites, if you will). And, like Dr. Susan Fiske argues, power means you think about other people less. You tend to pay more attention to other people when they have control over your life. If you’re wealthy and powerful enough, no one else can really affect you anymore.

At the same time, having power increases one’s tendency to objectify and dehumanize others — seeing other humans as tools, objects, and means to an end. It doesn’t even take a lot of power. Someone just having a factory job is enough to make random people think you’re more tool-like and less capable of “experienc[ing] human mental states.” (Which really puts into perspective all of the times Elon Musk called someone an NPC.)

It’s worth repeating that conclusion: random peers considered a person less human for having a repetitive, “unskilled” job. Human, here, defined as possessing thoughts, fears, plans, or even just seeing and hearing things around them. To be clear, there is no such thing as unskilled labor, only undervalued people. A full 20% of jobs in the United States pay less than $15 per hour. But these jobs aren’t “important.” Those people aren’t people.

The workers, their labor, and their jobs are only useful as cogs in the larger economic machine. And this is why shitting yourself to death is good for the economy. You don't matter.

Zakaras again, this time from an interview about the book:

These foundational American myths of independence, self-reliance, and the supremacy of the free market shift the blame and responsibility from the government to the individual. Economic failings became personal failings, and Americans were sold the lie that the government didn't owe them anything.

The United States didn’t even have an income tax until 1913 with the 16th Amendment. We didn’t have unemployment insurance, a protected right to trade unions, meaningful child labor laws, or social security until the 1930s.

And that brings us back to salads.

Back in 2025, when Elon Musk took the stage at CPAC waving around his pretend chainsaw like a sugar-addled toddler, he declared it, “the chainsaw for bureaucracy.” (God, he’s such an unlikeable dork.) When he spearheaded the disastrous Department of Government Efficiency, the stated goal was to make the government as a whole more efficient.

DOGE was the inquisition for the heresy Zakaras was talking about.

Musk said, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed:

And you know what? I don’t even necessarily disagree with him until the last sentences. Because those “rules and regulations” were there for our protection. And DOGE gutted them.

Over the last three months, since June of 2026, (deep breath) blueberries, lettuce, eggs, jalapeños, granola, dog food, ricotta, baby formula, more cheese, some mushrooms, ranch seasoning, and dried herring have all been recalled for contamination with various food-borne illnesses. To be fair, it’s not actually much higher than any other year and is only slightly above what you’d expect. The difference is how visible they are and how long they take to spot. That last part is the result of DOGE cuts.

But, for a free market fanboy, the argument goes: “Competition means that people will just buy the lettuce that doesn’t make you shit yourself to death instead.” And that might even work in a broad sense, but it ignores just how restricted the US food supply is and how much influence those big companies have.

It also assumes, and this is the big one, that it’s worth it to literally sacrifice a few people to the lettuce so that the rest of us can shop smarter. It elevates the functioning of the economy above the lives of the people who participate in it. Because, to the shareholders — those two Pittsburghs-worth of people — it is. You’re a thing, a cog in their machine, and the government is only there to protect them from you.

When I wrote about Taylor Farms the first time, I said that the fight was existential. It is, and it’s a simple one. You don’t have to be pro-regulation to be anti-shitting yourself to death. You just have to see real people as more important than a made-up story about the economy.

You have to see people as people.