The NETs Library: The archive.

Your feelings about the economy are not just nostalgia. Here's the proof.

How This All Began

How I Realized the Numbers Were Lying to Us: We keep getting better at making things. Farms produce more, factories produce more, and technology does more with less. So why does life keep getting harder to afford? That contradiction wouldn't leave, and this is the story of where chasing it led.

New to NETs? Start Here

Economics Made Simple: Why Your Household Budget Explains Everything: You already understand more economics than you think. This piece shows how running a household and running a national economy follow the exact same logic, and why that matters for everything NETs is arguing.

When the Numbers Gaslight You: The Felt vs. Measured Economy: The economy looks fine on paper. Your wallet disagrees. This piece explains why both things are true, and why your gut is actually the more accurate signal.

Human Time Is the Real Currency of the Economy: If the dollar is a broken measuring stick, what should we measure value in instead? The answer is the one thing nobody can print more of.

The Two Economies: Why Your Gut Beats the Official Numbers: What happens when you fix the inflation ruler? Wages, Big Macs, and corporate profits all start telling a very different story than the one in the headlines.

Why Food Has to Be Cheap for Everything Else to Exist: Food isn’t cheap because it matters less than other things. It’s cheap because it matters more than everything else, and this piece explains why that distinction is the key to understanding where the 1.5% drift shows up most painfully in your daily life.

Back to Basics: What Economics Really Measures: A plain-language reset on the core vocabulary of economics, the foundation you need before the bigger arguments start to build on top of it.

The CPI Series: Why the Number That Runs the Economy Might Be Wrong

What Is CPI, and Why Does It Run the Economy? Every interest rate decision, every wage negotiation, every inflation-adjusted number in the economy runs through one index. This piece explains what CPI actually is, how it gets built, and why getting it wrong has consequences that reach into every corner of your financial life.

Why Measuring Inflation Is Like Baking Grandma’s Chocolate Cake: CPI has a problem that has nothing to do with incompetence; it was always measuring a moving target. This piece explains why that’s already hard enough, and then introduces the part nobody anticipated: a shrinking measuring stick hidden behind ingredients that kept getting better

The Food Puzzle Series

Food Puzzle Master Summary: All 15 parts of the Food Puzzle series distilled into five pages, the core paradox, the suspects that were eliminated, the stress test results, and the conclusion. I always recommend reading the full series, as this summary necessarily oversimplifies some of the arguments, but I understand not everyone has the time.

Part 1: Why Agriculture Is the Perfect Smoking Gun: If CPI has a flaw, agriculture is the best place to find it. A century of clean USDA data, a product that barely changes, and a productivity boom so large it should be impossible to miss. This is where the investigation begins.

Part 2: The Money World Paradox, Where Did All the Savings Go? The physical story is clear: more food, fewer people, less land. So why doesn’t the dollar data show the savings that should be there? This is the moment the puzzle becomes undeniable.

Part 3: From Farm Gate to Cart, The Missing Miracle: Maybe the savings disappeared between the farm and the grocery aisle. This piece follows the crops out of the field and into your cart to find out, and the answer is more surprising than you’d expect.

Part 4: The Supply Chain Heist Part 1: The supply chain is the most obvious suspect. Packaging, transportation, labor, did one of them quietly absorb the farm’s productivity dividend before it reached consumers? Step up to the witness stand.

Part 5: The Supply Chain Heist Part 2: The supply chain is still on the stand. This time we go deeper, and find that the middlemen were actually getting more efficient too. The testimony doesn’t hold up.

Part 6: Big Food and Greedflation, What the Margins Actually Show: The supply chain has been dismissed. Next suspect: the corporations themselves. The charge is greedflation, using market power to pocket the productivity dividend consumers never received. The financial records are now entered into evidence.

Part 7: Why Markets Won’t Let Food Stay Expensive: The corporate case is weakening. This piece examines the structural reason why even the most powerful food companies can’t sustain elevated prices for long, and why the market itself keeps working against the greedflation story. For a deeper dive into the functional vs. priced utility argument, read Why We Hate Paying More for Groceries.

Part 8: Scarcity Was Never the Problem: With corporate power struggling to hold up under cross-examination, we call a new witness: external shocks. Droughts, wars, pandemics, energy spikes, could a century of bad luck explain what the other suspects couldn’t? Step up to the witness stand.

Part 9: How Regulation Touches, But Doesn’t Explain, Food Prices: One suspect remains before we turn the lens on the measurement system itself. Regulation, step up to the witness stand. The compliance costs are real, but are they anywhere near large enough to absorb an agricultural revolution?

Part 10: CPI at Odds with the Food Economy: Every physical suspect has been dismissed. That leaves one place left to look: the measurement system itself. This piece makes the formal case for CPI’s structural blind spot to productivity-driven price declines.

Part 11: Believing CPI Overstates Inflation Only Deepens the Food Puzzle: The Boskin Commission famously argued CPI overstates inflation. What happens when you apply that correction to the Food Puzzle? The gap gets wider, not smaller.

Part 12: Why Severe Understatement of Inflation Goes Too Far: On the other end of the spectrum, ShadowStats and the Chapwood Index claim CPI misses inflation by 7+ points a year. This piece applies that correction and follows it to its logical conclusion, a picture so extreme it can’t be reconciled with the world anyone actually lived through.

Part 13: The Final Straw. Comparing Inflation Metrics to Monetary Expansion: With the extremes eliminated, one interpretation remains. This piece lines up all four inflation readings against the money supply and asks which one classical monetary theory would actually predict, and the answer wasn’t reverse-engineered to fit.

Part 14: The Case Is Closed, and the Ruler Is Bent Everywhere: The Food Puzzle is solved. But the implications don’t stop at the grocery store. If the ruler is bent here, in the most data-rich, most observable sector in the economy, it’s bent everywhere it’s ever been used.

Part 15: Why Agricultural Prices Overshot Productivity, And Why That’s Not a Problem: (Coming Soon) Part 14 left one question open: why did drift-adjusted prices fall even further than productivity alone would predict? This piece answers it, and is upfront about where the argument has limits and where it doesn’t.

A Different Way In: When Data Becomes Story

The Silent Prescription: A Story of the Hidden 1.5% Inflation Drift: A hospital. A slow-drip medication called Extract-15. And a patient whose doctors keep telling him the vitals look fine. A short allegorical story that makes the abstract mechanics of the 1.5% drift feel uncomfortably real.

Walking the Bridge to Your New Life: Building something new doesn’t feel like progress for a long time, and that’s exactly where most people quit. This piece uses the Mackinaw Bridge Walk to explain why the stretch where nothing seems to be working is actually the most important part of the journey.

Where the Economy Is Headed: Prediction

Why an Iran War Oil Shock Won’t Bring Back 1970s-Style Inflation: Spiking oil prices feel like inflation. But there’s a critical difference between prices reshuffling and the whole price floor rising, and confusing the two is how bad economic policy gets made.

For the Skeptics and Researchers

The Hidden 1.5% Inflation Gap: Technical Proof: The full mathematical case for the 1.5% annual CPI understatement. If you want the methodology, the data sources, and the quantitative proof rather than the narrative, this is where to start.

NETs: Unmasking Economic Illusions with Time-Based Truth: The master summary of the Novack Equilibrium Theory. The measurement anomaly, the Food Puzzle, the Time Token proposal, and the broader implications, all in one place for anyone who wants the full theory without the storytelling.

NETs Core Claim: The 1.5% CPI Drift: Summary Memo A concise five-page brief designed for economists and researchers. Triangulates the 1.5% drift estimate across five independent mainstream data sources, explains what the correction resolves, and lays out explicit falsification tests, the specific conditions under which the NETs’ claim would be proven wrong.