Burgers, Lipstick & Underwear
What Strange Indicators Really Tell Us About the Economy
A sharp, entertaining guide to the strange indicators people use to make the economy readable—from Big Macs and iPhone work-hours to lipstick, freight rates, pollution equivalents, and AI benchmarks.
Available formats: Kindle, paperback.
About this book
The economy is too large to see. So we translate it into things we can hold, buy, count and remember.
A burger becomes an exchange-rate argument. A phone becomes a measure of working time. Lipstick and underwear become recession folklore. Freight rates reveal the physical economy moving beneath daily life. Cigarettes make invisible air pollution feel immediate. AI benchmarks turn machine capability into a score — and then change the behavior they were meant to measure.
Burgers, Lipstick & Underwear is a curious, skeptical tour of the strange indicators people use to understand prices, purchasing power, economic stress, risk and technological progress. It shows why some rough proxies are genuinely illuminating, why others are beautiful nonsense, and what happens when a measure becomes important enough to game.
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