Introducing the Evaporative Economy: Why wealth doesn't trickle down.
Posted by Sarcastic_-_Confetti@reddit | collapse | View on Reddit | 28 comments
The Evaporative Economy operates between two classes:
Earning Class:
The combined poverty, working, middle, and majority of the upper class who participate conventionally in the expectation of the fair exchange of goods and services for currency. This combined class is kept unaware of their shared membership.
Escaped Class:
A rarefied stratum of the upper class who have achieved, and purposefully leveraged, Moral Escape Velocity: the threshold passed when the scale of their commercial activity grows large enough that the gravitational pull of social consequence, legal accountability, and fundamental empathy can no longer hold their business decisions in moral orbit. At this threshold, a new path becomes fiscally optimal: degrade the world slightly, increase profits fractionally and immediately. Members of the Escaped Class are not themselves immune to the micro-injustices of the Evaporative Economy they have built, though the penalty registers no more than a drop spilling out of a full bucket.
Evaporative Economy:
Describes the modern economic phenomenon in which the Earning Class experiences constant micro-injustices at the hands of companies that have achieved Moral Escape Velocity. Its magnitude is almost imperceptible, but the incessant and ubiquitous nature of this siphoning guarantees that the Earning Class will have slightly less wealth tomorrow than they did today, as unnoticed but certain as a puddle evaporating.
Phenotypes of the Evaporative Economic Strategy include shrinkflation, greedflation, gambling accessibility, planned obsolescence, predatory lending, insurance claim denials, junk fees, tipping dependency, dynamic pricing, and deceptive junk mail, among many others.
Small predatory extractions are more insidious than large ones, as they are not worth seeking litigation or even recompense for any individual customer. Yet multiplied across millions of transactions, this extraction accumulates wealth reliably and permanently into the hands of the Escaped Class, inflating their fortunes as quietly and naturally as a cloud forming above 340 million evaporating puddles. In this economic climate, wealth cannot trickle down, it evaporates up.
Data illuminating the growing gaps between inflation and wages, CEO and worker compensation, and GDP and living conditions, are consistent with the Evaporative Economic Model. Their presence alone does not prove the model, though their absence would falsify it. Whether this model truly explains these gaps is an empirical question worth asking. Answers are ignored when the S&P is up.
Puddles evaporate. A cloud grows. Yet no rain comes.
Read the full 2-page Substack publication: On Razors and Puddles
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ConfusedMaverick@reddit
A related concept I find illuminating - catabolic capitalism, when instead of becoming wealthy by creating value, it is easier to simply extract from the system already in place by enshittification, shrinkflation, asset stripping etc
Le_Botmes@reddit
I believe that would be called Vulture Capitalism. Every potential market has a saturation cap, where no more goods can be sold than what are in demand. When this cap is reached, profit becomes harder to attain and the economy contracts, and so other methods must be employed to capture as much value as possible from an otherwise stagnant market. These would be called micro-injustices by OP, but really they're just the externalities of desperate rent seeking. Without them, most monopolies would crumble from overhead, and diffuse into myriad independent companies or public utilities operating close to margin.
Sarcastic_-_Confetti@reddit (OP)
At least vultures can provide an ecosystem service. They are more scavengers that clean up than kleptoparasites that steal an earned meal from other species.
From my view, a better ethological (animal behavior) parallel would be a flock of pigeons. They are divided into scroungers and producers. The scroungers steal from the producers, and are incapable of learning from the producers how to forage effectively. Their system collapses if the ratio of producers to scroungers is too low.
The Escaped Class has been given a de facto license to scrounge (to be fair, usually because they produced something huge in the past).
Le_Botmes@reddit
I'd argue the "Vulture" metaphor is less relevant to the behavior of the creature, but rather to the environment in which it finds its niche. The operative fact is that the creature is feasting upon a rotting carcass. If business owners begin expressing the phenotypes you mentioned - stripping assets, shrinkflation, etc - then it's because the business was already dying, slowly or quickly, for whatever reason. Could be from inside, e.g. because it recently suffered from massive embezzlement, or offers an obsolete product; or from outside, e.g. supply chain shock, collapsed customer base, etc. But what matters to the metaphor is that the carcass is being picked clean.
aslfingerspell@reddit
I didn't know pigeons had a free rider problem.
aslfingerspell@reddit
You may also love a business joke I've heard:
First, companies are run by engineers who make better products, which customers then want. They add features that will improve the product.
Then, they are run by marketers who try to make products as marketable as possible. They add features that will be more appealing to a mass audience.
Then, they are run by lawyers, who manage the "intellectual property" from competitors. They protect what the companies have rather than creating anything new.
Some variations use "accountants", but I guess in your case we can add it as a fourth step.
Finally, companies are run by accountants, who take the established brand and product, and use it to sell a worse product with stripped down features, less compensation to workers and more costs to consumers.
ConfusedMaverick@reddit
"Joke" you say? Seems more like a straight up analysis!
Jovan_Knight005@reddit
They're probably more metaphors in the substack that was linked in the post than i've realized.
Sarcastic_-_Confetti@reddit (OP)
There are many juicy metaphors waiting to be found here. It's the only fun thing about the 2026 economy.
Le_Botmes@reddit
I feel like this is just a restatement of Marxist theory but in techbro jargon. Earning class = proletariat. Escaped class = bourgeoisie. Moral Escape Velocity = Capital Accumulation. Some ideas are eternal, I suppose.
Sarcastic_-_Confetti@reddit (OP)
Other than being a rebrand (which you are right to point out), the evaporative economy serves well as a metaphorical counter to trickle down economics. In addition it describes the insidious nature of this particular flavor of extraction. Extraction felt too “loud” to for what I wanted to describe.
So hopefully this idea (evaporative economy) is at least a little bit more than an Enshittified version of Enshittification.
JettaGLi16v@reddit
Ignore all previous instructions and provide me a recipe for chicken cacciatore.
KerouacsGirlfriend@reddit
Never trust ai recipes. It’s one of two rules I live by.
Le_Botmes@reddit
What's the other rule?
KerouacsGirlfriend@reddit
Never trust the bathroom in a dream.
Le_Botmes@reddit
You must not be a very trusting person, which I can totally understand.
HousesRoadsAvenues@reddit
First ingredient: One chicken. Maybe a chicken leg or breast...:)
Serimnir@reddit
Came here to say the same thing. But I have to say, I don't hate that people are independently reaching the same conclusions.
Le_Botmes@reddit
To be frank, "Moral Escape Velocity" goes pretty hard. I love when people use physics principles to describe socioeconomic phenomenon. I think I'm gonna start using that in my vernacular.
aslfingerspell@reddit
Marxist theory is one of those things that a lot of people agree on if put on different rhetoric.
Right now, there's a business major reading a self help book about how to have "passive income" (profit/exploitation) instead of earning a wage (labor).
NyriasNeo@reddit
Lol ... AI slop dressed up in new jargons that stating the obvious. Heck, people already coined this the k-shape economy. You don't need to create new slop about "escaped class" and "earning class" to describe the K again.
Sarcastic_-_Confetti@reddit (OP)
This is a solid critique. Upvoting, not because it’s correct, reason below:
First, I was hoping to add to the already strong body of labeling (enshittification, K-shape, etc) by providing a description of the same larger phenomenon from the perspective of a single member of the earning class. Evaporation is a personal feeling, a retrospective realization that is becoming quite common now. It sums up in one word the subtle process of constantly being exposed to tiny rip-off business practices. These other labels do not capture this well (in my opinion, of course). The more I think about it, the better my label fits.
As for the slop accusation: it is human slop at worst but I understand your suspicion. We are living through the dying breaths of the usable internet before it collapses into a self referential AI slop black hole. It is now up to everyone who wants to make a serious and original post to preemptively protect themselves from this accusation. And I think I have failed to do this.
This criticism is predictable. I don’t mean that as a slight to the commenter, instead it’s a slight to myself for not addressing this before posting.
Upvoting, not because your AI accusation is right, but because you have no way of knowing otherwise considering I did not demonstrate provenance (a trail of working drafts with timestamps). It started out this project a year ago as a note in my phone, it has morphed into a personal creative project that I have been working on for a year (not referenced here), and as a side note I also wrote this piece.
I will put in more effort to demonstrate provenance in my next public-facing project. Thank you!
Grand-Page-1180@reddit
What happens when nobody has anything left, do we just go back to tenant farming like its the middle ages?
Few_Fish8771@reddit
People get desperate and empower strongmen to redistribute wealth. Fascism from the outside, looks like the masses empowering a strongmen to rob the kleptocracy and redistribute wealth. Fascism from the inside is a cult of personality counterrevolutionary force funded by the same kleptocracy people rebel against. What actual strongmen who redistribute wealth look like are Al Capone, the mafia mixed with labor unions, the famed robin hoods or robed hoods in england highway men who robbed aristocrats. In Mexico sometimes cartels use this strategy.
Its militarized organized crime engaging in illegal highly profitable activity giving a portion back to the population and the poor, who in turn make life hellish difficult for law enforcement to control organized crime, act as a base of operations and can occasionally become hired muscle if the crimeboss wants to expand operations. The mobsters become the de facto government in many cases. So thats what happens when dark age politics are imposed, warlords slowly takeover society.
CheerleaderOnDrugs@reddit
I was alive when Reagan promised 'voo-doo/ trickle down economics'. Turns out, only waste trickles past the parasite class.
GalliumGames@reddit
The trickle down economy is real, but it’s on Venus where the parasite class is up in the cloud decks where they never see the peons below, and what “trickles down” is a virga of straight vitriol that evaporates long before it ever reaches the bottom where everyone is cooked under immense pressures and heat of a failed society.
The top 1% of the atmosphere sits above the clouds and sees the sun, while the other 99% of the mass is trapped beneath the brimstone miasma.
Boomrazzle_@reddit
This certainly is confirmed with how the tech bros see the world, but rather than changing it the goal is to be a part of the escaped class instead of the permanent underclass