What Capital Never Told You About Rent

Share Every invoice you have ever paid contains rent you cannot see.

In this piece originally published on the Atlas Research Group blog, reformed former Amazon UK finance manager Simon Quarmby and I trace how rent extraction, not profit, built the modern world — from the enclosure of the commons to Big Tech’s current bid for metered intelligence — and why the smartest move for capital right now is to compost it back into the systems sustainable wealth depends on.

Many thanks to Simon for helping me learn to differentiate between two very distinct kinds of “making money” and inspiring me to see the history of economics in a new way, as a kind of evolutionary contest between ideas living on the substrate of human minds.

This article took months to write, distills of years of study, and delivers a message we think people really need to hear: