Pluralistic: Lindsay Owens's "Gouged" (29 Sep 2026)

Blog · Watch/Read · (gathered 2026-09-30)

• Cory Doctorow reviews Lindsay Owens’s “Gouged,” which argues that corporations systematically “pick your pocket” and “shrink your paycheck” through “surveillance pricing” and “algorithmic wage discrimination,” exploiting information asymmetry and a lack of competition to shift from a “fair price” model to “whatever the market will bear.”
• Owens introduces concepts like the “age of recoupment,” where companies raise prices after eliminating competitors, and proposes solutions such as “street pricing” for stadiums to reintroduce competitive pressure, tracing the ideological shift from Quaker-inspired “cost plus a reasonable percentage” to a profit-maximizing “market price.”
• While the book masterfully diagnoses the systemic roots of these problems, Doctorow critiques its final chapter for offering only personal measures (e.g., privacy defense, ethical consumption) rather than the bold, “shovel-ready” policy proposals he believes are necessary to dismantle a system designed to reward greed, urging for systemic solutions to prepare for inevitable crises.