The reason rent is unbearable and homelessness shapes our lives now is because the same small, self-reinforcing circle of elite thinkers has had a monopoly on “serious economic ideas” for forty years. It’s a closed ecosystem where columnists, policymakers, think-tank economists, and university insiders circulate one another’s arguments until they harden into consensus. That consensus, Crimson-coded, always tilts toward market solutions, property-owner interests, and fiscal austerity — not because it works, but because it preserves institutions from the threat of change. When gatekeepers all come from the same schools, the same networks, and the same worldview, they reproduce the same policies: deregulation that helps landlords and developers, hostility to public spending, and an obsession with deficits that justifies cuts to the very services ordinary people rely on. That’s how we end up in a country where rent rises faster than wages and austerity feels like a natural law — not because it’s correct, but because doing things any other way would be tantamount to admitting they’ve always been wrong. There is never any humility. The millions who suffer are irrelevant for this class, insulated as they are from their own broken policies. I’m sharing this in response to “The Files,” which revealed a trove of Centrist Dad Writers who have spent their entire careers in the service of this system. These Centrist Dads define our economic common sense for us—to the exclusion of all other possibilities. It is imperative to unsubscribe from their mediocrity and demand better. They don’t understand economics, they understand inequality and their job has always been to use their prestige to defend it.