Burgers, Lipstick & Underwear: What Strange Indicators Really Tell Us About the Economy

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.

You will learn how to ask better questions of any index: What is the object? Where did the data come from? What does the method actually measure? What disappears in the translation? And what changes when people start optimizing for the score?

This is not a book against weird measures. It is a book about using them with curiosity, method, and proportion.