Consumer Surplus, a newsletter by Sam Bowman

Welcome to Consumer Surplus. I’m going to use this for longer-form thoughts and ideas than I can do on Twitter, which has become more like an arena for combat than I’d like.

I am an optimistic ‘neoliberal’. In Consumer Surplus I’ll discuss ideas that I think are important to making people’s lives better, as well as some concepts I find useful for thinking about politics and the economy.

I’ll also recommend a few ‘consumer surplus’ items that I like and maybe drop in a couple of links to things I’ve read and enjoyed. I probably won’t review restaurants, because most readers won’t live in London, but if there’s somewhere that’s blown my mind I might mention it.

The newsletter is called Consumer Surplus: that’s the term in economics that describes the difference between what you pay for something and what it’s actually worth to you. Life should be filled with things that are cheap or free but fill your life with happiness. Sometimes you get that by telling people about an amazing microwave rice cooker you found on Amazon, sometimes by making it easier to build loads more homes in cities. With Consumer Surplus I hope to help a tiny bit with both.

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