The End of a Fair Price: Dynamic Pricing and the Normalization of Gouging
This article appears in the October 2026 issue of The American Prospect magazine. When inflation spiked shortly after the COVID crisis, neoliberal economists kicked into high gear. Their mission was to defend corporations for all price hikes.
- ▪This article appears in the October 2026 issue of The American Prospect magazine.
- ▪When inflation spiked shortly after the COVID crisis, neoliberal economists kicked into high gear.
- ▪Their mission was to defend corporations for all price hikes.
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Record
| Original publisher | The American Prospect |
| Canonical URL | https://prospect.org/2026/09/29/oct-2026-battling-an-army-of-price-setters-owens-review/ |
| Publication time | Tue, 29 Sep 2026 18:09:50 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-29T18:32:31.477Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-29T18:32:31.477Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | gaoT0xwMKHIu · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
This article appears in the October 2026 issue of The American Prospect magazine. If you’d like to receive our next issue in your mailbox, please subscribe here. When inflation spiked shortly after the COVID crisis, neoliberal economists kicked into high gear. Their mission was to defend corporations for all price hikes. The reason why prices were spiking, claimed the adherents to the dismal science, owed to demand—rents ostensibly spiked due to growing demand for home offices—or legitimate cost increases, or really any cause other than the firms actually setting prices higher. Gouged: The End of a Fair Price—and What That Means for Your WalletBy Lindsay OwensViking The mainstream media dutifully followed suit.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The American Prospect.
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