About
About the project
Misaligned Markets is a multimedia project exploring the fundamental challenge of aligning market capitalism with human well-being. Markets are powerful engines of progress but also drive instability—manifesting as procyclical mortality, market failures, and the growing individualization of risk. Ensuring human thriving requires a systemic understanding of how markets lead to these outcomes and how we can mitigate them.
Using history, complex systems theory, and political economy, Misaligned Markets aims to offer a high-level description of how the economy works. Expect blog updates about twice a month, with a podcast and videos forthcoming.
About me
My name is Mike, and I'm a lifelong student of political economy and philosophy. Misaligned Markets was born from a desire to better understand negative externalities—the unintended adverse effects of market activities on vulnerable populations. Of particular interest to me are health and environmental externalities like pollution, climate change, and the continued sale of harmful chemicals even when safer alternatives exist.
As I’ve reflected on this topic, I’ve realized that I’ve begun to touch on something much broader than markets or even capitalism. Over time, this project has expanded into a broader framework for understanding how social systems and technologies often overoptimize for short-term gains at the expense of long-term well-being. If this sounds abstract, well it is! But I assure you, once you recognize this pattern, you can't help but see it as foundational to understanding many of our most wicked problems.
Join me on this journey. Become a community member to discuss ideas, suggest topics, and help support this project!
How the site is operated
Site tech stack
This site is proudly self-hosted using Ghost, an open-source alternative to services like Substack and Patreon. Any subscriptions, free or paid, will be managed with Ghost which uses Stripe as a payment vendor.
I'm trying Litlyx as a cookieless, privacy-first analytics tool. Litlyx is an open-source project that I wanted to experiment with as I determine if web analytics would be useful for this project. The goal will be to self-host an instance of Litlyx (or one of the dozen other FOSS, privacy-first analytics tools) should I want to do that.
This section will be updated if or as I expand services, but the long term goal is to stick with Ghost and leverage it for most of my publication strategy.
Affiliate links
Where applicable, any books mentioned on the site will link to bookshop.org. They're a B Corp that supports local and independent bookstores by sending the cover price of books you purchase on their site to a local bookstore of your choice. As an affiliate Misaligned Markets will receive 10% of your purchase, which will go towards covering site costs.
Tips
I intend to offer paid subscription tiers in the future where you can become a member of the Misaligned Market community and enjoy perks like early content, access to drafts, the ability to vote on future topics, and more. However, if you've viewed my content and enjoy it, you're free to send tips via the button below. It'll take you to this site's payment portal which is managed by Stripe.
Contact me
I'm currently:
- On Mastodon. This is my primary social media for the moment. This Mastodon account mirrors to a BlueSky account using Bridgy Fed.
- Have a YouTube channel (under the name Misaligned Markets) launching shortly.
- I also have an X account repurposed from my last project, but I'm not very active there.
Send email inquiries or questions to the address below: