Book Review: Gouged by Lindsay Owens
Literally Calls For Bread Lines And Gas Lines. Read It Anyway. This is a book that absolutely has its own view of economics and attempts to gaslight the reader that this is the "majority" view of economics in the same way that climate alarmists trot out the "97% of scientists" bullshit. As I said in the title, Owens actively advocates for "queue based" distribution rather than "surge pricing" - what she calls "gouging" - in both normal and extreme circumstances. Yes, while not using this exact example, she actively says that she would rather you wait in a miles long line for a crumb of bread that you might not ever get (ask any former Soviet citizen) rather than allow a business to "gouge" its customers and make "too much" profit. This is a position that some will embrace just as much as Owens does... and others will want to defenestrate the book over.
But here's the thing - and the reason I didn't deduct a star for such obviously flawed "reasoning": While it is present and pervasive, the actual factual information Owens brings forth about how companies today use your data to both collude with each other and to squeeze every possible penny out of you as both consumer and employee is actually something so very many of us need to be aware of, and Owens largely presents these particular facts in a more balanced manner than her overall worldview might otherwise suggest. She lays this problem bare in all of its technical details, explaining the situations in ways that those trained in neither economics nor technology should be able to follow along with reasonably well, and she does it in an overall conversational style such that you could quite easily see her essentially holding court at some bar somewhere as she starts off talking to one person or a small group about these very things and the crowd just grows and grows until suddenly no one else in the bar is talking, the TVs are turned off, and everyone is paying attention to every word Owens is saying.
And then there is the Bibliography. Clocking in at 40%, this is one of the more well documented advance review copies I've ever come across in now 8 yrs (today!) of book blogging. Yes, I've seen a *few* books with even more documentation - and even longer books to begin with, meaning *even more* documentation - but this is absolutely up there in percentage of book, and because this particular book starts out with a short-ish barely 250 page length to begin with, what this ultimately means for the reader is that you're getting an insightful book chock full of information you're really going to want to know about so much of the 2020s era business climate... and yet it also isn't a book that you're going to have to spend the rest of the year reading either, even after its publication in late September.
Overall a very informative book, one that some will love its overall worldview and some will have to read in spite of said worldview, but truly every American needs to read and understand. It actually pairs well with Your Data Will Be Used Against You by Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, released in March 2026, and actually provides a degree of balance in the pairing both in the government vs business misuse of what should be personal data and even in the timing roughly six months apart and both roughly three months from either end of 2026.
Very much recommended.
This review of Gouged by Lindsay Owens was originally written on July 2, 2026.
