But Why?

News stories say married men don't pull their weight at home. They're usually counting only housework — cleaning, cooking, laundry. When you count everything a couple must do to maintain a household — market labor, commute, childcare, home maintenance, shopping, volunteering, and all the travel those require — married men and women with children contribute nearly identical total time: about 65 hours a week each. The difference is in the composition, not the total.

A simulated investor puts \$1,000/year of real (constant-purchasing-power) savings into the S&P 500 for 40 years. We run this for every starting cohort from 1950 to 1985, then again for 10-year careers from 1950 to 2015, and plot the final real net worth by starting year. Same plan, same index, same discipline — retirement wealth varies by 2.3× across 40-year cohorts purely on the year they happened to start. Over 10-year windows, several cohorts finish with *less* than they contributed.

An annual mark-to-market tax sounds clean on a slide. Two worked simulations — a family farm next to a data-center boom, and a founder whose startup goes from unicorn to zero — show what it does to people who aren't liquid.

An interactive back-of-envelope tool that estimates the consumer surplus Amazon generates each year — AWS, retail, 3P marketplace, payroll taxes — and compares it to Jeff Bezos's net worth. Move the sliders, change the assumptions, see whether the social utility argument holds up at your numbers.