Besides being an ad for a book, the article attempts to explain modern finance by value extraction. The real problem is extracting value. We see it everywhere - dynamic pricing for hotels, travel, and even food and goods. It forces upward pricing on things. Yes, inflation matters, but it's not the biggest influence. The incentives are to extract as much value as possible from tangible goods as consumers can pay. It will also reduce prices when demand fades, but the pressure is always to go up. As prices climb, owning becomes difficult, so the system breaks things into pieces people can pay. I'll argue the system doesn't care if people own things or not, but it structures things to extract the most value it can. Mentally, I picture it as HFT (high frequency trading). You're walking up to buy tickets for an event, scalpers run to the front of the line to buy tickets before you can get there. They all buy the tickets, sell them to each other. By the time you get there, the cost has tripled.