Sitting here, in this echoing vault of capitalism, I am less confused about the price of a good than I’ve ever been. And while I’m reluctant to glorify the dignity of manual labor, romanticize agrarian enterprise, or oversimplify a dense matrix of activity, the whole operation seems refreshingly straightforward. It makes me wonder whether the much-maligned, all-purpose nostalgia that’s rampant among city-dwelling young adults—the pickles, the flannel, the rye-based cocktails—is really a kind of mass intellectual crisis: an allergy to economic abstraction.

Alice Gregory, “Found Money”