CONCEPT
The Rational Flight to the Woods
The economically rational retreat of senior knowledge workers to lower-cost locations and simpler lives when the expected return on their specific human capital collapses — portfolio rebalancing, not panic, and precisely what Becker's framework predicts.
In the months following December 2025, a pattern emerged among experienced software engineers: some, often the most senior and accomplished, began reducing their cost of living. They moved out of expensive cities. They paid off debts. They downsized. They talked about homesteading, about self-sufficiency, about building a life that could sustain itself on a fraction of their current income. In the language of the moment, they were running for the woods. Other engineers, equally senior and equally aware of what was happening, did the opposite — leaning into AI tools with an intensity that bordered on compulsion, doubling down on the fight. Both responses are rational. Becker's framework does not predict that all agents will respond the same way to a shift in returns. It predicts all agents will respond in ways consistent with their individual constraints, risk preferences, and assessments of the probability distribution.
