There is a theory in economics known as “revealed preference,” introduced by Paul Samuelson in 1938. It posits that consumers’ true preferences in a market economy for the goods and services they want to see produced are not accurately captured by what people say they want. Rather, what reveals their preferences is what people actually choose to spend their valuable time and money on. Rational consumers want the things they buy and use — not what they claim they wish to have, but never get around to purchasing.
Based on the anguished shrieks emanating from the left-wing media ecosystem today, one might think that untold multitudes of Americans are deeply upset that the Washington Post is laying off 30 percent of its journalistic workforce, entailing the closure of the legacy newspaper’s sports and books sections and sweeping cuts to its local and international coverage. One might assume that all of the people who are furious with Post owner Jeff Bezos for his alleged cruelty are faithful readers of these clearly beloved sections. They passionately proclaim that these layoffs are an immense loss for the media landscape, so they must really mean it, right?
In fact, they do not. If everyone who is purportedly angry about the Post layoffs actually read the reporting of the now-unemployed journalists whose loss they are bemoaning, they would not be losing their jobs in the first place. The workforce of the Washington Post is shrinking because too few people consume the content that it produces. Even fewer people read the sections that are being targeted for the biggest cuts.
In 2025, the Post’s print circulation fell below 100,000 for the first time in 55 years. Its digital traffic has recently collapsed relative to the paper’s chief competitor, the New York Times. The paper lost $77 million in 2023 and $100 million in 2024. The companies that own the Times and the Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, are both earning record profits.
Jeff Bezos — famously one of the most successful businessmen in America — is running the Post like a business, as is his right. The reason that he is shuttering certain parts of his company to refocus on others is that they have no realistic hope of being profitable. And the reason they have no hope of being profitable is that not nearly enough people give them attention to justify the cost of maintaining them.
For many people to be genuinely upset about the death of the Post’s fiction reviews or local hockey coverage, they would have needed to read those articles with some regularity. But not that many people do, so they’re shutting down. Ergo, not that many people are truly upset.
This is revealed preferences triumphing over asserted preferences, as they invariably do in a competitive profit-and-loss system. Indeed, consumers as a whole will be better off once the laid-off Post employees find new jobs that provide enough actual value to cover their salaries.