Poor people have a problem.

Every time they invent a cheap way to survive, somebody eventually discovers that it has excellent margins.

Offal becomes cuisine. Preserved meat becomes patience. Wrinkled fabric becomes authenticity. Sugar becomes so cheap that people start paying extra to leave it out.

The rich do not simply buy expensive things.

They buy whatever has become difficult to reproduce.

**POOR PEOPLE, BEWARE** follows a strange economic migration across hotpot, roast duck, tea, soup dumplings, bird’s nest, cured ham, synthetic fibers, sugar, modern consumer culture—and finally artificial intelligence.

The pattern is not that poverty magically becomes luxury.

It is sharper than that:

**when one bottleneck disappears, value moves toward the next one.**

Industrial scale makes yesterday’s scarcity abundant. Abundance weakens old status signals. Choice explodes. Attention becomes scarce. Then filtering becomes valuable. When machines can generate thousands of plausible answers, judgment becomes harder to see. When judgment itself becomes automated, another question appears:

Who is allowed to make the answer real?

And when the answer goes wrong—

who absorbs the loss?

Through historical cases, sharp reversals, fictional corporate scenes, and a recurring cast forced to make decisions under pressure, Haijian Xing traces value as it migrates from scarcity to specialization, from abundance to curation, and from intelligence to permission, commitment, and risk.

This is not a book about why expensive things are better.

It is about something much more dangerous:

**the expensive thing keeps moving.**

If AI makes intelligence abundant, the next fortune may not belong to whoever produces the most answers.

It may belong to whoever controls what enters, what gets chosen, what is allowed to happen—and who can survive being wrong.

**Do not watch the product. Watch the bottleneck.**