The Plague

The political lottery, the market for Demagogues, the appeal of revolution, the probability of insurrection.

Under the accretion of the Rentier Black Hole, an inelastic, collateralised and tax-advantaged asset can sleepwalk an economy, through individually rational decisions, toward collective decline. Put simply, property eats the economy.

We have already discussed what happens to those left below the reference.

In The Accretion Disk, I argued that the ordinary reference life is increasingly written in the language of property ownership, the balance-sheet position a successful life is expected to reach, inferred from the generation ahead and from the society around it. As the structural rentier asset appreciates, that reference moves with it.

For someone below that reference, the rational allocation may cease to look like a steady plan and begin to look like a lottery distribution. A conventional portfolio can produce a perfectly respectable return in absolute terms and still amount to a near-certain loss relative to the asset one is trying to catch. The tiny probability gamble may be worse on average, but it contains something the prudent strategy no longer does, a state of the world in which the gap closes. Under those conditions, the gamble is not necessarily stupidity. It may simply be the only strategy on the menu that still contains escape.

In Degeneracy Is the Symptom, I argued that this does not stop with investments. The same distribution appears in careers and lived choices: the meme coin, the speculative venture, the creator economy, the job with a microscopic chance of extraordinary success. What looks like degeneracy from above the reference can look like rational skew-seeking from below it.

Those above the reference inhabit a different problem. They find themselves rational at these heights, prudent investors, risk averse in the main. From that position, the behaviour below looks incomprehensible, and what a society cannot explain structurally it tends to explain morally. “The gambler is degenerate. The renter is entitled. The young are irresponsible. The angry voter is stupid.”

This essay takes the mechanism to its political conclusion. There is no reason the gamble stops at the brokerage account.

If an increasing share of a population is pushed below a socially learned reference and becomes more willing to accept variance in exchange for a small probability of reset, why should that preference disappear at the ballot box? Does the segregation of a population by asset ownership remain a financial condition, or does it propagate into political choice? Does moral condemnation stop at the front page, or does it enter the polling booth?

When a generation is crushed beneath its reference, does the extreme become the expected?

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Why You Might Vote for a Demagogue

In 1979 Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky published the paper that eventually won the Nobel prize, and its central finding is simple enough to state in a sentence.^[1] People do not evaluate outcomes in absolute terms. They evaluate them against a reference point, and they behave differently on either side of it. Above the reference, in the domain of gains, people are cautious: they will take a sure thing over a gamble of equal expected value. Below the reference, in the domain of losses, the pattern inverts. People become willing to gamble, accepting a worse average outcome for a chance of getting back to where they think they belong. Losses also weigh roughly twice as heavily as equivalent gains, which is why falling behind a reference hurts far more than an equal advance pleases.

Nine years later, George Quattrone and Tversky asked whether any of this survived the journey into politics, and ran the experiments to find out. It survived intact. Voters evaluating candidates and referenda showed the same caution over gains and the same appetite for risk over losses. Incumbents were favoured when conditions were perceived as good and challengers when conditions were perceived as bad. When the experimenters moved the reference point, preferences reversed, with the same options and the same odds. Nothing had changed except where the voter stood relative to the line.^[2]

Now put a person below the reference in front of two political offers.

The first says: we will improve things, credibly and incrementally, over twenty years. The second says: give me the power and I will break the machine.

The first almost certainly has the better expected outcome, and the voter can usually sense that it does. But look at the two offers through the reference rather than through the average within the experience of a normal life below the reference. Under the incremental programme, their expected trajectory improves and still never crosses back into the life they were taught to regard as normal, not within any horizon that includes their remaining youth. It is a better version of a certain loss. Under the machine-breaking programme, most outcomes are worse and some are much worse. But a small set of outcomes contains reset. The political gamble has begun to resemble the financial one, for the same person, for the same reason, at the same time.

Every voter carries a weight on how much the gap between their position and their reference matters to them, and that weight rises as the gap widens. For each pair of programmes there is a threshold on that weight above which the riskier programme is preferred despite its worse average. Below the threshold, the voter is prudent. Above it, they are not, and nothing about their intelligence has changed. What has changed is that the reference gap has grown large enough that a route back is worth an expected-utility penalty to obtain. The voter is not blind to averages. They simply price the right tail at what it would mean to them.^[3]

The gamble does not have to look better on average. It only has to contain a route back to the life the status quo has made impossible.

First, the mechanism does not only touch the excluded. Owners have a reference too, not the price they paid, but the appreciation they have learned to expect, formed over decades of watching the asset climb. An owner does not need prices to fall to enter the domain of loss. They need them only to stall below the rate they were taught to expect, and once they do, the most placid voting bloc in the country quietly acquires an appetite for variance it never had before. Second, the mechanism says nothing whatever about direction. It predicts a demand for programmes with a certain shape, discontinuous, tail-heavy, promising restoration. It does not say which flank will supply them, and the recent housing-and-politics literature, which finds tenure to have become an electoral cleavage across the advanced democracies, expected future ownership to shape how non-owners vote, and local housing decline to feed support for anti-system parties, is consistent with the same silence:^[4] the demand rises with the gap; the product that meets it is decided elsewhere.

Press enough of a population below its reference and the extreme becomes, in expectation, the rational purchase. Which raises the prior question. Where does the reference come from, and why is it moving away?

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Separation

Every society teaches its citizens a trajectory. Not formally, and not as an entitlement. A reference.

You work, become competent, earn more, establish a home, raise children, accumulate some security, and leave something behind. It is an unwritten contract, but expected, that we might enjoy lives better than our parents, much as they enjoyed lives better than theirs. People infer it from the lives immediately ahead of them. The 22-year-old looks at the ordinary life of the 42-year-old in their profession and thinks, reasonably, that is approximately where I will be in twenty years.

The reference therefore moves with the society that produces it. Yesterday’s exceptional achievement becomes tomorrow’s ordinary expectation. A country that spends decades getting richer spends those same decades teaching its citizens what an ordinary successful life is supposed to contain.

The problem begins when the attainable trajectory separates from the reference.

The young professional can earn more than the generation before them, hold more qualifications, work in a more prestigious occupation, and still find themselves further from the balance-sheet position they had learned to regard as normal. The life has not disappeared. It has simply been repriced faster than ordinary competence can accumulate.

They are not necessarily becoming poorer in income terms.

They are becoming poorer relative to the life they expected to reach.

James Davies identified the political importance of precisely this distinction in 1962. Revolutions, he argued, are not best understood simply as products of poverty or inequality. Societies can tolerate extraordinary deprivation for very long periods. The more combustible condition is a widening gap between expected and realised conditions, particularly after a period in which improvement had taught people to expect continued progress.^[5]

That contains a darker result. The stable society is not necessarily the good society. A population can live horrendously and remain politically stable if reality roughly matches what it has been taught to expect. The humane equilibrium closes the gap by raising attainable reality toward the reference. The authoritarian equilibrium closes it by lowering the reference toward reality.

Once a society has demonstrated a better attainable life, however, it creates a reference it cannot easily erase. The generation that watched ordinary people buy homes, accumulate security and improve their position does not invent its expectations from nowhere. Society taught them what normal looked like.

The reference, moreover, does not fall when the attainment does. In England, 42 per cent of households headed by someone aged 16 to 34 own their home, against 79 per cent of those headed by someone over 65; yet 69 per cent of the younger group still expect to buy eventually, exactly the proportion that expected it ten years earlier, before the last decade of separation.^[6] The trajectory is being withheld. The expectation is not moving.

And when reality stops delivering it, the gap itself becomes politically important.

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The Pulpits Multiply

Meet a particular person. She is 36. She went to the right university and holds the right profession. She is articulate, credentialed, analytically trained; she can diagnose an institution at fifty paces, because diagnosing institutions is roughly what she was educated to do.

She lives in a rented flat.

A man who bought an ordinary suburban semi in 1998, and who has never read a book she would respect, may hold several times her net wealth, accumulated largely while he slept. She has status without assets, training without position, a diploma sold as a claim on a particular life that has quietly failed to settle.

Multiply her by a few hundred thousand.

Peter Turchin calls the larger phenomenon elite overproduction. A society can produce more aspirants to elite status than there are elite positions available to absorb them. The housing structure makes the mismatch especially strange, because it allows someone to become culturally elite while remaining economically excluded from the balance-sheet position that elite life was supposed to confer.

Some of these blocked aspirants become what Turchin calls counter-elites, articulate, ambitious people whose route to status now runs through challenging the order that failed to provide it.^[7]

Every counter-elite needs one thing. An audience.

And a counter-elite goes where the audience is. It does not need to change its mind first. Its ideological priors are the training it received on the way to being blocked; what it wants is the position, and the political content of the pulpit is the price of admission to the congregation that will pay for it.

Davies explains why the cathedral fills. Turchin explains why the pulpits multiply.

Millions of people know that the trajectory they were taught has broken. At the same time, an unusually large class of clever, frustrated, unplaced people has both the skill and the incentive to explain why.

The audience and the explainers arrive together.

What happens next is a market.

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Paneloux

Markets are built to clear, and one of the best illustrations comes from Albert Camus’s The Plague, one of my favourite books. In the city of Oran a pestilence arrives, the rats crawl out of the sewers to die in the streets, a plague spreads, the bodies pile up, the gates close, and a frightened population asks the only question a frightened population ever asks. Why us?

Father Paneloux mounts the cathedral pulpit before a packed congregation and explains the plague. It is deserved. The city brought it on itself, the flail is just.

It is a magnificent sermon. It explains not one rat. But a plague with a face is easier to live with than a mechanism without one.

Two explanations of the separation are on offer. One says: land elasticity, collateral feedback, tax preference, reference trajectories, coalition dynamics, banking regulation, planning systems reform.

The other says: Them.

The second product has an enormous advantage. It is cheaper.

A face is cognitively cheap. A mechanism is cognitively expensive. The face can be pointed at; the mechanism must be studied. Better still, the face comes bundled with a solution: remove the face. The mechanism offers no such convenience. It asks for institutional reform, patience, trade-offs, and an explanation of why individually rational behaviour has produced a collectively irrational outcome.

As products, these are not close.

Scapegoating is not the only sermon available. Lets step back to the two ways a reference gap can be closed. Reality can rise toward expectation, or expectation can be pushed down toward reality. The second has its own pulpit.

You should never have expected to own a home.
You should have worked harder.
You should have stopped buying coffee.
You should get used to renting.

It explains no more than the first sermon. It merely teaches the congregation to stop asking why the reference moved.

The faces themselves are familiar: the migrant, the foreign buyer, the developer, the older homeowner, the young themselves. Some of the claims made about them contain real information. Migration adds some minor housing demand. Foreign capital adds quite a lot of demand. Developers respond strategically by withholding land for development. Incumbent owners can obstruct supply as rational asset-protecting NIMBYs blocking planning permissions.

That is not the argument. The structural question is what happens when those pressures arrive. Pour additional demand into a housing market that can respond with supply and much of it becomes construction. Pour it into a closed market and much of it becomes price, then wealth separation, then grievance, then a congregation. The amplifiers are weather. The structure is climate.

A politics that promises to deport the weather leaves the climate intact.

The reactionary movement is not simply an alien force invading an otherwise healthy political system. It is one possible product supplied into a market for explanation whose demand side already exists.

The structure does not manufacture a particular ideology. History, institutions, culture and contingency determine what eventually clears the market.

What the structure does manufacture is more basic. A population for whom the ordinary trajectory increasingly resembles a loss, a greater willingness to entertain political variance, and a large market demanding to know who or what caused the separation.

Turchin supplies the preachers. Davies supplies the congregation. Camus’ Paneloux shows what happens when the cheapest sermon wins. The preacher need not be cynical. He may believe every word.

But agnosticism about the mechanism is not agnosticism about the market. Once you count, the market has odds, and they are not even. On the demand side first, two products are on the shelf, and they sell restoration or acquisition. Restoration says: the life you had, or were on course for, will be given back. Acquisition says, the life you never had will be seized. Restoration sells to people who held the asset and are losing ground on it; acquisition sells to people who never held it and have had a reference installed from outside. In a country where roughly two households in three own their home, the loss-domain mass, once the owners have entered it with disappointing returns, is mass that wants restoration, and the excluded credentialed cohort is the smaller reservoir that wants acquisition. Then the supply side. The face is cheaper to produce than the mechanism, and cheaper still for the credentialed producer, who can build it with a fraction of their training and keep the rest in reserve. Revenue in an explanation market is per view, so return on production time is higher where the mass is and the product is cheap.

Put the two together and the counter-elite’s crossover, held from the last section, resolves itself. The credentialed supplier follows the audience to the restoration product, and produces it more cheaply than the market’s own natives can. None of this requires anyone to be sincere and none of it forbids sincerity; the calculation is the same for the preacher who believes and the preacher who does not, and the congregation cannot tell them apart.

The historical rhyme is worth one hedged sentence. The structural-demographic literature, Goldstone and Turchin, describes the combustible triad as mass immiseration, elite overproduction and state fiscal distress; the addition here is only which product the mass buys. Where the loss-domain population had held the thing, a fallen middle, savings destroyed, a trajectory broken, the market cleared to restoration, and history has a word for what that became. Where the mass had never held it and a counter-elite installed the reference before the programme, it cleared to acquisition. Davies himself would insist that even the acquisition cases were reference gaps first, improvement then reversal, with the war or the harvest as the acute break. The structure does not choose a direction, it sets the odds, In a propertied society in the loss domain, the odds favour restoration, and restoration is the reactionary product.

Camus’s first readers, in 1947, did not need the mechanism spelled out. They had just watched a version of it clear.

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The Tail

Everything so far has described a public, a congregation, a market, an electorate. But a distribution has a tail, and the tail is where the same product reaches one person rather than a crowd. It is worth walking out to the end of the distribution deliberately because the criminology of the far tail turns out to be the most dangerous part of the distribution.

Ramón Spaaij, and later Mark Hamm and Spaaij together, spent years assembling the empirical record on the lone actor: the individual who commits political violence without an organisation behind him. Their findings, and those of the largest case study in the field, are not what the folk theory expects. There is no single profile; the researchers are emphatic about that. But certain things recur at rates far above the population’s. In the largest study of its kind, more than half of the actors were socially isolated, half had never married, four in ten were unemployed, and psychological difficulties appeared far more often than among group-based militants.^[8] The lone actor is not, in the main, a disciplined ideologue. Their grievance is characteristically hybrid, a private wound that fuses with, or borrows the vocabulary of, a political cause. They do not typically invent their frame; They adopt one, from an online milieu, from a text, from a figure whose account of the world they take as their own. They broadcast intent, usually well in advance, and usually to people not equipped to hear it. Then some triggering event, often trivial, often personal, converts intent into act.^[9]

The private wound and the political frame is Paneloux operating at the resolution of a single mind. The demand is the grievance, the supplied product is the story with a face, and the same compression that wins in the cathedral wins in a bedroom at three in the morning. The credentialed-but-unplaced case is Turchin’s tail, the blocked aspirant who did not become a counter-elite because they never found the audience, and was left alone with the frame. Then the socially detached, the unmarried, the man with no position. A society ordinarily holds its citizens inside its lines with sunk cost. The mortgage, the spouse, the children, the standing in a place, the career with something left to lose. Those are the stakes the ordinary trajectory installs, and they are precisely the stakes the reference gap has withheld.

A structure that prices a growing share of a generation out of the ordinary life is, whether it notices or not, manufacturing people for whom the ordinary restraints have nothing to attach to, not the majority, the tail.

This description, when laid over the statistics of the nation today, paint a stark image. The Financial Times put it plainly in a recent analysis under the headline that Covid isolation never ended for some people. The pandemic did not create the isolation of the young, but it accelerated a decline that was already under way and it did not reverse when the restrictions did. In-person socialising among young people has fallen for a decade, relationship and marriage rates have fallen with it, and a rising share of adults, young men in particular, now report going a full week without social contact with another person.^[10] The best analysis of the deaths-of-despair literature finds that what marks out those who succumb is not psychological distress or hardship as such but long-term joblessness and social isolation, the two conditions in which people have least left to lose.

Read that against the profile at the top of this section, unmarried, unplaced, isolated, and against the mechanism of this essay, which withholds precisely the household formation, the partnership and the position that would ordinarily pull a young man back into contact with other people. Isolation has causes the structure does not own, the phone, the remote job, the pandemic’s scar, and this essay claims only the component it does own: a housing structure that delays partnership and household formation by a decade is a structure that keeps a growing share of a generation in the state the criminology of the tail describes as its precondition. A country that has arranged those inputs at population scale has not produced any particular actor. It has widened the tail, and it has done so while simultaneously stocking the explanation market with faces.

Then the trigger. Hamm and Spaaij are clear that the triggering event is usually contingent, a personal humiliation, a rejection, an anniversary, a piece of news. The system does not pull the trigger, Coincidence does.

The wrong answer on one side says the structure produced the act, and therefore the act indicts the structure and nothing else. That is the fever mistaken for the treatment, and it is a sermon. The wrong answer on the other side says the act was one deranged individual, full stop, and therefore contains no information. That is the incumbent’s sermon, and it is equally cheap. The disciplined answer is that the distribution is endogenous and the draw is not. A structure that presses a population below its reference, supplies a market of faces to explain the pressure, and withholds from a growing tail the sunk costs that would ordinarily hold them inside the lines, raises the expected count of such acts and shapes the frames they will carry. It does not select the person, the day, or the trigger.

Take the demand the structure manufactures, combine it with any underlying condition or private wound, isolate the person from the ordinary society that would hold him, hand him a face and a cause and nothing to lose, and what may follow at a sufficient trigger is potentially boundless. That is not a prediction about anyone. It is a statement about the support of a distribution, and it is why the structure cannot be let off the hook for the shape of the tail even as the individual is never let off the hook for the act.

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Revolution

The people want the reset, suppose they get it by chance, suppose the political lottery pays out.

The most popular jackpot on offer, sincere and understandable, is housing as a right for this generation: distribute the asset, extend ownership downward, get the young onto the ladder at last. Versions of this are sold across the spectrum, and it sounds like the structural fix. A nineteenth-century anarchist explains why it is not.

Mikhail Bakunin spent the 1870s asking Karl Marx a question Marx never satisfactorily answered: if the proletariat becomes the ruling class, over whom does it rule? A class that rules is no longer the class it was; its members become, in his phrase, ex-workers, governing from the commanding heights they were supposed to abolish. Bakunin predicted the red bureaucracy a half-century before it arrived, and his point was never really about socialism. It was about structure. Seizing an asset does not abolish the asset’s logic. It enrols you in it.

Britain has run the experiment. From around 1980 the state sold the council houses to their tenants at deep discounts, more than two million homes by the latest count, the largest transfer of asset wealth to the working class in the country’s history, and owner-occupation expanded at enormous scale.^[11] What followed was not the disappearance of the homeowner coalition but its entrenchment.^[12] Changing the membership of an asset-owning class did not remove the political incentives attached to owning the asset.

The moment the asset is yours, its value becomes your reference, and losses against that reference hurt roughly twice what gains please. The tenant who marched for housing becomes available to vote as an owner votes, not through hypocrisy but through the ordinary arithmetic of loss aversion, and the next queue forms outside prices his coalition now has every incentive to defend.

The proletariat took the asset. The asset took the proletariat.

That is what the jackpot pays. Winning the lottery does not abolish the casino. It moves one gambler onto the house side of the table, resets his reference to the new chips, and hands the queue outside back one generation. Any programme whose endpoint is more people holding an appreciating claim on a fixed asset is a membership drive for the coalition it believes it is storming. This is not an argument against the young owning homes. It is an argument that owning the asset and profiting from its appreciation are separable things, and that every politics which distributes the second while promising the first is manufacturing next decade’s blockers, ensuring the continuation of the regime we are plagued by.

Removal

The other ‘jackpot’ on the shelf is sold from the opposite pulpit, the ‘restoration product’ and it deserves the same courtesy of being taken at its word. Suppose that programme pays out too. Suppose the face is removed, at scale, as promised.

Take the demand-side claim first. Migration adds some moderate housing demand, not anywhere near the order of the credit market, but some. Removing a large population removes demand, so far the sermon is arithmetic. What it does not say is what else leaves with the demand, and what the three dull facts do once it has gone.

What leaves is a large share of the labour that the economy’s output is currently made of, concentrated in three sectors a country cannot pause: health, care and construction. Roughly two in five licensed doctors in the UK qualified abroad; adult social care added around fifty thousand internationally recruited workers in a single year and still carries more than a hundred thousand vacancies; and the construction workforce has for years drawn on labour born elsewhere.^[13] The country that removes them does not get its doctors back, it gets its waiting lists back. Output shrinks with the population that produced it. There is also a quieter cost that arrives with the apparatus rather than with the outcome. A state that builds the capacity to identify, detain and remove people at scale, on the strength of a category rather than a conviction, has confirmed something about itself that does not stay confined to its original target. Once the machinery for removal on suspicion exists, the question of who it may be pointed at next is answered by whoever holds it, and the citizen who cheered its construction discovers that he lives inside its range.

Now the housing arithmetic, which is where the sermon’s own promise fails. Two things can happen to the price of the closed city when this marginal demand is removed, and neither is relief.

If the demand shock is large enough to unwind prices meaningfully, then the collateral channel that inflated the asset runs in reverse. Falling collateral values against fixed nominal debt is the mechanism of a Minsky-style deleveraging: lenders retreat, forced sales feed further falls, the balance sheets built on the appreciating asset are impaired at once. The terminal state of the rentier dynamic, the collapse the whole structure has been deferring, arrives sooner rather than being avoided. That is not the excluded getting their houses, that is everyone getting the crash.

If the shock is modest, and it is more likely to be modest, then prices reprice by some minor percentage and the three dull facts are untouched: the land is still fixed, the credit still flows preferentially against it, the tax still favours the gain. The asset remains what it was before the removal, the dominant risk-adjusted claim in the economy, the place where capital goes because it is still where capital does best. So it is bought again, by the same process, on the same collateral logic, and within a cycle the prices and the rents are back where they were. The mechanism has been fed a smaller country and has produced the same result.

Either the removal triggers the terminal state faster, or it reprices the asset by a rounding error and the black hole reabsorbs it. What it cannot do, on any setting, is address the reason the reference moved, because the reason was never the weather. You end where you began, the same rents, the same prices, produced by the same three facts, in a nation smaller and poorer than the one that voted for it, and no longer able to pay for what it built.

The reactionary jackpot sells restoration, which is why it sells to a country that once had the thing. There is also a second-round move that any incumbent facing that jackpot will discover without needing to be told, because the polls will teach it. Retire the face with a gesture, an announcement that costs nothing and touches no climate, and buy the owners back with appreciation: a stamp duty holiday, a mortgage guarantee, a loosened lending limit, whatever name it wears. Restore the asset’s climb above the rate the owning cohort learned to expect, and that cohort walks back into the domain of gains and its appetite for political variance switches off, It works, but It works once. A flood of cheap credit soothes the demand for political variance temporarily.

Expected appreciation is adaptive, so each restoration raises the rate against which the next disappointment is measured, and the boost required to hold the ballast next time is larger, the frontier is further from the excluded, the graduate reservoir is deeper in its own loss, and the cliff under the whole structure is taller because nothing was deleveraged and the collateral has been re-inflated. Nobody plans this, every poll-driven government arrives at it independently, which is the point of an emergent equilibrium. The bribe that staves off the restoration lottery is a dose of the disease that manufactures its buyers.

The revolutionary jackpot and the reactionary jackpot need not resemble one another morally or politically, and nothing here equates them. Both sell a discontinuous restoration of the reference life, a fat right tail purchased at the price of a fat left tail the brochure does not dwell on. Both, on payout, leave the three dull facts standing. The content differs, the distribution is the same shape, and it is the shape, not the content, that the customer below the reference is buying. A politics that fights only the rival sermon, while leaving the congregation’s reasons intact, is competing for the pulpit rather than emptying the cathedral.

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The Rebellion

Camus spent The Rebel asking the question this essay has been walking toward: what does a person do who sees the mechanism, refuses the sermon, and declines the jackpot?

His answer was a distinction. Revolution begins in a legitimate refusal and then totalises it. It seizes the machinery of suffering and, in seizing it, risks inheriting its logic. The guillotine changes hands rather than disappearing. Rebellion is narrower, the rebel says no, but the no contains a limit.

This far, no further. The line binds the rebel too.

That is the crucial point. The no must be consequential enough to matter, but bounded enough that resistance does not become a new licence for domination. The first line restrains the structure. The second restrains the rebel.

Translated into the closed city described here, rebellion does not require personal purity. It does not require refusing to own a house, abandoning ordinary ambition, or accepting permanent loss with good manners, It asks for something harder.

I can own a house without requiring somebody else’s child to become poorer so that I become richer. I can acknowledge that migration adds demand without turning a migrant into the mechanism. I can want radical reform without requiring an apocalypse to deliver it. I can stand below my reference, understand exactly why, and still refuse every political lottery merely because it contains a right tail. That is an ethic, It is not yet a cure.

No quantity of personal virtue changes supply elasticity. Rieux’s decency cannot alter a collateral system. A society cannot moralise its way out of incentives that make destructive behaviour individually rational.

But that observation contains the escape from the determinism.

Everything in this essay has been endogenous to structure: The gambler, the blocker, the despair merchant, the preacher, the political lottery. If the structure manufactures the behaviour, then the behaviour is not fixed. Change the structure and the incentives change with it, the people were never the constraint because the people were never the cause.

What would a better structure do? Not a manifesto, a specification.

It would make productive activity more rewarding than ownership of scarcity.

It would allow supply to answer demand rather than capitalising every increment of demand into the price of a fixed claim.

It would provide security without requiring the exclusion of the next entrant as the source of the incumbent’s wealth.

And, above all, it would reconnect ordinary effort with an ordinary attainable life.

None of that requires a final theory of history, no purified population, no enemy class, no New Man, no revolutionary state, no return to an imagined past.

There are simply institutional arrangements that produce better incentives and arrangements that produce worse ones.

When the rules make destructive behaviour individually rational, change the rules. Camus supplies the limit, Economics supplies the design brief. Build institutions in which decency does not require heroism.

The plague does not require villains, the reaction does not require villains, the revolution does not guarantee a cure. None of that means the plague is inevitable.

Which leaves Rieux, not salvation, not ideology, work on the mechanism.

He treats patients, keeps the numbers honest, refuses the sermon and gets up the next morning to do it again. The novel’s word for that is not heroism, It is merely a job.

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Bacillus

So we return, finally, to Oran, because the novel does.

On the night the gates reopen, while the crowds celebrate, Rieux stays sober, because he knows what the crowd has chosen to forget: the bacillus never dies. It waits, patiently, in the furniture and the linen and the cellars until the conditions return in which the rats can come upstairs again.

Britain has lived something like that paragraph without recognising itself in it.

There was a period, within living memory, when the ordinary trajectory and the attainable trajectory ran much closer together than they do now. Not a golden age; do not let anyone sell you one. Simply a period in which ordinary earnings could more plausibly purchase the ordinary reference life, But remission is not cure.

The underlying susceptibility remained: fixed land, a supply system increasingly unable to answer demand, and a financial architecture increasingly capable of capitalising additional demand into the price of existing land. It waited in the deeds, the covenants, the planning files and the balance sheets.

Then the host environment changed, the mechanism accelerated, the reference began separating from reality again. Now the rats are easy to recognise, because we have watched each one being manufactured.

The memecoin boom is a rat.

The betting boom is a rat.

The despair economy built to serve them is a rat.

The fury of the brilliant graduate in the rented flat is a rat.

The homeowner’s sudden political volatility when appreciation disappoints is a rat.

The proliferation of counter-elites auditioning explanations is a rat.

The sermon about them is a rat.

The jackpot programme promising the reset is a rat.

The jackpot programme promising the removal is a rat.

The credit boost sold as reform, to keep the owners calm for one more cycle, is a rat.

The credentialed young preacher who found his audience on the side he was not trained for is a rat.

The young man who has gone a week without speaking to anyone, in a flat he does not own, with a face on his screen and nothing to lose, is a rat.

The extreme refusal at the far end of the distribution, when every quieter no has become decorative, is a rat too.

The rats are not scattered evenly.

Look at where we stand now. Sixty-five per cent of English households own their home,^[14] and the owning cohort has been below the trajectory it learned to expect since 2022, prices rising below the long run average, falling in real terms, and mortgaged at a rate that makes holding the asset a losing carry at most loan-to-value ratios. The over-fifty-fives, the highest-turnout cohort in the country, now give a third or more of their intention to the ‘restoration product’; more than two-thirds of that product’s supporters are over fifty, and among those who came to it from the Conservatives, a majority own their homes outright.^[15] At the other end, one of the most credentialed young populations in the world, carrying its education as debt, watching real graduate earnings sit below where they stood in 2007 and young graduate employment fall, priced out of the reference life its degree was sold as a claim on, gives its intention to the acquisition product,^[16] and the parties of the low-variance centre are being emptied from both sides at once. The frustrated elite is enormous; the audience for restoration is larger.

So the market for faces against structures clears, on price and on quantity, to the right, and for the political opportunist there has rarely been a better moment in Britain to be a right-coded demagogue. That is not a moral observation. It is a market one.

The short-term incentive for whoever governs is equally legible, ratchet the asset back up, quiet the owners, retire the face with a gesture, and buy a cycle. The ratchet will run higher. The machine will not stop. It will only decide how the dominoes fall, and when.

These are not causes of a plague, they are what the plague produces when it presses a population below the life it was taught to expect.

Blaming them is simply one more sermon, and by now you know how sermons work. They explain not one rat. They only tell you where to look so that you never look at the structure.

The rats are the symptom.

The plague is the structure.

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Sources and References

^[1] Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, “Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk,” Econometrica 47(2), 1979.

^[2] George A. Quattrone and Amos Tversky, “Contrasting Rational and Psychological Analyses of Political Choice,” American Political Science Review 82(3), 1988. The experiments report risk aversion over gains, risk seeking over losses, incumbent advantage under favourable conditions and challenger advantage under unfavourable ones, and preference reversal when the reference point is moved.

^[3] The formal statement is in the author’s working paper on the political corollary to the structural rentier framework. For direct electoral evidence that disappointed expectations, rather than absolute position, predict electoral change, see Thomas Kurer and Briitta Van Staalduinen, “Disappointed Expectations: Downward Mobility and Electoral Change,” American Political Science Review 116(4), 2022.

^[4] On tenure as an electoral cleavage across advanced democracies: Goddard, “Housing and Electoral Behaviour: The Changing Face of Class Voting in Advanced Democracies,” Electoral Studies, 2025. On expected future ownership shaping how non-owners vote in Britain: James Breckwoldt, “The Prospect of Upward Housing Mobility: Future Homeownership Likelihood and Voter Behaviour in the United Kingdom,” working paper, 2025. On house prices and preferences: Ben Ansell, “The Political Economy of Ownership,” American Political Science Review 108(2), 2014; David Adler and Ben Ansell, “Housing and Populism,” West European Politics 43(2), 2020. None of these establishes that housing position determines ideological direction, and this essay does not claim it.

^[5] James C. Davies, “Toward a Theory of Revolution,” American Sociological Review 27(1), 1962. The older statement of the same observation is Tocqueville’s, in L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution (1856): revolution came where conditions had improved most, and the most dangerous moment for a bad government is when it begins to reform.

^[6] English Housing Survey 2024 to 2025, age cohorts release, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, May 2026. Of households with a reference person aged 16 to 34, 42 per cent were owner-occupiers and 43 per cent private renters; 79 per cent of those aged 65 and over were owner-occupiers. Sixty-nine per cent of the 16 to 34 group expected to buy eventually, against 69 per cent in 2014-15.

^[7] Peter Turchin, Ages of Discord: A Structural-Demographic Analysis of American History (Beresta Books, 2016); with Jack Goldstone, the structural-demographic model treats popular immiseration, intra-elite competition and state fiscal weakness as the joint conditions of instability. The literature establishes elite overproduction and counter-elite formation. The explanation-market extension in this essay is the author’s.

^[8] Paul Gill, John Horgan and Paige Deckert, “Bombing Alone: Tracing the Motivations and Antecedent Behaviors of Lone-Actor Terrorists,” Journal of Forensic Sciences 59(2), 2014, a study of 119 cases which found no uniform profile but reported the recurring characteristics given in the text. On the higher prevalence of psychological difficulties among lone actors than group-based terrorists, the finding is consistent across the subsequent literature.

^[9] Ramón Spaaij, Understanding Lone Wolf Terrorism (Springer, 2012); Mark S. Hamm and Ramón Spaaij, The Age of Lone Wolf Terrorism (Columbia University Press, 2017), for the radicalisation sequence of personal and political grievance, affinity, enabler, broadcast intent and triggering event.

^[10] “Covid isolation never ended for some people,” Financial Times, 2026. Figures in the text to be read against the article. On joblessness and social isolation as the marks of those who succumb to self-destructive behaviour, see John Burn-Murdoch’s analysis of the deaths-of-despair literature in the Financial Times, and his earlier “Young people are hanging out less,” Financial Times, 17 January 2025.

^[11] Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, Right to Buy sales live tables: just over 2.03 million sales in England from 1980 to March 2025.

^[12] For the tenure cleavage in the British case, and owners’ opposition to construction where they expect prices to rise, see Ben Ansell, “Brexit and the Politics of Housing in Britain,” The Political Quarterly 90(S2), 2019. That the newly enrolled owners specifically became the blocking coalition is not established by that literature, and this essay does not claim it; the claim here is the narrower one stated in the text.

^[13] General Medical Council, The State of Medical Education and Practice in the UK: Workforce Report 2025, and House of Commons Library, “International recruitment in the NHS workforce,” 2026: around 138,400 licensed doctors qualified abroad, 42 per cent of the total. Skills for Care, The State of the Adult Social Care Sector and Workforce in England 2025: around 50,000 internationally recruited starters in 2024-25 against roughly 111,000 vacancies. Office for National Statistics, construction workforce by country of birth series.

^[14] English Housing Survey 2024 to 2025, headline report: owner-occupation 65 per cent of households (36 per cent outright, 29 per cent with a mortgage), private renting 19 per cent, social renting 16 per cent.

^[15] YouGov, voter study, July 2026: 68 per cent of Reform UK supporters aged over 50; among those who supported the Conservatives in 2024, 56 per cent own their homes outright. Age breakdowns of voting intention by pollster through 2026 place Reform at roughly a third or more among the over-55s and under a tenth among 18 to 24s, with the Greens leading among the youngest cohort.

^[16] Department for Education, Graduate Labour Market Statistics 2024: young graduate employment down 0.7 percentage points on the year, real median graduate earnings £3,500 below their 2007 level. On the Green coalition being disproportionately young, degree-educated and renting or living with family, see the same YouGov study as note 15.