or years, we were told that the unease spreading across Western societies had more to do with perception than reality. Nostalgia, resistance to change, a failure to adapt to a more complex world. Public services were not deteriorating, we were simply more demanding. Industry was not vanishing, it was ‘evolving.’ We were not poorer, just living differently.
That explanation becomes harder to sustain once discontent turns into daily experience: wages that no longer cover basic costs, housing drifting out of reach, energy prices that never quite come back down, infrastructure that quietly ages, and an increasing reliance on external suppliers for things that once seemed trivial. At that point, the problem looks less psychological and far more political, in the broadest sense of the term.
A growing number of observers now concede as much. What we are facing is not a temporary downturn, but a deeper rebalancing of the economic and geopolitical order that took shape after the Cold War. The sense that ‘everything feels like it’s breaking’ is not a collective hallucination. It is what a system under strain looks like when it is forced to redistribute costs, power and opportunity in a harsher, more fragmented environment.
This argument has circulated recently in a widely shared essay by The Long View (@HayekAndKeynes), titled The Great Rebalancing. Its central claim—that today’s instability is not accidental, but the logical outcome of an exhausted model—is a useful place to begin, even if it should not be the place where the discussion ends.
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