Where the Money Isn't

The most urgent problems are often exactly where the market won't go.

Markets flow toward paying customers. When the people with the problem cannot pay, the market finds something more profitable to do instead. This is not a failure of will. It is a structural fact — and it has played out, in roughly the same pattern, across every major social problem that eventually became public infrastructure.

The question is never really whether the state will act. It usually does. The question is what accumulates in the gap before it does.

Historical Patterns: Social Problems in Cash-Poor Industries