Prosperity theater and the economics of blame

It usually starts with a number dropped into conversation, said casually, as if it explains everything.

Record highs. Best year ever. Markets soaring. I notice how those phrases land like closure, how they discourage a second look. The surface gleams just enough to keep people from asking who the shine is really for.

Step back and the picture changes.

Global stocks are up roughly 30% over the past year. U.S. stocks are closer to 18%. That is a 12-point gap in which American investors quietly lagged the rest of the world, even as domestic headlines celebrated victory laps.

It is not a disaster. It is something more familiar. Performance is framed as success because the framing matters more than the result.

That same framing shows up everywhere else.

For decades, people were taught to treat need as a personal failure and wealth as a moral achievement. If someone struggles, the story says they did something wrong. If someone accumulates billions, the story says they earned wisdom, discipline, even virtue. “Job creator” becomes a kind of halo, one that never asks how much labor was extracted to polish it.

Once that logic settles in, the anger gets rerouted.

It points downward, sideways, anywhere but up. The poor become suspect. Help becomes indulgence. Meanwhile, capital keeps doing what capital does best, compounding quietly, protected by complexity and distance.

The people with the least power absorb the most blame. The people with the most power become abstract, almost mythic.

What eventually clicks is not outrage, but clarity. The economy keeps score, but the narrative decides who gets judged. When you stop confusing headlines with outcomes, the shape of the problem sharpens. The question stops being who needs help and starts being who benefits from everyone arguing about that instead.