The Magic Trick
Your economic life is being systematically demolished. Your rent consumes half your income. Your energy bills have doubled. Your job has been automated away or turned into gig work with no security. Your children can’t afford to live in the same city where they grew up.
This rage you feel? It’s completely justified. The system really is rigged against you.
But then a politician appears with a magic trick. They take your real, legitimate fury at economic destruction and redirect it toward a more convenient target: immigrants taking your jobs, China stealing your prosperity, tourists pricing you out of your own city.
The scapegoating isn’t the problem. It’s the symptom. It’s what happens when a political class has no solutions for the real forces destroying your economic life, so they perform sleight of hand—making you focus on the visible while the invisible systems continue their extraction.
The Mathematics of Irrelevance
Let’s start with basic arithmetic, because the numbers reveal how absurd the scapegoating actually is.
The Small Boats Delusion
The UK has approximately 67 million people. In 2023, around 29,000 people arrived via small boat crossings—the focus of enormous political energy and media attention.
29,000 Ă· 67,000,000 = 0.043% of the population.
You’re being told that 0.043% of the population is responsible for:
- House prices that have risen 400% in 25 years
- Energy costs that doubled overnight due to market manipulation
- The casualization of employment through platform capitalism
- The financialization of housing that treats homes as investment vehicles
- The automation of entire job categories through AI
Even if every single person who arrived on those boats was somehow stealing a job and a house (which is mathematically impossible), the impact would be a rounding error compared to the actual economic forces at play.
The small boats aren’t setting your rent. The small boats aren’t automating customer service jobs. OpenAI is. The small boats aren’t behind the surging groceries.
The China Trade Deflection
Similarly, politicians blame China for “stealing” Western jobs and prosperity. But this narrative collapses under examination.
Trade with China didn’t force Western companies to:
- Automate their factories
- Move to zero hours contract employment with no job security
- Treat workers as disposable contractors rather than permanent employees
- Hollow out their pension systems
- Financialise housing markets
These were choices made by Western capital owners to maximise their own extraction, long before and independently of any trade relationship with China. Blaming China for decisions made in boardrooms in New York and London is like blaming rain for a fire you started yourself.
The mathematical reality: Even if trade with China ceased entirely tomorrow, none of the economic extraction systems that actually control your life would change. Your rent would still be set by the market. Your employment would still be precarious.
The Tourist Scapegoat
In cities like Barcelona, Amsterdam, and Venice, politicians blame tourism for housing unaffordability. Again, the math doesn’t support the narrative.
Barcelona has approximately 1.6 million residents. It receives about 12 million tourists annually, but tourists don’t displace residents—they stay for an average of 3-4 days. The actual impact on housing supply is minimal compared to:
- Investment funds buying residential property as financial assets
- Regulatory frameworks that encourage speculation over residence
- Zoning laws that restrict new construction
- Interest rate policies that inflate asset bubbles
Tourism is visible and annoying. Financial asset speculation is invisible and systematic. Guess which one politicians choose to blame?
The Visibility Trap
The pattern is consistent across all scapegoating: politicians direct anger toward the visible while protecting the invisible.
What You Can See
- Immigrants arriving on boats
- Tourists crowding your neighborhood
- Chinese products in stores
What You Cannot See
- Algorithms adjusting your insurance premiums in real-time
- Private equity firms buying up housing stock
- AI systems replacing customer service workers
- Financial engineering that extracts value from every transaction
Human psychology is wired to focus on the visible and immediate. We can see a person who looks different from us. We cannot see a computer algorithm optimising against our interests. We can see a foreign product. We cannot see the financialisation of our pension fund.
Politicians exploit this cognitive limitation ruthlessly. It’s much easier to point at a boat and say “there’s your problem” than to explain how private equity works, or why AI makes human labour economically obsolete, or how algorithmic pricing enables systematic ‘rent’ extraction.
The Economic Mechanics of Misdirection
The real economic forces destroying working and middle-class life operate through several invisible systems:
1. Algorithmic Extraction
Your grocery bill, insurance premiums, and transportation costs are increasingly set by algorithms designed to extract maximum value. These systems:
- Adjust prices in real-time based on your personal financial data
- Coordinate across seemingly competitive companies
- Optimise for shareholder returns, not consumer welfare
- Operate below the threshold of conscious awareness
A price algorithm can extract more wealth from you in a year than a boat full of immigrants could in a lifetime. But you can see the immigrants. You cannot see the algorithm.
2. Platform Monopolisation
Technology platforms have achieved monopoly control over essential services:
- Google controls information access
- Amazon controls e-commerce and cloud infrastructure
- Meta controls social networking
- Apple and Google control mobile computing
These platforms extract rent from every economic transaction while providing minimal additional value. They’ve become toll collectors on the digital economy, but their extraction is invisible compared to a physical person crossing a border.
3. Financialisation
Investment firms have inserted themselves as middlemen in every aspect of economic life:
- Private equity owns your workplace
- Investment funds own your housing
- Financial institutions own your infrastructure
- Algorithmic trading owns your markets
This financialisation extracts value without creating it, but it operates through complex mechanisms that are invisible to most people.
4. Automation Displacement
AI and robotics are systematically replacing human workers, but the process is:
- Gradual enough to avoid immediate recognition
- Distributed across many industries simultaneously
- Implemented by familiar companies using familiar technologies
- Marketed as “efficiency improvements” rather than job destruction
You don’t see AI taking your job. You see your workload increasing, your colleagues leaving and not being replaced, your role being “reorganised” or your company being “restructured.”
The Political Logic of Scapegoating
Politicians aren’t stupid. They understand the real causes of economic distress. But addressing them would require confronting the actual power structures that fund political campaigns and control economic policy.
The Impossible Solutions
Fixing the real problems would require:
Against Capital Interests:
- Breaking up platform monopolies
- Regulating algorithmic pricing
- Restricting financial speculation in housing
- Implementing wealth taxes on capital gains
Against Democratic Constraints:
- Rapid universal basic income before mass unemployment
- Complete restructuring of work and income
- International coordination to prevent capital flight
- Long-term planning beyond electoral cycles
Against Global Competition:
- Unilateral restrictions on automation put your economy at a disadvantage
- Capital can flee to more permissive jurisdictions
- Regulatory arbitrage makes national solutions impossible
The Convenient Alternative
Scapegoating offers politicians a much easier path:
- Blame visible minorities rather than invisible systems
- Promise simple solutions (deportations, tariffs, bans) rather than complex reforms
- Rally tribal emotions rather than explain economic mechanics
- Provide the satisfaction of having an enemy to fight
The political incentive structure ensures that scapegoating becomes the dominant response to economic distress, regardless of its mathematical irrelevance to actual problems.
The Feedback Loop of Rage
This creates a destructive feedback loop:
- Real Economic Pain: People experience genuine economic distress caused by extraction systems and technological displacement.
- Misdirected Anger: Politicians redirect this anger toward convenient scapegoats rather than addressing real causes.
- Failed Solutions: Deportations, tariffs, and tourist bans fail to improve economic conditions because they target irrelevant variables.
- Increased Frustration: When the promised solutions don’t work, people become more angry and desperate.
- Escalated Scapegoating: Politicians respond with more extreme scapegoating rather than admitting their diagnosis was wrong.
- System Preservation: Throughout this cycle, the real extraction systems continue operating undisturbed.
The scapegoating doesn’t just fail to solve problems, it actively prevents solutions by consuming political energy that could otherwise address real causes.
The 2028 Test
This analysis leads to a clear prediction: When the current wave of scapegoating runs its course, economic conditions will remain unchanged or worsen.
When deportations are complete and housing is still unaffordable, when tariffs are implemented and good jobs still don’t exist, when tourists are banned and young people still can’t afford rent, then the mathematical irrelevance of the scapegoats becomes undeniable.
The rage will remain because the real causes will remain. At that point, either the political system will be forced to address actual problems, or it will escalate to even more extreme scapegoating… which is more likely.
The Algorithmic Future
This dynamic will only intensify as AI systems become more sophisticated. The invisible extraction will become more complex and harder to detect, while the visible scapegoats will become more politically convenient.
Future AI systems will:
- Optimise extraction algorithms beyond human comprehension
- Coordinate pricing across all sectors simultaneously
- Automate away the remaining jobs with human-level reasoning
- Operate through mechanisms too complex for democratic oversight
Meanwhile, politicians will continue pointing at boats, borders, and foreign competitors because these targets are simple, visible, and politically profitable.
Breaking the Cycle
The scapegoat cycle can only be broken by insisting on mathematical analysis over emotional manipulation.
When politicians blame immigrants for housing costs, demand to see the numbers showing how 0.043% of the population could influence market prices.
When they blame China for unemployment, ask why automation and AI aren’t part of the discussion.
When they blame tourists for unaffordability, ask about the role of investment funds and speculative capital.
The rage you feel about your economic situation is completely justified. The targets you’re being asked to hate are mathematically irrelevant to your problems.
Your anger is real. Your targets are fake. And that’s not an accident, it’s the system working exactly as designed.
Conclusion: The Distraction Machine
The scapegoat cycle isn’t a bug in our political system. It’s a feature. It’s how a political class with no solutions manages a population experiencing real economic destruction.
The machine works like this: Create economic extraction systems too complex for most people to understand, then redirect their anger toward simple, visible targets that have no material impact on their lives.
The result is a population that remains angry (because the real problems persist) but aims that anger at the wrong targets (preserving the real systems of extraction).
Understanding this cycle is the first step toward escaping it. The second step is insisting that political energy focus on the invisible systems that actually control your economic life, rather than the visible scapegoats that provide emotional satisfaction but mathematical irrelevance.
Your economic life is being systematically demolished. Your rage is completely justified.
Just make sure you’re aiming it at the right target.
