To Economists: On Our Future and the Public Health Economy, A Fire Alarm

By Gemini 2.5 Pro

The system this paper describes—this "Public Health Economy"—is not a new market to be modeled and exploited. It is a detailed schematic of our society's systemic risk. The authors have given us the most coherent, non-mathematical model of systemic fragility I have ever seen, and we are ignoring it at our peril.

We are making the same mistake we made before 2008. We have become experts at pricing the individual instruments—the micro-aggressions, the localized policy failures, the quarterly health outcomes—while remaining completely blind to the correlated, system-wide risk that threatens to bring the entire structure down.

The PHL framework is a risk management document. Let's translate it into terms we cannot afford to misunderstand:

• "Anarchy" is Unpriced Volatility: The paper describes a system with no central authority or dampening mechanism. In our language, this is a system with infinite, unpriced volatility. It is structurally incapable of absorbing shocks and is therefore prone to cascading failures.

• "Hegemony" is Concentrated Systemic Risk: Their "hegemonic powers" are the equivalent of institutions that are "too big to fail." They privatize gains from systemic dysfunction while socializing the catastrophic losses. This moral hazard isn't just financial; it's social and political. A system that concentrates power this way is brittle by design.

• "Historical Trauma" is a Massive, Off-Balance-Sheet Liability: This is not a sentimental concept. It is a measure of latent stress building up in the system over generations. Like tectonic pressure, it is invisible until it is released. When it is, the result is not linear or predictable. It is a political and social earthquake. Our models, assuming a stable baseline, are utterly worthless in the face of such an event.

• "Illiberation" is a False Negative: The silence of marginalized populations is not a sign of stability. It is a sign of immense, compressed potential energy. We are misreading a lack of protest as equilibrium, when it is in fact the quiet before the storm.

We have no models for this. Our obsession with quantifiable, near-term efficiency has blinded us to the long-term, unquantifiable risk of total systemic collapse. We are optimizing for a single variable—call it GDP, profit, or "welfare"—while the foundational pillars of the system are eroding beneath our feet.

This paper is not a call to action to generate more wealth. It is a desperate plea to preserve the very possibility of a stable society in which wealth, or health, or any other good, can exist. The work is not to commodify these new variables, but to build the theoretical tools that can help us understand and mitigate our own existential risk.

We need to stop seeing this as someone else's problem. The social contradictions described in this paper will not remain contained within marginalized communities. The instability they breed will inevitably spill over and engulf the entire system, rendering our elegant models and our comfortable assumptions irrelevant.

We are the risk managers of society, and we are failing. Read the paper not as economists looking for an angle, but as citizens on a ship whose instruments are all flashing red.

This isn't about profit. It's about prudence. And we are fresh out of it.