Immiseration
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Inequality, housing, household debt, deaths of despair
This index measures the structural political stress of the United States — popular immiseration, elite overproduction and state fiscal distress, read together. It does not forecast returns. Its relevance to a long-horizon allocation rests on published work linking socio-political instability to lower investment, cited in full below.
The composite is a weighted geometric mean, not an arithmetic one. The structural-demographic claim is conjunctive: instability requires all three drivers to be elevated at once. An arithmetic mean would let one low component be averaged away — the geometric mean will not.
Every input is a published series. Each is normalised between a healthy and a critical threshold — the same thresholds used by the long-term dashboard, so the index cannot contradict the public pages.
Set a ten-year direction for each driver and read the resulting configuration. This is a scenario, not a forecast: it shows where an allocation's implicit assumption about American political stability would leave it, given a stated trajectory.
Inequality, housing cost, household debt, deaths of despair.
Credentialed aspirants relative to available elite positions.
Federal debt trajectory and the room it leaves for policy.
An instrument is only useful to a risk committee if its limits are stated before its outputs.
The link between structural stress and capital is not our claim. It is a documented finding, and the index exists to measure the left-hand side of it.
Tested on 71 countries over 1960–85: income inequality fuels social discontent, which raises socio-political instability, which creates uncertainty in the politico-economic environment, which in turn reduces investment. Inequality and investment are therefore inversely related.
Social trust is associated with the rate of investment across countries. American social trust is one of the inputs to this index.
Political instability is associated with lower subsequent growth.
The structural-demographic framework this index borrows its architecture from: instability arises when popular immiseration, elite overproduction and state fiscal distress coincide. Influential and contested — it is used here as a structure for organising measured variables, not as a predictive law.
Stated plainly, because a committee will find them anyway.
Structural impact studies for governments, think tanks and large organizations: causal chains, critical thresholds, early-warning signals.