The four major black holes of modernity are not the result of incorrectly tuned policy levers but the result of fundamental cultural blindspots. These four areas: education, medicine, housing, and prison, all relate to one central problem. An incoherent philosophy when it comes to the concept of 'responsibility.' When I say black holes I mean that they are capable of sucking up arbitrary amounts of capital as we fight over them fruitlessly. And to be absolutely clear: the claim here is not that personal responsiibity should be 'higher' or 'lower' (whatever those mean) than they are now, that's what I mean by fighting over them. I genuinely mean that the incoherence of the concept itself is the problem. Consider the following questions: how responsible is a criminal for their actions? how responsible are young people for making good decisions about their education? to what degree are NIMBYs responsible for the housing crisis? how can externalities of housing be assigned responsibility to various parties? does the medicalization of problems, and thus the denial of agency lead to more problems than it solves?

You've seen debates about these and they never go anywhere because there aren't final answers. There is no algorithm for 'blame' that is perfectly equitable. Neither holding people to high standards nor relaxing those standards is stable or workable. Reality is always multicausal and situations are different. The traditional answer to this is the discretion of judges to adjust to what is happening. But law still has to deal with the fundamental incoherence and it has been deprived of one of the historical ways it has dealt with it. The idea that different people might have differing capabilities to take responsibility for things, whatever the reason, is in untenable tension with the notion that all men are created equal. We have a few categories that recognize that not everyone can hold the same privileges such as child, felon, or legally mentally unable to grant consent. There are also the only semi legible ways that money and access grant privileges while that very same hidden nature frees the beneficiaries of any responsibility for the poor exercise of said privilege. Now we're seeing other countries find their own ways forward in creating a tiered society like China's social credit system or the soft classism of inscrutable and gameable admission to elite colleges (whereas before lower class people got in on merit). These are terrible solutions and we had better find better ones before the march of history declares a shitty winner for us. We can find a way to more tightly couple privileges and responsibilities or we can continue reaping the externalities of allowing incentives to drive a stronger wedge between them.