Start where you are
Eleven stages of a life, plus the frictions that never leave. Pick one and read down.
Where the pressure is
Ten human constants across the phases of a life. The darker the cell, the more frictions sit there — and the more industries grew out of it. Click any cell.
| Infancy | Childhood | Adolescence | Early adulthood | Household formation | Parenthood | Midlife | Late career | Retirement | Decline | Death | Across every phase | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hunger | 1 | 2 | 1 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | |
| Shelter | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 6 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 5 |
| Safety | 10 | 7 | 4 | 6 | 4 | 3 | 6 | 2 | 5 | 8 | 3 | 8 |
| Belonging | 2 | 5 | 6 | 3 | 7 | 4 | 2 | 6 | 5 | 5 | 5 | 7 |
| Status | 1 | 3 | 6 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 4 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 2 |
| Reproduction | 2 | 1 | 2 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | |
| Mortality | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 2 | 4 | 4 | 6 | 7 | 2 |
| Scarce time | 5 | 6 | 2 | 2 | 4 | 6 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 3 |
| Scarce resources | 4 | 5 | 2 | 12 | 4 | 8 | 6 | 6 | 9 | 3 | 6 | 5 |
| Uncertainty | 5 | 3 | 3 | 6 | 8 | 2 | 5 | 3 | 3 | 1 | 1 | 8 |
Uncertainty and scarce resources root more frictions than any other constant. Hunger roots the fewest. The modern economy is mostly about not knowing the future and not having enough to buy it.
Good places to start
Mortgage
Six hops from a couple who need a bedroom to the securities that crashed the world in 2008.
Solution
Borrow the price of the home against the home itself; repay from future income.
Someone must watch the infant every hour, but someone must also earn
The friction that decides whether a parent can work, and the industries built on it.
Friction
The central economic friction of infancy: care and income compete for the same hours.
Generative AI and agents
What cheap cognition does to tutoring, companionship and entry-level work.
Trend
Language and reasoning models move from chat to autonomous work: tutoring, companionship, coding, customer service, diagnosis.
Cannot manage washing, dressing, eating, or moving alone
Where infancy's problems return, and nobody can staff the answer.
Semiconductors and AI infrastructure
The sector the index now depends on, and what it actually enables.
Sector
Chips, fabs, cloud, data centres, and the models that run on them; the decade's capex cycle.
The market, by what it is worth
The same solutions, grouped the way the market groups them. Note which sectors are large and which relieve the hardest problems — they are not the same list.
From factors to decisions
Market factors resolve into six dials. Each says what tight and loose mean and which sectors it governs; each documented chain names what would prove it wrong.
Cost of money
How expensive is it to borrow, and where is that heading?
11Price pressure
Are prices still rising faster than the target, and why?
12Growth and jobs
Is the economy adding income, or shedding it?
13Credit and plumbing
Is money still flowing, and is anything jamming?
11Earnings and what you pay for them
Are profits growing, and how much is being charged for them?
16Risk appetite and positioning
Who already owns this, and what are they forced to do next?
What changes next
Structural forces that will change which frictions hurt and which solutions survive.
Generative AI and agents
Language and reasoning models move from chat to autonomous work: tutoring, companionship, coding, customer service, diagnosis.
Second-order effects
Cheap cognition collapses the price of advice-shaped services (tutoring, tax prep, basic legal, therapy triage) while raising the value of the physical work it cannot do. Electricity, not chips, becomes the binding constraint. Concentration risk in t
Data-centre and power build-out
Trillions of dollars of data centres, transformers, turbines, and nuclear restarts to feed inference demand.
Second-order effects
Utilities become growth stocks; residential power bills rise as households compete with hyperscalers for the grid; gas turbines sell out for years; water use becomes a siting fight. If the demand curve bends, the depreciation shows up in hyperscaler
Humanoid and care robotics
General-purpose robots trained on the same models as chatbots, aimed first at warehouses and then at homes and care.
Second-order effects
The only credible answer to the care-worker shortage that does not involve wages or immigration; if it works, decline-phase economics change more than any other phase's. Battery, rare-earth, and actuator supply chains become strategic.
Autonomous vehicles
Robotaxis in a growing list of cities; driver assistance sliding toward full autonomy in consumer cars.
Second-order effects
Solves the retirement driving cliff and the teen crash problem at once, then destroys the largest occupation for non-graduate men, reshapes auto insurance (liability moves to the manufacturer), and empties parking — freeing urban land.
GLP-1 obesity and metabolic drugs
Weekly injections, then pills, that cut weight 15–20% and reduce cardiac, kidney, and addiction risk.
Second-order effects
A single drug class that reprices food, alcohol, joint replacement, sleep apnoea devices, airlines' fuel bills, and life insurance mortality tables. The diet industry becomes a pharmacy. Employers and Medicare fight over who pays $1,000 a month for a
Ageing populations and the longevity economy
The over-65 share passes 20% across the rich world; the over-85 cohort doubles. Care, capital, and votes tilt old.
Second-order effects
Retirement and decline become the largest consumer phases. Labour shortages in care collide with anti-immigration politics. Pension and healthcare promises crowd out other spending; the political economy becomes a fight between phases. Boomer selling