[...] standard economic indicators no longer measure these problems—one reason why elites have been slow to react. Inflation hovers at 1 per cent, and the price of consumer goods has dived since 1985. But over the same period, the cost of health care and education has multiplied 600 times. Unemployment has fallen to low single digits since 2014, but almost one-in-five working-age adults is no longer looking, and thus goes uncounted, to the point that a higher share of French males are in full-time employment than American. This leaves them prey to heroin and painkillers like OxyContin, prescriptions of which have quadrupled since the late 1990s, leading to the type of mortality levels that Durkheim associated with a ‘civilizational break’. Job growth since 2008 has come in the informal sector, sucking retirees into the gig economy, to spend their pensionless golden years driving cabs as so-called private contractors. At the same time—Luce cites Branko Milanovic’s famous ‘elephant graph’—elite incomes have soared. Global cities, sucking in wealth and talent from their impoverished hinterlands, now sit ‘like tropical islands surrounded by a sea of resentment’. New York City, treated more as an asset class than a home by its 116 billionaires, lets 34,000 apartments sit vacant amidst a desperate clamour for housing. [...]