Anna Karina showed you the pattern. Six grievances. Six villains. One solution every time: more power for the people who made you angry in the first place.
Inequality is too high? Tax the rich harder. Poverty won’t go away? Redistribute more. Prices are up? Price controls. The planet is warming? Carbon taxes. University is unequal? More subsidies. Kids are on phones? Ban them.
Same pattern, every time. The grievance is identified, a villain is named, and the answer is always the same: give the state more authority, more money, more control over your life. When it doesn’t work - and it never works - the response is not to reconsider the theory. It is to demand even more power. “We didn’t go far enough.”
Anna laid out the economics of why these policies fail. My job is simpler: name the hyenas. Meet the people who profit from the machine, and understand why they need it to keep running.
The Hyena Dynamic
A hyena does not hunt alone. It works in a pack. Each member has a role. One tires the prey. One distracts. One moves in for the kill. They do not coordinate consciously - they follow the scent of the same meal.
The grievance machine works the same way. Nobody sits in a room and plans it. But the incentives align so perfectly that conscious planning is unnecessary. Each group in the machine benefits from the machine running. None benefits from it stopping. And that alignment is what makes the machine so hard to disable.
Who benefits? Five groups:
Politicians need crises to campaign on. A politician who says “things are actually improving and the trend is your friend” does not get elected. A politician who says “we are in the grip of an unprecedented crisis and only I can save you” does get elected. The incentive structure rewards alarmism and punishes honesty. That is not a character flaw in individual politicians. It is a structural feature of electoral competition. The politician who promises to solve a crisis voters can feel gets more votes than the one who tries to explain why the crisis is overstated.
Bureaucrats need problems to regulate. An agency that has successfully solved its assigned problem faces budget cuts or elimination. An agency that can demonstrate the problem is getting worse - requiring more funding, more staff, more legal authority - gets rewarded with growth. The incentive structure produces a permanent bias toward worst-case framing. Every government report must conclude that more action is needed, because the alternative is to recommend its own obsolescence.
Journalists need crises to report. “Things are basically fine” is not a headline. “New study reveals hidden crisis”? That is a headline. The incentive structure of modern media - click-driven revenue, 24-hour news cycles, algorithmic ranking that rewards outrage - selects for alarming coverage. Stories about steady, gradual improvement are systematically filtered out of what reaches the public. Nobody plotted this. It is the natural outcome of a system that pays for attention.
Academics need findings to publish. A study that confirms conventional wisdom - inequality is bad, the rich have too much, the system is failing - gets published, cited, and amplified. A study that challenges the narrative faces higher scrutiny, lower citation rates, and less media coverage. The incentive structure produces a publication bias that systematically overstates problems and understates progress. The result is a research literature that makes things look worse than they are, which journalists then report as settled fact, which politicians then cite as evidence of crisis.
Activists need causes to fundraise for. An organization that achieves its stated goal - poverty reduced, environment improved, rights secured - must either find a new problem or shut down. The rational choice is to redefine success so that it remains permanently out of reach. Relative poverty statistics are perfect for this: they can never improve, by definition, so the fight against poverty can never end. That sounds cynical. It is actually just organizational survival.
Not a Conspiracy - A System
The temptation is to reach for a conspiracy theory. Someone must be orchestrating this. Some cabal of elites must be pulling the strings.
That is the wrong conclusion, and it is dangerous for the same reason conspiracy theories are always dangerous: it lets the real mechanism escape scrutiny.
There is no conspiracy. There is no secret meeting where the hyenas divide the spoils. What exists is far more durable: an alignment of incentives so perfectly calibrated that no coordination is needed. Each group pursues its own institutional self-interest. The sum of those individual pursuits produces a machine that generates permanent crisis, permanent demand for more state power, and permanent failure of the proposed solutions.
The machine does not need operators. It runs on its own momentum. Every ‘crisis’ creates demand for intervention. Every intervention that fails creates demand for a stronger intervention. Every call for a stronger intervention gives journalists a story, politicians a platform, academics a grant cycle, and activists a fundraising appeal. The machine feeds itself.
This is harder to fight than a conspiracy. A conspiracy can be exposed. A conspiracy has names and dates and documents you can point to. An incentive structure has none of those things. You cannot arrest an alignment of interests. You cannot prosecute a system of institutional self-preservation.
How to See It
Anna’s framing gives you a test. Next time you hear someone demand action on a grievance, ask two questions:
First: who benefits from this crisis narrative? Not who benefits from solving it - who benefits from keeping it alive. Does a politician need this issue for their campaign? Does an agency need this problem to justify its budget? Does a journalist need this story to fill tomorrow’s front page? Does an academic need this finding for their next grant application? Does an activist need this crisis for their next fundraising email?
If the answer is “several of the above,” you have identified a hyena.
Second: what would happen if the problem were solved tomorrow? Would the people demanding action celebrate and go home? Or would they find a new crisis to campaign on? If the answer is the latter, the problem was never the problem. The problem was the machine.
The Deeper Pattern
This goes beyond specific policies. It reaches a deeper phenomenon that Hayek identified better than anyone. The knowledge problem applies not just to economics but to governance itself. The information needed to evaluate whether a policy is working is dispersed across millions of individuals and cannot be collected by any central planner. Yet every intervention in the grievance machine’s catalog assumes the opposite: that the state can know enough to fix the problem, and that fixing it will produce the intended result.
The record of the last fifty years is a consistent refutation of this assumption. But the assumption survives because the machine benefits from it. Every failure is attributed to insufficient power, not to the fundamental impossibility of the task.
The hyenas benefiting is one thing. The deeper problem is that the theory underlying every proposed intervention is wrong, yet the theory cannot be disproven in a way the machine will accept, because every failure is interpreted as evidence that more power is needed, not less.
Hyenas Among Themselves
Consider how the hyenas feed each other. An academic produces a study showing that inequality is at record levels. A journalist writes a story about the study, emphasizing the alarming findings. A politician cites the story to justify a new wealth tax. A bureaucrat is tasked with designing the tax. An activist organization launches a campaign supporting it, raising money from people who are alarmed by the story (or, more likely, the government proposing it).
Everyone in this chain benefits. The academic gets citations and media coverage. The journalist gets clicks. The politician gets a campaign issue. The bureaucrat gets a new program to administer. The activist gets donations.
Nobody in the chain has an incentive to ask whether the study’s methodology is sound, whether the wealth tax has worked anywhere else (it has not - France and Sweden both abandoned theirs), or whether the problem being solved is real in the first place. The incentives align to produce action. The evidence is a secondary concern.
Now consider what happens when the wealth tax fails. Revenue is lower than projected. Capital has fled. Administrative costs exceed the take. The academic produces a new study showing that the tax was “not aggressive enough.” The journalist writes a story about how the wealthy evaded their civic duty. The politician proposes a stricter tax. The bureaucrat designs a more complex system. The activist campaigns for it.
The machine does not learn from failure. It uses failure to demand more power.
The Question
Anna ended Part I with a simple test: ask what the concrete harm is, and ask whether the last intervention worked. If the person demanding action cannot answer both questions, you are not listening to a problem-solver. You are listening to someone blowing a dog whistle. And the dog is supposed to be you.
I want to add a second test. It is not about the person making the argument. It is about you, the person hearing it.
Are you going to join the chorus of hyenas?
Because that is the choice. The hyenas are not going to stop. Their incentives will not change. The machine will keep running as long as it has fuel. The only question is whether you are going to add your voice to the chorus demanding more power for the people who created the problems in the first place - or whether you are going to step back, look at the pattern, and say: not in my country. Not on my dime.
The grievance machine does not need your agreement. It needs your panic. It needs you to believe that things are getting worse, that the crisis is unprecedented, that something must be done right now. Without your panic, the machine has no fuel. With it, the machine can run forever.
Choose carefully. The machine is counting on you to panic.