Investing does transfer a claim on future output from spectators to owners, but the transfer is not automatic. The world can keep inventing and building while a particular company’s share of that progress shrinks, or while the price paid for the claim already discounts most of the expected growth. Optimism only becomes a financial force when it is paired with a purchase price that still leaves room for the outcome to exceed what the market has already priced in. Without that margin, owning a piece of progress can still produce mediocre returns.
The scenes you describe are hard to argue with once you’ve seen them up close. Open drug use, exploitation of kids, bodies left in the street, and whole blocks burned out aren’t abstract policy failures—they’re the result of years of decisions that treated disorder as someone else’s problem or as a rights issue that couldn’t be constrained.
Politics can clear encampments, raise enforcement, and fund treatment, but it can’t manufacture the social norms that once kept most people from sliding that far. When large numbers of people treat basic self-control, family formation, and regard for public space as optional, every election becomes a temporary adjustment rather than a real change in direction. The ballot box can slow the decline or accelerate it; it doesn’t reverse the underlying loss of capacity for order.