I was recently thinking about the irony of human persistence. We have an astonishing ability to ignore the obvious if the truth is uncomfortable enough to make us walk away. There is an old piece of wisdom, attributed to Native Americans, which simply says: ‘When you realise you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount.’
It seems like a truism, doesn’t it? But if you look around, you will see that we live in the age of the stubborn rider. What is interesting is not the diagnosis of death —which is usually clinical and glaringly obvious— but the array of manoeuvres that organisations, governments and we ourselves deploy to avoid hitting the ground. We buy a more expensive saddle, change riders, set up a committee to study the horse’s health and, when there is no other recourse left, we redefine the word ‘dead’.
Anyone reading this inventory with a degree of detachment, free from the bias of political activism or the fear of the unknown, will recognise something unsettling. It is not a caricature of some distant enterprise; it is a mirror. And what that mirror reflects is the playbook for global economic policy over the last two decades. I am not speaking of an imminent Hollywood-style collapse, but of something more discreet and technical: an institutional inertia that has turned denial into a method of governance and postponement into an existential doctrine.
Analytical honesty compels us to define what official statements shroud in circumlocution. The world drags along at least four structures whose functional death is indisputable, even though they remain at the heart of every election campaign from Sydney to New York.
The first is the pay-as-you-go pension system. It was designed in the 20th century for demographic pyramids with a broad base of young people supporting a narrow apex of elderly people. Today, that pyramid is inverted or is turning into an unstable rectangle. In Europe, the old-age dependency ratio will rise from the current 33% to unsustainable levels in less than two decades. But this is not just a European problem.
Look at Asia. Japan is the world’s laboratory in this regard, a country that is more of a high-tech nursing home than a vibrant powerhouse. China, for its part, faces ‘ageing before wealth’, a demographic trap that will cause its working-age population to plummet by millions every year. Even in Latin America, the demographic dividend is running out without having been used to build solid infrastructure.
Governments react by tweaking the parameters: they push back the retirement age by six months, change the indexation formula, or dress up the figures. But the underlying structure —paying for today’s promises with money that those just being born haven’t yet earned— is a horse that has long since breathed its last. We are trying to win an endurance race on an animal that died ten kilometres ago, but the jockey keeps tugging at the reins so the crowd doesn’t notice the rigor mortis.
There is a second dead horse galloping—or rather, dragging itself—across the northern hemisphere: denied deindustrialisation. For decades, the West lived under the illusion that we could be pure service economies whilst outsourcing the ‘dirty’ work of manufacturing to Asia.
Europe, and specifically Germany, based its recent economic miracle on an equation that has now been blown to smithereens: cheap Russian gas, security guaranteed by the US, and a hungry market in China. In 2022, the bill arrived. When the price of gas on the European wholesale market increased tenfold, it was no accident; it was the collection of a strategic debt that had been brewing for twenty years.
The case of BASF in Ludwigshafen is empirical proof. Seeing the world’s largest chemical giant close plants on the Rhine to invest €10 billion in China is not a corporate anecdote; it is a turning point. It is the recognition that manufacturing in the heart of Europe no longer makes economic sense due to hostile regulation and energy costs that are, in practice, a tax on survival.
But let’s cross the pond. In the United States, the ‘Rust Belt’ remains an open wound. Attempts are being made to revive industry with massive subsidies (the Inflation Reduction Act), which is basically like injecting adrenaline into a dead horse to make it take one last spasmodic leap. Meanwhile, in Africa, industrialisation is failing to take off at all because global powers prefer to keep the continent as a mine of raw materials for their own ‘green’ transitions. It is the same horse, just in different stages of decomposition.
The third horse is the global fiscal model based on infinite debt. In Europe, the 1992 Stability Pact (the famous 3% deficit and 60% debt limits) was designed for a world that no longer exists. Today, those figures are almost decorative for countries like Italy or France.
However, if we look at Oceania or the emerging economies, we see that the problem is mirrored there. Global debt has reached levels exceeding 300% of global GDP. We find ourselves in a situation where central banks have become the on-call veterinarians, printing money to buy up the debt that nobody else wants, keeping asset prices artificially high whilst the real economy suffocates.
Italy, with debt at 137% of GDP and growth close to zero for two decades, is the example of what Machiavelli called political consumption: at first it is difficult to detect and easy to cure, but if left untreated, it becomes easy to recognise and almost impossible to remedy. The world has decided that the solution to debt is more debt, renaming the manoeuvre ‘stimulus’, ‘easing’ or ‘resilience’. It is the horseman asking for a loan to buy golden horseshoes for a horse that can no longer stand.
The fourth concern that is laid bare before us is the energy transition as it has been proposed. Don’t get me wrong: the need for change is real, but the implementation is another dead horse. Ambitious climate targets are being set without having resolved the basic physics of large-scale storage, the distribution network or the industrial base.
Europe wants to be the green continent, but to achieve this it is entirely dependent on mining in Africa (where child labour and environmental degradation are the ‘hidden cost’) and on the processing of materials in China. We are exporting our emissions and our industrial sovereignty in exchange for a moral superiority that does not turn turbines.
In Australia, the energy debate is a battleground between a long-standing reliance on coal and the climate emergency, with no one willing to admit that the transition comes at a cost that nobody wants to see on their electricity bill. It is the paradox of the 21st century: we want a clean world, yet we continue to ride the horse of infinite consumption, fuelled by an infrastructure that does not yet exist.
The most worrying aspect of this ‘dead horse’ theory is not the state of the animals, but the vocabulary we use to describe them. Politicians and economists speak of ‘adjustment’, ‘harmonisation’, ‘structural reform’ or ‘enhanced coordination’. These are words designed to prevent you from looking at the corpse beneath the saddle.
This is the greatest victory of institutional inertia: cognitive capture. The average citizen discusses the problems using the language of the rider. We worry about the risk premium or the debt ceiling as if they were laws of gravity, when they are human constructs that are failing to provide the basics: stability and a future.
Mario Draghi’s 2024 report was a wake-up call that was filed away in a drawer. It stated that Europe needs €800 billion a year in investment just to avoid becoming irrelevant. But where will that money come from if the funding model has run its course? The response was to commission a new chair. No one said: “Let’s find another horse.”
At this point, it is easy to fall into nihilism. If the systems that underpin our pensions, our industries and our currency are in a functional coma, what can the ordinary person do?
This is where the way of thinking we share in places like HIVE comes into its own. The solution is not to wait for the rider to dismount – because he won’t; his salary depends on staying in the saddle – but to reclaim our ability to name things.
Clarity begins with not swallowing the morning chloroform of official statements. Understanding that a factory closing in Germany holds more information about the future than a hundred summits in Brussels or Washington. Understanding that venture capital isn’t fleeing out of malice, but out of a survival instinct towards where the horse still has a pulse (Singapore, Texas, Shenzhen).
Europe, and the Western world in general, are not dead. We have institutions, we have talent, and we have a democratic tradition that is the much-envied source of almost everything good we know. But what is dead is the economic model of complacency.
The danger is not collapse; it is prolonged agony. The danger is wasting our best energies trying to resuscitate systems that have already given all they had to give. Perhaps the useful question each of us should be asking ourselves today is not ‘What is the government going to do?’, but ‘Which horse am I betting my savings, my time and my expectations on?’.
Because sometimes, the greatest freedom does not lie in winning the race, but in having the courage to be the first to dismount, touch the ground with your feet and start walking towards the next horizon. Getting off a dead horse was never a defeat; it is the necessary condition for being able, one day, to ride again.
