Living in & Beyond Economies of Desperation of Hope

Every week, across cities and margins, millions of us buy hope.

They do this in the form of lottery tickets, crypto tokens, multi-level marketing schemes, viral content attempts, miracle finance products. To a rational economist, this looks absurd—near-zero probabilities with deeply negative expected value.

But let’s imagine that these acts, however marginal or desperate they may appear, reflect not irrationality—but a hyper-rationality within structurally irrational systems. They are acts of decision-making shaped by hyperbolic valuation under structural precarity—a logic that unfortunately will increasingly define the behavioural foundations of our economies unless we radically reconfigure what we call opportunity.

This short essay sketches the contours of what could be calling the Desperation of Hope Economy—not as critique alone, but as an invitation to think differently about risk, transformation, and the latent design failures of our shared infrastructure.

Homo Transformativus

In classical economics, the figure of the rational actor—homo economicus—maximises expected value across linear, additive time.

This model holds in environments of relative stability, where the future is a field of incremental optimization and compounding advantage. But for many—for most—the experience of the economy is not one of compounded agency, but of structural thresholds. In such realities, the value of a marginal increase is negligible. What matters is crossing a phase line.

Let me be blunt: £1,000,000 is not 1,000× more useful than £1,000. It is qualitatively different. It is the difference between a lifetime of subsistence and a threshold of freedom—freedom from debt, from housing precarity, from the constant epistemic fog of financial stress. It is not more. It is something else entirely.

This is the logic of homo transformativus: the human whose economic decisions are oriented not toward efficiency, but toward the remote—but real—possibility of transformation.

The Mathematics of Desperation

To understand this form of rationality, we must depart from linear models of utility. Instead, consider a hyperbolic utility function: It doesn’t. £1,000 to someone living in generational stability is a budgeting line. But to someone navigating housing insecurity, legal uncertainty, or unpayable debt, £1,000 might mean the difference between sleeping inside or outside, between staying in the country or being deported, between holding onto a job or losing it.

In these contexts, the value of money doesn’t increase in smooth steps—it jumps in thresholds. Small sums often make little to no difference. But at certain points—when the amount is large enough to cross a structural boundary—the value of that money explodes. It becomes not about utility, but about transformation.

This is where classical economics falters. It assumes every additional pound has a similar marginal benefit. But for someone locked out of future possibilities, most money is meaningless unless it gets you over the line—out of eviction, out of a debt spiral, out of bureaucratic limbo. The mathematics here is more like a cliff than a slope: nothing matters until everything changes.

And when the official economy offers no legitimate way to reach those cliffs—no accessible loans, no trusted services, no scaffolded options—people will logically place their scarce resources into what seems like the only available hyper transformation vehicles: lotteries, crypto schemes, viral fame attempts.

In this reality, it is not irrational to invest in miracles when miracles are the last visible route to structural change.

This is the mathematics of desperation. Not linear, not incremental—but thresholded, saturated, and singularly obsessed with escape velocity.

This formulation reflects a reality where small sums (£1,000) yield almost no structural change, but crossing the threshold of £1M delivers nearly full-scale transformation.

In such cases, the decision to spend £2 on a 1-in-100-million chance isn’t about expectation—it’s about possibility. The cost of maintaining hope in a world devoid of other escape routes is not only rational, it may be the most sensible act of agency available.

Let’s be clear: this is not the logic of indulgence. It is the logic of non-consensual constraint—where people invest in futures because the present is structurally incapable of delivering them otherwise.

A System that Sells A Desperation of Hope

When most people can’t access structural mobility through legitimate pathways—through housing, healthcare, education, legal status, institutional trust—the informal economy of transformation blooms. This is what we now see in memecoins, YouTube dreams, reality shows, hyper-financialized self-help schemes. These are not random events—they are the systemic byproducts of institutional absences.

The economy begins to behave less like a flow of value and more like a marketplace of asymmetric options:

This isn’t merely an economic shift. It’s a moral fracture: the structural abandonment of transformation as a public good, outsourced to volatility.

Rethinking Our Economic Design Imperative

If we want to build systems that displace the Desperation of Hope Economy, we must build the infrastructures of transformation—not just patchy income redistribution or marginal reforms.

This is not charity. It is not paternalism. It is simply good design.

The Desperation of Hope Economy thrives where institutional imagination fails. Our task is not to condemn hope, but to build legitimate architectures that render despair economically unnecessary.

Closing

In a structurally unjust system, gambling on transformation is not irrational—it is hyper-rational, even sacred. It is a refusal to surrender to the slow violence of stasis.

But if we are serious about transitioning beyond this era of social volatility, we must ask: What if the pathways to transformation was not a lottery?

What if £2 wasn’t the price of hope, but the relic of a society that forgot how to distribute futures?

Until then, expect people to keep collocating &  investing in miracles—because in the absence of real options, miracles are the last rational bet standing.