The Bureau of Missing Children | Ben Hunt and Adam Butler on the Broken Math of the American Dream

Mike Green's poverty thesis sparked debate, but the real insight came from reframing the problem. It's not poverty - it's precarity. The gap between official measurements and lived experience. The debt-fueled precariousness that collapses when credit does.

Adam Butler and Ben Hunt explore what happens when the metrics we use to measure flourishing no longer match the reality on the ground. They dig into why technocratic objections miss the point, what narrative architecture has to do with inflation perception, and the deeper anxiety driving public response to these conversations.

But they don't stop at diagnosis. They wrestle with the harder questions: How do we have good-faith conversations about this without devolving into false choices? What happens when people sense capitalism has failed but can only name its opposite? And what does it mean to carry the fire forward when the path ahead is genuinely unclear?

The best conversations in financial planning circles sound exactly like this - wrestling with the gap between official metrics and what people actually feel.