The Epstein Economy Field Guide

The Neuroscience, Economics, and Psychology of a System That Makes Monsters Inevitable

There is a five-tonne economic elephant standing in the middle of Jeffrey Epstein’s town house, and the elephant has been there the whole time, patient as a creditor, while the rest of us have been distracted by the horror-show carousel of names. The private island. The fourteen staff members whose unofficial job description was, essentially, don’t ask, don’t know, don’t exist. The flight logs. The compromised politicians. The royal with the sweating problem and the unconvincing alibi. The files that kept appearing, then disappearing, then reappearing, like a magician’s trick performed in slow motion for an audience too stunned to ask how it’s done. It has been, in every measurable sense, a neverending episode of Scooby-Doo — except in Scooby-Doo, the culprit is always exactly one person, the motive is always money, and Fred and Daphne never end up on a deposition list.

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But the real story of Jeffrey Epstein is not really about Jeffrey Epstein at all. He is a harrowing symptom, not the disease. He is the lead henchman in a much older, much larger drama — and the actual villain, the one lurking behind the curtain with its hands deep in the machinery, is extreme and concentrated wealth and power itself. And the science — actual, repeatable, peer-reviewed science — proves it. Not rhetoric. Not politics. Neuroscience.

Here is where it begins.

Researchers at McMaster University ran a series of experiments measuring how power changes the brain. Participants were asked to reflect on moments in their lives when they had held power over someone else. Their neural activity was recorded via fMRI while they did it. What the researcher Sukinda Obi found was not what you’d call cheerful reading.

Power, it turns out, actively inhibits the brain’s mirroring function. Mirror neurons are the neurological architecture of empathy — the involuntary mechanism by which, when you watch someone in pain, your brain physically mirrors that experience, generating within you a pale but real echo of their suffering. That’s it; the simple biology behind it. And having power over others switches it off. Measurably. In the brain. In an fMRI scan. In a laboratory.

Society calls that switch being successful. Neurology calls it damage. Therapy calls it we need to talk, please sit down, do you want some water.

Paul Piff and Dachner Keltner at UC Berkeley compounded this finding with a body of research so consistently damning that you start to wonder how it got funded at all. As people accumulate wealth and power, they documented, compassion and empathy decline — measurably, verifiably, consistently. They become objectively worse at reading emotions in other people’s faces. Which is, again, not a moral failing so much as a documented physiological consequence.

They watched drivers at intersections and found that luxury car drivers were substantially more likely to cut off other motorists and ignore pedestrians. They invited people to help themselves from a jar of candy labelled for children only — and found that high-income participants took twice as much as low-income participants. Literally taking candy from children.

Step one: take the candy. Step two: invoice the children for the jar’s storage fees. The study might as well have been titled Who Wants To Be A Cartoon Villain?

And here is where it gets worse, because it always gets worse: extreme wealth does not merely give you power over other people. It separates you from them entirely. Every friendship becomes suspect — is this person here for me, or for my money? Every relationship begins to feel transactional, and your nervous system, which has no sense of proportion, responds to this threat of social isolation using the same neurological hardware it would use to respond to actual physical danger.

The billionaire in the penthouse is, at some neurological level, perpetually on high alert. He can afford everything in the world except the feeling of trust. And the science is unambiguous: isolation causes measurable brain damage. It impairs the brain’s ability to connect with other human beings. The more wealth, the more isolation, the more damage, the less empathy, the greater the impunity. It is not a vicious circle so much as a self-sealing system, and it is running right now, in multiple time zones, in multiple industries, producing its output with the quiet efficiency of heavy manufacturing.

Now, none of this is particularly uncomfortable to hear, right up until we get to the part where the wealthy justify all of it to themselves. And here’s the thing: they don’t see themselves as the villains. Nobody does. That’s practically the one universal constant of human psychology — we are all, in our own interior narrative, the hero.

But Piff and Keltner’s research found something specific and worth dwelling on: wealthier people are measurably more likely to believe that greed is justified, beneficial, and morally defensible. They don’t merely rationalize their greed; they ideologize it. Self-interest becomes not a failure of character but a proof of character. The market, in their cosmology, is a meritocracy. Those at the top are there because they deserve to be. Those at the bottom are there because something is wrong with them.

This was demonstrated with particular clarity in UC Berkeley students from upper-class backgrounds, who showed what the researchers described as “essentialist explanations for social hierarchy” — a serene conviction that great people naturally rise, and that the people at the bottom have character flaws. The wealthy convince themselves, systematically, that their wealth is evidence of their moral worth. And what flows from that conviction is something very practical: a green light.

If you are the good guy, if you are the job creator, the innovator, the philanthropist who gave all those people at GymShark somewhere to go — well, then, clearly, whatever you feel like doing is probably fine. You are, by definition, the leader. The natural order has placed you here. The normal rules were written for normal people. You are not normal. You are exceptional. The law, for you, is more of a suggestion box.

We know, because history has been kind enough to document it in merciless detail, exactly where that green light leads.

In 2006, Jeffrey Epstein faced a massive federal indictment for crimes involving the sexual abuse of minors. The plea deal he ultimately received was described by legal experts not merely as unusual but as completely unprecedented — a non-prosecution agreement so lenient that seasoned attorneys said they had never seen anything like it. He served thirteen months in a county jail, was permitted to leave six days a week for “work release,” and walked free.

In 2008, the global financial crisis destroyed the savings, jobs, homes, and futures of tens of millions of people. Not a single major banker went to prison. The British bank HSBC was caught enabling drug cartels and suspected terrorists to launder billions — ABC’s investigative correspondent obtained internal documents in which HSBC executives explicitly acknowledged what they were doing, in writing. No criminal prosecution. No sentences. Just a fine.

The only crime in 2008, it turned out, was being poor at the wrong time. You really should have scheduled your poverty for a more convenient quarter. It’s just one of those things. Terrible timing.

When the justice system repeatedly demonstrates to you, across decades, that the rules do not apply to you, your brain updates accordingly. It learns. Neural pathways rewire. The lesson becomes instinct: I can do whatever I want. And then you do. Reliably. Predictably. Like a factory.

But now we must discuss the part that almost nobody discusses — the part that, in some respects, is more important than all the rest of it. While we have spent considerable energy asking how Epstein’s clients became the way they were, we have spent almost none asking how Epstein’s victims came to be available to them. The answer is equally systematic.

The same economic machinery that made Epstein’s predatory pathology possible also manufactured the circumstances that made his victims vulnerable. When the top one percent controls more wealth than the bottom ninety-nine combined — and we are not talking historical hypothetical here, we are talking about right now, today, a situation so extreme that even the International Monetary Fund has publicly described it as out of control — you are not merely creating damaged billionaires. You are creating millions of desperately vulnerable people, and you are doing so with the same mechanical reliability.

Think carefully about what that actually means. A young woman, eighteen, nineteen, twenty years old. Working two jobs and still unable to make rent. Student loans compounding. Family drowning in the same water she is. And then someone very rich offers her more money than she has ever seen. Real money. Life-changing money. Just fly to an island. Just hang out. The people already there seem to be accepting things. Besides, “you can leave whenever you want.”

It’s an island.

She can leave whenever she wants. By swimming.

That is not a choice. That is economics with a weapon on the table, and the weapon doesn’t need to be visible for the coercion to be complete. Epstein did not merely exploit vulnerable people. He operated within a system specifically engineered to produce them — the same tax policies that permitted the accumulation of obscene wealth in individual hands simultaneously defunded education, dismantled social safety nets, crushed union power, and made housing in most major cities affordable only to those who already had wealth. That is the other face of the same coin. The inequality that made Epstein’s crimes possible created both the predator and the conditions that delivered the prey to his door. This is the Epstein Economy.

This is the factory. This is the machine. And understanding the machine matters enormously right now — in February 2026, as the Epstein files continue to send shockwaves through the Western world — because without understanding the machine, we will do what we always do: hunt the individual monster, congratulate ourselves, and leave the factory running to produce the next one.

The files, as they stand, have already done “considerable” damage to some carefully constructed reputations. The Guardian — not historically a publication one associates with conspiratorial thinking — has run the headline that the Epstein files prove a large-scale global conspiracy really does exist. German mainstream outlets like Deutschlandfunk, which have spent years treating anything that resembled systemic elite criminality as the province of people who film themselves in bunkers, are now reporting on criminal networks of power elites, though with the delicacy of a surgeon operating without anaesthetic on someone who is still technically awake.

In the United Kingdom, the Prime Minister’s chair has acquired the specific wobble of a man who knows the floor has dropped out but hasn’t yet decided whether to mention it. Peter Mandelson — the British ambassador to the United States, personally appointed by Keir Starmer — has been revealed by the files to have passed confidential government information to Jeffrey Epstein and to have received money from him.

The British government, displaying a commitment to transparency best described as theatrical, had Mandelson’s premises searched and announced extensive investigations. Starmer’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney, resigned and claimed personal responsibility for the appointment — an act of political theatre so transparent it would insult the intelligence of a moderately attentive houseplant. One man falls on his sword so that the man who handed him the sword can deny ever having owned cutlery.

What makes Britain’s situation particularly acute is the context it sits within: The artist formerly known as “Prince Andrew”, brother to the King, was one of Epstein’s closest associates and repeatedly abused victims. He has been arrested today for “passing confidential government information”. The inconvenient fact that he did so before or after humping a 12-year-old will probably be lost in some Parisian tunnel.

The current revelations suggest that it was not merely the Crown that had contact with paedophile blackmail networks, but the political class as well. Norway’s former ambassador to Iraq and Jordan, Mona Juul, resigned after it emerged that she was in close contact with Epstein and that her children were generously provided for in his will — though what services she rendered in exchange remains, with some diplomatic understatement, “unclear.”

France’s former Culture Minister Jack Lang stepped down from his chairmanship of a cultural institute after his own connections surfaced. These are small fish. But they are illustrative small fish. They show the map. They indicate the scale.

Individual emails have now emerged establishing that Epstein was trained and deployed by the Israeli intelligence service Mossad and by former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak as an intelligence asset — a spy embedded within Western elite networks, tasked with gathering compromising material that could be used to make those elites compliant with Israel’s political agenda.

Israel is presently governed by ultra-Orthodox factions pursuing what they describe in biblical terms as a divinely ordained claim to global influence. Unable to achieve this militarily, the strategy shifts to infiltration and leverage. Targeting the American elite made particular strategic sense: the United States possesses the world’s most powerful military, and compromising its leadership produces maximum benefit to those doing the compromising. The Epstein operation was not a side hustle. It was statecraft.

Richard Branson, who appears frequently in the files, owns Necker Island — another Caribbean island, positioned a few kilometres from Epstein’s own, that has served as a destination for the global elite. Barack Obama has been known to visit it. The Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, who also features in the files, reportedly purchased his three-hundred-million-dollar Hawaiian island partly out of envy for Epstein’s setup. Ellison’s island hosted Bill Gates’ wedding, and was visited by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu. The problem is not Epstein. The problem is an archipelago. A network of islands, both literal and metaphorical, where the rules have been suspended because the people inside them own the rules.

The question of what to do with this information — how to understand it in a way that does not simply overwhelm and disorient — requires a degree of structural thinking that is not naturally rewarded by the news cycle. Here, the bird’s eye view is essential.

Over the course of the twentieth century, Western capitalism prevailed over Soviet communism. Capitalism won, in part, because it required fewer overt control mechanisms and offered individuals genuine economic freedom — the freedom to accumulate, to compete, to build. Communism, by contrast, bundled all productive power into the hands of a single party, and single-party control almost invariably slides into obvious dictatorship, which is the political equivalent of adding a single point of failure to a load-bearing structure and then being surprised when it collapses. Capitalism didn’t have that flaw. But it has its own.

Capitalism makes the pursuit of capital its central doctrine, and the logical endpoint of that pursuit is monopoly — the elimination of competition, the consolidation of market share, the swallowing of rivals. Most consumers, liberated from any obligation to care about intrinsic values, optimise for price and convenience. This automatically rewards the entrepreneurs who can push costs down fastest, which often means the entrepreneurs with the least concern for social or moral constraints.

The system selects for them. It does not merely permit them; it elevates them. And because the system is global, the monopolies it produces operate across national borders, making them largely immune to the regulatory oversight of any single government — particularly when those governments’ representatives find their career prospects considerably improved by serving the will of the people whose regulation they are supposedly providing.

This is why lobbying works. This is why the revolving door between corporate boards and legislative chambers keeps spinning. Not because of individual corruption — although there is plenty of that — but because the structural incentive is to corrupt, and the structural disincentive is... not much.

The economic elite this system produces can be called “elite overproduction”: elites consistently have more children than the general population, because children, for these families, are instruments of dynastic continuity — carriers of the family’s market position across generations. Over time, more and more elite offspring compete for an increasingly consolidated pool of positions at the top of the pyramid. Internal competition within this stratum becomes fierce. And in fierce competitions, advantage tends to accrue to those willing to do what others are not.

This is where the most disturbing insight demands to be confronted directly, without euphemism. Parts of the elite have, across generations, weaponised the psychology of trauma — specifically the trauma of childhood sexual abuse — as a tool for manufacturing the psychological profile they need in their children. The mechanism is grounded in established behavioural science: a child who experiences profound powerlessness will often, as an adult, spend their life driven by a compulsive need to compensate for that stored feeling — to accumulate power, status, control, in quantities that no rational calculation would suggest are necessary, because the drive is not rational. It is neurological. It is the nervous system’s attempt to heal a wound that cannot actually be healed by external achievement.

The former German billionaire Florian Homm described his own experience of this with a candour so stark it is almost unbearable to read. He was, by his own account, sexually abused by his own father for five years, with his mother’s knowledge. At eighteen, he was told explicitly: there had been so little love, such brutal violence, because he was in a programme. He was broken, then rebuilt, then aimed. His energy was channelled into success. He became a billionaire. He was a product. And he reports that virtually every billionaire he has known shares some version of this origin — severely traumatised, almost without exception, the true self buried beneath a pseudo-identity constructed for performance in the arena of capital.

Parts of the elite perpetuate this. They use child abuse, both within families and through networks like Epstein’s, as a mechanism for producing the next generation of driven, damaged, psychologically programmable power-seekers. The occult groups and secret societies that gather the most powerful members of this stratum serve, in part, as ritual containers for this abuse — giving it a theological or esoteric framing that elevates it from crime to ceremony, from pathology to purpose.

And trafficking operations like Epstein’s extend this further: they allow individuals to enact their compensatory fantasies outside the family, under conditions of extreme discretion and leverage.

This is not new. Virtually every major civilization in recorded history — the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Aztecs, the Israelites — eventually descended into ritual child abuse at the highest levels before collapsing. The pattern recurs so consistently across cultures and centuries that it begins to look less like coincidence and more like a structural consequence of hierarchical power accumulation taken to its logical extreme.

The one form of social organisation that appears to have consistently avoided this particular collapse is the one we have spent millennia systematically dismantling: decentralized tribal life, in which no single person can accumulate enough power to become genuinely unaccountable. Communities structured around shared responsibility for food, housing, education, and protection — rather than around the delegation of those needs to centralized structures that invariably produce a detached governing layer at the top.

This, perhaps, is the structural alternative that the current moment is forcing into view. Not revolution — the files alone have generated enough political pressure that, in an earlier age, actual revolutions would already have occurred. Americans started their War of Independence over a four percent tea tax — but they of course didn’t have TikTopium. The revelations in these documents involve something considerably more serious than tea. Yet the most violent response has been institutional embarrassment, a few resignations, and a flurry of searched premises.

What is different now is the information environment. The overwhelming majority of the substantive investigative work on the Epstein files is being done by independent journalists, podcasters, citizen investigators, and people operating entirely outside legacy media structures — because those legacy structures either cannot or will not pursue it with the necessary rigour.

Mainstream outlets are being dragged into coverage reluctantly, by the sheer volume of public engagement generated elsewhere, and they are handling the material with a combination of kid gloves and institutional vertigo. The Guardian acknowledging a global conspiracy exists is significant. Deutschlandfunk discussing elite criminal networks is significant. But the bulk of the connective tissue — who knew what, when, and what they did about it — is being assembled in the open, by people who don’t own television stations or answer to boards with their own conflicts of interest.

This matters enormously. Humanity, for perhaps the first time in history, possesses enough distributed informational infrastructure to conduct something resembling mass accountability without requiring the cooperation of the institutions most invested in preventing it.

Congressman Thomas Massie, who has spent years campaigning for full release of the files, has asked his followers directly to send him any redacted documents so he can view them in unredacted form once Congress gains that access.

The Justice Department, under Pam Bondi, has agreed to provide elected representatives with access to the complete, unredacted files — a path that threads the needle between full public release (which would risk vigilante justice and derail due process) and continued suppression (which would be simply indefensible). It is an imperfect mechanism, but it is a mechanism, and it points in the right direction. Whether charges actually follow remains is something we will have to wait and see about.

What we should not wait to see about is the broader question: what kind of system produces this, and what would it take to change it?

The answer is not, as the enthusiasts of enforcement would have it, better monitoring and stricter policing. You cannot police your way out of a structural dynamic. You cannot arrest your way to economic equilibrium. The first step toward stopping the next Epstein is not improved law enforcement — it is addressing the obscene inequality that creates the abuser’s pathology on one end and the victim’s vulnerability on the other. Fix the wealth gap and you eliminate both sides of the equation. Abolish the conditions of extreme concentrated wealth and you abolish the neurological damage those conditions produce. Rebuild social safety nets, fund education, make housing affordable, and you remove the desperate economic precarity that makes young women fly to private islands a calculation worth making.

It is worth noting, with the bitterness it deserves, that Jeffrey Epstein was a tax adviser to the rich and powerful. He made his living, at least officially, helping the wealthiest people on earth avoid contributing to the society they were simultaneously exploiting. The financial architecture of his crimes and the financial architecture of his career were reflections of each other.

We worship the system that produces these people. We build monuments to it. We make films in which the billionaire is the hero, the saviour, the man with the technology and the moral will to fix what the rest of us cannot.

Bruce Wayne does not spend a single dollar on the economic conditions that make Gotham a crime-ridden hellhole. He has the resources to solve Gotham’s problems at a structural level. He could open schools, build affordable housing, fund mental health services, pay living wages. Instead he puts on a suit made of advanced military-grade materials and drives a car that probably costs more than a small hospital, and he goes out at night and punches people.

Mostly, judging by the demographics of Gotham’s criminal class, he punches people who are poor. Or he punches the mentally ill, because he was too busy playing dress-up to go to business school and learn that the solution to crime is gentrification.

Batman is not a superhero. Batman is a billionaire who decided that personal violence was more interesting than structural change, and we have been conditioned, by decades of extraordinary storytelling, to find this inspiring.

It is, in fact, the perfect expression of the billionaire ideology: the conviction that the right individual with sufficient resources can solve collective problems through personal action, that what the world needs is not systemic reform but a better-equipped lone genius.

That ideology is not a quirk of comic book mythology. It is the operating philosophy of several actual human beings who own social media platforms, and political movements. The superpower is not the cave or the car. The superpower is the billion dollars. Always has been.

The fact that no one in power appears to be doing anything of actual benefit (as boring as that may be) — that the factory keeps producing, the names keep appearing, the files keep getting partially released and partially redacted, the chief of staff keeps resigning to protect the minister, the bank keeps paying the fine instead of the sentence — is not evidence of exceptional evil or exceptional incompetence. It is evidence of a working system.

The system is functioning exactly as designed. The factory owners are running the factory, the media owners are running the media, the justice system is providing just enough justice to maintain its own legitimacy without threatening the people who fund it.

And yet. The files are out. The shockwaves are real. Politicians are wobbling. Former ambassadors are resigning. Mass media is cautiously using the word “conspiracy” without quotation marks. Independent journalists, citizen investigators, and ordinary people with internet connections are assembling a picture that the legacy institutions have spent decades suppressing, and they are assembling it in public, in real time, for hundreds of millions of viewers. The information monopoly that once made suppression logistically feasible no longer exists. The question of what follows from that is the defining question of this moment.

The answer, for what it is worth, is not dramatic. The new world order — if there is to be one — will not arise through a single galvanizing event. It will come from the slow, boring, deliberate work of building systems that make the current ones unnecessary. It will come from the decentralisation of power in all its forms — political, economic, informational — because concentrated power, as the neuroscience confirms and history demonstrates, reliably produces the same outcomes regardless of the individual holding it. It is not, in the end, about Epstein. It never was.

It was always about the system that made him not merely possible, but inevitable.

The machine is still running. The question is whether we are finally paying attention to the machine, or whether — dazzled by the carnival of names and scandals and leaked documents and political theater — we will keep staring at the symptom and ignoring the disease.

Because Epstein is… gone. The pathology that produced him is very much alive, and it is in excellent health, and it operates quietly, and it has an incredible PR team, and it would very much like you to keep watching the Scooby-Doo reruns or “10 disturbing images from the Epstein files”.

Still… it’s the bank president. It was always the bank president.

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