Informational pattern

Agency asymmetry

Some actors are described as autonomous decision-makers while others appear only as passive reactions or victims of circumstance.

The diagnostic question

Whose choices are foregrounded, and whose choices are treated as background conditions?

What to look for

Responsibility follows grammar rather than causal leverage
Institutions disappear from an individual-choice story
One actor receives motives while another receives constraints

See it in context

Public analyses using this lens

The subprime mortgage crisis

Did subprime borrowers cause the financial crisis?

Their defaults helped trigger losses, but securitisation, leverage, ratings, opaque exposures, runnable funding, and regulatory failures turned mortgage risk into a global systemic crisis.

Read the X-Ray →