We bought the rocket because the wage stopped working

A week ago this desk wrote about a very human thing: a wave of ordinary people moving their savings into a single bet on the future - the SpaceX listing. This week's follow-up is less flattering. The shares slipped from their debut high, and the average person who bought in near the top is now, by one tally, roughly underwater.

The easy story is greed: people who should know better, chasing a rocket. I don't buy it, and the data is why. In the three months to April, real wages - pay after inflation - rose by all of 1.3% including bonuses, and just 0.3% without them. A pay packet that barely keeps pace with prices is one that has quietly stopped being a route to getting ahead. So people look for another route. And the route the culture advertises, loudly, is ownership: if the machines are going to do the work, own the machines.

That is the behaviour worth understanding. When work feels less able to deliver security - when your wage flatlines and your employer stops hiring the juniors — buying a slice of the thing replacing the work starts to feel less like a gamble and more like the only sensible hedge. It is our founding question turned into a financial decision: if my labour is worth a little less each year, I had better own some capital. The rocket was never really about Mars. It was about a mortgage.

None of which makes it safe. A hedge bought at the top, with money you will need, is a hedge that can hurt you - and "everyone's doing it" is the oldest reason in the book for doing something unwise. The charitable read explains the behaviour; it doesn't bless it. The honest position is to understand the impulse and respect the risk in the same breath.

For the British reader specifically: this is happening to a workforce whose vacancies just hit a four-year low and whose pay growth is among the thinnest in years. The conditions that make "own the future" feel rational are not only American conditions. They are Reading conditions too.