Statecraft

§Series III · Nº 02 · Pattern 1

The Congealed Outcome as Manifested Preference

How a supply decision reads itself back as consumer choice, and what the administrator who pronounces it no longer sees

28 April 2026 · by Jacob Huibers · Lees in het Nederlands → · NL-EN glossary →

§ 01 · The alderman and the queue

In a medium-sized Dutch municipality, somewhere in 2025, an alderman opens an apartment block of twenty-six units. They are apartments of sixty-six square metres, in a four-storey block, with a Juliet balcony and mechanical ventilation, on an inner-city site where twenty years ago a school building stood. The registration for the units drew more than a thousand applications. The alderman speaks at the opening. He is cheerful, sincere and well prepared. He says: “This is what our residents want.”

The sentence is, in its own way, true. The twenty-six units are booked and the waiting list is long. Whoever analyses the applications sees young first-time buyers, divorced mid-life households, and older people who want to leave their single-family home behind because the garden has become too heavy. None of them is forced to sign. All have chosen. The economic logic of revealed preference is satisfied: this is what they wanted, this is what they got, this is what they accepted.

The sentence is, in another way, also misleading. Two streets away, in the same municipality, a family lives in a rental dwelling of one hundred and five square metres. The family has been on a waiting list for a single-family home since 2017. They did not respond to the registration for the apartment block, because an apartment of sixty-six square metres is not a dwelling for two adults and two school-age children. Whoever listens to the older person moving into the block hears not only “it is manageable here”. He also hears “in a smaller single-family home I would have stayed put”. But such a dwelling does not exist. The intermediate segment, the senior dwelling, the patio house, the courtyard cluster, has not been built for years. The average usable floor area of a Dutch new-build home dropped between 2021 and 2026 from one hundred and eighteen to ninety-nine square metres.¹ Seventy-three per cent of permitted housing in the pipeline is apartment, upper- or lower-storey unit. In Amsterdam this share is ninety-six per cent.²

What the alderman says is not a lie. What the applications show is not an error. What the family two streets away does is not a preference. All three observations are simultaneously true. The pattern that binds them together is that a congealed supply decision returns in the administrative conversation as manifested preference, without the speaker, the applicant or the excluded party seeing what is happening. The alderman reads the waiting list as confirmation of his design. The applicant reads the apartment as the best option within what is available. The family reads its absence of registration as personal choice, not as systemic exclusion. And the feedback loop closes. Next year, at the next programming round, the waiting list will be cited as justification for building apartments again. None of the three actors lies. All act sincerely. The pattern works through them.

This paper names that pattern as the first form by which Series III teaches seeing: the congealed outcome as manifested preference. It works not only in the housing market. It works in the supermarket shelves, in the margins of leasing contracts, in the parcels of Shein, in the order routes of Picnic, in the subsidy applications of the Climate Fund. Time and again, an outcome of a production chain, a fiscal regime, a shelf architecture or an algorithmic logic is presented back as what the market is asking for, what consumers are choosing, what citizens want. And time and again that reading-back parasitises on a methodological foundation, revealed preference, that is valid under three conditions and in most Dutch policy sectors fails to satisfy those conditions.

§ 02 · What the pattern is, and what it is not

The pattern can be formulated precisely. A professional, policy-maker or administrator presents the outcome of a production chain, supply decision or fiscal regime as the manifested preference of citizens or consumers. The claim is generally not factually false. People do indeed choose what they choose within the supply offered to them. What is misleading is the nature of that choice. The so-called demand is the residue of an earlier supply-decision that fixed the choice architecture. The preference is not an exogenous input to the system but an endogenous output of it, which is then played back as justification for the original supply decision.

The pattern is not a conspiracy. The alderman designs no plan to impose apartments. He believes in his programme. He sees the waiting list and is reassured. The pattern is not a lie. The CBL representative who says supermarkets “leave the choice to the customer”³ describes a truth within the existing architecture. The pattern is not stupidity. The Picnic CEO who says that parents after the day-care pickup “really do not enjoy having to drive past the supermarket”,⁴ makes a sharp observation on which he has built an enterprise. What the pattern is, is a specific form of structural distortion in which the original supply decision becomes invisible the moment it has landed in a choice architecture and people choose within it.

The analytical instrument that names this most precisely is Bourdieu’s misrecognition or méconnaissance. Bourdieu describes how a social structure can endure only when it is perceived by its bearers not as what it objectively is, but in a form “that legitimises it in the eye of the beholder”.⁵ It is not ideology in the Marxist sense, for there is no truth being concealed; it is not false consciousness, for there is no prior consciousness that could be false. It is structural, non-intentional, and co-produced. The alderman and the applicant jointly produce the misrecognition. Both experience the outcome as preference. Both thereby miss the supply decision that produced the preference. Symbolic violence, in Bourdieu’s formulation, is “violence which is exercised upon a social agent with his or her complicity”.⁶ That is a precise description of what happens daily in the Dutch housing market, the Dutch shelves and the Dutch Climate Fund.

The pattern parasitises on the logic of revealed preference, the mathematical formalisation by Paul Samuelson of 1938 which says that what someone chooses within a given budget and supply reveals their preference. That formalisation is useful when three conditions are met. The budget must be exogenous to policy. The supply must be exogenous to earlier policy choices. A working exit option must exist. In a mathematics admissions test these conditions are satisfied. In the Dutch housing market none of the three is met. The budget of a first-time buyer is endogenous to a mortgage regime, a tax structure and a wage level shaped by policy. The supply is endogenous to thirty years of land policy, developer contracts and planning capacity allocation. The exit option is missing: a housing seeker with a tightness indicator of 2.4 in their market area cannot walk away.⁷ In such a configuration the choice does not reveal the preference. It reproduces the system.

Amartya Sen has supplied the sharpness of that critique in his work on adaptive preferences. In Development as Freedom (1999) Sen observes that the privileged can become blind to their privileges and that the disadvantaged learn to count only their blessings, not their deprivations. Whoever fails to recognise this adaptation “biases the development process in favour of the status quo”.⁸ Sen quotes Cowper: “Freedom has a thousand charms to show, that slaves, howe’er contented, never know.” For the Dutch public administration this means that WoON figures, RIVM food consumption surveys and ISDE statistics cannot be read as preference thermometers, but must be read as capability thermometers. What people choose within the existing supply tells us something about what they can do. It tells us appreciably less about what they would want were the supply different.

§ 03 · The housing market: supply as preference

No Dutch sector shows the pattern as clearly as the housing market. The figures are hard, the rhetoric is consistent, and the feedback loop has been documented over twenty years.

The material anchor. According to CBS, since 2023 at least half of all newly delivered Dutch homes have consisted of apartments.⁹ In 2025, sixty-nine thousand new-build homes were delivered, of which nearly forty thousand were apartments or upper- and lower-storey units. Seventy-three per cent of permitted homes in the pipeline are apartment or multi-family unit. In Amsterdam this is ninety-six per cent, in Eindhoven ninety-three per cent, in Utrecht and Rotterdam both eighty-seven per cent. The average usable floor area of a new-build home dropped from one hundred and eighteen square metres in 2021 to ninety-nine in 2026. Terraced houses fell from one hundred and twenty-seven to one hundred and fifteen square metres. Apartments fell from seventy-three to sixty-five. In Amsterdam mid-rent the average usable floor area over the past four years has hovered around fifty-nine square metres.¹⁰

The speech anchor is the programmatic verb that reads the supply decision back as a demographic fact. The Province of Overijssel notes that in 2024 forty-nine per cent of housing seekers indicated they wanted an apartment, and adds that this “is presumably connected to housing policy that strongly emphasises inner-city building and affordable housing”.¹¹ The sentence is factually correct. What it does not make explicit is that the causal direction points one way: policy has changed the choice architecture, and the measured preference follows. A comparable reading takes place when a local alderman, at an apartment block with more than a thousand responses to twenty-six units, says: “So many applicants is bizarre.”¹² Bizarre it is not. It is exactly what a market does when supply is artificially scarce and exit options are missing: oversubscription peaks on the scarce good, and that peak confirms the programming that produced it.

The supply decisions behind these figures are thirty years old. The Vinex era introduced residual calculation in municipal land exploitation, in which public and private revenues became so entangled that spatial quality became instrumental to land yield.¹³ The developer market consolidated around land positions and building claims.¹⁴ Nitrogen impasse and grid congestion delayed an estimated half of the remaining housing assignment by a substantial margin.¹⁵ Rising construction costs combined with rent regulation made larger mid-rent units financially unviable.¹⁶ Institutional investors preferred apartment complexes in inner-city locations because the yield per let square metre is higher than on ground-bound single-family homes in greenfield extensions. None of these decisions was taken with the intention “the Dutch person wants a smaller apartment”. All of them together produced a pipeline whose outcome is now being interpreted as precisely that wish.

The misrecognition mechanism sits in the measurement itself. WoON 2024 shows forty-nine per cent apartment demand among active housing seekers, a shift relative to earlier surveys. WoON 2021 had identified new-build need according to housing wishes for nearly seventy per cent as single-family home.¹⁷ The shift is presented as changed preference. Two mechanisms coincide: the active housing-seeker group has shifted in composition (a doubling of first-time buyers between 2012 and 2024, higher apartment shares among older people leaving their single-family home), and the survey measures “what are you looking for now?”, a question that structurally cannot distinguish between exogenous preference and endogenous adaptation. Whoever has lived in an apartment since 2018 and no longer has a realistic prospect of a single-family home describes that adaptation as a wish. He does not lie. He is adapted, in Sen’s sense of the word.

Whoever wants to see the pattern need only ask one question of the WoON figures: who has no exit option, and what does their absence of choice do to the aggregates? The NVM tightness indicator stood in the first quarter of 2024 at 2.4, far below the equilibrium value of five to ten.¹⁸ In such a tight market exit is not possible. The family from the opening scene, on a waiting list for a single-family home since 2017, is not choosing an apartment because they have no alternative. Their non-choice does not appear in any WoON table. They are absent from the measured preference. The table the alderman cites to legitimise his programme is precisely the table from which they have dropped out.

§ 04 · The shelf architecture: convenience as residue

The second dossier shows the same pattern in a different material. The Dutch Food Consumption Survey 2019–2021 documents a share of ultra-processed food in Dutch energy intake that is high in European comparison. The exact estimate is sensitive to NOVA classification and cohort, but the bandwidth lies between thirty-seven and sixty-one per cent.¹⁹ Only twenty-nine per cent of Dutch adults meet the guideline of two hundred grams of vegetables a day. The five largest supermarket chains, Albert Heijn, Aldi, Jumbo, Lidl and Plus, jointly hold a market share of approximately eighty-seven per cent. The share of own-brand products on the shelf is fifty-four point five per cent.²⁰

The speech anchor sits in the administrative rhetoric of the sector. The ACM noted in 2023, in its investigation into sustainability strategies, that supermarkets “leave the choice to the customer” and that they apply no strategy to steer customers toward organic. The reasoning, in the chain’s own words: “Not every customer has the budget to buy mainly organic, and for far from every customer is sustainability an important choice criterion. Steering all customers towards organic is therefore commercially unwise.”²¹ The reasoning shifts seamlessly from “what the consumer would choose under different price conditions” to “what the consumer chooses today within the existing price regime”. CBL formulations about “what the modern consumer wants” and “convenience as the driving factor” operate in the same register. The pattern here runs parallel to what Nº 04 (The optimisation asymmetry) and Nº 06 (Form laundering) diagnose on adjacent dimensions: the same ACM commitment by which Albert Heijn in April 2024 withdrew its claim “most sustainable supermarket” and the slogan “we work together with our growers and farmers” can in the architecture of the shelf still function as a substrate for the reading-back of choice described here.1

The supply decisions behind these figures are no less congealed than in the housing market. Shelf engineering determines what stands at eye level and what at undercabinet level. Eyeline pricing ranks prices so that own-brand products visually fall below the A-brands. The bakery at the entrance makes the first contact with the shop a scent anchor that lengthens the average dwell time. Promotion strategies on A-brands shift their economic weight to own-brands without the consumer experiencing this as steering.²² The ACM researchers themselves note that Albert Heijn applies its own sustainability criteria within Beter Voor programmes for around seven hundred of its more than eleven thousand own-brand products, while A-brands less often carry a sustainability label. The choice architecture is, in other words, not neutral. It is presented as such.

The parent who on a Thursday evening after the day-care pickup, with whining children, would rather not drive past the supermarket is not choosing convenience. He is choosing against exhaustion within an arrangement in which time and care are structurally unequally divided. The choice that the shelf architecture measures as preference is in reality a choice within an industrial-logistical configuration that preceded him. Galbraith wrote about this in 1958: the more wants are fabricated by the production process itself, the less tenable the premise that production satisfies wants that exist a priori.²³ The producer makes both the goods and the desires for them. The proof of Galbraith’s thesis, requiring little reinforcement since 1958, lies today in every shelf layout and every marketing department.

§ 05 · ISDE and the Heat Fund: choice architecture as social selection

The third dossier touches the Climate Fund and is perhaps the purest example of the pattern, because here a policy register actively articulates the choice as preference. Minister Hugo de Jonge announced on 26 February 2024 an increase in the use of the National Heat Fund by lower and middle incomes, and formulated this with a rhetorical move that illustrates the pattern precisely: “Previously, it was mainly home-owners with higher incomes who made use of the National Heat Fund.”²⁴ The passive construction made use of reads a supply structure, a tenant-owner asymmetry, a financing accessibility and a sludge architecture as a choice pattern.

The figures show what the rhetoric conceals. TNO and CBS report that the number of energy-poor households in the Netherlands rose from three hundred and ninety-six thousand in 2023 to five hundred and ten thousand in 2024, an increase of nearly one hundred and eighty thousand, mainly through the lapse of compensation measures.²⁵ Energy-poor households spent on average eight point five per cent of their income on energy costs in 2023. An average household five point two per cent. The joint ISDE-NWF Monitor of CBS and TNO over 2023 establishes explicitly that middle and higher incomes use the schemes more often, both in absolute and in relative terms. Of the one hundred and twenty-nine thousand residential heat pumps installed in 2025, ninety thousand were supported by ISDE subsidy.²⁶ TNO has explicitly argued in its policy advice to the Ministry of Climate and Green Growth for an income ceiling on ISDE, because the subsidy “currently lands disproportionately with higher-income households”.²⁷

The supply decisions that produce this distribution are layered. First the ownership structure: a tenant cannot apply for ISDE, since subsidy follows ownership. A separate scheme for landlords, the SVOH, has existed since 2025 but lands on a social-housing-provider and private rental market that has its own logic and its own pace. Then the pre-financing requirement: an applicant must first pay themselves and then apply for the subsidy. The ISDE amount for an air-water heat pump in 2025 is one thousand two hundred and fifty euros starting amount plus two hundred and twenty-five euros per kilowatt plus two hundred euros label bonus, while the actual investment costs lie between fifteen thousand and twenty thousand euros.²⁸ The subsidy covers approximately twenty-five to thirty per cent of the investment. The remaining seventy to seventy-five per cent must be pre-financed by the home-owner. Whoever has no home equity, no savings and no borrowing capacity cannot structurally apply. Then the procedural architecture that Sunstein would categorise as sludge: DigiD, registered installer list, invoice, payment receipt, RVO portal.²⁹ Each one separately reasonable; cumulatively a filter that rewards administrative capacity and punishes its absence. Finally grid congestion: TenneT and the regional grid operators give priority to new connections for large consumers, holding back heat-pump investment in densely populated districts.³⁰

The resulting ISDE distribution, disproportionately high in the highest two income deciles, appears in policy documents as “active choice of the owner-occupier”. Hirschman’s distinction between exit, voice and loyalty makes visible what that policy formulation conceals: the tenant has no exit option, since they do not decide about the dwelling. The low-income owner has no exit option, since they cannot pre-finance. Only the high-income owner has all three options available: exit through insulation, voice through political participation, loyalty through subsidy application. The choice the system measures is the choice of the only group that had one.³¹ That the other groups “do not choose” is then read not as the absence of a choice option but as the presence of a divergent preference. It is precisely that misunderstanding that defines the pattern. Series II, in The quiet dispossession (Nº 02) and The pressure on the weakest (Nº 04), has shown on adjacent terrains how the absence of a single corrective instrument produces an outcome that no one wanted and that almost no one can any longer reverse. Pattern 1 supplies the cognitive mechanism beneath that reverberation: the outcome acquires, after the fact, the weight of a chosen preference.

§ 06 · Picnic, Shein and the fabricated preference

The preceding three dossiers show the pattern where the government itself has taken the supply decisions. The next two dossiers show the pattern where the market has taken the supply decisions, and the administrative conversation goes along nonetheless with the reading-back as consumer preference. The pattern is structurally identical; the authors differ.

Picnic CEO Michiel Muller is the most articulate bearer of the pattern. In an interview he formulates it with unintended purity. To the rhetorical objection that people “just like to go to the supermarket”, he replies: “Of course not. Parents really do not enjoy having to drive past the supermarket with their whining offspring after day-care. […] They simply did not consider it possible that things could be different. With Picnic we offer an alternative.” And: “Everything we do is aimed at making it easier for the consumer […] so that they order more.”³² Muller’s rhetoric is a marketing discourse, but the analytical structure beneath it is clear: the “preference for convenience” is not discovered, but constructed, and the construction is then presented as discovery. Picnic realised in 2024 a group turnover of one and a half billion euros, with a Dutch market share of one point nine per cent according to Circana, and posted a net loss in the Netherlands of sixty-five million euros; Edeka holds a thirty-two per cent stake.³³ The online share within the Dutch supermarket channel stands at seven point eight per cent.³⁴

At the same time, the number of physical shops in the Netherlands declined from one hundred and seven thousand in 2005 to fewer than eighty thousand in 2025.³⁵ Between 2010 and 2024 some twenty-five thousand shops disappeared, a decline of twenty-five per cent, of which twenty-three thousand in non-food. The number of supermarkets and mini-supermarkets did grow, but the district coverage in villages and peripheral neighbourhoods is thinning. Locatus noted in 2021 alone two thousand five hundred and sixty-eight properties withdrawn from the retail stock, mostly to residential function. The neighbourhood shop does not disappear through consumer preference. It disappears through a converging combination of consolidation, parking norms, OZB (Dutch property tax) pressure on small retail premises, BAG (Basisregistratie Adressen en Gebouwen, Dutch property registry) use-purpose regimes that facilitate transformation to dwelling, and demographic ageing of the self-employed. The parent who takes Muller’s Picnic crates is not choosing convenience over the neighbourhood shop. He is choosing between Picnic and a distant supermarket. The neighbourhood shop is not on his choice menu because it has been marginalised.

The Shein-Temu dossier shows a variant with Asian authorship. Shein has five point eight million Dutch users, Temu four point six million, both reported under DSA obligations.³⁶ In 2024 Dutch customs handled around one point two billion of the four point six billion parcels sent from China to the EU. Dutch textile waste totalled two hundred and fifteen kilotonnes in 2022, that is twelve point one kilos per person per year.³⁷ Forty-eight per cent of French Shein buyers were born between 1997 and 2012; sixteen per cent of Temu buyers are under twenty-five while forty-four per cent are forty-five or older.

Trade bodies speak of “Gen Z chooses fast fashion” or “young people want fast fashion”. The analysis of endowed professor Kim Poldner is sharper: Shein and Temu are “monster companies” that are “destructive for our textile and textile-recycling sector, but also for the financial and mental health of our youth”.³⁸ The supply decisions are three pillars deep. The fiscal arbitrage below the one hundred and fifty euros threshold, to be abolished in the EU customs package of 2028, makes small-parcel imports disproportionately cheap. The algorithmic demand engineering via TikTok Shop, personalised push notifications, gamification, daily deals and countdown clocks was identified by the ACM in 2024 as unfair commercial practice. The logistical immediacy of factory-to-consumer is, in the words of expert Ed Sander, ironic: “Many goods come from factories that previously produced for European or American brands. Whereupon these manufacturers ended up with overcapacity and decided, via a platform such as Temu, to sell more directly to the Western consumer.”³⁹ The European sector has built the chain that now bypasses it. What appears as youth preference is a fabricated ecosystem.

A fourth market deserves brief attention here because it shows the pattern at the level of fiscal design. The Dutch car-leasing market, with 1.37 million vehicles in 2025 according to VNA, produced in 2024 a striking figure: of newly registered passenger cars, thirty-five per cent were fully electric according to BOVAG, but the growth came almost entirely from the corporate market, where the EV share rose from thirty-four to fifty-three per cent, while the private share fell from thirty-two to twenty-six per cent and in February 2025 dropped further to twenty-three per cent.2 The trade rhetoric reads this as “consumer preference is stagnating” or “the private buyer remains hesitant”. The pattern is the same: benefit-in-kind regime, BPM (Belasting van Personenauto’s en Motorrijwielen, Dutch passenger-car purchase tax) exemption that lapsed on 1 January 2025, MRB (Motorrijtuigenbelasting, road tax) tariff scale and residual-value drop on new models together form a fiscal-financial architecture in which a corporate driver can financially carry an EV and a private buyer generally cannot. The choice that the system measures is the choice of the group that could carry the architecture.

§ 07 · International parallels

Three international parallels clarify the pattern through its variations and its limits.

The American parallel sits in food deserts. USDA data identify around six thousand five hundred and twenty-nine census tracts as food desert. Thirty-nine point five million Americans, twelve point nine per cent of the population, lived in 2017 in low-income, low-food-access areas. In Mississippi this concerns thirty per cent of residents, in New Mexico twenty-nine per cent, in Arkansas twenty-six per cent.⁴⁰ Marion Nestle’s Food Politics (2002, revised edition 2013) and Michael Moss’s Salt Sugar Fat (2013) document in detail how the American supply structure, from industrial production to shelf engineering to marketing budgets aimed at children to lobbying practices, shapes the American diet. The American rhetorical move is identical to the Dutch: retailers and lobbyists explain consumption of ultra-processed products as “consumer choice”, while USDA data show that the choice is bounded by physical and economic access. The parallel is stronger in rhetoric than in scale; Dutch neighbourhood-shop marginalisation is real but not as extreme as American food deserts. What it shows is that the pattern operates transnationally and that the speech register in both countries is identical, even with differing underlying empirical severity.

The British parallel is analytically the strongest. The UK home-ownership figure rose from twenty-five per cent in 1918 via thirty-eight per cent in 1958 to seventy per cent in 2003, then fell back to sixty-three to sixty-five per cent in 2023. At the same time private renting rose from eight per cent in 2003 to twenty per cent in 2023.⁴¹ Buy-to-let mortgages, an instrument introduced in 1996, had financed by 2025 four point seven million dwellings in the private rental segment. Total buy-to-let lending amounted to twenty point five billion pounds in 2024. The average return on buy-to-let investments since 1996: sixteen per cent annually, against six point eight per cent for shares and six point five per cent for bonds.⁴² The combination of Right to Buy in 1980, the gradual phasing-out of mortgage interest relief at source, the Assured Shorthold Tenancy in 1988 that protects landlords, and buy-to-let mortgages in 1996 has constructed a market in which an entire generation without purchase potential becomes a tenant. That “preference for renting” is then presented as choice by policy-makers and lobbyists. The pattern works over forty-five years and shows how a supply decision fabricates a preference structure.

The Chinese parallel is, paradoxically, the most explicit and therefore the most instructive as a mirror. Chinese consumption rose from a slight contribution to GDP growth to fifty-two per cent in 2025. Total retail sales exceeded fifty trillion yuan for the first time, equivalent to seven point one trillion US dollars. Singles Day generated in 2025 one point seven trillion RMB GMV; livestream commerce accounted for more than thirty per cent of agricultural e-commerce in the first half of 2025.⁴³ Made in China 2025, formalised in 2015, and the consumption-led growth strategy, formalised from 2020, are explicit demand-management frames. The Chinese system acknowledges the construction and presents it as policy. In the Netherlands the same mechanic is daily denied and presented back as spontaneous consumer preference. It is the same logic with a different self-image. The parallel therefore works not as an analogous case, but as a mirror: it shows what could be said when Dutch policy-makers stop the fiction of exogenous consumer preference.

§ 08 · The cognitive structure and its resilience

The pattern parasitises on a logic, revealed preference, that is valid under conditions and in most Dutch policy sectors fails to satisfy those conditions. But that does not explain its resilience. Why does the pattern keep working, even when the figures and theories to unmask it have been on the table since 1958?

The answer lies in the feedback loop. The pattern is four-phase. A supply decision produces an outcome. The outcome is read by professionals as preference. The interpreted preference becomes justification for the next supply decision. The next supply decision reinforces the outcome. Four institutional forces hold the loop in place. Marketing departments interpret the outcome as preference because that is their normative compass. Market-research firms measure only choices within the given architecture. Policy advisers and consultants build “what the market wants” into advice as a premise. Media representations present the outcome as trend, not as artefact. The fifth, less visible force is the survey chain itself: WoON, the Food Consumption Survey, RDW figures and ISDE databases cannot distinguish supply constraint from capability because the instruments do not draw that distinction.

Above this work the psychological forces of status quo bias, system justification and the Galbraithian dependence effect, which coincide with Sen’s adaptive preferences. A person who lives for years in a sixty-five-square-metre apartment without the option of a single-family home develops a habitus in which “a small garden” has become an unattainable luxury. When the WoON survey asks what they are looking for, they answer in terms of what is conceivable. They do not lie. They are lived-adapted. The psychological forces are precisely the channels along which méconnaissance becomes operational.

What makes the pattern so recognisable to those who look for it is the role distribution between sincere speakers and congealed structures. Series III elaborated that meta-pattern in Nº 01: the housing director who entirely sincerely says people want to live in apartments is literally the face of Pattern 1. The sincere voice shows that he means it. This paper shows why he can mean it. The sincerity is not the exception that proves the rule; it is the condition on which the rule operates. A cynical player could not bear the pattern because the listener would see through his irony. The sincere speaker bears the pattern because the listener recognises his sincerity and takes over his assertion. The feedback loop closes precisely there.

§ 09 · The Strategic Triangle and the colour that is missing

The Strategic Triangle teaches us to read these patterns in three corners: public value, operational capacity and political legitimacy. Pattern 1 sits at the legitimacy corner, but it is a fabricated legitimacy. The alderman who justifies his programme with “this is what our residents want” thinks he is in possession of political legitimacy for his supply choice. In fact he is measuring the residue of an earlier supply choice that he or his predecessors took. The legitimacy is, in other words, an echo of his own design. Whoever does not see through this fabrication thinks he has legitimacy while he is merely measuring the residue of an earlier decision. Mark Moore’s framework becomes diagnostically precise here because it makes the three corners explicit; the tension turns out to lie not in a shortage of legitimacy, but in a misconception about its source.⁴⁴

In De Caluwé and Vermaak’s change colours the pattern works through a dominance of the blue register. Blue is rational-planned: figures, forecasts, KPIs, housing programming, ISDE tables, food-consumption surveys.⁴⁵ In a reality where capability and preference have been decoupled, blue reproduces itself through its own measurement instruments. What is missing is yellow: the political question of who took the supply decision, in whose favour. And what is missing is white: the space to let the congealed structure be seen as it is, without resolving it immediately into a new blue plan. A long-form essay that speaks only blue reproduces the pattern. Yellow and white are needed to make the pattern visible without obscuring it in a guise of technical mastery.

The Aiki method, in De Richting van de Beweging elaborated as an intervention principle for the interim manager under pressure, seems at first sight in tension with pattern-disruption. Whoever moves with “consumers want apartments” reinforces the pattern. But Aiki is not mere accommodation; it is the redirection of energy. The attacking energy here is the administrative urge to present supply decisions as preference. Whoever does not block this urge but redirects it can read the same data simultaneously as preference and as architecture. Concretely: the administrator who receives the WoON figures forces himself and his policy advisers into a double reading. First: this is what people choose within the existing supply. Then: this is what the existing architecture produces. The two readings are not the same, and the difference between them is precisely what the pattern wants to make invisible.⁴⁶

In Nº 01 of this series, and also in The sincere voice, the Aiki link has already been laid: without an ethical ground, accommodation becomes pattern-work. The alderman moves with the market, and thereby confirms the pattern. Aiki demands an ethical ground that determines direction, not a tactical suppleness that accommodates every direction. For Pattern 1 this means that the administrator who moves with the measured preference without asking the supply question does not practise Aiki but its opposite: the strengthening of the existing structure by following it where it leads him.

§ 10 · Embedding as touchstone

A central proposition from De Richting van de Beweging: success is not measured on the day of departure, but in what still stands when no one thinks any longer about the intervention. In chapter 9 I work this out as the first KPI of interim work. Pattern 1 undermines embedding (in Dutch borging, the long-term anchoring of an intervention in structure, persons and processes such that it survives without continuing attention) precisely because it makes the original design choice invisible. What was once “we opted for inner-city densification” becomes, after three cycles of the feedback loop, “the market is asking for densification”. Embedding as KPI becomes impossible when the original decision is no longer remembered as a decision. The intervention disappears into the outcome, and the outcome is then presented as a given against which the intervention is supposed to push.

This is the pattern’s significance for those who work in practice. The interim manager who arrives in a municipality to get a housing programme moving, transform a social domain, professionalise a Climate Fund implementation, operates within an environment in which congealed outcomes articulate themselves as consumer preference. Whoever fails to see through this articulation repeats the feedback loop with other methods. Whoever does see through it can break it open at the place where it costs least and changes most: in the language of the administrative meeting, in the measurement of the housing wish, in the design of the subsidy architecture. The breakthrough is not a new plan. The breakthrough is a new question. Not “what do people want?”, but “what can people choose, and who has designed the supply within which they choose?”. The embedding test that goes with this reads more sharply: what remains of the breakthrough when the alderman changes, the programme manager leaves, the coalition agreement mutates? A redesign of the subsidy architecture that depends on a single administrator is not embedded. A measurement instrument that separates capability from choice and is included in an audit-office protocol is.

§ 11 · What breaks the pattern

Five levers emerge, each with institutional anchoring demonstrably elsewhere, plus a sixth that is linguistic.

The first lever is capabilities monitoring in the Sen tradition. International examples show that it can be done. Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness Index, formal since 2008, measures capabilities across nine domains. New Zealand’s Wellbeing Budget, first edition May 2019, anchored capability tests in the budget cycle through the Living Standards Framework with sixty-one indicators across twelve domains, set down in the Public Finance (Wellbeing) Amendment Act 2020.⁴⁷ Independent evaluators describe Budget 2019 as institutionally less transformative than presented, though a turning point in language. The OECD Better Life Index has supplied a comparable framework for forty-one countries since 2011. For the Netherlands: CBS publishes annually since 2018 the Monitor of Broad Prosperity, but without the operational consequences that New Zealand has marked in the budget process. The step would be to turn the Monitor from a reporting instrument into a decision instrument.

The second lever is material audits. Building-programme test against WoON, food test against the Schijf van Vijf (Dutch dietary guidelines), energy-bill decile monitor: all three exist in fragments. The Algemene Rekenkamer (Court of Audit) has reported intermittently in recent years on ISDE effectiveness, energy-allowance efficiency and nitrogen policy. Local audit offices in Amsterdam and Rotterdam do comparable audits at municipal level. What is missing is a structural audit mechanism that sets the congealed outcome against the manifested preference. A statutory material-audit duty on the National Performance Agreements for Housing, on the Food Agenda of VWS and LVVN, and on the implementation of the Climate Fund would force the pattern into explicit recognition at the level where it is produced.

The third lever is making counterfactual supply variants visible. Flanders’ Woonbeleidsplan 2021–2025 makes supply typology explicitly linkable to public goals. Vienna’s Gemeindebau tradition since 1923, with two hundred and twenty thousand municipal dwellings plus two hundred thousand subsidised dwellings, that is around half of Viennese households, shows that a large-scale supply regime reorients preference structures.⁴⁸ Seventy-five to eighty per cent of the Viennese population is theoretically eligible for social housing through broad income thresholds. The Dutch lesson: the ratio of social rent to ownership is not a natural outcome but a design choice. Caveat: Viennese critique rightly observes that the system disadvantages newcomers and those on waiting lists and generates operational shortages. The point is not the copying of Vienna, but the visibility of the design.

The fourth lever lies in survey design that separates being able from choosing. WoON 2024 does this partly through asking for desired residential environment versus current residential environment, but the aggregates are scarcely presented counterfactually. SCP-Burgerperspectieven 2024 poses explicit counterfactual questions, but rarely specified to material domains. The methodological recommendation is questioning in two stages: what would you want if everything were possible, and what do you choose within the current supply. The difference between the two answers is precisely the measurement that is missing.

The fifth lever is institutional friction. The Parliamentary Inquiry Committee on Housing Corporations of 2014 broke open the feedback loop between corporation governance, financing and policy expectation. A comparable parliamentary inquiry into housing construction is conceivable and would lay bare the Pattern 1 circuit of land-developer-WoON-pipeline in a similar way. The ACM investigation into supermarket concentration in 2023, the commitment Albert Heijn made in April 2024 to withdraw the claim “most sustainable supermarket” and the slogan “we work together with our growers and farmers”, and the EU DSA investigation into Shein/Temu in 2024–2025 are smaller examples of such friction. The Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis (CPB) has integrated since 2022 distribution analyses that visualise inequality and redistribution at decile level. What works in this lever is bringing an external, non-stakeholder body into the feedback loop that can set the measured preference against the supply decision. The internal bodies cannot do that: they are part of the system that produces the pattern.

The sixth lever is, paradoxically, language. An administrator who says “we have chosen seventy-three per cent apartments in the pipeline” instead of “the market is asking for densification” breaks the feedback loop at the place where it costs least and changes most. Not redesigning the entire chain, but making the first sentence of the administrative meeting different. No solution to the pattern. But the first condition for seeing it. It is the most modest perspective for action in this paper. It is also the least immediately implementable, because it touches precisely those institutional forces that are most attached to the pattern: the marketing department, the market research, the policy advice, the media representation. Whoever changes this language does what an interim manager does when he enters an organisation and starts to conduct a meeting differently from what custom requires.

§ 12 · What comes after

This paper opens the four form-patterns that follow. Nº 03, Word continuity that masks the material rupture, treats the speech dimension of what here was the supply dimension: how does the word house keep operating when the thing beneath it has changed? Nº 04, The optimisation asymmetry, treats the measurement dimension: which variable is being maximised, and which is being expelled as waste because it is not measured? Nº 05, The problem-causer as solution-provider, treats the chain dimension: who sells the solution to the friction that he or his chain has itself produced? Nº 06, Form laundering, treats the procedural dimension: how does the form assert the content the procedure can no longer carry? On the five form-patterns and the meta-pattern of Nº 01 a closing synthesis follows that brings together the discriminating eye in its institutional and personal elaboration.

This paper closes not with a conclusion. It closes with the observation with which it opened. The alderman, at the opening of the apartment block of twenty-six units and a thousand applications, says: this is what our residents want. The sentence is, in its own way, true. The sentence is, in another way, also misleading. Whoever can see the difference between those two truths is exercising precisely the discriminating eye this series wants to teach. Whoever sees only the first truth remains within the pattern. Whoever sees only the second forgets that the pattern works through sincere people. Whoever can carry both at once sees the architecture that makes the sincerity possible, and thereby the place where intervention can begin.

Jacob Huibers is an interim manager with more than twenty years of experience in the Dutch public sector. He has worked as cluster manager, cluster director and quartermaster at municipalities ranging from fifty thousand to over two hundred thousand inhabitants, and at inter-municipal collaborative bodies across the social and physical domains. Statecraft is his platform for strategic reflection on public-sector execution, pillar IV of House of Viridian.

Responses and counter-arguments via Statecraft.nl.

Footnotes

Colophon

About the author Jacob Huibers is an interim manager, author and adviser in the Dutch public sector, with engagements in the social domain, the physical domain, regional cooperation and administrative recovery work for municipalities of 50,000 to 250,000 residents. He is the author of De Richting van de Beweging: Interim-Management in de Publieke Sector (manuscript in preparation) and of the corpus Limbic Literacy, Allemaal Ontheemd and Decline and Revival, all published under House of Viridian.

About the series Series III teaches administrators and citizens how to recognise five form-patterns of cognitive distortion that remain invisible in soft policy layers but become legible in hard materiality, dwellings, food, objects, infrastructure, transmission. The five form-patterns are carried by one meta-pattern and closed by a synthesis. Materiality is less mendacious than documents because it does not change quickly enough to convincingly carry the illusion of exogeneity. The meta-pattern that bears the five form-patterns, The sincere voice, has been elaborated in Nº 01. This paper, The congealed outcome as manifested preference, opens the form-patterns.

Connection with the existing corpus Series I (Dissociated Organisations) diagnosed the internal symptomatology of the dissociated organisation. Series II Doorwerking (Reverberations) documented its external reverberation in the private lives of citizens. Series III teaches seeing the cognitive patterns that were implicitly at work in both series. De Richting van de Beweging (manuscript in preparation) supplies the practical layer, Allemaal Ontheemd the human layer, Decline and Revival the civilisational time layer. The pamphlet The Discriminating Eye (Huibers, April 2026, at nourishment.houseofviridian.org) is a parallel source, not a primary cited source.

Place in the series Series III Nº 01: De oprechte stem (The Sincere Voice) — meta-pattern. Series III Nº 02: De gestolde uitkomst als gemanifesteerde voorkeur (The Congealed Outcome as Manifested Preference) — Pattern 1. Series III Nº 03: De woordcontinuïteit die de materiële breuk maskeert (Word Continuity that Masks the Material Rupture) — Pattern 2. Series III Nº 04: De optimalisatie-asymmetrie (The Optimisation Asymmetry) — Pattern 3. Series III Nº 05: De probleemveroorzaker als oplossingsleverancier (The Problem-Causer as Solution-Provider) — Pattern 4. Series III Nº 06: De vorm-laundering (Form-Laundering) — Pattern 5. Series III Nº 07: Synthese (Synthesis).

Publisher HOUSE OF VIRIDIAN OÜ Tallinn · Lisbon

Contact jacob@statecraft.nl statecraft.nl

Series: STATECRAFT SERIES · SERIES III Nº 02

Footnotes

¹ Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek (CBS, Statistics Netherlands), Steeds meer (en kleinere) appartementen, April 2026, on the basis of BAG data. Average usable floor area new-build home dropped from 118 m² (2021) to 99 m² (1 January 2026). Terraced houses from 127 to 115 m², apartments from 73 to 65 m², semi-detached from 161 to 158 m², detached from 204 to 199 m².

² CBS, Steeds meer (en kleinere) appartementen, April 2026. In 2025, 69,000 new-build homes were delivered of which nearly 40,000 apartments or upper-/lower-storey units. 73 per cent of permitted housing “in the pipeline” is apartment, upper- or lower-storey unit. Amsterdam 96 per cent, Eindhoven 93 per cent, Utrecht and Rotterdam both 87 per cent.

³ Autoriteit Consument en Markt (ACM, Authority for Consumers and Markets), Verkoopstrategieën van Nederlandse supermarkten, 2023. ACM document on sustainability strategies of AH, Aldi, Jumbo, Lidl and Plus, with a joint market share of approximately 87 per cent. The cited formulation is the gist of explanations by the chains as rendered by the ACM, not a direct quotation from an individual spokesperson.

⁴ Michiel Muller, interviewed in MT/Sprout, Hoe Michiel Muller markten op z’n kop zet: eerst met Tango en Route Mobiel, nu met Picnic, 2024.

⁵ Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 191: “in order to be socially recognised it must get itself misrecognised”. For the elaboration of the concept see also Pierre Bourdieu, La Distinction: Critique sociale du jugement (Éditions de Minuit, 1979), English translation Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Harvard University Press, 1984), and Language and Symbolic Power, John B. Thompson (ed.), Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991.

⁶ Pierre Bourdieu, Méditations pascaliennes (Seuil, 1997), English translation Pascalian Meditations (Stanford University Press, 2000), p. 213. For the operational elaboration see Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture (Sage, 1990).

⁷ NVM, Marktcijfers Q1 2024, tightness indicator for the Dutch owner-occupied housing market. A value below 5 indicates substantial scarcity; between 5 and 10 equilibrium; above 10 a buyers’ market.

⁸ Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (Knopf, 1999), pp. 62–63. The Cowper quotation opens the book (pp. xi–xii) and is used by Sen repeatedly to illustrate the adaptive-preferences critique. For the earlier methodological elaboration see Amartya Sen, “Rational Fools: A Critique of the Behavioral Foundations of Economic Theory”, Philosophy & Public Affairs 6, no. 4 (1977): 317–344.

⁹ CBS, Steeds meer (en kleinere) appartementen, April 2026.

¹⁰ City of Amsterdam, Halfjaarrapportage Woningbouw 2025. Average usable floor area of Amsterdam mid-rent over the past four years has been around 59 m².

¹¹ Province of Overijssel, Appartementen winnen aan populariteit onder woningzoekenden, published on overijsselsewoonaanpak.nl, on the basis of WoON 2024 (BZK/CBS).

¹² Cited in Seniorenjournaal, 26 appartementen, meer dan duizend reacties, regarding an apartment complex in Stede Broec. Alderman Nico Slagter.

¹³ Parliamentary Inquiry Committee on Building Subsidies, final report 1988. For the evaluation of the Vinex working-out see Planbureau voor de Leefomgeving, Woningproductie ten tijde van Vinex, 2007.

¹⁴ RIGO, Grondbeleid en woningbouw, 2000; Kolpron Consultants, Bouwclaimcontracten en grondposities, 1998.

¹⁵ Interprovinciaal Overleg, Stikstof, netcongestie en woningbouw, 2024. The estimate that around half of the remaining housing assignment (approximately half a million homes) is delayed considerably by converging blockages is substantiated in this report on the basis of permits and grid-capacity analyses.

¹⁶ City of Amsterdam, Halfjaarrapportage Woningbouw 2025. For the interaction between rent regulation, construction costs and the mid-rent segment see the explanatory memorandum to the Wet betaalbare huur, Stb. 2024, 193; entry-into-force decree Stb. 2024, 197; in force 1 July 2024.

¹⁷ The WoON 2021 figures are cited here from a re-interpretation by Companen / IVBN / Neprom / WoningBouwersNL, published via Gebiedsontwikkeling.nu, Zo willen Nederlanders werkelijk wonen: tussen beeldvorming en realiteit. The original WoON 2021 core publication is by BZK/CBS. The interpretation of nearly 70 per cent single-family home as new-build need follows from the combination of current housing situation, moving wish and segment mismatch in the microdata.

¹⁸ NVM, Marktcijfers Q1 2024, quarterly report NVM Brancheorganisatie / VBO / VastgoedPRO, with tightness indicator on the owner-occupied housing market.

¹⁹ Rijksinstituut voor Volksgezondheid en Milieu (RIVM), Voedselconsumptiepeiling 2019-2021, final report published September 2024. For the percentage of ultra-processed food the estimate is sensitive to NOVA classification. A frequently cited estimate is around 61 per cent of total energy intake; an EPIC cohort study among older adults (50–70 years, Utrecht region) arrives at around 37 per cent (see M. Mertens et al., “Ultra-processed food consumption patterns among older adults in the Netherlands and the role of the food environment”, Public Health Nutrition, 2021, PMC8275501). The spread depends on NOVA definition, age group and cohort selection. In this paper the bandwidth 37–61 per cent is explicitly stated.

²⁰ NielsenIQ, market-share figures Dutch supermarkets 2024 and 2025: Albert Heijn 38.2 per cent, Jumbo 19.9 per cent, Plus 8.1 per cent (2025). Share of own-brand products: 54.5 per cent (2024). For the joint market share of the top-5 see ACM, Verkoopstrategieën van Nederlandse supermarkten, 2023.

²¹ ACM, Verkoopstrategieën van Nederlandse supermarkten, 2023.

²² ACM, Verkoopstrategieën van Nederlandse supermarkten, 2023, in particular the paragraphs on shelf engineering, eyeline pricing and own-brand strategies. Albert Heijn applies its own criteria within Beter Voor programmes for around 700 of its more than 11,000 own-brand products.

²³ John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (Houghton Mifflin, 1958), chapter 11: “wants are increasingly created by the process by which they are satisfied” and “the producer makes both the goods and […] the desires for them”. For the further elaboration of the revised sequence and the technostructure see John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State (Houghton Mifflin, 1967).

²⁴ Ministerie van Binnenlandse Zaken en Koninkrijksrelaties, Sterke toename gebruik Nationaal Warmtefonds bij lage en middeninkomens voor verduurzaming van woningen, press release 26 February 2024 (rijksoverheid.nl), with accompanying letter to Parliament from Minister Hugo de Jonge of the same date. The release presents the increase in use of the National Heat Fund by owners with low and middle incomes as a policy outcome and contains the fragment cited in this paper.

²⁵ TNO, Energiearmoede in Nederland 2019-2024: Een overzicht en een verdieping op risicohuishoudens bij hoge energieprijzen, TNO 2025 R11172, 25 July 2025; CBS, Monitor Energiearmoede 2023 (published simultaneously); TNO press release 25 July 2025, Energiearmoede in 2024 gestegen naar 6,1 procent. Energy-poor households rose from 396,000 (4.8 per cent) in 2023 to 510,000 (6.1 per cent) in 2024, an increase of nearly 180,000 households, mainly through the lapse of compensation measures.

²⁶ Dutch New Energy Research, market report heat pumps 2025. Of the 129,000 residential heat pumps installed in 2025, 90,000 were supported by ISDE subsidy. For the income distribution of ISDE applications see also CBS, Monitor ISDE NWF 2023, 3 May 2024 (cbs.nl), on the basis of which TNO formulates the income-ceiling recommendation.

²⁷ TNO advice to the Ministry of Climate and Green Growth, included in the Draft Multi-Annual Programme. See also Warmte365, Toekomst ISDE onder voorwaarden: normering en eerlijke verdeling centraal, 2025.

²⁸ Rijksdienst voor Ondernemend Nederland (RVO), ISDE: wat is er gewijzigd vanaf 2025? and ISDE: Warmtepomp woningeigenaren aanvragen. For air-water heat pump 2025: €1,250 starting amount plus €225 per kW plus €200 label bonus.

²⁹ Cass R. Sunstein, Sludge: What Stops Us from Getting Things Done and What to Do about It (MIT Press, 2021), p. 8 et seq. Sludge is defined by Sunstein as “frictions that separate us from what we want […] unnecessarily effortful processes, bureaucratic procedures, and other barriers to desirable outcomes”.

³⁰ TenneT and Netbeheer Nederland, Capaciteitskaart elektriciteit and Investeringsplan 2024-2033; ACM, Codebesluit congestiemanagement from 2022.

³¹ Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (Harvard University Press, 1970), p. 17 et seq. Exit as “to quit the organization or for the customer to switch to the competing product”; voice as “attempt to repair or improve the relationship through communication”.

³² Michiel Muller, interviewed in MT/Sprout, Hoe Michiel Muller markten op z’n kop zet, and in MT/Sprout, Natuurlijk wordt Picnic winstgevend, dat hebben we in Nederland al laten zien.

³³ Picnic annual report 2024; Circana, market shares Dutch supermarkets 2024 and 2025: Picnic 1.9 per cent (Circana). Picnic group turnover 2024: €1.5 billion (including Germany and France); net loss Netherlands approximately €65 million; Edeka holds a stake of 32 per cent. NielsenIQ and Circana each report according to their own measurement methodology. For the Picnic market share the Circana figure series is consistently followed here; for the general supermarket market shares and own-brand shares the NielsenIQ figures are used.

³⁴ NielsenIQ and Circana. Online share within the Dutch supermarket channel: 7.4 per cent (2024) and 7.8 per cent (2025).

³⁵ Locatus, Retailmonitor 2025; Stadszaken, Opvallende daling winkelleegstand door ombouw woningen; Binnenlands Bestuur, Meer winkelleegstand ondanks drukkere centra. Number of physical shops in the Netherlands: from 107,000 (2005) to fewer than 80,000 (2025); between 2010 and 2024 some 25,000 shops disappeared (-25 per cent), of which 23,700 in non-food. Retail vacancy 2025: 7.0 per cent.

³⁶ Reported by Shein and Temu themselves under DSA obligations to the European Commission, 2024. For further context see Emerce, Temu: 4,6 miljoen gebruikers in Nederland, and RetailDetail NL, Jongeren shoppen bij Shein, hun ouders bij Temu.

³⁷ Massabalans Rijkswaterstaat, Hoeveel textiel gooiden we weg en wat gebeurde ermee, 2024-2025. Dutch textile waste was 215 kt (12.1 kg per person per year) in 2022, down from 305 kt (17.7 kg per person) in 2018; of collected textiles, 54.2 per cent was suitable for reuse, 29.2 per cent for recycling. The 2018-2022 decline partly reflects pandemic effects in the volume placed on the market.

³⁸ Kim Poldner, cited in Change Inc and MT/Sprout, Zijn Shein en Temu nog te stoppen?, 2025. Open letter from Dutch fashion and textile companies, 2025.

³⁹ Ed Sander, cited in Twinkle Magazine, Hoe Temu, Shein en Alibaba de Europese consument verleiden en wat wij daarvan kunnen leren, May 2025.

⁴⁰ USDA Economic Research Service, Food Deserts, revised edition 2017; The Annie E. Casey Foundation, Communities With Limited Food Access in the United States, 2025; Wikipedia overview entry Food Deserts in the United States. 39.5 million Americans (12.9 per cent) lived in 2017 in low-income/low-food-access areas; around 6,529 census tracts classified as food desert. For the broader analysis see Marion Nestle, Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health, revised edition (University of California Press, 2013), and Michael Moss, Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us (Random House, 2013).

⁴¹ ONS via Belvoir analysis and Brookings, In the United Kingdom, homeownership has fallen while renting is on the rise; Springer Nature Link, Britain’s Housing Disaster and Its Effects on Young People (Tunstall, 2017).

⁴² Finder, UK buy-to-let statistics 2026; Paragon, market analysis buy-to-let, 2014. Figures: 4.7 million dwellings in private rental segment via BTL mortgages (2025); total BTL lending £20.5 billion in 2024.

⁴³ Qiushi, China’s retail sales hit 50-trillion-yuan mark, January 2026; Chinese Internet Watch, Double 11 2025: RMB 1.7T GMV, November 2025; Selling in China: The Rise of Livestreaming E-commerce, USDA Foreign Agricultural Service Shanghai ATO, 2025.

⁴⁴ Mark H. Moore, Creating Public Value: Strategic Management in Government (Harvard University Press, 1995). For the elaboration in the Statecraft corpus see J. Huibers, Statecraft in het Interregnum, April 2026, Statecraft Series Nº 04, and Navigeren versus Plannen, 2026.

⁴⁵ Léon de Caluwé and Hans Vermaak, Leren Veranderen: Een handboek voor de veranderkundige, first edition Samsom, 1999; third fully revised edition, Vakmedianet, 2019.

⁴⁶ The Aiki method is elaborated in J. Huibers, De Richting van de Beweging: Interim-Management in de Publieke Sector (manuscript in preparation), chapter 11; in conjunction with the Strategic Triangle in chapter 3, in conjunction with embedding as primary KPI in chapter 9. For the meta-pattern elaboration of the Aiki link in Series III see J. Huibers, De oprechte stem, Statecraft Series III Nº 01, April 2026.

⁴⁷ Wellbeing Economy Alliance, New Zealand: Implementing the Wellbeing Budget, and New Zealand Science Media Centre, Budget 2019: Wellbeing - Expert Reaction. The Living Standards Framework was developed by the NZ Treasury in 2011; the accompanying Dashboard appeared in December 2018 with 38 indicators across 12 domains and was substantially revised in April 2022. Public Finance (Wellbeing) Amendment Act 2020 (No 29), in force 1 July 2020, anchors the obligation for the government to formulate wellbeing objectives in the Budget Policy Statement (section 26M) and for the Treasury to publish a Wellbeing Report every four years.

⁴⁸ socialhousing.wien (City of Vienna). For critical evaluation see Warsaw Enterprise Institute, A Critical Examination of the Viennese Housing Model, 2025. Wish-shortage figure estimated at €827 million in 2016; broad income thresholds make 75–80 per cent of the Viennese population theoretically eligible for social housing.

Footnotes

  1. ACM, Toezegging Albert Heijn over duurzaamheidsclaims, April 2024. No formal fine; commitment to withdrawal of the claim “most sustainable supermarket” and the slogan “we work together with our growers and farmers”. For the broader reverberation of form claims without underlying content see Statecraft Series III Nº 06, Form laundering. ↩

  2. Vereniging van Nederlandse Autoleasemaatschappijen (VNA), Autoleasemarkt in cijfers 2024 (VNA publication, May 2025) and Omvang autoleasepark stabiliseert in 2025 (vna-lease.nl, 6 March 2026): Dutch lease fleet 1,371,900 vehicles end-2025. BOVAG, EV Marktmonitor 2024, published 17 March 2025: 35 per cent of newly registered passenger cars in 2024 were fully electric; corporate registrations rose from 34 to 53 per cent in two years; private registrations (purchase plus private lease) fell from 32 to 26 per cent and in February 2025 further to 23 per cent. BOVAG, EV-marktmonitor H2 2025: particulier blijft terughoudend, published 12 March 2026, confirms that the EV share in corporate new registrations in H2 2025 came in at 61 per cent, while private new registrations stagnated at 26.3 per cent. ↩