Avengers Endgame: 10 Unexpected Consequences To Reversing The Snap

In situations like this, the cynical and exploitative will rise up to take advantage of matters for their own gain. Some of these will belong to organised and opportunistic crime: just as many, however, will be part of the millionaire and billionaire class in the developed world. And they’ll do it legally.

Look at Prohibition. The Volstead Act was passed in 1920 to ban the production, importation, transportation, and sale of alcoholic beverages in the USA. Before the law had even come in, the rich were buying up whole warehouses of booze to stash as their private supplies: the rich could still drink, but the poor were dry.

Then the criminal element added bootlegging to their revenue streams. There were over 7,000 violations of the Act within six months; a year later it was nearly 30,000, it rose significantly further over the following decade and those were just the ones they caught.

Now imagine that, but on a global scale and covering every single aspect of people’s lives. The insurance and banking industries contract? That’s a rise in loan sharks and protection rackets. Half the police are dead? That’s an increase in looting and armed robbery.

A proportion of the population are living in sudden desperate poverty? They’re wide open for human trafficking and sexual exploitation: organised crime flourishes in those conditions like knotweed in unkempt gardens. People are griefstricken, living in misery? Cottage industries will arise to provide a variety of coping mechanisms, legal and otherwise, and at extravagant cost.