“i can’t believe in the richest country in the world. …”

this is the expression of incredulity and dismay that precedes 
some story about the fundamental impoverishment of american life, 
the fact that the lived, built geography of existence here is so frequently wanting, 
that the most basic social amenities are at once grossly overpriced and terribly underwhelming, that normal people (most especially the poor and working class) 
must navigate labyrinths of bureaucracy for the simplest public services, 
about our extraordinary social and political paralysis 
in the face of problems whose solutions seem to any reasonable person self-evident 
and relatively straightforward.
it is true that, as measured by gdp, the united states is the greatest machine 
for the production of money in the modern history of the world.
but this wealth is largely an abstraction, 
a trick of the broad and largely meaningless aggregations of numbers 
that makes up most of what the business pages call “economics.” 


jacob bacharach