Americans feel poor despite being orders of magnitude richer than most others because our gov. cannot provide cheaper public options to costly private goods. You don't need a big house if there's a vibrant public square, you don't need a car if there's a train every 5 minutes.
Americans feel poor despite being orders of magnitude richer than most others because our gov. cannot provide cheaper public options to costly private goods. You don't need a big house if there's a vibrant public square, you don't need a car if there's a train every 5 minutes.
how a country that could put a man on the moon could still have people sleeping on the streets.
Charles Wheelan • Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science (Fully Revised and Updated)
Measuring wealth from zero is a different way to think about it than normal. What makes you wealthy, in the way the word is typically used, isn’t what you have, but what you have compared to the people near you in time, space, and culture.
We Are All Surrounded by Immense Wealth
extreme presentism as a common experience of people who grow up poor.
Keith Payne • The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Changes the Way We Think, Live and Die
America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, “It ain’t no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.” It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk tra
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