The tenth thing we have to understand is that actually Americans
aren't as rich as all that. This is very important because if
that sort of free market capitalist society did lead to the
richest society on Earth then of course all the other strictures
about how awful free market capitalism is would be rather
wasted. We'd start to believe our own lyin' eyes rather than the
Reader in Economics at Camdridge and that would just never do.
The rest of the chapter is just hemming and hawing about how we
should change the figures to show that actually Americans are
not the richest society on the planet. Well, OK, even I'm not
going to claim that there aren't certain microstates that beat
the US: Luxembourg for example. But comparing a few hundred
thousand people to 300 million seems rather like cheating. It
would be like comparing Manhattan to Texas for example, just not
quite fair. Or, again about the same distortion of scale,
comparing the residents of Eaton Square to the entirety of
Luxembourg. Chang has two basic