How did Venezuela go from Latin America’s richest economy to an impoverished basket case where food is so hard to come by that the average citizen has lost some 20 pounds? The answer would seem to be obvious—so obvious that it could be captured in a single word. But The Scrapbook gets ahead of itself. For this is a story not about a single word, but about its absence.

The New York Times took on, this month, the question of Venezuela’s ruin. It was a very serious, erudite piece, more than 1,800 words, with no shortage of quotations from Ivy League professors of political science.