America is a rich country with a lot of poor people. Around 22 million people, nearly 1 in every 15 of us, are estimated to have assets worth at least $1 million. Our population of paper millionaires may have doubled between 2020 and 2023 alone. To fully savor this marvel of capitalism, money-printing, and inflation, they would need to sell everything they have and live in their cars. They could then join the 37.9 million people who, the 2020 census found, were living in poverty and presumably still are. It has never been easier to get rich on paper. It has never been harder to recover from the reality of joining the 1 in 10 who are poor.

Thomas Carlyle called economics the “dismal science.” It is not much of a science, because it cannot replicate its results or predict its outcomes. It is dismal because it reduces human value to the thin black line of GDP on a graph. If the line is rising, governments and investors are happy, and so, we are told, should we be. If it is falling, government will intervene, investors will go elsewhere, and we are told to pull up our socks, roll up our sleeves, tighten our belts, and, having performed these Victorian adjustments, bootstrap ourselves with vigor sufficient to raise the thin black line again. Meanwhile, in another Victorian adjustment, the losers sink into the red. The wealth of nations is not the health of nations.