Tired of winning? Why settle for actual, tangible financial security when you can have the ‘greatest nation on earth’ vibe?

Donald J. Trump famously promised that if he were elected, the American people would get so tired of winning that they would practically beg him, “Please, Mr. President, it’s too much winning! We can’t take it anymore!” Well, sleep easy, Mr. President. The latest economic data has arrived, and you can officially call off the exhaust team. Americans are not tired of winning, because as it turns out, they are spectacularly, unequivocally losing.

According to a meticulously depressing report published by journalist Ben Norton at the Geopolitical Economy Report, the reality of the US economy is a far cry from the glittering golden escalators of Mar-a-Lago. While corporate media outlets routinely churn out breathless headlines claiming that ordinary Americans are significantly wealthier and more prosperous than their counterparts across the Atlantic, the actual data tells a completely different story. In fact, when you strip away the statistical smoke and mirrors designed to make the billionaire class look like the baseline, the United States ranks a humiliating 28th in the world in median wealth.

Yes, you read that correctly. Twenty-eighth. We are nestled comfortably behind a laundry list of European social democracies that we are consistently told are failing under the weight of universal healthcare and mandatory four-week vacations. But don’t despair! While the average American is clipping coupons and trying to figure out if they can stretch a single pack of instant ramen across three distinct fiscal quarters, a select group of patriots is doing enough heavy lifting for all of us. The report highlights that an astonishingly microscopic sliver of the population controls the vast majority of the nation’s prosperity. To put this “winning” into a neat, easily digestible perspective: the richest 1% of Americans own more wealth than the bottom 90% combined, and the top 10% of households control over 70% of the entire nation’s wealth.

But why look at percentages when we can look at raw, individualized exceptionalism? The absolute pinnacle of the American economic model is best illustrated by the fact that the richest 19 American individuals own more wealth than the bottom 50% of the entire United States population. That is 19 billionaires holding more financial muscle than roughly 165 million of their fellow citizens. If that isn’t the purest distillation of “winning,” it’s hard to imagine what is.

The Magic of the Metric: Average vs. Median

To fully appreciate the genius of the American economic system, one must first understand the art of the statistical scam. For decades, Western economists and financial journalists have patted themselves on the back by pointing to the United States’ “Gross Domestic Product per capita” or its “average wealth.” On paper, these numbers are majestic. They conjure up an image of an average suburban family residing in a pristine, two-story home with a manicured lawn, two late-model SUVs in the driveway, a fully funded retirement account, and a golden retriever that never gets sick. But Ben Norton’s reporting bravely pierces through this corporate fairytale. The trick, as Norton points out, lies in the deliberate conflation of “average wealth” and “median wealth”. To understand how this works, let us conduct a simple thought experiment. Imagine a local dive bar. Inside this bar, there are nine patrons. Each of these patrons works a standard working-class job—maybe they are teachers, mechanics, or retail workers—and each has a net worth of roughly $10,000. The total wealth in the bar is $90,000, and the average wealth per person is a modest $10,000.

Suddenly, the door swings open. In walks Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, or perhaps Donald Trump himself (assuming his liquid net worth matches his rhetorical boasts). For the sake of the math, let’s say this incoming billionaire has a net worth of $10 billion. If you recalculate the average wealth of the people inside that bar, the numbers go completely haywire. Suddenly, the average net worth of a patron in that establishment is a staggering $1 billion. On paper, the corporate media can now run a front-page feature celebrating the dive bar as the most prosperous, economically vibrant, hyper-wealthy watering hole on the face of the planet. Journalists will write op-eds wondering why the bartenders in Europe aren’t working hard enough to achieve the “billion-dollar average” of their American counterparts. But does the school teacher sitting at the end of the counter suddenly have a billion dollars in their bank account? Can the mechanic now afford to buy a yacht? Of course not. Their actual wealth remains exactly $10,000. Their reality hasn’t changed by a........

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