Anand Giridharadas

I see on websites all the time, you know, you're reading the New York Times, you're reading whatever publication, you see these ads.

Have you yet saved $3 million for retirement?

People in this country, as statistics have recently shown, like most people don't have a few hundred bucks saved if they had an emergency.

They broke their arm or something happened to their truck.

And those same people who don't have $300 saved are seeing these ads.

Do you have $3 million saved for retirement?

Let me tell you something.

In a lot of countries in the world, people don't need to stress about saving $3 million for retirement.

Because they don't need to...

deal with all those risks themselves.

By the way, they don't need to save for college.

They don't need to spend sometimes more than their own salary on childcare.

There are people in like many countries, affluent countries, living their best lives out here, not stressing about the shit that is stressing your marriage out, that is making you short with your kids when you wish you were just

playing with them, the things that never leave the back of your mind.

There are countries, almost all of them slightly poorer than us, or quite a bit poorer than us, that have just literally removed those anxieties.

It's a collective choice, a choice we don't even realize we have made to live without nice things.

And for...

people who are billionaires to have a near monopoly on all the nice things.

First of all, all this discussion of cookies is making me hungry.

We can have nice cookies.