On Freedom

by Timothy Snyder

Politicians of inevitability and their acolytes like to talk about averages, but they are worse than meaningless. If Jeff Bezos is in a room with a hundred impoverished working mothers, their average wealth is north of $1 billion, but that means nothing to the women. If you have $12 million, and each of your ten friends has $100,000 in college debt, you and friends are, on average, $1 million in the black. But your friends can’t pay off their debts with that average. It only seems that the typical American has some money because the wealth of a few hundred families—again, a group the size of my high school class—gets into the mix and spoils the math. Since half the national wealth is owned by an irrelevantly small group of people, the country is only half as wealthy as the numbers present it to be. If we remove oligarchs from the sample, it becomes brutally clear that the national wealth is spread thin. Typical Americans live from paycheck to paycheck, which is a polite way of saying that they are poor. A typical American cannot come up with $1,000 in an emergency. A typical American cannot pay for the funeral that negative freedom hastens.