Everything about the USA will make you feel as if your whole ability to reason and think coherently has just flown away.
I’m thinking right now about a radio advertisement I overheard for Indeed - a theoretical jod search website. The advertisement, however, was directed at companies who were searching for employees. Presumably these companies pay Indeed to serve as a hub for their job postings and applicants. So Indeed wants people signed up, because more accounts shows more potential applicants and they can get more money from companies looking for employees. There’s no money in actually connecting applicants to positions, so you sign up, make the account, discover you signed up for a portal that just sends you to other company’s jobs pages with the same info and spams you with jobs you don’t want, and you leave forever. Money in the bank.
Meanwhile on the hiring side, job postings make a business look good. If you always got job postings, you’re growing. But keeping fresh postings in rotation is time consuming, especially when you’re lean staffed on purpose with investors who demand you show an infinitely growing rate of improvement. So you pay Indeed a monthly fee to upload a bunch of jobs you aren’t hiring for and use that to hook more investors to pay the first group.
And you end up with a company that gets paid to do nothing but generate fake data by other companies paying them to do nothing but post fake information, and the only part we (the ones looking for income to survive) play in this transaction is lending the process just enough legitimacy to make it legal. Money that doesn’t exist cycles around between people doing nothing and as long as none of us can afford groceries or a home, the economy is considered “doing well,” but the second one investor caves and demands to be paid, the economy collapses and suddenly 99% of the population in the USA can afford to eat again.
All you have to do is multiply that by a thousand companies doing it a thousand times a month and that’s the USA baby, except also we supply billions of dollars of weapons killing people around the world.
Part of why this makes my brain turn into a pile of whimsical dinosaur socks is you can say all this to almost any economist in the USA and they’ll agree with all of it except that part where 99% of the population has no money is good and when the bubble collapses and 5 trillion dollars in made up money vanishes, forcing three people to skip a single weekly trip to the top of Mount Everest, while the entire globe gets to put $100 away in savings that year it’s bad because of growth.