Notes on David French’s “How Can America Be So Miserable When It’s So Rich?”

David French wrote a piece in the New York Times about America’s tiered economy[1] — Disney World pricing, travel sports, airline boarding groups, concierge medicine. He describes the symptoms well. The top 10% account for nearly half of all spending. The economy warps to serve them. Everyone else feels like a second-class citizen in their own country.

His conclusion: no one is the clear villain. It’s just millions of rational choices aggregating into collective misery. The sad byproduct of prosperity.

This is wrong, and it’s wrong in a specific way that matters.

The income distribution French describes didn’t emerge from nowhere. It was built. Shareholder primacy. The deliberate weakening of organized labor. A tax code redesigned to favor capital over wages. Stock buybacks made legal again. These weren’t millions of Americans acting in rational self-interest. They were policy decisions made by identifiable people who profited from them.

French can’t say this because it breaks his frame. If there are villains — or at least architects — then there are also different choices available. And that means his elegant sadness has to become something more: an argument about power.

A commenter named Cynthia Gomez pushed him on this. She pointed to the policy regime that began under Reagan and has continued through every administration since. French’s reply was a textbook deflection — he answered a claim she didn’t make, then retreated to “no easy fix” paired with the quiet threat that structural responses would endanger “entrepreneurialism and economic freedom.” This is the move that has shut down serious conversation about distribution for many years.

Here is what I know from experience, not from data.

Gelsenkirchen, in Germany’s Ruhr Valley, was once part of the industrial engine of Europe. Coal and steel. Full employment. A city that made sense. By the time I left, the mines were closing, and the region was being told to retrain, adapt, and find new opportunities. My father spent his working life underground in those mines. The opportunity never came.

Gelsenkirchen didn’t decline because people made bad choices. It didn’t decline because tides rose unevenly. It declined because the system no longer needed those people as a resource. And nobody in power owed them an alternative, because capitalism doesn’t carry that obligation.

That’s the subject French won’t touch. Capitalism doesn’t care for people. It is concerned with the resources that it needs to create profits. When it needed millions of factory workers, it created the conditions that built the middle class — not out of generosity, but out of need. The postwar prosperity wasn’t a feature of the system. It was a temporary alignment between what capital needed and what labor could demand. Once that alignment broke, the system didn’t malfunction. It recalibrated.

French’s tiered economy is what recalibration looks like. And if AI compresses the number of humans capital needs to generate returns — which it will — then what he’s describing isn’t an unfortunate side effect of prosperity. It’s a preview. I wrote about what that preview looks like when you’ve already lived through it once. “I’ve Seen This Before”

The system is working. That’s the problem.

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Sources

[1] David French, "How Can America Be So Miserable When It’s So Rich?," New York Times, March 26, 2026.