I'm a Stranger Here Myself (7 page)

The U.S. Congress, which never ceases to be amazing, recently voted to give the Pentagon $11 billion more than it had asked for. Do you have any idea how much $11 billion is? Of course you don’t. Nobody does. It is not possible to conceive of a sum that large.

No matter where you turn with regard to America and its economy you are going to bump into figures that are so large as to be beyond meaningful comprehension. Consider just a few figures culled at random from this week’s papers. California has an economy worth $850 billion. The annual gross domestic product of the United States is $6.8 trillion. The federal budget is $1.6 trillion, the federal deficit nearly $200 billion.

It’s easy to lose sight of just how enormous these figures really are. America’s cumulative debt at last count, according to
Time
magazine, was “a hair” under $4.7 trillion. The actual figure was $4.692 trillion, so that statement is hard to argue with, yet it represents a difference of $8 billion—a pretty large hair in anybody’s book.

I worked long enough on the business desk of a national newspaper in England to know that even the most experienced financial journalists often get confused when dealing with terms like
billion
and
trillion,
and for two very good reasons. First, they have usually had quite a lot to drink at lunch, and, second, such numbers really are confusing.

And that is the whole problem. Big numbers are simply beyond what we are capable of grasping. On Sixth Avenue in New York there is an electronic billboard, erected and paid for by some anonymous source, that announces itself as “The National Debt Clock.” When I was last there, it listed the national debt at $4,533,603,804,000—that’s $4.5 trillion—and the figure was growing by $10,000 every second, or so fast that the last three digits on the electronic meter were a blur. But what does $4.5 trillion actually mean?

Well, let’s just try to grasp the concept of $1 trillion. Imagine that you were in a vault filled with dollar bills and that you were told you could keep each one you initialed. Say, too, for the sake of argument that you could initial one dollar bill per second and that you worked straight through without ever stopping. How long do you think it would take to count a trillion dollars? Go on, humor me and take a guess. Twelve weeks? Two years? Five?

If you initialed one dollar per second, you would make $1,000 every seventeen minutes. After 12 days of nonstop effort you would acquire your first $1 million. Thus, it would take you 120 days to accumulate $10 million and 1,200 days— something over three years—to reach $100 million. After 31.7 years you would become a billionaire, and after almost a thousand years you would be as wealthy as Bill Gates. But not until after 31,709.8 years would you count your trillionth dollar (and even then you would be less than one-fourth of the way through the pile of money representing America’s national debt).

That is what $1 trillion is.

What is interesting is that it is becoming increasingly evident that most of these inconceivably vast sums that get bandied about by economists and policy makers are almost certainly miles out anyway. Take gross domestic product, the bedrock of modern economic policy. GDP was a concept that was originated in the 1930s by the economist Simon Kuznets. It is very good at measuring physical things—tons of steel, board feet of lumber, potatoes, tires, and so on. That was all very well in a traditional industrial economy. But now the greater part of output for nearly all developed nations is in services and ideas—things like computer software, telecommunications, financial services—which produce wealth but don’t necessarily, or even generally, result in a product that you can load on a pallet and ship out to the marketplace.

Because such activities are so difficult to measure and quantify, no one really knows what they amount to. Many economists now believe that America may have been underestimating its rate of GDP growth by as much as two to three percentage points a year for several years. That may not seem a great deal, but if it is correct then the American economy— which obviously is already staggeringly enormous—may be one-third larger than anyone had thought. In other words, there may be hundreds of billions of dollars floating around in the economy that no one suspected were there. Incredible.

Here’s another even more arresting thought. None of this really matters because GDP is in any case a perfectly useless measurement. All that it is, literally, is a crude measure of national income—“the dollar value of finished goods and services,” as the textbooks put it—over a given period.

Any kind of economic activity adds to the gross domestic product. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a good activity or a bad one. It has been estimated, for instance, that the O. J. Simpson trial added $200 million to America’s GDP through lawyers’ fees, court costs, hotel bills for the press, and so on, but I don’t think many people would argue that the whole costly spectacle made America a noticeably greater, nobler place.

In fact, bad activities often generate more GDP than good activities. I was recently in Pennsylvania at the site of a zinc factory whose airborne wastes were formerly so laden with pollutants that they denuded an entire mountainside. From the factory fence to the top of the mountain there was not a single scrap of growing vegetation to be seen. From a GDP perspective, however, this was wonderful. First, there was the gain to the economy from all the zinc the factory had manufactured and sold over the years. Then there was the gain from the tens of millions of dollars the government must spend to clean up the site and restore the mountain. Finally, there will be a continuing gain from medical treatments for workers and townspeople made chronically ill by living amid all those contaminants.

In terms of conventional economic measurement, all of this is gain, not loss. So too is overfishing of lakes and seas. So too is deforestation. In short, the more recklessly we use up natural resources, the more the GDP grows.

As the economist Herman Daly once put it: “The current national accounting system treats the earth as a business in liquidation.” Or as three other leading economists dryly observed in an article in the
Atlantic Monthly
last year: “By the curious standard of the GDP, the nation’s economic hero is a terminal cancer patient who is going through a costly divorce.”

So why do we persist with this preposterous gauge of economic performance? Because it’s the best thing that economists have come up with yet. Now you know why they call it the dismal science.

I decided to clean out the refrigerator the other day. We don’t usually clean out our fridge—we just box it up every four or five years and send it off to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta with a note to help themselves to anything that looks scientifically promising—but we hadn’t seen one of the cats for a few days and I had a vague recollection of having glimpsed something furry on the bottom shelf, toward the back. (Turned out to be a large piece of gorgonzola.)

So there I was down on my knees unwrapping pieces of foil and peering cautiously into Tupperware containers when I came across an interesting product called a breakfast pizza. I examined it with a kind of rueful fondness, as you might regard an old photograph of yourself dressed in clothes that you cannot believe you ever thought were stylish. The breakfast pizza, you see, represented the last surviving relic of a bout of very serious retail foolishness on my part.

Some weeks ago I announced to my wife that I was going to the supermarket with her next time she went because the stuff she kept bringing home was—how can I put this?—not fully in the spirit of American eating. I mean, here we were living in a paradise of junk food—the country that gave the world cheese in a spray can—and she kept bringing home healthy stuff like fresh broccoli and packets of Swedish crispbread.

It was because she was English, of course. She didn’t really understand the rich, unrivaled possibilities for greasiness and goo that the American diet offers. I longed for artificial bacon bits, melted cheese in a shade of yellow unknown to nature, and creamy chocolate fillings, sometimes all in the same product. I wanted food that squirts when you bite into it or plops onto your shirt front in such gross quantities that you have to rise very, very carefully from the table and sort of limbo over to the sink to clean yourself up.

So I accompanied her to the supermarket and while she was off squeezing melons and pricing shiitake mushrooms, I made for the junk-food section—which was essentially all the rest of the store. Well, it was heaven.

The breakfast cereals alone could have occupied me for most of the afternoon. There must have been two hundred types. Every possible substance that could be dried, puffed, and coated with sugar was there. The most immediately arresting was a cereal called Cookie Crisp, which tried to pretend it was a nutritious breakfast but was really just chocolate chip cookies that you put in a bowl and ate with milk. Brilliant.

Also of note were cereals called Peanut Butter Crunch, Cinnamon Mini Buns, Count Chocula (“with Monster Marshmallows”), and a particularly hardcore offering called Cookie Blast Oat Meal, which contained
four
kinds of cookies. I grabbed one of each of the cereals and two of the oatmeal— how often I’ve said that you shouldn’t start a day without a big, steaming bowl of cookies—and sprinted with them back to the shopping cart.

“What’s that?” my wife asked in the special tone of voice with which she often addresses me in retail establishments.

I didn’t have time to explain. “Breakfast for the next six months,” I panted as I sprinted past, “and don’t even
think
about putting any of it back and getting granola.”

I had no idea how the market for junk food had proliferated. Everywhere I turned I was confronted with foods guaranteed to make you waddle—moon pies, pecan spinwheels, peach mellos, root beer buttons, chocolate fudge devil dogs, and a whipped marshmallow sandwich spread called Fluff, which came in a tub large enough to bathe a baby in. You really cannot believe the bounteous variety of nonnutritious foods available to the supermarket shopper these days or the quantities in which they are consumed. I recently read that the average American eats 17.8 pounds—17.8 pounds!—of pretzels every year. And that, remember, is the average. Somebody somewhere is eating most of my share as well.

Aisle seven (“Food for the Seriously Obese”) was especially productive. It had a whole section devoted exclusively to a product called Toaster Pastries, which included, among much else, eight different types of toaster strudel. And what exactly is toaster strudel? Who cares? It was coated in sugar and looked drippy. I grabbed an armload.

I admit I got a little carried away—but there was so much and I had been away so long.

It was the breakfast pizza that finally made my wife snap. She looked at the box and said, “No.”

“I beg your pardon, my sweet?”

“You are not bringing home something called breakfast pizza. I will let you have”—she reached into the cart for some specimen samples—“root beer buttons and toaster strudel and . . .” She lifted out a packet she hadn’t noticed before. “What’s this?”

I looked over her shoulder. “Microwave pancakes,” I said.

“Microwave pancakes,” she repeated, but with less enthusiasm.

“Isn’t science wonderful?”

“You’re going to eat it all,” she said. “Every bit of everything that you don’t put back on the shelves now. You do understand that?”

“Of course,” I said in my sincerest voice.

And do you know she actually made me eat it. I spent weeks working my way through a symphony of junk food, and it was all awful. Every bit of it. I don’t know whether junk food has gotten worse or whether my taste buds have matured, but even the treats I’d grown up with—even, God help me, Hostess Cup Cakes—now seemed disappointingly pallid or sickly.

The most awful of all was the breakfast pizza. I tried it three or four times, baked it in the oven, zapped it with microwaves, and once in desperation served it with a side of marshmallow Fluff. But it never rose beyond a kind of limp, chewy listlessness. Eventually I gave up altogether and hid what was left in the Tupperware graveyard on the bottom shelf of the fridge.

Which is why, when I came across the box again the other day, I regarded it with mixed feelings. I started to toss it out, then hesitated and opened the lid. It didn’t smell bad—I expect it was pumped so full of chemicals that there wasn’t any room in it for bacteria—and I thought about keeping it a while longer as a reminder of my folly, but in the end I discarded it. And then, feeling hungry, I went off to the pantry to see if I couldn’t find a nice plain piece of Swedish crispbread and maybe a stick of celery.