The drive toward complex technical achievement offers a clue to why the US is good at space gadgetry and bad at slum problems. - John Kenneth Galbraith

C'é infatti un numero considerevole di persone di cultura convinte che qualsiasi sforzo riuscito per rendere le idee vive, intellegibili e interessanti sia una manifestazione di scarso rigore professionale. E' questa la fortezza dentro la quale regolarmente si rifugiano.

This was because of a special American commitment to the seeming magic of money creation and its presumptively wondrous economic effects. T

There was much that was good about the world of which Coolidge spoke. True, as liberal misanthropes have insisted, the rich were getting richer much faster than the poor were getting less poor. The farmers were unhappy and had been ever since the depression of 1920–21 had cut farm prices sharply but left costs high. Black people in the South and white people in the southern Appalachians continued to dwell in hopeless poverty. Fine old-English houses with high gables, leaded glass, and well-simulated half-timbering were rising in the country club district, while farther in town one encountered the most noisome slums outside the Orient.