Wealth & Money Quote by Bill Bryson

A sneaky thing Bryson does here is make a massive system feel both obvious and absurd. “The whole of the global economy” is a grand, almost imperial phrase, the kind you expect to end in a statistic about trade flows or productivity. Instead he yanks the lens toward something petty and bodily: “cravings.” Not needs, not rights, not development. Cravings. The word choice shrinks capitalism from a story of progress into a story of appetite.

The “two per cent” is doing double duty. It’s small enough to sound like an indictment of inequality, but vague enough to be elastic: the rich world, the consumer class, the frequent flyers, the people whose preferences become everyone else’s jobs. Bryson’s number isn’t really about actuarial precision; it’s about moral math. By making the beneficiary group so tiny, he forces the reader to feel how much labor, extraction, shipping, advertising, and waste can be mobilized to satisfy a sliver of humanity.

The subtext is that the global economy isn’t simply serving demand; it’s trained to manufacture it. “Supplying” implies an obedient machine, but “cravings” hints at a cycle of cultivation: you don’t just meet desire, you breed it, then point entire supply chains at it. Bryson’s comic bleakness lands because it cuts through the comforting rhetoric of “the market” and replaces it with a blunt image of who gets catered to. It’s a travel writer’s political critique: less manifesto than raised eyebrow, but the eyebrow is sharp enough to puncture a lot of self-flattering narratives.