bad stat

Every once in a while a statistic comes along that is embraced by popular consciousness. It spreads like wildfire, tossed around at golf courses and unemployment lines everywhere. The conclusions that people draw may differ, but virtually everyone holds that statistic aloft as a shining example of "OH YES, HOW TRUE, HOW TRUE".
Statistics, however, are a fool's game. I submit that never in modern history has there been a more idiocy-outing stat than this winner of the "90's Statistic of the Decade" award: money is the greatest source of marital stress.
Oh yes. How true, how true.
Idiots.
Do you know how moronic that stat is? Let me ask this - what is the greatest source of SINGLE-person stress? If it occurs to you that the answer might also be about money, you're on your way to de-pantsing one formerly neat-o keen, insightful stat. For your edification (and at the risk of having my own boat capsize in the statistical simpleton sea), according to a 2009 CNN poll, guess what the single largest source of stress is for ALL HUMANS EVERYWHERE ON EARTH?
Everybody say it together. MONEY.
What fun.
Money is the greatest source of marital stress...and a stake through the heart is the greatest source of stress for nattily-dressed vampires (but somehow i don't think that "nattily-dressed" is the story there).
So what is it, exactly, that believers in capitalism are waiting for? Some "growth curve" whereby it's all just a click away from smoothing itself out, and suddenly every adult, every child, will be cared for? How, precisely, is this going to happen? Are we not "doing" capitalism right yet? Is there a capitalistic utopia at hand where everyone is rich and loves each other?
No.
There isn't.
Capitalism's winners have always necessarily been to some degree deficient in intelligence or niceness (or both). Nobody who has ever embodied those two qualities has been anything but a decrier of capitalism. For inherent in capitalism is the following: THE SINGLE GREATEST PRIORITY OF EVERYONE WILL ALWAYS BE SOME FORM OF STARING AT YOUR OWN ASSHOLE.
We can have a world based on selfishness, or a world based on sharing. With all apologies to Robin Hood, Mother Teresa, and USA for Africa, we can't have both.
Until we figure that out, we'll suck around the bottom of life's fish bowl spouting idiocies that pass for insights, and statistics that serve no one.
So what IS the greatest source of marital stress?
Marriage, of course.