In Richland, all economic and social structures are geared toward the needs of the consumer (low prices, excellent customer service, 24-hour shop opening), which requires elimination of sacred high holidays and weekends, yet citizens are taught to think of themselves primarily as consumers rather than producers, allowing them to disassociate their multiple woes as producers from their expectations as consumers.

Politics, at its core, revolves around the question of what you need to do to make a country richer.

In Richland, people take very few holidays and practice self-denial, being suspicious of indulgence and fearful of what might happen if they remain absent from the office too long, yet simultaneously they spend substantial money on high-status consumption like expensive cars that exceed legal speed limits and frequent expensive holidays, while low-cost activities like walking or poetry are viewed as eccentric.

Designing an ideal wealth-creating society ('Richland') requires eight core structural requirements: military security and law in order, lack of corruption and strong institutions, low red-tape around employment legislation and taxation, a technically well-educated, mobile, flexible labour-force, high-grade infrastructure and good telecommunications, fair, transparent, and competitive markets, reliably enforceable contracts, and low corporation tax (probably between 10-15%).

In Richland, 24-hour catastrophic news media (on websites, phones, and channels) teaches citizens that the world is incredibly unsafe and that terror, accident, and cruelty await at every turn, with utter silence about anything positive, leaving people to believe that the only way to protect oneself is through accumulation of ever-larger sums of money.

Beyond the eight structural economic requirements, cultural factors—the attitudes, values, and behaviors embedded in a society's mentality—invariably make a critical difference to a nation's wealth and are necessary to make Richland properly rich.

In a wealth-maximizing society like Richland, professional identity and work status become the primary determinant of social worth and inclusion, such that what is on one's business card 'is simply who you are,' and other dimensions of identity (childhood experiences, inner thoughts, family background) are rendered irrelevant to social acceptance.

Friendships in Richland are instrumentally linked to work and involve covert status rivalries, such that falling behind in career achievement leads friends to abandon one, forcing individuals to invest enormous effort in career success not primarily for money but to maintain a functioning social identity and ensure people will be nice to them.

In Richland, children are encouraged from an early age to aspire to become the richest person in the country by around age 33 through hard work, with cultural reinforcement through posters of wealthy famous people in schools and a national anthem celebrating human possibility ('I can do it!'), keeping the workforce highly motivated by dreams of successful entrepreneurship.

By middle age, most people in Richland have, by definition, failed to measure up to the exalted aspirational hopes placed on them in childhood, yet they keep their regrets hidden and quietly medicate with tranquilizers and antidepressants.

People in Richland do not sleep well, often waking at 4 am with career-related worries, because market capitalism in Richland is very 'efficient,' meaning constant innovation and ruthless competition in which weaker players are driven out of business swiftly and without mercy, and the stock market punishes underperformance on a quarterly basis.

In Richland, despite psychologists speaking of the benefits of parents spending time with small children, most children are raised by low-wage staff from other countries while their parents work, and this lack of secure attachment makes children grow up anxious, eager to please, and desperate to attain security through work.

Though every society has famous people, Richland is selective about whom it reveres: it does not revere contemplative monks, wise sages, or philosophers, but instead monopolizes glamour for wealth creators (especially in films), whose doings are constantly reported so that ordinary people's lives seem squalid and awful by comparison, motivating them to work much harder to improve their apparent misery.

Richland is perceived as a very 'fair' place where hard work and cleverness lead to success with no nepotism or insider trading, creating a level playing field that is philosophically nice for winners but deeply punitive for those left behind, who are termed 'losers' and held personally responsible for their shortcomings in a culture hostile to luck, where individual agency is absolute and suicide rates are very high.

In Richland, there is no religion that promotes spiritual goods and sees kindness or wisdom as superior to wealth or power; people are generally secular and mock the religious, and insofar as people do believe, the God they believe in is materialistic—a figure who rewards moral goodness with money.

Richland has very bad weather, combining the worst of England and the Netherlands—brief, mild, unreliable summers with only about seven cloudless days reaching into the 20s Celsius, followed by long dark winters with gusty, icy winds and low heavy cloud—which delivers a constant psychological reminder that delight is not freely provided by nature and that only unrelenting human industry can provide salvation.

Citizens of Richland can be envied for their material wealth and superior shopping malls and restaurants, but they must also be pitied for their 4 am anxieties, relentless doubts about their careers, and worries that no one can really like them outside of what they've managed to achieve in the current quarter.

In Richland, parents condition love and lovability on educational achievement, especially in mathematics and science, teaching children from an early age that affection and self-worth are contingent on successful performance rather than intrinsic to their existence.

In Richland, there are powerful currents of fashion around consumer goods (TV screen thickness, food ethnicity, phone models), and people become rapidly dissatisfied with current possessions and excited by new products, with maintaining up-to-date status being psychologically important and ownership of outdated items (especially phones more than 3 years old) damaging to self-esteem.