Institutions and infrastructures shape our lives while remaining largely out of sight. We inductively learn that the world works in a certain way, but we don't understand how much complicated effort goes into producing and reproducing the institutions and infrastructures that enable the world to work that way. The result might be called first-world myopia. People in the first world live in a dream.
We think that we determine our own fates, that we are free and autonomous individuals, when in fact we live in bubbles whose preconditions would scare us if we knew just how numerous they are. If there's a rock in the road, we just assume that it's someone's job to pick it up. The supermarket will have food in it. Airplanes fly. You can get parts for your car... First-world myopia means that you can forget, or never even know, about the elaborate institutional systems that make it possible to live in a bubble... First-world myopia, by contrast, can be downright dangerous. Think of all those experts who flew to Russia in 1989 to advise the Russians about how to create a market democracy. Those people were dangerous fools. They had no idea what life was like in a society without functioning institutions. They really believed all this drivel about the free market meaning an absence of government.
--Phil Agre, Red Rock Eater News Service 12/22/00

Crime & Punishment Beware of Gurus: Gone with the ill Wind

But what troubled me even more was the recognition that the system wasn't as fair and balanced as I had led myself to believe. While it's true that there's more than one side to every argument, more often than not only one has the financial resources to get its story heard. Not everyone has access to a top-shelf expert at $600 an hour. The winner is too often the side wealthy enough to purchase the highest-caliber experts. The pretense that I was just a necessary cog in the adversarial process became increasingly hard to believe.
· A top-shelf expert at $600 an hour [LegalAffairs]