ndanger.organism

Is $200k/year enough money to be comfortably? Marty Peretz doesn’t think so. In fact, he says “…what we used to think of comfortably middle class is not comfortable at all.” (emphasis mine). I’m sure a falling economy and rising–if the evil Democracts have their way–taxes are unhappy lifestyle changes for the “upper middle class”, but if you can’t live comfortably on two hundred thousand dollars you’re doing it wrong.

In their otherwise worthless book, Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter differentiate between absolute happiness (clean water, food, confidence that you won’t die in a bomb attack) and relative happiness (my car is bigger than yours). They compare the latter with an arms race: a one-up-manship downward spiral ending in economic apocalypse. Could this be the cause of all this discomfort?

Peretz’s specific example involves the cost of college. Ivy league schools are expensive, but how much of that is a “relative” expense? Is a Harvard education worth infinitely more than one from the Cooper Union. Is it worth twice as much as a state school? My guess would be that a child in a top-tier school is just another beamer to store in the “things that make my neighbors jealous” stable.

This isn’t to discount education–after all I spent 5 years on mine–or to say that there is no difference between schools. But if you believe that education is important you should probably make it a priority and, you know, save money for it. It’s also not to say that there aren’t people who can’t save money for them, but, to steal a line from Blackton “if you earn close to 200k and don’t have any catastrophic illness or have 10 children and claim you feel pinched, then frankly you are an idiot who needs to rein in your spending.”