Seeing a range of reactions to this from "yeah, I make that in SF and am not anywhere NEAR 'wealthy'" to "that's 10x what I make and upper middle class IS 'wealthy'"

but I think the point is in big cities $400k barely gets you what used to be expected for anyone who wasn't poor https://twitter.com/CNBC/status/1313489245823283201

like the whole supposed promise of the 1950s, that became ingrained in the American pop culture imagination, was "work 40 hours a week at your job and you can own a house and a car and afford kids and a dog and a family vacation each summer."

Now, obviously, that wasn't true for most people who weren't white and male. But that was how the standard for what was "normal" and the layperson's understanding of how our economy was supposedly working was set.

Having that stuff was middle class.

Hell, when I was growing up "upper middle class" was "owns a vacation home."

In 2020, the idea of owning a *second house* puts you, conceptually, in the category of "fabulously wealthy" for most people I know.

And I feel like we have all these very technical and formal ways to define what "inflation" is and what its rate is, and we look at the inflation rate in the US and are like okay, that's not great, but it's not early Soviet Russia levels.

Like, we're not having to take wheelbarrows full of paper money to the store to buy a loaf of bread, our money isn't worth more as fuel to burn to keep the house warm than it is as money, so things aren't *that* absurdly bad.

(I mean, part of it might be that we use cards to pay for everything, so we're not getting the visuals of exactly how much money we're handing over. $50 barely gets you a single bag of groceries--if we actually took $1s and $5s to the store we might well need a wheelbarrow.)

And because of the way "luxury" tech items like big TVs and smartphones have plunged in cost while basic necessities like housing and medical care have skyrocketed, I'd argue that there *isn't* a simple, pragmatic way to understand the buying power of a dollar.

So does making $400k in San Francisco make you "wealthy"? I mean, in terms of "I want to lease a Mercedes and have the latest gadgets," sure. In terms of the sort of things you might notice about someone you run into at a coffee shop, sure.

But in terms of security? In terms of owning property and having robust savings and retirement and knowing that if you lose your job you'll be fine?

Maybe.

If you didn't have student loans and have been making that much since more or less the start of your career.

But, like, according most of the stuff I can find, in 1960, you needed to make about $5000 a year to afford a home. The average and median income were both right around $5000.

Real estate sites tell me that to buy a home in SF, I need to make $200,000. The average household income in the US in 2020 is about $60,000.

And, like, I dunno about you, but when I, as a non-economist, try to understand the difference in what money is worth between now and 1960, I look at inflation.

So I put my 5000 1960 dollars into an inflation calculator and they come out to be about 44,000 2020 dollars.

And yes, I know that there are other indicators, like affordability indices, that are better at explaining how much your money is actually worth, but they're not necessarily household terms the way the concept of "inflation" is.

And "inflation" says that a $44000 salary should make me squarely middle class, able to get a modest home and car and have a family.

The point of all of this isn't, by the way, that people making $400,000 shouldn't pay more taxes. They should.

It's that financial security has gone from being a "middle class" thing to being a "very wealthy" thing.

But how most of us laypeople understand numerical indicators of What Money Can Buy You doesn't actually reflect that, so we're left with a vague sense of "maybe I'm bad with money? I'm making $80k but living paycheck-to-paycheck."

And wow, people who've come in to say "if you're making $400k and aren't financially secure, you're an idiot,"

um, welcome to the tech industry, where you can suddenly be making mid-six-figures after years of spotty employment.

Honestly I should have set this whole thread to "only people I follow can reply" because a bunch of randos are going to read the first tweet and decide I'm saying we shouldn't have higher taxes for people making $400k rather than "our entire economy is utterly fucked."

Or, to put it another way, salary != wealth, and to have actual financial security in the US, where getting cancer can't wipe you out, you have to have actual *wealth*, reserves, not just an income that looks good on paper.

Anyway, I'm not sure we'll recognize it when we hit "early Soviet Russia" levels of bad.