>Brad De Long wrote:
>
>> Wow. That people claim that "those with $100,000 annual incomes...
>> are not themselves rich" shows how astonishingly wealthy this society
>> has become... and how weird our perceptions are...
>
>Not at all. Consider the Swineherd in the *Odyssey* -- a slave. But
>his position (his relative wealth) was not far from that of someone
>making $100,000.00 today. Moreover, his present was pretty much
>his future -- i.e., his present was not ruled by the future. The only people
>
>I know making this kind of money are my daughter and her husband --
>and so far as I can determine, the "structure" of their lives bears more
>resemblance to mine (or even to some of my friends who earn below the
>poverty level) than it does to any of those in the Forbes 400. Have you
>read Doug's piece on the distribution of wealth in the U.S.?
>
>It takes an awful lot of wealth -- probably more than anyone "earns"
>-- to free one's present from the tyranny of the future. And that is the
>tyranny which over 90% of the world's population have most to fear
The border between the fourth and fifth quintiles of the income distribution in the U.S. in 1998 was $75,000; the bottom limit of the top 5% was $132,199. So it seems a good guess that $100,000 puts you at the 10th percentile, which isn't too shabby. Solidly "upper middle class," in the popular argot, I'd say.
Doug