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I agree. I’m from an upper-middle background and my parents always try to downplay it. They’ll say things like ”well, they say we’re rich but you know we don’t see how we could afford going abroad this year, you know with the renovations going on” and I’ll respond ”yeah, you do have less money after you spend it on a vacation home, a boat (with a luxurious boat house) and on fixing it up. I think everyone would agree that you can’t indulge yourself in luxuries like travelling abroad before you’ve covered your basics like you’re doing now”.

I’m very thankful for the economic position I was born into. I have a lot of personal problems with my parents but as I’ve listened to other people’s upbringing I have realized I owe a substantial part of my success to luck. If my kids ask me about our financial position I’ll tell them the truth and if they feel entitled to being spoiled then that’s a different problem entirely. Telling them that their good home, their schools and their health care are not indicators of wealth will give them the impression everyone has it, or that it comes easy. That is a really bad message.

It must be where i grew up but in St.Louis and Kansas city, you could give your children most of these opportunities with roughly a middle class dual parent income. The smartest kids in my class became doctors, stanford phds, etc... None of them were what i consider upper middle class (provided they came from both parent educated households).

Curious what decade?

I was born in the 80s and that was the case in my Boston suburb - most people started out middle class, and where you ended up had more to with how smart & hardworking you were (and how much you took your good fortune for granted) than what your parents did.

I'm not sure that holds for kids today, looking around at my Silicon Valley suburb. If you're a tech worker with a Ph.D from MIT, IIT, or Chinghua that now works for Google, married to a fund manager from Stanford, your kid is going to have dramatically different opportunities from the children of a single immigrant mother from Mexico that cleans houses for a living. You'll likely grow up in a house with a yard rather than sharing an apartment with another family. All of your parents' friends will be similarly educated, and you'll have time to see them and socialize with them regularly. You'll go to an expensive preschool where kids get individualized attention, rather than a home daycare where one caregiver is trying to manage 8 kids. You'll end up in a different school district where everybody else had similar backgrounds and the teacher can teach to that level. Your parents will be able to help you with homework and do school projects for^H^H^Hwith you, and won't be exhausted and overworked when they come home.

I grew up during the 90's and 2000's. I would hate to use Silicon Valley as an example for a normal american life. In most of America, you could give your kids pretty good opportunities without earning 500k. As for the immigrant mother struggling, this was true even 30 years ago when things were supposedly better.

Silicon Valley has a track record of being just like the rest of America, just 10-20 years ahead of it. My wife grew up here during the 80s and 90s; the middle-class lifestyle was very achievable then. When I compare her childhood with mine, it wasn't that different - the main differences are outdoor school hallways, bigger high schools (it was my school that was atypical here), more non-white people, and everybody liked hip-hop instead of rock music.

It's worth noting the median income in around $60k per household, not individual. That's split between single income households and dual income households. A large (and growing) portion of households are dual income and $60k is roughly equivalent to two people in minimum wage, or slightly above wage, jobs. Being single in the Bay Area and making $100k as a software developer and jokingly "feeling poor" is not the same as being middle class. It's not even in the same realm of possibilities for most middle class people.

I know that most people don't think about the people who make their coffee, butcher their meat, bring gasoline to their gas stations, package their products, stock shelves, and deliver their Amazon packages… but these are people. This is the "silent majority" of America. These aren't all young people doing temp jobs for the summer. These are people in their 30's and 40's living paycheck to paycheck working their ass off to support their kids.

Doesn't this "silent majority" get disproportionate political power in America due to the constitution's bias towards rural, White states (by, e.g. the senate and electoral college)?

Rent and other living expenses are also much higher in the Bay Area than in, say, Montana. So a dollar-to-dollar comparison that doesn't consider purchasing power isn't very useful.

It does give them disproportionate political power. But they’ve not had much choice in recent times because the political establishment ignores them. All Trump had to do to win was acknowledge they exist.

It is useful. It’s not like you don’t get anything for living in San Francisco. Wealthy people love to pretend like their is some kind of equivalence in terms of lifestyle because the big coastal cities are so expensive to live in. But they aren’t arbitrarily expensive. You pay more money and you get more things—things that people in Montana don’t have access to. You get access to jobs, technology, amazing food, cheap international flights, public transit, museums, parks, amazing weather, the list goes on and on. Making $100k in San Francisco still gets you $100k worth of stuff. Making $50k in Montana still gets you only $50k worth of stuff. Different stuff, but not even close to equivalent lifestyles. You’re not magically middle class just because you happen to make $120,000/yr and live in a $3,000/mo apartment. Do you realize how insane that sounds?

Studies show that money can, in fact, buy happiness, but its effect starts to plateau at the point someone makes enough to not worry about whether they can pay their monthly bills.

IMO that's the real separator you're getting at here - which, of course, fluctuates based on location.

The world income comparison thing at the end is not meaningful in the slightest.

Why not? I would say that it's very important to understand that even middle class Americans are quite well off when compared to the vast majority of the rest of the world.

It's not meaningful because it doesn't address the heart of the question the kid was asking.

A child doesn't ask if their parents if they're rich because they looked up the GDP of various nations. They ask their parents if they're rich because they see differences between the things they have access to and the things their peers have access to.

Even a child knows that when they have a bigger house, receive better gifts, visit more places - that they are different from their peers and even families on TV. They deserve to know that most everyone they actually interact with will consider them "rich" and treat them accordingly. They also deserve to know that being "rich" is truly not the norm and that acting like everybody in the USA has the exact same opportunities as them is going to leave them out of touch with reality.

This is a great answer. Thanks.

Because Americans aren't buying groceries or paying rent in the rest of the world, they're doing that in America. Knowing that you're theoretically well-off in comparison to people living in other places doesn't put food in the fridge, and it tends to be deployed to shame people who are having a tough time making ends meet.

Knowing that you're theoretically well-off in comparison to people living in other places

It's not theoretical. It's factual.

It's also very important as a step on the way to understanding how precarious that position is. That inequality is unsustainable in the face of increasing ability to have someone do the same work elsewhere for a fraction of the cost. People need to adjust and plan accordingly, but first they need to understand how anomalous the US "middle class" has been.