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>It's a question of living within your means. A guy who's fortunate enough to have an engineering job at EA and IBM

First of all - you are almost never 'fortunate'. Jobs offers do not fall from the sky usually.

Second - you many live well within your means and then have a car accident, or an ill relative, or something else that will make you into piss poor indebted fella real quick.

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(Additionally, QA jobs for game companies are almost never lucrative.)

The core problem is that a median income lifestyle is a relatively unstable state due to unforeseen circumstances like your example. A poor person stays poor (if whatever happens doesn't kill them) which means that poverty is a stable state. A rich person can weather at least a couple disasters, so that makes it a mostly stable state. If you're in the middle, you are in a more unstable position compared to the extremes.

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