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Comment by seanccox | Hacker News Reader

Let's be careful with that term, "luxury". You're a well-paid and comparatively comfortable wage slave, but just because you don't have to labor in a mine or a burger joint doesn't mean you are experiencing luxury.

Luxury is what these people are living: http://www.forbes.com/billionaires/

We would all do well to remember that the first 85 people on that list have as much wealth as the 3.5 billion poorest people in the world: http://www.forbes.com/sites/laurashin/2014/01/23/the-85-rich...

That is luxury – a lifestyle only attainable by an infinitesimally small number of people, and one that they protect with the might of laws they author, politicians they buy, and force they command. It's important to keep sight of where the upper limits of wealth are, lest you get confused about your class or with whom you have the most in common.

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Luxury is relative, is it not? Working in a posh office with a very comfortable salary, very lenient management, and extensive benefits straight out of college is a hell of a lot nicer than laboring in a mine in your 40s, struggling to put food on the table, having no advancement opportunities whatsoever, and rather than getting health care benefits actually suffering health-wise due to the intensity of the labor.

Of course, nobody I know works in a mine. But my job is still generally a bit nicer in most ways than that of all of my friends outside of technology. I realized this when it occurred to me that I worked half as much as my friend who is a physician in residency and yet I actually am paid more. That's kind of ridiculous, isn't it? Of course, he'll get a big pay bump when he finishes residency--but that'll be several years from now, and if things keep going the way they are, my pay will jump up a lot as well.

So let me rephrase that: seasoned developers in Silicon Valley are paid as much or more than licensed family physicians. To find the doctors who beat us squarely in pay, you have to start looking at the radiologists and the surgeons.

A few years ago, I was the math equivalent of the aimless college poet who tugged at his heart for guidance but felt nothing. The poet is now working for nearly minimum wage and I'm now making more than my parents combined. Let's face it: I lucked out. Not as much as Mark Zuckerberg and other billionaires, but relative to most people--definitely.

I don't know if you lucked out. You chose a market-friendly position which you are mentally equipped to do. You might have lucked out in being born in America and being in a stable enough financial position to pursue that career - but after that, it is as much careful planning and work as it is anything else.

Poets choose to be poets knowing that they will most likely never be on stable financial ground. That is not unlucky, it's simply a hardship they've chosen to accept in pursuit of something they'd rather attain than wealth and ease of life.

> Poets choose to be poets knowing that they will most likely never be on stable financial ground.

I chose to major in math without the expectation of ever having some great financial payoff for the choice. I was so ignorant of money at the time that when I made that decision I probably would have considered $40k a huge salary. I was interested in programming when I was 12 and didn't have the slightest care in the world about money.

I feel pretty lucky that interests that I've cultivated since a young age happened to turn into a high-paying comfortable career. I easily could have been like most of my friends and instead had interests that fulfilled me intellectually but didn't pay much at all.

It is true that luxury is relative, but, from an external point of view, when I was a kid, I remembered commenting with people how everyone in American movies seemed to be rich, even when depicted as "low middle class" (huge houses, a couple of cars, tons of clothes, toys, etc) We are not talking about having an helicopter, but my family bought our first car when I had 15 years, and live in a relative small flat for 4 people. My father had a well paid job in IT industry and we considered ourselves middle class.

And I am not talking about a really poor country on the third world, but Europe.

As usual, we perceive as rich anyone "an income step above us" that can mean they'll go on holidays to a private island, that they'll go on holidays to Aruba, they'll go on holidays to a rural house, or that they simply go on holidays, period, depending on your income.

I think we focused too much on the "hyper rich" billionaires. A couples of steps down from that is also luxury...

The point parent is making, i think, is this:

The people running the show can't have everybody thinking 'wow i'm getting fucked' because then the show is over. they need a buffer; people who think they have it really well off because they look at how hard the people below them have it. when the people at the very bottom start to complain about their situation and say they're being screwed by the rich, the people who _think_ they have it well take offense because think they're being blamed. so they fight back.

Lenin had something to say on this very subject... which I can unfortunately only paraphrase – something to the effect of, "The working class can never truly trust the middle class, because while the middle class will sympathize with the aspirations of working class people, they will betray them when their own comfort level is threatened".

Wait... maybe it was Trotsky? Goddamned communists are so difficult to keep straight.

One of the interesting things that has happened with the increase in inequality is the ability for more people to say, "No, I'm not rich. that guy is rich." Because as inequality rises, the people you compare yourselves to are much further away than they used to be. That's how people making 10x the median income can, with a straight face, declare themselves to be "middle class". Inequality itself is used to justify other inequality.

Having lived and traveled in developing nations, I am perfectly happy to call what I have "luxury". Which is exactly what most of the world would call it: http://gumption.org/1993/memo/landmarks/global_income.html

When expenses exceed income, misery: when income exceeds expenses, bliss.

I agree with you that what we have is luxury compared to much of the world. Like you, I've seen this first-hand.

What I think is often missing from these discussions though, is that working a low paying job in New York City, for example, also affords considerable luxury compared to much of the developing world. That hypothetical person working that low paying job might not feel that s/he is living in luxury -- without some agreement on what constitutes basic comfort, it's quite difficult to define luxury.

The problem, which I think you've identified well, is that even the idea of basic comfort shifts as the economic landscape shifts. When the idea of basic needs shifts, the idea of wealth shifts with it.

In general, I think it's good for those of us living in privileged areas to recognize our blessings. I also think comparisons made to the developing world tend to oversimplify the problems of inequality present here as well.

Also, not to single this comment out on the middle class thing, but I've seen a few comments here which are equating middle class with median income. Middle class is a social construct. It's not well defined.

>We would all do well to remember that the first 85 people on that list have as much wealth as the 3.5 billion poorest people in the world

Does anyone know where to get the raw wealth data for something like this? It might be interesting to know for example, if you have a net worth of $1, that you might have more wealth than the poorest 500 million combined (or whatever).

http://data.worldbank.org/topic/poverty

Thanks for the link. I've only spent a little time, but I downloaded several of the data sets there, and they don't appear to have what I'm looking for. Lots of data income, etc., but nothing on wealth and what they do have on income is coarse grained (based on quintiles).

There's always a bigger fish. But most billionaires seem capable of owning sports teams and single handedly funding large scale philanthropy, so there's some point before then that it stops being just luxury. I don't find this kind of envy you're expressing to be useful, however.

Comparative comfort _is_ luxury, compared to that which most of the people on the planet experience as their daily lives.

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