Why your middle-class salary is better than you might think

washingtonpost.com

1 pointkldavis42 comments

Try this thought experiment. Adjusted for inflation, would you rather make $50,000 in today's world or $100,000 in 1980's? In other words, is an extra $50,000 enough to get you to give up the internet and TV and computer that you have now?

I think the more import trade-offs are around availability of free time, which probably has been reduced for a lot of workers by the internet and smartphones as well as technologies that allow individuals to do things that would be either labor intensive or have high capital requirements. I can do things today on a middle class salary that only a millionaire would have been able to do in the 1980's.

I had a dream where I was looking at my 3D color holographic watch app, while sitting naked in a grass hut on a beach somewhere, cooking out of old tin cans. Not a bad life (at least in the dream).

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