A month or two ago I saw an article
online claiming that the minimum gross household income for a family of four to live comfortably in my state was $174,000 per year. It gave figures for other states, with the usual suspects like NY and CA being more expensive and WY and ND being less, etc. but generally the numbers were in that sort of range.
I no longer remember who wrote that article or where it appeared (I could probably look it up, but I won't right now), though I do remember that I came across it because it was passed around LinkedIn with much fanfare, amid people complaining about how they weren't being paid
enough or something. It made me so irritated I'm still thinking about it, and it prompted me to write this!
There are definitely lots of people who are underpaid, and there are indeed way too many people who struggle and are unable to live comfortably. (As I struggled, for much of my life.) But this article was suggesting that to live comfortably, people must earn an amount that, to my eyes, looks too big by at least double.
And it got me thinking about 1) what sorts of habits and expectations and values must people hold, what sort of lifestyle must people lead, to arrive at a figure like that? And 2) what sort of effect does an article like this have on the way people think about their needs and their finances? Clearly, there is a lot more I could say about it, but I'll leave it at that outline level for now to give you the basic idea.
And then the meta-level question, which I referenced in the title of this
thread, is what all this says about "standard of living". This concept is tossed around and casually accepted, it's named expressly by politicians and implied by advertisers, and even children seem to come up with an intuitive notion of it. But is it meaningful? Is it useful? Or is it a harmful lie? (Right now I feel like I have an
answer to these questions, but I will leave them as questions because I am willing, eager even, to have my mind expanded on this topic by whatever you, Permies, might write about it.)