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I agree with your general point regarding wealth, although I do think it's worth considering that absolute real wages are down significantly from their peak, an

I agree with your general point regarding wealth, although I do think it's worth considering that absolute real wages are down significantly from their peak, and academia, in particular, is a brutally tough place to get a stable job now. Humans generally rate themselves in relative terms: how are they doing compared to the people "around them". This wealth gradient has become more extreme in the last thirty years, leading to more intense competition for the higher slots. Additionally, modern media has brought more people "around us." I say this descriptively and without any value judgement, simply to explain the current behavior of children and parents. It's a long conversation that is hard to carry out in HN comments, but suffice to say that despite the fact that I lean stoic, I cut parents and kids quite a lot of slack given the context they find themselves in.

CWuestefeld 11y ago
Thanks for your rational response. I think what you're describing is very much the point, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't feel it a bit myself. But if there exists a tiny set of super-rich people, that only affects our perceptions, and doesn't do anything to actually make our life worse. Most of us will never even come into contact with the stratospherically rich; why should their theoretical existence bother us? Disproving my own point a bit... I actually do regularly come into contact with one such person. My employer is a billionaire (or so says Forbes magazine), and I interact with her regularly. But, believe it or not, she's a real person. She drives her own car, I've bumped into her at CostCo, and so on. And I'm really glad that she is so successful, because her success is the success of the company that puts food on my table, pays my mortgage, etc. I can see that it's her skill, her work, that has built the enterprise, and I'm grateful that she continues to invest those into its success. And for what it's worth, I know that she personally feels the responsibility of the livelihood of a couple of thousand employees on her shoulders.

CWuestefeld 11y ago

Thanks for your rational response. I think what you're describing is very much the point, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't feel it a bit myself. But if there exists a tiny set of super-rich people, that only affects our perceptions, and doesn't do anything to actually make our life worse. Most of us will never even come into contact with the stratospherically rich; why should their theoretical existence bother us? Disproving my own point a bit... I actually do regularly come into contact with one such person. My employer is a billionaire (or so says Forbes magazine), and I interact with her regularly. But, believe it or not, she's a real person. She drives her own car, I've bumped into her at CostCo, and so on. And I'm really glad that she is so successful, because her success is the success of the company that puts food on my table, pays my mortgage, etc. I can see that it's her skill, her work, that has built the enterprise, and I'm grateful that she continues to invest those into its success. And for what it's worth, I know that she personally feels the responsibility of the livelihood of a couple of thousand employees on her shoulders.