I'm pretty sure this is true, but there's an extra dimension. When we look at others around us, we see that the Smiths take a vacation in Europe every year; th

I'm pretty sure this is true, but there's an extra dimension. When we look at others around us, we see that the Smiths take a vacation in Europe every year; the Joneses have three kids, each in travel sports leagues; Fred Johnson has a new Corvette; the Harrisons just put in a swimming pool. All those people that we take to be our peers are able to do various expensive things, and from that we generalize that we, too should be able to do those things. The problem is that such expenditures are probably OK if you're doing one or maybe two of them. But it's hard to see that all those other people are limiting themselves in that way; it's easy to see an illusion that our peers can do all those things, and so we believe that if we're of the same economic class, we ought to be able to do them all as well.