Rich is always, by definition, a relative/comparative term. As evident by you making _comparative_ statements about what Americans have to.. fictional machines

Rich is always, by definition, a relative/comparative term. As evident by you making _comparative_ statements about what Americans have to.. fictional machines from star trek? Saying comparative statements about wealth aren't useful is... even less useful? What are we supposed to do, gauge things by an absolute scale? That becomes useless pretty quickly unless it's updated to be _relative_ to some new standard (aka being comparative). So the metric by which Americans have an improved "access to vast quantity of high quality consumer goods" would be, from the article, the fact that Americans have had their purchasing power increase by 3% relative to other nations, which saw purchasing power of their citizens decrease. Things like housing and medicine are generally going to be expensive at any point in time (due to supply/demand and cost of development, respectively) but the increase in purchasing power outlined in the article is a pretty good (not perfect) proxy for Americans ability to acquire consumer goods.