Here's a great rule-of-thumb that I've gotten by with: Never ever compare the cost of your standard of living to someone else's. You just don't have enough inf

Here's a great rule-of-thumb that I've gotten by with: Never ever compare the cost of your standard of living to someone else's. You just don't have enough information to do an accurate comparison. My in-laws buy a lot of stupid stuff (IMHO) that saps their spending money. Do you think they're going to stop buying stupid little knick-knacks when they're retired? Probably not. Should they? Probably. But humans have a hard time changing their behavior. So what this woman is proposing is to work with and solve the problems we have, not try to magically wish them away or pretend that we can easily change the behavior of the 400mil Americans overnight, and I tend to agree with her that it's a good idea.