I suspect you're correct. But people's behavior is driven more by what has happened, not what will happen. And what has happened is that the upper middle class

I suspect you're correct. But people's behavior is driven more by what has happened, not what will happen. And what has happened is that the upper middle class has gotten much richer in material terms over the past 50 years. The top 0.01% has obviously gotten richer much faster if you count all the paper money locked up in the stock market. But it's not clear to me that Sergei Brin consumes more actual resources than a Rockefeller did. But their respective bankers and lawyers almost certainly do. If you look at the established, affluent suburbs where these people live, everything is much bigger and nicer than it was in the 1990s.