Thanks to all of you for your thoughtful comments. Several of you drew the important distinction between individual income and household income, which often poo

Thanks to all of you for your thoughtful comments. Several of you drew the important distinction between individual income and household income, which often pools the incomes of more than one income-earner. As is surely apparent from my submission and comment history on HN, I am not a person with a technical education or technical occupation. My person income since I had children (when I reduced labor force participation in the interest of homeschooling the kids) has been below the United States median personal income. My wife likes her work and does it well, and much of the time we have had children we have been near the United States median household income, and recently above it, in nontechnical occupations. I like HN because it includes a lot of discussion about lifestyle and education tradeoffs that I wish I would have engaged in when I was the age of most participants here. I'm happy with my life, and think I am staggeringly wealthy--not least because I have this Internet technology that lets us communicate with one another all over the world. My oldest son is launched into adulthood as a hacker and has an income sufficiently high to save money in his high-expense city, and my other children look set also to have more expedient career choices than I made.