A $140,000/Year Poverty Line? I: Stewarding & Utilizing Resources
Four factors making even rich people feel poor in our immensely rich modern economy: a sense of precarity, a lack of centeredness, failures of stewardship, and an absence of mindfulness; all things that keep us from living wisely and well in our Attention Info-Bio Tech Economy. No, you are not poor if your household income is less than $140,000. But no matter how high your income is, you can make yourself live poorly. And it is surprisingly easy to do…
It continues to be the case that, every time something from the Free Press <http://thefp.com> brushes past my awareness, it almost invariably turns out to be deeply, stupidly, and even ignorantly wrong.
This time, it is Mike Green. And so we have a very nice piece of intellectual refuse and detritus collection from Noah Smith:
Noah Smith: The “$140,000 poverty line” is very silly <https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-140000-poverty-line-is-very-silly>: ‘Mike Green <https://www.thefp.com/p/why-do-americans-feel-poor-because>… claimed… making less than $140,000 is poor…. There’s a much bigger market for the idea that $140,000 is poor than there is for the idea that $400,000 is middle-class. But… Green… is wrong…. He means that people can’t afford what he calls a “participation ticket”….
[But] if… even the basics of a “participation ticket” got further out of reach every year, then why are Americans flying to foreign countries, and going out to eat… working fewer hours and taking more leisure every year [with]… bigger houses, better MRIs, fancier food ingredients, and nicer cars, and also “luxuries” like foreign travel and restaurant meals. The “participation ticket”… is… to… a level of material luxury never before experienced by any middle class in any nation at any point in the history of the world…
And, related, crossing my screen the same day, we have John Scalzi:
John Scalzi: Poor Little Rich People <https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/11/28/poor-little-rich-people/>: ‘People making $500,000 a year… [yet] still frequently living paycheck to paycheck… vastly economically closer to someone in abject poverty than they are to… billionaire[s]…. If you are in the 1%… you’re comparing your lifestyle to other people in the 1%… people who have ten or a hundred times more income…. The temptation of the “lower rung rich” to financially overextend themselves to keep up appearances is real… [as] companies catering to [the] rich… know… customers don’t want to be seen counting their coins… shopping at Erewhon, not Aldi….
“Well, Scalzi, you’re bougie as f*** and yet you don’t seem to be living paycheck to paycheck,” I hear you say. And it’s true!…
The highly sporadic nature of writer income also means I am aware the income is not reliable….
Avoid… the comparison trap…. Krissy and I… experienced, shall we say, a deficit of money…. [So] we’re not going to spend money to impress….
Where we live… [an] investment strategy… predicated on… compound interest [being] our friend…. Buy[ing] a lottery ticket… has roughly the same odds as me or any other non-professional without access to advanced financial market tools successfully day trading or timing the market.
Finally… diminishing returns, and we don’t tend to spend after that bend…. My 2011 MINI Countryman lacks some modern technological amenities that I would like… [but] my own car still runs perfectly well and, frankly, sticking my phone into an eye-level holder and using an adapter to plug the thing into my car speakers will handle 90% of what I want…
From these Thanksgiving-week observations we could go in two directions:
First: We could go in the direction of the question: “Why are not people living wisely and well?” That is where Scalzi goes by giving readers a brief vade mecum to how he has (a) been lucky, while (b) using resources to conduct life wisely and well,
Second: We could go in the direction of the question: Why are there so many people who feel very small, unrespected, and dissed, for reasons? Why does even the upper-middle class of the richest civilization the world has ever seen lament so that it is put upon and oppressed by an inability to escape the grinding pressure of material necessity, when nearly everyone else always had or still has it far far worse? For, as Noah Smith admonished Mike Green thus, it is indeed the case that:
Noah Smith: The “$140,000 poverty line” is very silly <https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-140000-poverty-line-is-very-silly>: ‘The “basic needs”… are also a lot higher-quality than… back in 1963. Mike hand-waves this away: “Yes, cars today have airbags, homes have air conditioning, and phones are supercomputers. The quality of many goods has gotten markedly better. But we are not calculating the price of luxury. We are calculating the price of participation…”… But does this make any sense?… Middle-class people in 1963… aspired to buy new homes… [of] 1,450 square feet. Today… [it’s] 2,600 square feet…. Did Americans buy bigger houses because they were forced to… [as] real estate companies would only make gigantic houses… to force Americans to pay more for floor space they didn’t really care about?…
To me, Green is here exposed as simply incoherent: today’s American upper middle-class family with an income of $140,000 has, by yesterday’s standards, access to unbelievable heights of luxury. But somehow it lacks the ability to participate in middle-class American life.
Huh?
But—and I was surprised to see this—Green is backed up by Jared Bernstein here:
Jared Bernstein: That Kerfuffle Over a $140K Poverty Line <https://econjared.substack.com/p/that-kerfuffle-over-a-140k-poverty>: ‘The dude’s got a point…. What families needed to get by amounted to at least twice the poverty line…. The family budget lit[erature], which is where Greeen’s work would locate, is… not measuring poverty… [but] what it takes to get by with something closer to a middle-class lifestyle without a lot of stress around making ends meet…. How well people are doing… invokes complicated issues, particularly around absolute vs. relative well-being. Today’s poor… enjoy… plumbing, AC, antibiotics… far above the wealthy of years past. But… a lot of people, including the non-poor by any reasonable measure, are unhappy with economic conditions, their own perceived precarity, and their concerns about what the future holds…
So what is really going on here?
Let’s consider the first dimension here, and postpone consideration of the second to later.
With respect to the first, let me say this: Listen to John Scalzi. John Scalzi is right. John Scalzi has extremely good advice on using your resources to live wisely and well. (Which he puts into practice. Or, does he, really? Or is it all a fraud? I do not really know! I have only seen him once in the flesh! He is a very good writer, and so I am confident that he could pull off an impressive simulacrum on the internet, even if it is all merely his Rental Family <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rental_Family>!) Scalzi’s approach revolves, I think, around four concepts: call them precarity, centeredness, stewardship, and mindfulness. The first and third are pretty much about the acquisition of resources; the second and fourth about using them. Go read the whole thing!
Unfortunately, his very worthwhile weblog post is overcompressed. So let me lay out what he says, or at least what I take him to be saying, at more length: