A $140,000/Year Poverty Line? I: Stewarding & Utilizing Resources
Four factors making even rich people live poorly and hence feel poor in our immensely rich modern economy: a sense of precarity, a lack of centeredness, failures of stewardship, and an absence of...
Four factors making even rich people live poorly and hence 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 wrong—usually deeply, often ignorantly, and also frequently making a choice to be stupidly wrong.
This time, it is Mike Green. And so we have clean-up on aisle #5 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:
Scalzi’s advice on precarity: He writes thus:
“Well, Scalzi, you’re bougie as f*** and yet you don’t seem to be living paycheck to paycheck…”… It’s true! There are reasons…. My “paychecks”—advances, royalties, the occasional film/TV option—arrive so sporadically that if we tried to budget around their arrival we would be s***ed. Early on… we built up a “buffer account” to make sure our paying of bills was not dependent on waiting for any one particular check of mine to arrive…. The highly sporadic nature of writer income also means I am aware the income is not reliable, and watching the careers of other writers through the years means I know one can’t just assume everything will be golden forever…
A buffer account is indeed important. But more important is not assuming that you will have more income in the future than you do now. The key thing that causes life-crisis and family-wrecking shocks is optimism, which leads to borrowing from unhatched future chickens to boost the totals in your current budget. It is much easier, psychologically and practically, to spend an after-the-fact windfall well than to effectively slash to make serious economies.
To do this:
Brainwash yourself into thinking that your income is only 3/4 of what it is (much easier to do if you are on an academic-year, and your summer salaries and such do not show up in the headline number)…
Borrow only to earn net income (and reducing the rent you have to pay qualifies)…
Recognize in your bowels and your bones that, every generation since 1870, about one-fifth of the economy is overturned utterly; so much so that continuing to do the same thing in the same way is a relative and often an absolute income disaster; and that you should be ready to find yourself in this creative-destruction bullseye at any moment…
Scalzi’s advice on centeredness: He writes:
[Since] we live in rural Ohio… [we are] not exactly swimming with people whose income we directly index our own against… [lacking] shops cater to the higher end of incomes.… [My] professional community I am part of does not generally have the same incomes as, say, neurosurgeons or finance dudes…. Also… Krissy and I [have] both… experienced, shall we say, a deficit of money…. [So] we’re not going to spend money to impress other people. We’re sure as hell not going to pile up debt to do it…
William Morris wrote: “Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful…” That is a good test…
The same applies to experiences—if, after the fact, you cannot look back on it and regard it as a good use of a slice of your three-score-and-seven, then change your life…
Whenever you see someone with something or some experience that you envy, think: is that really making them happy? (If “yes”, figure out how you can go for a close equivalent you could it inside your budget.) Plus, if appropriate, tell them you envy them! It is a cheap way of making them happy, and making them think you have good taste…
Recognize that you really impress people not by having more luxuries, but by living wisely and well—which means that the bar with respect to luxury goods and services requires that you first develop the appropriate degree of connoisseurship…
Scalzi’s advice on stewardship: He writes:
We are able to acquire property at a discount to other areas…. We don’t… pay out of our income to service [debt]…. Our overall investment strategy is very much predicated on the idea that compound interest is our friend. Whenever I feel like trying to get rich quick, I buy a lottery ticket. It 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…
This has corollaries which Scalzi does not spell out:
(i) Stuff as much of your current income as you can as early as possible into tax-favored savings vehicles, like 401(k)s and IRAs—and then draw in your stomach and stuff in some more.
(ii) Then leave it alone for decades, letting it accumulate while not watching it.
(iii) Diversify, diversity, diversity your investments across funds and asset classes—and diversify across time, which leaving it alone and not watching it will do.
(iv) In the financial world, people in aggregate are too scared of risk, so you should not be. Figure that your portfolio as a whole should be about as risky as and heavily aligned with the stock market as a whole.
This last is because are very few moments in which it has turned out to be good after the fact to have a total portfolio not aligned with and less risky on average than the stock market. 1928-1929 and 1998-2000 are pretty much the only moments when timing the stock market by pulling money out and hunkering down into other savings vehicles for five years or so would have turned out well:
(There is one implication of what Scalzi says on stewardship that I think is wrong. A trained financial professional running a large-cap equity fund is not in the business of trying to underperform the market. But that is what, at a fifteen-year horizon, 88.3% of them do:
And only 0.8% manage to be in the top half of active funds for one year and then stay in the top half for each of the next four years. Thus when he implies that trained financial professionals with access to advanced financial-market tools have better odds of striking it rich through active trading, etc., then through buying lottery tickets, he is wrong. The overwhelming majority of such who do strike it rich do so, intentionally and unintentionally, by grifting their clients in various ways.)
Scalzi’s advice on mindfulness:
There’s a point where the use of money has diminishing returns, and we don’t tend to spend after that bend of the curve. Last year Krissy bought a Honda CR-V… [which] had everything Krissy wanted and needed in a car, and going upscale from there would have meant a lot more money for only marginal improvement in utility, was it worth it to her? No. Likewise, my 2011 MINI Countryman lacks some… amenities… but not so… that I’m going to spend for a whole new car when my own car still runs perfectly well…. (This doesn’t mean I have never done silly things with money…. But I don’t get out over my skis…
The point of having goods and services, and utilizing the service flows from the goods and the services directly from the service-providers is to make your life better, in terms of control of nature and interactions with others that serve the purposes of your best self, both in pure enjoyment and in accomplishment. But in order for that to work, you have to be mindful of what you are doing.
Yet being mindful is, in fact, in this harried world, a surprisingly difficult thing to successfully do. Our attention is constantly monetized and fragmented. For one thing, the “attention harvesting aspects of the modern Attention Info-Bio Tech Economy persistently pulls focus, training us toward distraction and micro-reward loops rather than sustained presence. For another, in our pop-psychology culture, “McMindfulness” often reframes mindfulness as a quick personal optimization tool—stripping it from ethical and communal roots, which can blunt its purpose and make practice feel shallow instead of stabilizing. The minimalist way to counter this: one-minute breath attention, notice wandering without judgment, return to breath, repeat daily. Small, consistent practice builds attentional control against the incentives to fragment your mind.
And work to be fully present to your experiences and your tool uses. Treat each moment and each instrument not as background noise but as intentional extensions of attention and judgment. In practice, this looks like noticing the texture of your day.
For Thanksgiving dinner, I went to the basement and brought up a bottle of the 2009 Château Pichon Longueville “Comtesse de Lalande” from 2009. Pauillac. Medoc. Bordeaux. Dordogne, Garonne, Gironde. $250 a bottle for what is a very good year, now approaching its likely peak. Perhaps the right thing to do would have been to see if I could get Cask on College to slip me $150 for it, and then buy 5 $30 Safeway gift certificates for a Gifting Tree somewhere. But I decided we should drink it. In small amounts.
After it had been breathing for 36 hours, we were down to one-ounce shot-glass servings, paying careful attention to how this peak of the long tradition of wine production in what had once been part of the dowry of Eleanor d’Acquitaine smelled and tasted.
But true mindfulness gets much harder than that. For, after all, a big part of the point of “making it” and one of its big benefits is that you feel you should not have to count the pennies. Your life should not be shadowed by regret as you contemplate opportunity costs. Regret from constantly contemplating opportunity costs—what the economist claims is the natural mode of human life—is a truly oppressive cognitive load. You are very happy to shed it.
The problem is that shedding that cognitive load can very quickly become very expensive indeed. You offload vigilance. Then you drift into expensive defaults. Then you discover that the money is gone, but that you do not know where it went. And you did not enjoy it as it went away. There are solutions: in the modern world figure out a micro-tracking information flow so that awareness is ambient, not oppressive; pre-commit to midrange standard defaults wherever diminishing returns in utility are steep; engage in rituals wherever luxuries are concerned in order to foreground a mindfulness in which each raise in your standard of living is story-rich.
But most of all: gamify it! Take glee in getting a bargain, or in keeping the 21-year-old Subaru on the road for an extra six months, or holding the back passenger door of the Citation closed with a rope for three.
The question is this: Have we always been lousy at figuring out how to use our resources to live wisely and well? Or is the shape of the Attention Info-Bio Tech Economy that we are moving into is taking making it much harder for us than for our ancestors?
References:
Green, Michael. 2025. “The Valley of Death: Why $100,000 Is the New Poverty”. The Free Press. November 24.
Orwell, George. 1937. The Road to Wigan Pier. London: Victor Gollancz. <https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200391.txt>.
Hikari & Stephen Blaut. 2025. Rental Family. Los Angeles: Searchlight Pictures. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rental_Family>.
Scalzi, John. 2025. “Poor Little Rich People”. Whatever. November 28. <https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/11/28/poor-little-rich-people/>.
Scalzi, John. 2000. The Rough Guide to Money Online. London: Rough Guides. <https://www.amazon.com/Rough-Guide-Online-Internet-Computing/dp/185828676X>.
Smith, Noah. 2025. “The ‘$140,000 poverty line’ is very silly”. Noahpinion. November 29. <https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/the-140000-poverty-line-is-very-silly>.
Weiss, Bari & al. The Free Press. <http://thefp.com>.
It wasn't that long ago that Scalzi wrote a post about how he had bought gas for his car and not checked the receipt for the first time in his life, ever. He was middle aged and had been a successful writer for decades. He grew up extremely poor and wrote an internet famous post about being poor which made the point that being poor is knowing exactly how much everything costs.
A lot of having enough money is about not having to know exactly how much everything costs. While the official inflation rate has been modest for decades, save for a brief period during COVID, the real inflation rate has been much higher while wages have lagged productivity. Business practices have grown increasingly predatory as antitrust action and regulation have been defanged. Maybe it takes $140K a year to not have to worry about what everything costs in terms of making housing payments, buying medical insurance, paying off student loans, stocking groceries and so on. It's less about the money than about the mental load. Women often complain about the grinding, unrewarding, often unacknowledged work of scheduling and planning for their families. Having to know exactly what everything costs is precisely that kind of labor.
As a graduate student, I had a limited stipend to cover my living expenses, but once I got a real job I could afford to buy anything that cost about $100 as long as I didn't do so too often. A mental burden had been lifted. Being poor is knowing that a dollar can buy one ten meals of ten cent ramen but only eight meals of twelve cent ramen. As one's income rises, one can afford to buy all the ramen one might care to eat even at higher prices, and as one's income rises further one can choose other foods more costly than ramen with decreasing concern about their price.
Maybe it isn't exactly a poverty line, and maybe $140K isn't the proper threshold, but there is something there, and most people know it when they sense it.
I read the post and was constantly thinking of all the lucky accidents in our lives that lifted us beyond precarity, lack of centeredness, failure of stewardship and absence of mindfulness. The parents we were born to. The color of our skins. The gender we were gifted with. The functioning bodies and brains. The nation and state we were born in.
I was also thinking of the cost of participation. The cost of having a house in Palo Alto within walking distance of downtown. The cost of having a house in San Jose. The cost of having a cabin at Donner Lake with a dock and all the water toys. The cost of having a horse property and 3 horses in the gamma quadrant of the Sierra foothills east of Sacramento. Because I have lived in shacks and public housing from age 5 to 19 I don't compare my life with our billionaire friends. I envy the young men and women I converse and flirt with at the checkout lane for their youth and the strength of their bodies.