a rising tide lifts all anxieties

“Keeping up with the Joneses” takes on a new meaning in Silicon Valley, California, where a $3 million nest egg isn’t enough to keep away the uneasy feeling that everybody is doing better than you are, sayeth the New York Times of August 5, 2007:

So spare a thought for the poor working “Millionaires Who Don’t Feel Rich“

Mr. Steger, 51, a self-described geek, has banked more than $2 million. The $1.3 million house he and his wife own on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean is paid off. The couple’s net worth of roughly $3.5 million places them in the top 2 percent of families in the United States.

Yet each day Mr. Steger continues to toil in what a colleague calls “the Silicon Valley salt mines,” working as a marketing executive for a technology start-up company, still striving for his big strike. Most mornings, he can be found at his desk by 7. He typically works 12 hours a day and logs an extra 10 hours over the weekend.

“I know people looking in from the outside will ask why someone like me keeps working so hard,” Mr. Steger says. “But a few million doesn’t go as far as it used to. Maybe in the ’70s, a few million bucks meant ‘Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,’ or Richie Rich living in a big house with a butler. But not anymore.”

As if their status anxiety isn’t enough to keep them awake at night, now the new working rich must also take their share of the blame for harming the middle class, and society at large, by displacing those anxieties on the unsuspecting.

In his new book “Falling Behind: How Rising Inequality Harms the Middle Class,” Professor [Robert H.] Frank deftly updates the argument for our current gilded age. The rise of an overclass, he convincingly argues, is indirectly affecting the quality of life of the rest of the population — and not in a good way.

Knowing that Steve Schwarzman of the Blackstone Group made almost $400 million last year, or that he spent $3 million last February on his 60th-birthday party (entertainment: Rod Stewart, Marvin Hamlisch, Martin Short, Patti LaBelle), doesn’t simply make the typical American green with envy, and hence unhappy. Rather, Frank argues, the problem is that extreme consumption — at which Schwarzman excels — helps shape norms for the whole society, not just his fellow plutocrats. “The mere presence of … larger mansions, for example, may shift some people’s perceptions about how big a house one can build without seeming overly ostentatious,” Frank writes.

Got that? While you, Mr. Jones, lust after East Egg, Mr. Smith lusts after a tenth of your nest egg.

Stop lusting after more and faster and bigger and better and newer and shinier and cooler! You’re hurting America!