If you are on X or just do a lot of investment-reading online, you are quite aware of the “$140k of income is the new poverty line discourse”.
Mike Green kicked it off with probably the most viral Substack post of the year:
My life is a lie: How a Broken Benchmark Quietly Broke America (Yes, I Give A Fig)
Of course, there are critical counters:
- “The ‘$140,000 poverty line’ is very silly” by Noah Smith
- “The Myth of the $140,000 Poverty Line” by Tyler Cowen
- Or you can follow any of the critiques Cliff Asness boosted
Criticisms notwithstanding, the article struck a nerve, so naturally finds thousands of supporters. I link to Adam Butler a lot, so here’s an example of his:
Marking the Household to Market: Why Mike Green’s $140k Benchmark May Be Conservative
And the article has been picked up and commented on by major media outlets as well. Nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd.
I thought the article was good, even if I reject the blunt claim that $140k of income is the poverty line. The article is trying to grapple with the American malaise from an economic and cost-of-living point of view. It’s hard to disentangle economic opportunity from any discussion of culture. Chris Arnade has a uniquely interesting voice on these issues, given that he’s been literally doing the footwork for over a decade on the ground (see Why are Americans Unhappy?). Green himself has pointed to Peter McCormack’s Nick Fuentes vs The World – No Country for Old Rules which centers more on the theme of a broken promise between generations. I personally find Kyla’s writing in 2025 to be exceptional with respect to diagnosing the Gen Z condition. See her recent post Everyone is gambling and nobody is happy.
I got nothing rigorous or data-driven to add. This is no obstacle to shooting from the hip. Let’s make it personal.
Immediately after reading Green’s article, I texted my mother.
The median household income in the US in 1990 was $29k or about $70k in 2025 dollar (source DQYDJ). It was about 30% higher in New Jersey. Our household income was $40k. Solidly middle class.
What did that mean?
- We had 1 car, a 1980s Dodge Lancer that we bought used. Brand new, they were $12k.
- Childcare? That’s called unpaid grandparents. When they couldn’t be there, we did have a babysitter who lived across the street who would come help my younger sister get ready for school when I was 12 (and make sure I actually woke up). She came by for about 30 minutes at a $5/hr rate. We were classic latchkey kids. Dinner time was the first occasion to see my mother each day.
- My mother deeply valued education, but we were not in a good school district. So my sister and I went to 12 years of Catholic school. My high school was a La Salle high school, Christian Brothers Academy in Lincroft, NJ. “CBA” in the text. CBA allowed me to attend one of my years for free because my mom pleaded that she didn’t have the money. Tuition was a massive burden BUT we were able to do it and still eat.
- We had lots of gifts under the Christmas tree every year. How? Credit card debt. But we were given nothing outside of Christmas and our birthdays, so this was prioritized. Not easy, but a choice nonetheless.
- We went on one vacation a year. In the early 80s, it was always Wildwood, NJ or Niagara Falls but by the late 80’s we went to Florida. I even got a boogie board and we were allowed to get any junk food we wanted from the supermarket on vacation. We still didn’t really eat out, we’d stay in time-share hotels where mom could cook or we’d eat sandwiches. We went to Disneyworld, SeaWorld, MGM Studios. I saw Batman (the Michael Keaton one) in a theater in Daytona Beach. It was our favorite 2 weeks of the year.
Money issues were a cloud over my whole childhood growing up. Still, I knew I was safe and I knew I wasn’t exactly poor. If we didn’t eat our food our elders would tell us to think of the “poor” so we knew there were levels to this. Plus, I saw the Sally Struthers commercials with the African kids who don’t even swat the flies from their eyelids. It took me 3 years of begging to finally get the bike I wanted, but I eventually got a bike.
In general, I knew that it would be selfish to ask for things because we were constantly reminded that money was scarce. In Catholic school, I felt like I had less than the other kids on average, although I’m sure there were some kids in the same situation as me. As I got older, my awareness of this grew. The bar to think someone else was rich was low. Did they have a pool, even above-ground? A second car? Did they get Skidz or Cavariccis when they were popular or long after they went out of style?
It’s extremely clear what my mother’s financial algorithm was. Budget ruthlessly while prioritizing what she thought were a few must-haves:
- education
- vacation at the beach (this is universal across my family and I wonder if there’s an Egyptian undercurrent to it)
- And specifically in my immediate family, Christmas gifts. I had a sense not only that my mother loved us, but I think she wanted us to have a concentrated moment of joy, even if it was once a year. She was hard on us, at least compared to how we saw “the American kids” get raise,d but Christmas always felt a bit extra. Like she was saying, “I know it’s hard around here most of the time, but life is supposed to have joy. You’re not brats and I see you. This is our little deal. Bear with me the rest of the year and I’ll make it up to you.”
The point is, being middle-class is hard. You cover basic needs and triage just a few wants. There’s very little slack. If mom loses her job, does the credit card debt bury us? Look, my parents split. Mom gave dad what little money she could afford out of sympathy. He had nothing, his single-livery-car business going bankrupt a few years earlier than he went bankrupt personally after a short time on his own. It’s all so precarious.
But it is obviously precarious. So much so that you burn with desire to escape it. By the time I was in high school, I knew I wasn’t going to live like this when I got older. I’ll do whatever pays because I know this sucks as a state-of-being, even if it’s not destitution. This is my hot take — there was nothing ever comfortable about being middle-class. It’s not supposed to be the basin of an attractor curve. It’s a transition to a better life or moment during a freefall. It sucks to be middle-class according to these articles. Well, guess what? It sucked 40 years ago, too. And if you are in it, the only thing you should be doing is trying to escape it.
The literati, finance-footed, and cultural observers go on about the plight of the middle-class — causality, diagnosis, comparing what life is like for those in the middle-class. That’s fine in some academic, sense-making context. Maybe it’ll even affect policy. But this is all you need to know — being middle-class sucks. It will always suck. And all the discussion about it is under some guise that if we [insert policy] it won’t suck OR to make you feel that the plight is exaggerated. The first is lie and the second is patronizing.
Poor people don’t need to be told it doesn’t suck as much as they think. Poor people don’t think there’s some intervention that will make being poor suddenly acceptable. They just want to be unpoor. It would be adaptive to adopt that mindset if you are one rung away from being poor, too.
Am I being harsh? I think I’m just being realistic, but I know it sounds harsh. My perspective is meant to be individually pragmatic because there’s never going to be rest for the middle-class as a cohort. As pointless as they feel, I have my sympathies. When I was growing up, I believed that through education, I was going to escape. And with reasonable odds. Like being top 5% in my class was a sure ticket to a better life. Not easy, but an amazing payoff reliably predicated on effort and persistence.
Today, there is a profound sense that you can do “all the right things” and that only earns a ticket to a capricious, opaque lottery. College application stress in 2025 is societally pathological. Meanwhile, on the backside, new grads face cloudy prospects and high living costs.
Being middle-class sucks. To be stuck in it without a legible path out is but a dormant revolt. “Do everything to be in the top 5% and escape” vs “do everything to be in the top 5% to be allowed to enter a lottery with a 5% hit rate” is a giant deterioration of the American bargain in just a single generation.
To wrap up, remember, it may sound self-contradicting because the middle-class is defined by centrality and encompassing the masses, but it’s not a place to stay. The resolution of the statement is dead simple — being average stinks. It always has and it always will. You might find solace in the fact that being average here is better than being average elsewhere. But you’ll probably stay average if that’s of any comfort. The world is indifferent to an American’s complaints. The human condition reminds us that it is a luxury to be heard. Accept that and act accordingly.