In 2022, the difference in total holdings between an American in the 50th percentile of household wealth and an American in the 51st percentile was $9,130, or 4% of total holdings and roughly the cost of a used Hyundai Sonata. At the same time, the difference between the household wealth of an American in the 90th percentile and an American in the 91st percentile was $225,150, or 10% of total holdings and roughly the cost of a vintage Aston Martin. The difference between the household wealth of an American in the 95th percentile and an American in the 96th percentile was $450,000, or 12% of total holdings and roughly the cost of a house with a used Hyundai Sonata out front.
Differences in wealth may be most extreme at the tippy top – where they are best measured in a yacht length at the waterline – but inequality is most keenly felt among the merely well-to-do. This why the children of upper-middle class providers – the folks with household incomes north of $150,000 and south of “fuck you money” – don’t sleep well at night. This is why America is full of poor little rich kids.
The poor little rich kid is both a staple of popular culture – Emma Watson in Bling Ring, Winona Ryder in the 1980s, Barry Keoghan in Saltburn – but also a very real social phenomena. In 2025, Harvard Researcher Emily Dore demonstrated that childhood exposure to income inequality had a more profound negative effect on the long-term health of children from more privileged backgrounds than it did on children from less privileged backgrounds. Her data suggested that well-off children from high-income areas had worse expected health outcomes than less well-off children from middle-class towns. Dore had an explanation too: anxiety.
There’s a reason that Millennial AP students spent the early 2000s cranking David Usher’s cover of Tracy Chapman’s Fast Car (“Any place is better/Starting from zero, got nothing to lose”) in the Passats they’d received as 16th birthday presents. The song wasn’t new and they weren’t sympathetic; they were jealous. The animating idea of America is that each generation will do better than the last. Most feared they wouldn’t. Plenty feared they’d do worse than their friends, specifically the ones driving faster cars.
If hope is the thing with wings, class is the thing with a klonopin prescription.
“In the last twenty-five years, the borderline patient, who confronts the psychiatrist not with well-defined symptoms but with diffuse dissatisfactions, has become increasingly common,” wrote cultural critic Christopher Lasch in 1979. “He does not suffer from debilitating fixations or phobias or from the conversion of repressed sexual energy into nervous ailments; instead he complains ‘of vague, diffuse dissatisfactions with life’ and feels his ‘amorphous existence to be futile and purposeless.’ He describes ‘subtly experienced yet pervasive feelings of emptiness and depression,’ ‘violent oscillations of self-esteem,’ and ‘a general inability to get along.’“
Guys like that have now been pulling their Acuras up to shrinks’ offices for more than a half-century. They wear expensive shirts and very expensive watches while laying on couches and talking about money – specifically the money they didn’t make. For anyone who has never found himself sideways on a Chesterfield, it’s deeply unrelatable behavior.
But Walter Garrison Runciman, 3rd Viscount Runciman of Doxford – known to the chaps as “Garry” – got it. Runciman spent the 1960s attempting to popularize the concept of “relative deprivation,” the idea that particularly strong negative emotions are experienced by those deprived of access to desirable goods and experiences enjoyed by their friends, family, neighbors, or former selves. A neo-Darwinian, Runciman hypothesized that wellbeing is determined by relative rather than absolute position – at least in places where everyone is eating well.
His was the kind of alienating theory that only a Viscount and heir to a shipping empire could have conjured. Unsurprisingly, Runciman’s academic career faltered – not in absolute terms, but compared to his Cambridge contemporaries – and he spent the nineties stuck in the great circle jerk that is the House of Lords. But in the 2010s, his idea suddenly gained traction. A new generation of Associate Professors begging money off their parents to make rent recognized themselves in it.
Interestingly, the places Dore observed the effects of “Relative Deprivation” were generally highly educated and associated with a certain kind of old-school sophistication. These were places – cough, Connecticut, cough – where real wealth is fairly common, but flaunting that wealth is considered gauche. It’s odd that a culture of understatement would seemingly amplify the effects of relative deprivation, but it makes sense in the context of the massive economic switcheroo that took place over the last few decades.
For most of the 20th century, life was affordable in America and luxuries were expensive. In the wake of the housing market collapse, that reversed. Life became expensive as housing and care (day, elder) costs skyrocketed. Luxuries – specifically high-end home goods, electronics, and travel – became cheaper. The upper-middle class entered the “avocado toast” era, during which confused Boomers whined about profligate Millennials making rational, responsible decisions on tight budgets.
As the stress associated with maintaining a standard of living – much less a high standard of living – increased so did the psychological importance of the small luxuries members of the Upper Middle used to perform their class identity. Resident of Darien, New Canaan, and Greenwich didn’t need to park vintage Aston Martins in their tulip-lined driveways to make a point – the tulip beds sufficed. Whether they could articulate it or not, kids figured this out. They became fluent in the language of other people’s money. They eavesdropped.
In the early 2020s mortgage rates skyrocketed and families got stuck. Rather than moving, successful families invested more and more tulips. Massive flower beds abutted fallow gardens. Kids noticed. Parents couldn’t look away.
