if you are trying to provide your kids with every opportunity, it becomes less clear that a secure frugality is wisdom after all. to integrate among the affluent, you find you have to spend like them, whether that is comfortable for you or not.

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Raj Chetty famously showed how much it matters to grow up in an affluent neighborhood. there a few slots in affluent neighborhoods for people paying moderate rents, but almost by definition most of the housing in such places costs enough you have to affluent to afford it.

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it’s fine to write off the PE yacht people as just political enemies who have to be defeated. But you can’t just write off the 80th to 99.9th percentiles of the contemporary wealth/income distribution as class enemies and expect to find a decent way forward. /fin

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If you don’t understand this, if you can’t put yourself in the place of people perhaps much wealthier than you but not ill intentioned, who from their own perspective are just struggling to keep what they consider to be a normal life together, whose objective circumstances might be privileged but 9/

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Note that all of this is path dependence. If you had never lived in the big house in the fancy neighborhood, your friends would be no worse, just different people with different habits. If your kids had always gone to a (decent) public school, there’d be no threat of traumatic withdrawal. 6/

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