That Henderson Feeling

[Update below; all of the Todd Henderson links in the first and second paragraphs are now dead links]

The weekend’s most diverting blog eruption, without a doubt, is the hot-lava reaction to Professor Todd Henderson’s sardonic cri de coeur, “We Are the Super-Rich” about the perceived impoverishment and straightened circumstances he experiences living with his family in Chicago on an income of more than $250,000 a year. (That number is one key to this story’s Darwinian meme fitness, its viral potency, since the Obama administration has pegged $250K as the Mason-Dixon Line of tax and budget policy: below it, the middle class and working poor; above, the target-rich wealthy.) Henderson, a professor of law married to a physician, posted his essay four days ago on a collaborative economics blog called Truth on the Market. Since then, whoa Nelly, we’ve got a flame war—which is our moral equivalent of Class War.

A Sunday morning James Fallows post titled “Mauve Gloves & Madmen, 2010 Version” sent me back to a Michael O’Hare takedown of Henderson's post, “The Whining of the Rich.” O’Hare characterizes “We Are the Super-Rich” as a “truly amazing pasticcio of mendacity, ignorance, and small-minded cupidity.” Fallows, who, with trademark mildness, limits himself to calling the offending post an “unwise confession,” also links to Brad DeLong, piling on. Paul Krugman cracks his Nobel medal on Henderson’s exposed pate here. Memeorandum is aggregating the fray, and Henderson has responded to “the overwhelming negative response” with increasingly embattled weariness here and here. Below many of these various posts are sulphuric comment threads unfurling to the vanishing point, so be my guest. (A DeLong reader named will provided the title for this post.)

Expressions of upscale anxiety, defined by shifting and purely relative notions of affluence, are stringently policed by standards of seemliness and discretion, even in the wake of an economic collapse that wiped out $5 trillion in household net worth. Henderson is guilty, like British Petroleum CEO Tony Hayward before him, of saying he wants his life back. But blurting out the wrong thing can be both offensive and illuminating. Henderson has given voice to the gnawing sensation of relative poverty that is imposed on middle-class Americans with overwhelming cultural force, not only by the neighborly pressure to keep up with the Joneses, but by saturation media portraying luxury as normative and attainable. Actual income almost doesn't matter; the greyhound will never catch the rabbit. In movies and television the camera adds 20 pounds of fat to the body and hundreds of thousands of dollars to the net worth of characters whose houses, apartments, furniture, and clothing are ridiculously beyond their real-world means. Meanwhile, it’s impossible to advertise to the rich without broadcasting to the not-quite-rich and further down the scale, and all those surplus eyeballs absorb the flickering message that just a little more will bring within reach those beautiful discretionary things people like me should own.

My own meddling get-richer-quick advice to Professor Henderson is to invest $10,000 in non-luxury travel in the Third World, say, Southern Africa. Perhaps make it a working vacation to support a cause: conservation, agrarian modernization, health care, evangelizing, anything will do. It will subsequently add at least $125,000 per annum to his relative income, and in my experience it does wonders for bursting the most persistent bubble in the American marketplace, the one inside our heads.

[Update: Todd Henderson, in manifest despair over the "firestorm" his original post stoked, has deleted "We Are the Super-Rich" and his two follow-up posts. He has apologized, renounced blogging, and revealed that his wife was appalled by what he had written:

The reason I took the very unusual step of deleting [the posts] is because my wife, who did not approve of my original post and disagrees vehemently with my opinion, did not consent to the publication of personal details about our family. In retrospect, it was a highly effective but incredibly stupid thing to do.

Brad DeLong has re-posted a version of "We Are the Super-Rich" retrieved from Google's cached pages here.]