Affluence and Austerity

Abstract A funny thing happened to me on the road to affluence. I have talked about it with others often enough to discover that it is a common happening and an important one. But before you read any further you should know that what you are about to encounter is presented as a middle-class problem—nobody dies in an unheated garret, nobody is thrown out on the street with their meager belongings, nobody is in prison as a birthright, nobody is caught in a drug runner’s cross fire. For all its bourgeois setting, however, my story is about the aspirations of our whole society; directly or indirectly it affects us all.