The discussion took place on the comment boards of Teresa Nielsen Hayden's occasionally interesting (to me, at least; the blog is continually absorbing, to people who care about the inside baseball of sf publishing, or to people whose politics are left of mine) Web site. The prompt for the discussion on Nielsen Hayden's site was her republishing a truly distinguished whine from a woman who wondered whether half a million (or so) in passive income was enough to retire on for her, her trust-fund-baby husband, and their child.

The woman's question, asked on a bulletin board for wealthy Manhattanites (and maybe a few Park Slopers, too), drew two waves of replies. The first wave, on the original bulletin board, said, essentially, "Hell no"--that the minimum income level for stopping work and enjoying oneself was north of half a mil a year. The second wave, on Nielsen Hayden's site, said that everyone on the Manhattan bulletin board was crazy--and possibly too greedy to live.

My reaction was far different from that of Nielsen Haydens's posters. At the time of the discussion, I was working in Manhattan, and knew from first-hand experience that even $500k could be eaten up very quickly (by taxes, including New York City and New York state's take; co-op fees and/or mortgage payments, for what would be a tiny apartment anywhere else; schooling for the child; a parking space or two; and auto insurance; all of that could easily eat up 70 percent or 80 percent of that figure, and we haven't even talked about babysitters, dining out, clothing, or a vacation). Such a lifestyle would not be excessive. It might, in fact, be considered barely upper-middle-class for Manhattan, and would certainly be far less than what the couple's likely social peers would be enjoying (i.e., my list above had no houses in the Hamptons, art-buying budget--and someone has to support all those artists--, or au pairs).

Granted, money in Manhattan is apt to cause neuroses in Manhattanites. But that is nothing compared with the bile that the hapless not-quite-rich woman's question aroused in the commenters:

If she spends 15k per month that's still only 180k per year so what does she need 350k for? Who spends $1,000 per month on clothes anyway?
...
That's just incomprehensible. You sure they're not joking?
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Personally, I can't imagine where I'd put $1,000 per month of random stuff.

And many other such remars in that vein. There were a few people who pointed out the obvious--about taxes, about rates of return, and most of all about Manhattan rents ("Manhattan" here meaning "below 110th Street")--and one person who wrote what I had been thinking:

You pepole are all nauseatingly well-adjusted and sensible. Is there no one else who, if they came into a huge amount of money, would buy a Maserati and a villa in Lombardy and spend the rest of their days giving a) scholarships to promising writers and historians, and/or b)Wodehousian parties, but actually probably c)both?

What was stunning was that, in fact, nobody else admitted that they would do that. Everyone claimed that they would support family, (weirdly) grad students and scholars, and poor African orphans--but nobody came to the sorts of conclusions that I come to when I play the mental experiment "What to do with a $50m windfall", which starts with learning Italian the fun way and ends with funding the University of Hawaii women's beach volleyball team. Given the way actual rich people behave, I'm pretty sure that my musings are more honest, albeit also moreunflattering, than the Nielsen Hayden commenters'.

What really irked me was this poster:

A 5 mil trust fund would mean I would be giving away tons of money. I couldn't read all the books that would buy, and I shouldn't eat that much chocolate, and what other true luxuries are there?

Above all else, this is either a display of fanatical ascetiscism or a confession of a fantastic lack of imagination. There are many other true luxuries: a private viewing of the Sistine Chapel, charter flights between my flat in Chelsea and my pied a terre in Kyoto, time to study any subject I want to exhaustion, and the convenience of never doing another load of laundry ever again. Yes, the Buddha disapproved of desire, but so what?

The attitude behind such comments speaks of a fundamental envy of wealth masquerading as a lack of desire. Why express satisfaction with one's own frugal lifestyle--and then condemn someone else in such martial tones unless, secretly, one actually wants what they have? (Or, as one of the contestants put it in the "Player Haters Ball" on Chapelle's Show, "I want to thank God Almighty for giving you so much and me so little.")

It is true, as Gilbert writes, that materialism runs the risk of putting the materialist on a "hedonic treadmill"--once you've bought a big-screen plasma TV, you can't go back to CRT or even a medium-size LCD screen. But Gilbert also allows that wealth can increase your happiness (or, at least, banish sources of acute and chronic unhappiness), for instance by allowing you to live nearer your work (long commutes are major factors of dissatisfaction) and relieving sources of stress (such as being without health insurance).

There is neither anything inherently virtuous in poverty nor sinful in wealth. (Your religious mileage may vary.) Of course, there is always something wrong with being purely superficial and materialistic--and as wealth allows one to indulge in everything, so too are rich people who would be naturally superficial no matter what estate they occupied made even shallower by their money. But it is not their money, but their greed, that makes them so.