Diamond Age Watch

Many (most?) of the leisure goods I like are getting so cheap that it's almost not worth worrying about the cost of the good. The main cost is the time spent enjoying them.

The worst thing about being poor in the U.S. is having to live around trashy and criminal-ish people. If it wasn't for that, I could live a pretty nice life at a poverty income. Diamond Age, indeed.

Which is why the Neo-Victorians had such a strict code of justice - make the cost of being a criminal high, and you'll get fewer of them. Even when they have nothing better to do.

Free riding is NPV positive

To some degree, real wealth relative to others, is the ability to pick more freely the terms of your life.

So, the ability to say one will do no or little work and spend all of one's time at a set of cheap but reasonably satisfying leaisure (sports and games) is indeed a kind of wealth.

Likewise, the ability to choose which major projects will happen, or which climate one resides in during a given season, or which of several cars one might drive, is real wealth.

So it's U shaped - the middle class - who have the least leisure, whose choices are the most constrained by economics and commitments, are in some sense the poorest.

Middle class as the poorest: perhaps that explains the way I have seen some people approach a vacation: as though it were something to be consumed at high velocity on automatic pilot.