According to this she's at least in the 8th percentile (http://graphics.wsj.com/what-percent/). Meaning she doesn't have to worry about keeping a roof over her head or how to feed herself (that's 1 in 6 btw https://www.dosomething.org/facts/11-facts-about-hunger-us). So yeah, she's safely rich enough to be insulated from being wrong about poverty. And people will listen to her because she has a title (ie rich enough to pay for one) and so therefore they assume she is right.
>35% of all households in San Diego make at least that much (something like 180,000 people), and the percentage is significantly higher if you only look at mid-career professionals.
Median household income in her city for her age group is about $80k/year. $100k/year puts her in the top 35% or so of all households, but probably not “rich” by local standards under a typical definition of “rich”.
When someone says “that guy is rich”, “oh what a sheltered rich guy who can’t understand the struggles of the rest of us”, etc., I’m imagining someone who eats expensive restaurant meals 5 times a week, vacations all over the world, puts their kids in exclusive private schools, maybe owns a sailboat or a small plane, buys luxury cars, etc... Someone who can just afford to buy a house and put 3 kids through college and save for a modest retirement seems pretty solidly “middle class” by most standards. You might have a different definition.
Obviously if you compare to rural peasants or developing country factory workers, $100k is a very high salary, but compared to working professionals in urban California with a similar amount of training and experience, state university professors are at the low end of salaries.
>Someone who can just afford to buy a house and put 3 kids through college and save for a modest retirement seems pretty solidly “middle class” by most standards. You might have a different definition.
idk what standards these are. Someone who can buy a house, put 3 kids through college and retire is rich. Do you live in America??
You are basically describing every suburban, white picket-fence American dream lifestyle, a lifestyle unobtainable for most people because most people aren't rich.
Twenge has a salary of about $100,000/year. https://transparentcalifornia.com/salaries/2016/california-s...
Plus whatever she brings in by writing non-fiction books, delivering paid speeches, doing market research consulting, and maybe some summer job.
That’s probably quite a bit lower than the average reader of this forum.