How Can America Be So Miserable When It’s So Rich?

A closely divided country will never express broad-based economic optimism.

But then I read a piece that completely changed my perspective, and once my perspective changed, I saw a reality that I couldn’t unsee — we are miserable in part   because   we are wealthy.

The piece , which appeared in the Times Opinion section last August, was by Daniel Currell, a management consultant, and it was about the economics of Disney World. It described a park once accessible to most Americans that has become extraordinarily expensive, charging fees that would crush the budgets of countless millions of American families.

But it’s not just the base-line cost of attendance that has exploded. Disney offers various extra benefits (at extra cost) that create a multitiered experience. Think of the park as creating something like the boarding groups for airline flights. Life is just better if you’re in Group 1.

In one sense, the Disney story is understandable and lamentable, but it’s hardly alarming. Only a small fraction of Americans will go to Disney World in any given year, and if there are many more rich Americans, then it only makes economic sense to create benefits that cater to their tastes (and empty their wallets).

But it’s not just Disney. The examples are all around us. This month, The Wall Street Journal published a   fascinating article   about the explosive costs of youth sports. The average family’s annual spending on baseball, for example, increased to $1,113 from $660 between 2019 and 2024.

That’s partly because the nature of youth sports has changed. When I was young, we all owned a bat, a glove and a few balls. We signed up for Little League at a community table set up outside the entrance of the closest Walmart, and we joined teams with names like Tom’s Oil Change Tigers and Wayne’s Video Wildcats.

And now? Travel sports have taken over, and travel sports are expensive. As The Journal reported, “Teenagers on travel teams are rolling into weekend tournaments wearing a few thousand dollars of apparel, equipment and swag.” Forget the local teams sponsored by local businesses. Now you often find yourself traveling regionally or maybe even nationally for teams called Alliance A or Alliance B, representing different branches of your chosen travel sports company.

If you’re a sports fan, forget about going to see your favorite pro team unless you’ve got a lot of extra cash on hand. As my colleague at The Athletic Henry Bushnell   reported in December :

The price of attending an N.F.L. or M.L.B. game rose, on average, by around 300 percent from 1991 to 2023, according to the Fan Cost Index. The average N.F.L. ticket now costs more than $300.
The   cheapest   ticket to an average N.F.L. game is around $169, per an Athletic analysis earlier this season — more than every single standard English Premier League ticket except those in the   most expensive tier for the most appealing games at Arsenal .

And what about flying? To purchase a plane ticket is to open a restaurant menu. You’ve got choice after choice of seating tiers. It’s not just First Class and Coach — boarded back to front — any longer. Nope. We’ve got First Class, Main Cabin Extra, Main and Basic Economy. We’ve got ConciergeKey boarding, preboarding and nine other boarding groups.

The result can be endlessly frustrating. We’re constantly reminded that America is a multitiered society in which a high income buys you a very visible degree of prosperity, and a decent income gives you nothing special at all. There are so many high-income Americans that the entire economy is warping to accommodate the minority at the expense of the majority.

In other words, we have a Group 1 economy for a Group 9 nation, and it’s no wonder that so many Americans feel economically disadvantaged and insecure.

There is a   statistic   that backs up this perception. In February of last year, The Wall Street Journal reported that the top 10 percent of earners — households earning about $250,000 or more — now account for 49.7 percent of all spending. That’s a staggering percentage — a percentage that can tilt an entire economy toward the top.

Extend the analysis to the top 40 percent of earners and that percentage grows to more than 75 percent of all spending. That means that the poorest 60 percent of Americans account for less than a quarter of all spending. Put all this together, and it means that individually rational economic choices are driving the entire economy to cater to the wealthy. And if the top 10 percent are far and away the dominant spenders, that will mean that even members of the upper middle class will strain to feel secure.

If you’re a car manufacturer, do you want to build low-margin entry-level cars? Or do you reap much greater rewards by   selling the high-margin S.U.V .? If you’re a developer, luxury housing is typically   much more profitable .

Yes, used cars can still be very nice cars, and there is evidence that building more high-end housing   can lower prices   by increasing overall supply, but middle-class America is used-car America. The shiny new thing? That’s for someone else.

The result can be a constant sense that you’re a second-class citizen. You check into hotels eyeing the shorter Gold check-in line. You ride in the rental shuttle past the Preferred kiosk, where the frequent travelers just grab their keys and go.

Or, much more consequentially, you move to a new city and find that the wait to get established with a new doctor can stretch for months — unless you are able to pay the high monthly fee for concierge medicine. Then you can be seen right away, perhaps with a bonus offer of Botox for the middle-aged patient.

And what if you live in a city that the top 10 percent love? Well, then even being upper middle class doesn’t feel affluent at all. Six-figure salaries purchase shoe-box apartments, and everything from groceries to gas costs an absurd amount. Soon enough, you’re googling the real estate prices in Chattanooga or Des Moines — surely it’s cheaper there — whether or not you intend to ever leave.

In this context, “affordability” doesn’t just refer to the cost of a specific good (or even necessarily the rate of inflation at any given time) but rather to the price of entry into what should feel like a normal American life — one that includes baseball games with the kids, a doctor on call, a home you like, and, at the very least, a basic sense that you haven’t been left behind.

Wealth always   tempts us to be discontent. We’re cursed with that insatiable desire for more. We’re prone to envy. There is a reason we talk about keeping up with the Joneses.

But what if the Joneses inadvertently also make it hard to keep up? What if their sheer economic power changes our communities so much that we’re priced out of our doctors, our homes, our sports and many, many other things we need or want?

In this story, maybe the problem isn’t oligarchy. Elon Musk’s billions don’t tangibly change my life. But all the doctors, lawyers, engineers and accountants in my city do. They’ve bought the houses in the gated community. Their kids are playing travel ball. Because of all their money, the next restaurant is more likely to be a farm-to-table bistro than a Waffle House.

No one is the clear villain in this story, and that’s one thing that makes the problem difficult to solve. We can’t target and defeat a specific set of bad actors who are immiserating America. Everyone is acting in rational self-interest. Why not be a lawyer or an engineer if you can? Why make less money selling food to kindergarten teachers when you can charge architects more? Why not pay for concierge services if they make your life easier? Why not be a concierge physician if the pay and lifestyle are better?

It’s these choices, made millions of times by millions of Americans, that are both spurring our growth and — perversely enough — increasing our misery. We can’t have what we can’t afford, and we can’t have what we used to afford, and that combination can make even a middle-class American who may be well-off by historical standards feel very poor indeed.