Out of position: Against the politics of relative standing

From Policy magazine, by Will Wilkinson

HL Mencken once quipped that, ‘a wealthy man is one who earns $100 a year more than his wife’s sister’s husband.’ Writing last April on the definition of poverty in The New Yorker, journalist John Cassidy takes the logic of Mencken’s satire of low-grade ressentiment fully seriously and plumps for its liberal application to public policy. Cassidy argues that it is indeed a hardship to make less than your wife’s sister’s husband ...more>>