Every d-bag in this picture (the "d" stands for "dirt") thinks he or she is rich.

A few weeks ago, the popular personal finance meta-blog Yakezie held a contest for students, asking them to define richness and answer related questions. Even though our studyin’ days are long in the past, we decided to write an essay anyway and modify it for you folks. If this doesn’t spur some comments, nothing G-rated will.

Do you think becoming rich is easy or hard in America?  Please explain your viewpoint.  
What is rich to you?  Is it a dollar amount in the bank, a lifestyle, or perhaps even a state of mind?  
The United States is the richest country in the world.  Will there always be poverty?

In the fashion of a corporate customer service department, let’s answer these questions in the order in which they were received.

Becoming rich in America is easy – maybe not easy in absolute terms, but the qualifier “in America” implies that we’re to compare getting rich here relative to getting rich elsewhere.

In the vast majority of the world, getting “rich” means capitalizing on influence and heredity. The most motivated, diligent, dedicated Kyrgyz camel tender or Mozambican copper miner can’t get rich in any meaningful way that we in the Western world understand the term. The opportunities for entrepreneurship just don’t exist elsewhere, for the most part.  The opportunities for joining the governmental apparatus and perpetuating it abound, however. (But only if you’re connected.) And while the United States still has its share of nepotism, red tape, political maneuvering and corruption, it’s nothing compared to what goes on in the rest of the world.

Your humble blogger has a slightly different perspective, having been born and raised elsewhere and only arriving in the United States at the age of 25. When I did I had no money, nor did I have any connections – unless you count the hotel waiter I’d met in Miami a couple years earlier who let me crash on his couch when I first emigrated*. My dreams were modest, but they were distinctively American: make enough to achieve financial independence, ideally on my own and without having a boss breathing down my neck.

So what is rich to us? You’re not going to hear us give some bromide about it being health and good friends, or any of that crap. This isn’t a box of Kashi cereal. If non-monetary criteria are what make people rich, then everyone’s rich, and therefore no one’s rich because “richness” loses its meaning.

“Rich” as we define it means not having to worry about worrying about money. It means having assets that routinely outpace liabilities. Beyond a certain level of subsistence, that’s all anyone can hope for. If you gross $100,000 a year, spend money on everything you could possibly want and need and have $20,000 remaining at the end of the year, and can apply that to the following year’s assets, you’re rich. If you make $5 million and have a $6 million hooker-and-heroin habit, you’re poor.

Will there always be poverty? Again, it makes all the difference in the world whether we’re talking in absolute or relative terms. Our poorest acquaintance lives far more lavishly than John D. Rockefeller ever dreamed of. She can communicate across the world instantaneously. She can control the temperature of her dwelling with the press of a button. She can travel at speeds that the richest people of previous generations couldn’t fathom. For pennies a day, she can ensure that her teeth will stay strong and not fall out of her head. She can eat thousands of calories daily without having to spend time doing the backbreaking labor of growing the food herself. Or even cooking that much of it.

So yes, there will always be “poverty” in the sense that someone will be at the bottom – even though that bottom has risen throughout the history of civilization and will continue to. Is that a bad thing? Not if the alternative to having some at the bottom is to have everyone at the bottom. It’s important to remember that everything is transitory. The vast majority of people in the lowest quintile of income don’t stay there long: it’s more a function of the point a “poor” person’s at in his or her life – just out of school for instance, or unmarried and pregnant with one’s sixth baby – rather than a permanent condition of status. Both Control Your Cash principals were poor by any modern definition at 19. And are probably rich by most people’s definition a couple of decades later. We wouldn’t have changed any of it to have lived under circumstances where the opportunity to fail and be poor wasn’t available.

*No, it wasn’t the follow-up to a torrid homosexual tryst. Just because a guy sets foot in Miami doesn’t mean he’s gay. You people are perverts.

**This article is featured in the Yakezie Carnival-Best of Yazekie this Week**

**This article is also featured in the Baby Boomers Blog Carnival One Hundred-second Edition**