Let's say you're a kid and nobody has a car except the very wealthy. You grow-up thinking that cars are a sign of wealth. You get to be an old guy, saym 29, and you can buy a car. Are you wealthy? Maybe. Or it maybe that some external factor has resulted in cars now being in your price range.

By the time you're 40 nearly every family that wants a car has a car. But very few, except the wealthy, have two cars. Your children grow-up thinking cars are the normal possession for a family and only wealthy people have 2 cars. It doesn't matter that you tell your kids that trolleys, buses and subways work just fine. Form them a car is a normative possession. In your fifties you buy a TV and your kids (and perhaps grandkids) all come to visit to see the silly thing. The grandkids think only wealthy old farts have a TV.

What I'm saying is that we have become accustomed to a certain rate of increase in affluence in the USA from generation to generation. But past performance is no guarantee of future earnings. The world is far, far more competitive now and most Americans are simply NOT accustomed to working their asses off, dawn-to-dusk, to earn enough money to keep starvation from the door. They think of a job as a necessary evil that interrupts a "normal" life of leisurely self-indulgence.

Expectations are unrealistic and so we externalize the responsibility for failure to meet those unrealistic expectations.

B