Posted by Vince Wadhwani on Apr 14, 2006
It's not often that a cartoon comes up that pretty much sums up how I feel so succintly. Yet today Tom Toles published this beauty. It is pure genius and over the next few days I would like to address each panel one by one. They are all extremely important and worthy of your attention. So let's get started!
Panel 1: My house is too big to heat. How true. The size of the average home has increased remarkably over the last few decades. In 1970 the average house in the US was 1400 square feet. Today that number is 2412 square feet Why the dramatic increase? I have a few ideas why:
Developers are greedy. It's true. Just like in food where they give you double the soft drink (which costs 5 cents) and charge you an extra dollar, in home building, developers take up more land and charge you more giving you the same argument of more for your dollar. Panel 2 shows the unrealized costs associate with that!
. We all want what the rich want. There's a saying that goes something like "we all want equality, but only with the people who have it better than us." Yup, nobody is clamoring to be as poor as a homeless guy or have a house as small as the japanese (Average is 1000 square feet). It's not even a case of the grass is always greener, it's pure self-esteem measured by wealth instead of inner worth.
We all want what TV tells us we should. Almost identical to the above point, a lot of the times wealth, success, and happiness are seen and understood by us best through the television and movie theater. This is where we can observe all the details of another persons situation through uninterrupted voyeuristic clarity. You know what we learn? Yes, greed is good, but also that at the end of the day, the rich, powerful, and successful covet and obtain expensive cars, big houses, beautiful women, private school, swimming pools, private jets, etc. How will our neighbors or worse, strangers, know that we are just as good as these fictional characters unless we have those things too!?!?? Note dear reader, that TV is evil.
So with the increased size of your home come increased expenses. Heating and air conditioning is just one of them. Another is lawn care. A third is insurance. Also don't forget about property tax. Dear reader, I would be remiss if I also did not mention the extra cost of furnishing that McMansion. Lastly, there are the hidden costs of getting from that lovely retreat in the mountains to your daily grind in the city.
We'll discuss that in Part 2!
