At the American Interest Online (January–February 2011), Tyler Cowan proposed a new category for employment statistics in an essay on “Inequality of Incomes.”
He calls the category: “Threshold Earners.”
A threshold earner is someone who seeks to earn a certain amount of money and no more. If wages go up, that person will respond by seeking less work or by working less hard or less often. That person simply wants to “get by” in terms of absolute earning power in order to experience other gains in the form of leisure –whether spending time with friends and family, walking in the woods and so on. Luck aside, that person’s income will never rise much above the threshold.
Eric Koch’s book, The Weimar Triangle, is available at Indigo-Chapters and in your local bookstore. 
I take it that the implication is that such people volunteer to receive – and therefore deserve to receive – many times less than the voracious acquisitors who over the last few decades have been outstripping them by increasingly many multiples of their indolent income thresholds. Another great excuse for successful social Darwinists to rip off the rest of society with a clear conscience!
The super-rich are not super-happy.
A few of them deserve to be super-rich – rock stars and baseball players, for example – because they make a lot of people very happy. Others are super-rich because they have a special financial talent without necessarily ripping off the rest of us.
Some make just enough money – the Threshold Earners – to get by and are super-happy.
How about the people who work full time and still are not able to afford the basics of life. Try living on minimum wage in Toronto.
My heart bleeds for them. The problem with Threshold Earners is that not everybody is equipped to make use of the benefits in time for walking in the woods……
How much really PRODUCTIVE intelligent work can an individual do in a day? Some writers claim 4-6 hours. Others, after excluding meetings, filing, mindless correspondence and general chit-chat, reluctantly agree.
Good question. Some of us – I will not mention names – do our most productive work while sleeping. All their problems are resolved by the time they wake up.
Most of us are threshold earners. We just have different thresholds.
The exceptions are the no-threshold guys (and they’re nearly always guys, but let’s save that for another day) with the core belief that more — more money, more stuff, more ROB or Economist covers — somehow means a better life.
They’re idiots, of course. You and I, with our properly-calibrated thresholds, know better.
And so do all the beneficiaries of this blog.