When I was a grade school kid we lived on a mainly working/lower middle class block. We were better off than average, but the rich people, and the rich kid, were definitely at the far end of the dead street, after if branched off to another street. They drove a Cadillac, had a swimming pool and season tickets to the Mets. Their house wasn’t that different though. In the 1960’s.
When I was in junior high/HS in 1970’s I lived in an area Charles Murray later listed as a ‘super zip’, though it’s much more upscale now than then. There are just a lot more people in the NY area who make very high incomes relative to the median now than then, as is generally the big change in US income distribution but particularly NY area. Anyway, even then things changed from us being better off than average but the one obvious ‘rich kid’, to most people being, or at least seeming, better off than we were, and sometimes ‘rich’. Which I guess meant much bigger house than ours, those kids I knew from pick up sports games who went to private (other than Catholic) rather than public school like I did, in a few cases there were new cars for them in HS. One kid I knew was heir to Ohaus brand scales, though I don’t know if that was really a lot of money in his nuclear family. I guess it was a semi-adult view though and more realistic than my previous view of the ‘rich kid’ in my former neighborhood.
Even the fully adult view some posters assumed the OP is looking for is somewhat arbitrary.
To explain to those who don’t know (I’m assuming most US) the Youth Hostels Association provided ultra-cheap accommodation for young persons on walking, hitch-hiking and cycling holidays at close to zero cost. Crammed into dormitories of bunk beds with dozens of hairy-arsed twenty-year-olds. It was channeling Wandervogel (this old person would now say). I was 10, 11, 12, 13… and on family holidays. I swear in every hostel my parents were twenty years older than the next oldest person. No, I guess there were others, like the pensioners you see at Glastonbury.
This was the very opposite of rich - but it was oddly aspirant, because it meant we actually could go on holidays. And - returning to the OP - where I grew up I had no role models at all for “Rich”, no real concept of what it meant. And even referring to TV (which we didn’t have for a chunk of my childhood, now I think of it) doesn’t really help - British TV told grimy stories - it was the era of kitchen sink drama and all that.
So no, I don’t think I really had a concept of rich as a kid. Outside my frame of reference.
I arrived at this conclusion because Publisher’s Clearing House, the Illinois Lottery, and related win-big-money situations treated a million bucks as the default grand prize. And also because Mr. and Mrs. Howell were the Millionaire and His Wife, and in my mind it only took one million to qualify. And the Howells were obviously rich.
I think Gordon Gekko said it best “I’m not talking a $400,000 a year working Wall Street stiff flying first class and being comfortable, I’m talking about liquid. Rich enough to have your own jet. Rich enough not to waste time. Fifty, a hundred million dollars, buddy. A player, or nothing.”
Maybe you don’t need $50 million to $100 million. But to me “rich” implies a certain financial independence that comes from passive income and control of revenue producing assets. Doctors, lawyers and working Wall Street stiffs are “upper middle class”. People with advanced income tied to their labor and profession.
When I was in high school, I had a friend who dated the daughter of a local real estate developer who had built a bunch of 1950s subdivisions. Her family had a big two-story house and she went to private school. That was rich.
As for my own family, my parents were teenagers in the Great Depression, and they knew what poor really was. We were, to quote my father’s exact words, “doing okay.”
Wondering about the people quoting particular incomes and net worth. When they were a kid, like grade school (when I thought an in ground pool was rich), they had any idea of the distribution of incomes or wealth in $'s?
Although I guess you’re still a kid in HS or college. But I wonder how many HS kids even have a good idea of that kind of thing.
Definitely how I think of “rich” now, but too advanced for me as a kid. Back then, doctors & lawyers were rich!
What you’re talking about, I probably thought there were maybe like 5 people on the planet, mostly kings or something, who could just not work, and live off the money their money makes.
I think the earliest concept of “rich” I had as a kid would have been cartoon characters like Richie Rich or Scrooge McDuck. Maybe the episode of Bugs Bunny where Bugs gets hypnotized to believe he is Elmer J Fudd and owns a mansion and a yacht.
80s movies about “class struggle” like Wall Street or Trading Places came out when I was a bit older in my teens.
Also, having family in Pittsburg, I had kind of a vague notion about industrialists like the Carnegies and Mellons.
But basically, I grew up considering “rich” to be these absurdly wealthy people who lived in big mansions off in their own world of other rich people. Like celebrities or CEOs or people in families with the same last name as Fortune 500 companies.
An inground pool sounded pretty rich to me when I was very little. But then a couple of streets over some installed an inground pool that took up the entire backyard of their modest house. I was certainly jealous of such a luxury, but it didn’t seem to qualify them as rich anymore.
It would be a while later when I was 16 and my first plane trip. Looking out the window after takeoff I was amazed at how many people had pools, and the neighborhoods around airports aren’t full of mansions.