Given Frank’s “choosing the right pond” idea, what is the right pond? When we engage in our inevitable social comparisons, to whom do we compare ourselves? In earlier times, such comparisons were necessarily local. We looked around at our neighbors and family members. We didn’t have access to information about people outside our immediate social circle. But with the explosion of telecommunications—TV, movies, the Internet—almost everyone has access to information about almost everyone else. A person living in a blue-collar urban neighborhood forty years ago might have been content with his
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