Even in deep recession

things could be much worse:

In 1960, when I was 10, we spent Christmas with another family. One of their daughters, Dru, a precocious 5-year-old who had a crush on me, chased me around their house until my pants split. So I walked home, changed pants, and returned. Dru chased me again and my second pair of pants split. I was out of options--two pairs of pants were all I had. Fast forward to today. When a newly married friend recently showed me proudly how neatly his wife had organized his clothes closet, I commented, "We are so incredibly wealthy." He had 5 to 10 suits, about 20 nice shirts, and the same number of nice ties. Even a friend of mine whose income of under $15,000 put him just above the poverty level had 6 to 10 pairs of pants and about 20 shirts all neatly stacked or hanging in his closet. When I was a child, I had one pair of shoes and one pair of Converse sneakers. Now children, even those in lower income brackets, often have more than two pairs of shoes, and the shoes are of much higher quality.