HOW SUCCESS CAN BE RELATIVE

Achieving the American dream consists in becoming better off than comparison point, whether one's childhood, people in the old country, one's neighbors, a character from a book, another race or gender-anything or anyone that one measures oneself against. Relative success implies no threshold of well-being, and it may or may not entail continually changing the comparison group as one achieves a given level of accomplishment. A benign version of relative success is captures by James Comer's " Kind of competition ... we had ... going on" with "the closest friends that we had": When we first met them, we had a dining room and they didn't. They, went back and they turned one of their bedrooms into a dining room ... After that we bought this Buick car. And we came to their house and they had bought another car. She bought a fur coat one year and your dad bought me one the next. But it was a friendly thing, the way we raced. It gave you something to work for, to look forward to. Every year we tried to have something different to show them what we had done, and they would have something to show us.