Broke, Plastic, Easy Housewives of New York

Have you ever wondered why they call the show, “Real Housewives of New York”? It’s because ‘Broke, Plastic, Easy Housewives of New York’ doesn’t have the same ring.

The reality of ‘Reality Television’ is that it is fake. ‘Real Housewives’ are not real. The girls on ‘The Hills’ work 4 hours a year. And ‘the Bachelor’ is a test study for an STD clinic. Please take note all of the ‘quotation marks’.

In short: most of these characters aren’t rich, they just play them on reality TV, usually in hopes of getting rich. If the audience is on the joke, no harm done. It all makes for good entertainment.

The problem is that these shows give us all a false impression of wealth. Economic and psychological research has shown time and again that wealth is a relative concept, based on a reference group of our peers. If our peers were only our friends and neighbors, there would be relatively small differences in wealth or spending disparities.

But in our media-saturated age, our ‘peers’ are increasingly the rich people we see on TV. In her book “The Overspent American,” Juliet Schor cites research that shows that the more people watch television, the more they think American households have tennis courts, private planes, convertibles, car telephones, maids and swimming pools. Heavy watchers also overestimate the portion of the population who are millionaires, have had cosmetic surgery and belong to a private gym.

Rich reality-TV, in other words, distorts our own reality of wealth.

Clearly this video vomit isn’t going anywhere. The ratings are too high. But as frugal-ers, we must protect ourselves from the faux status quo.

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