Living below my means doesn't mean I live like my neighbors. My house is roughly the same as everyone around me. The contents of the house are not (and they are private), and yet I still live well below my means. I have a semi-nice TV, and more importantly, expensive computers like pretty much everyone on HN to do my job.
Their entire point is that publicizing their salary eliminates that privacy by telling people their income. It's a proxy measurement. Even if all they have in the house is a can of beans, publicly making more than their neighbors puts a target on them.
Because robbers tend to rob wealthy people? You get looted or shot more likely, because the robbers don't know this guy lives a humble life. They think this guy must have cash and big TV.
ah yes, the booming American kidnapping business. /s
Seriously though, it's not hard to find targets for this sort of thing by looking at census data and sales records for nice homes, yet it really never happens in the US. WHen was the last time you heard of some random lawyer, ceo, or banker getting kidnapped in the US?
I mean yes, if you can imagine a crime, surely it has happened in a nation of 350 million people. I think my point stands that it's an extremely rare crime, that's hard to commit, harder to cash in on, and harder still to get away with.
How about service providers like car repairmen and house contractors ripping people off? How about gold-diggers pursuing people on false romantic pretenses? How about just people gossiping about you out of envy?
Doesn't that already happen? And what evidence do you have to suggest that known income would make it worse on average? What about cases where a contractor would presume a client is wealthy and try to rip them off, but income data would show that they are actually not as well off as appearances suggest?
But I haven't really bothered to think through any of that, because my point was about kidnapping, which almost never happens in the US. Fewer than 100 people are kidnapped for ransom in the US every year.
I have no idea the mindset of these robbers who seem to be after your paycheck, but I do know that Norway has made salary information public [0], and they have a very low crime rate [1], in fact it's far lower than the U.S. crime rate.
If you live below your means, why would robbers target you? They don't care how much you make, they care what TV you have.