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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   23407 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 1, 2025

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Scott Alexander just released another "Much More than You Wanted to Know" article, this time on the Vibecession.

He goes through all of the traditional arguments in his standard exhaustive way: is it housing? no. is it wealth inequality? no. is it wages down? no. is it overall GDP down? maybe, but no.

Ultimately he makes the case that the economy is doing well, and the younger cohort is doing great. Many economic indicators do seem to show that in real terms, they are doing better than ever! Reading this article I was excited to see that he might get to what I consider the real problem, but alas, he concludes in a very lukewarm way with:

Because of decreasing application friction, any given opportunity requires more effort to achieve than in earlier generations. Although this can’t lower the average society-wide success level (because there are still the same set of people competing for the same opportunities, so by definition average success will be the same), it can inflict deadweight loss on contenders and a subjective sense of underachievement.

Because of concentration of jobs in high-priced metro areas, effective cost-of-living for people pursuing these jobs has increased even though real cost-of-living (ie for a given good in a given location) hasn’t. This effect is multiplied since it’s concentrated among exactly the sorts of elites most likely to set the tone of the national conversation (eg journalists).

Homeownership has become substantially more expensive since the pandemic (although the increase in rents is much less). This on its own can’t justify the entire vibecession, because most vibecessioneers are renters, and the house price change is relatively recent. But it may discourage people for whom homeownership was a big part of the American dream.

But even if these three factors are really making things worse, so what? Have previous generations never had three factors making things worse? Is our focus on the few things getting worse, instead of all the other things getting better or staying the same, itself downstream of negative media vibes?

I find this hard to believe, but am unable to find the smoking gun that definitively rules it out. I hope this post will serve as a starting point for further investigation: now that we’re all on the same page about which purported explanations don’t work, we can more fruitfully investigate alternatives.

I hope that eventually Scott comes around to the idea that economic indicators are a proxy for community, emotional and spiritual health! Ultimately the average person doesn't really care much about the economy or their wealth, instead they care about how easy their life is. How pleasant their interactions are. What the emotional tone is of the people they interact with the most.

Scott does briefly get into this talking about the 'negative media vibes,' but for some reason he doesn't dig in there more?

My take is that our culture and religious framework have been breaking down at an increasing speed for the last couple centuries, and the last few decades we have accelerated into freefall. It's complete chaos out there, the Meaning Crisis meaning that young people have zero clue what to do with their lives, no consistent role models to follow, and as we discussed in a post below, they basically are told that they're doing great even if by objective standards they are fucking things up terribly.

The younger cohort has lost connection to any greater framework of values that teaches them how to actually live in a positive and healthy way. Instead, they are awash in technological substitutes for intimacy, cheap hedonistic advertising, and an increasing propensity to fall back to vicious, tribal infighting based on characteristics like race, gender (or lack thereof), or economic status.

Overall the vibes are bleak not because of any material wealth issues, but because the spirit of the West is deeply, deeply sick.

This just passed across my Facebook feed: https://www.facebook.com/share/1MHqtmtrnm/

It’s a NY Post piece from a colleague of Luigi Mangione’s victim.

I opened the comments and my fears of a Bolshevik revolution are now higher. Maybe it’s algorithmic bias, but a few pages of scrolling reveals only Luigi fans, with thousands of likes on their comments.

At least the Russian peasantry had experienced setbacks under a wartime economy. But if the American people are convinced they’re being economically disenfranchised despite the numbers and all the existing redistribution, maybe they’ll stand back and let a small group topple the existing order.

People don't like Luigi because they hate Capitalism they like him because they hate health insurance companies. If he had killed the CEO of Kroger he wouldn't have the fandom he has. All you need to do to diffuse his fans and the Bernie bros for that matter is pull a Bismark and choose one of the healthcare models of any other developed country and the leftists will evaporate.

It seems to be partly a facebook thing. The comments on the actual article are more mixed.

But it shouldn't be a surprise, it's not about socialism or redistribution. It's about health insurance and their leadership specifically. Health insurance companies are known chiefly for two things -- hiking premiums and denying claims.

But it shouldn't be a surprise, it's not about socialism or redistribution. It's about health insurance and their leadership specifically.

I actually don't think it's even about health insurance. One thing I think is fairly consistent is that in general, people (but especially young, unestablished people) tend to believe that the elites are basically taking advantage of their situation. The disagreement tends to come in as to what the solution would be, rather than that it's happening.

Someone like Luigi is considered to be a hero because he is striking back against the corrupt rule of the elites; both left and right tend to correctly note that a lot of our so-called elites are anything but, but are somehow paid ridiculously well and given huge amounts of public respect despite their complete incompetence.

In Canada, our MPs (members of parliament) are paid approximately $200,000 a year as a baseline salary, with ministers in charge of specific roles (like minister of justice, minister of public safety) getting more, and our prime minister making around $400,000 a year. This is in addition to a really really good pension plan (so good, in fact, that it is extremely credible that our last government only survived as long as it did due to its existence; basically, we had a liberal minority, but our "labour" party voted in lockstep with them even for things like forcing unionized workers back into the office because their leader's pension vested in late December; literally the week after it vested Singh agreed to bring down the government the next time an open vote occurred). Of our MPs, we have a large number that are considered to be worse than incompetent (Bill Blair, this charming lady, our PM's former babysitter). I'm not going to go over all the horrible businesses in Canada - but needless to say, we have a lot of those too. Loblaws is fairly famous for how price-gougey it is.

People want a change from the corrupt and shitty elites who seem to destroy value rather than create, but who are constantly failing upwards.

From a foreign perspective, it looks like the problem is less general economic disenfranchisement and more than American medical care structuring really is uniquely awful and there isn’t the state capacity to rip it out and replace it with a new kind of system (most likely the kind they have in France, Japan etc.).

I might go further and say that insurance in general is just totally broken in the West.

Firstly, the stuff that people want to insure against (big, unpredictable disasters that result in ongoing costs) aren’t what insurance companies want to cover.

Secondly, the likelihood that an insurance company will pay you depends less on the terms of your contract and more on its own PR and financials. And those financials depend on how new the company is and how its investments are going than anything to do with you and your problems. All the incentives are massively perverted - it’s a way to milk money off people to use for stock market gambling whilst paying out the minimum possible until you inevitably go bust.

I might go further and say that insurance in general is just totally broken in the West.

Firstly, the stuff that people want to insure against (big, unpredictable disasters that result in ongoing costs) aren’t what insurance companies want to cover.

Do you have examples? I have zero problems getting cover for those. The insurance companies all try to tag on useless crap I don't want, and they call to up-sell this stuff if I un-select it, but they all end up selling me insurance in the end.

I was thinking of the big change-your-life medical claims, plus some problems my friend once had with house insurance after part of the house collapsed and needed to be rebuilt. The insurance company shrugged and said 'you bought a house with a hidden structural defect decades ago, that's not our problem' and indeed that is broadly what the contract says, but the endless list of opt-outs in the contract doesn't fit with what 'insurance' is meant to be.

Hold up. Weren't they aware or should they not have been aware of the structural defect from the moment they decided to provide that insurance?

In the UK it is common for residential buildings to be >200 years old. Nobody was aware, even the surveyor didn't notice. Just one day part of the building fell down and the insurer said (paraphrased) 'okay, you had an insurance policy but it doesn't cover anything that happens because of gradual decline, or gradual damage, or structural issues, or...'. In theory they should be aware that old buildings sometimes have these issues but in practice they refuse to pay out.

It's not that I don't get where insurers are coming from on these kinds of cases, it's just that in reality they rule out basically any of the actual causes of big expensive problems which makes the policy kind of worthless. They sell the illusion of safety on their advertising materials without any actual intent to provide it. You're always taking a gamble on whether they come through for you or dig in their heels.

I agree. Isn't it the alleviation of big, unpredictable disasters that result in ongoing costs that insurance as an institution was invented to do in the first place?

I think Scott hit the nail on the head when he said that people feel like they need to do more to keep up. People are nostalgic for the times where you could get hired in the town you were raised and make a good life for yourself. Now you have to compete against the world. I started feeling this way in the 2000's and it's only gotten worse.

Where I disagree with Scott is that CPI is the wonderful and infallible marker of how expensive things have gotten. It's not capturing people's necessary expenses, because necessary expenses have inflated. CPI does hedonistic adjustments.

A flat-screen TV that cost $5,000 in 2000 costs $300 today, and CPI calculations include this decline. But no lower-income family was buying $5,000 flat screens in 2000. Families in 2000 were buying the $300 small boxes. The amount of money a lower-income family spends on TV hasn't gone down, it's stayed flat. They may be getting better bang for their buck and that's significant. But when the question is, "Do you feel like you can afford more than your parents?" The answer is "no." I don't even know where to buy a new CRT TV. Maybe they're cheaper now, but I don't have that option when I go to the electronics store.

The same kinds of adjustments are made for things that legally aren't available anymore. In the past people bought cars without airbags and now we need to buy cars with airbags. The price increase from airbags is factored into the CPI and the CPI says the cost is flat given the upgrade, even if in real dollars it's 5k more. I like having airbags, don't get me wrong. But the previous option is not available. The real cost of car ownership went up, even if that's not, strictly, "Inflation."

The cost of participating in a Middle Class Life has gone up - due to lots of things. High speed internet, computers, and phones are new entrants into "Bare Minimum to participate in the current economy." Cars with more environmental and safety features, mandatory insurance costs, mandatory home features. Meanwhile jobs feel precarious - one wrong move and you'll be replaced by a foreigner or an AI chatbot and no one else will be hiring. Are we right or wrong to think so? I don't know. But that's the vibes part of the vibecession.

A flat-screen TV that cost $5,000 in 2000 costs $300 today, and CPI calculations include this decline. But no lower-income family was buying $5,000 flat screens in 2000. Families in 2000 were buying the $300 small boxes.

Also you cannot try to save money by buying a small box today even if you wanted to, because it’d not even recognize the TV signal and would just be an unusable waste of space.

The amount of money a lower-income family spends on TV hasn't gone down, it's stayed flat. They may be getting better bang for their buck and that's significant.

I'd argue that its' not, not one bit. Back in 2000 nobody cared at all about not having a flat-screen TV for the simple reason that those were not available to average people in a practical sense. Nobody felt one bit poorer due to not owning one, the thought didn't even occur to anyone. The same goes for cell phones without cameras back in the old days. The notion of capturing videos with your phone and posting them online wasn't even on anyone's mind.

The cost of participating in a Middle Class Life has gone up - due to lots of things. High speed internet, computers, and phones are new entrants into "Bare Minimum to participate in the current economy."

I'd argue that lacking a smartphone with installed DM and e-mail apps and a PC/tablet basically locks you out of doing any job that is not undocumented fruit picking.

But the previous option is not available. The real cost of car ownership went up, even if that's not, strictly, "Inflation."

Well not really. It moved from one kind of cost (some probability of splattering your brains on the steering wheel) to another kind of cost (at most 2% at most the cost of a new car).

There was never getting around the cost.

Right, but that doesn't change the fact that the car is now, in fact, more expensive than it was before, which is what a measure of inflation is supposed to capture.

This fraud is revealed when the same discounting principle isn't applied to, say, GDP, or other "good numbers". Oh yes, you bet your ass the extra dollars get counted there. With this neat trick, you get to double, triple, maybe even quadruple count the benefits of a technology or innovation.

Things in the past were going well enough for the common man that there wasn't much to notice here, but now that John Everyman is getting squeezed from all angles, the official numbers are starting to look suspicious. Hard to ignore the dissonance when your typical bag of groceries jumps 20% and the official numbers are still like "3% :)". Becomes clear that the numbers aren't about you or people like you. There's so much witchcraft that goes into these numbers anyway that they are essentially a matter of interpretation rather than fact, and it's becoming clear to a lot of people that it's a picture painted by a club they're not in. And yeah, I guess if you're an upperclassman like Scott is now, it's easy to believe everything's great. But if you're a member of the Rent Food Gas class, you have been getting obliterated.

It's actually difficult for me to believe the level of condescension that these people are speaking to the working class. I couldn't imagine biting the hand that feeds me that hard. Maybe we need a little bit of rising Bolshevism to remind these people who actually runs the place.

Right, but that doesn't change the fact that the car is now, in fact, more expensive than it was before, which is what a measure of inflation is supposed to capture.

Inflation is supposed to compare like-for-like. You can't switch from a Big Mac to a NY Strip and call it inflation, it has to be a fundamentally comparable good.

But if you're a member of the Rent Food Gas class, you have been getting obliterated.

Gas is impossible to game, a gallon is a gallon

You can't switch from a Big Mac to a NY Strip and call it inflation, it has to be a fundamentally comparable good.

Cool, so base the numbers on comparing like goods and stop fucking with them. How is a bureaucrat supposed to measure how much more better the Philly Cheese-steak is? This also doesn't solve the double counting problem. The BLT doesn't count for less dollars in the GDP line go up so shut up data.

EDIT: It also doesn't solve the problem that, in a lot of cases, consumers stopped buying the Big Mac because it was outlawed.

Gas is impossible to game, a gallon is a gallon

Unfortunately, you cannot eat or live in gas.

Buddy, you can't tell people to shut up.

in a lot of cases, consumers stopped buying the Big Mac because it was outlawed

Yes. This is a problem on the regulatory side. And I'm very sympathetic to the claim that a given regulation (say, for backup cameras or whatever) has an unfavorable cost/benefit ratio -- in many cases it's absolutely true. So it's completely valid to say that shitty regulation makes things more expensive, but that isn't inflation.

I think he is saying that the economists are telling the data to go away and stop bothering them, not telling you to shut up.

This is like that "Mandatory booster seats reduce the birth rate" study. A feature that saved the lives of 1:100 prevents the entrance into he middle-class of 10:100.

Don't get me wrong, it's better to be financially stressed than dead. But I am explaining why people's experiences of the economy is not matching up with the markers economists are paying attention to. If economists actually want to figure it out, they need to start here. What is the minimum basket of goods someone needs to buy in order to achieve a "middle class lifestyle" this decade and how many people in each generation can afford it today?

People are nostalgic for the times where you could get hired in the town you were raised and make a good life for yourself.

They're nostalgic, then, for a time their parents don't remember.

I don't even know where to buy a new CRT TV. Maybe they're cheaper now, but I don't have that option when I go to the electronics store.

You can't get a new CRT TV. But I see that Best Buy and Amazon have flat screen TVs (24") for $50. These are strictly superior to the old 20" CRT TVs. $300 gets you up to 50".

But I see that Best Buy and Amazon have flat screen TVs (24") for $50.

This is interesting but kind of besides the point. The point is, Economists are able to say something like, "The cost of TVs has gone down from $5,000 to $300, offsetting the increase of the cost of quality cotton shirts increasing from $10 to $50 (quality meaning of the same threadcount/fabric weight as was common before the 2000s) and the increase of quality jeans from $40 to $130. And so the true cost of things has only increased slowly.

But in reality, people in the middle class in the 1990s bought the $10 shirts and $40 jeans and the $300 CRT and were happy enough, while people in the middle class in the 2020s still spend $300 on TV hardware but also buy jeans and t-shirts that fall apart after 20 wears and feel like it's all a sham.

The numbers that will reflect how people feel about the economy - the vibes - will be the minimum amount it takes to purchase a middle-class lifestyle. Middle class lifestyle is what bundle of goods they feel socially obligated to purchase as reflected to them by their parents, relatives, employers, and the TV. I don't think CPI really tracks this and so CPI isn't going to tell us much about vibes and whether people think they're struggling or not.

I get the impression that Scott used to talk to poor people as their psychiatrist sometimes, listen empathetically to their vibes, and end up with some insight usually unavailable to people in his situation. Lately he listens to people like Bryan Caplan, hires a second nanny, and wonders what the fuss is about. Of course, what with the having a wife and twins and employing servants, it would be unreasonable to hope he would actually go spend some time in a community where the vibes are bad, like Orwell. But then it's unsurprising that he has little of value to add to the conversation, aside from looking at the official statistics, and mostly agreeing with the official narrative.

It would be interesting to hear more interviews by someone fair and not given to ragebait. We bought a second car because the house we could afford is very far from public transport, but when we looked into it, it was post Covid, and the used cars actually cost more than ordering a new car but with worse financing, so we did buy a new car. It then had to fit three car seats across and go down rutted dirt roads, so it's a small SUV not a sedan. Apparently my grandmother, a very respectable person, put her fourth child in the hatchback, but we wouldn't be equally respectable if we couldn't fit the third car seat until our oldest is 7. Both the car and the car seats are certainly better, but also more mandatory.

Yep, my parents were able to have three kids fit in a sedan, and when they bought an SUV it was a choice they made in their 40s because they had the extra cash for the luxury. Meanwhile, the second I got a positive pregnancy test for my third kid, my husband did his research and we traded in our two cars (we each had a car before we married) for a used minivan.

I see that Best Buy and Amazon have flat screen TVs (24") for $50. These are strictly superior to the old 20" CRT TVs.

"Strictly superior" may be a very slight overstatement, since IIRC these super-cheap televisions are subsidized by built-in advertisements. Maybe "strictly superior in 95 percent of graded areas (all except built-in advertisements)" would be more accurate.

From what I understand, you can buy displays that are sold without advertising, referred to as 'Commercial Displays'.

The issue is that you're then paying full-price, and no longer paying 50$s. Instead, you're paying something along the lines of 350$.

link to category "digital signage", filtered by "size: 24 inches"

Better links:

I'm neither American nor economy-literate, but no, Scott, my vibes are shit because as a matter of very obvious fact everything is expensive as hell and wages can't keep up and it's been getting worse for years.

I made the right career choices. I earn a solidly above-average wage. And yet every year our family budget grows slimmer. What haven't we cut by >90%? Vacations are cut. Gifts are cut. Entertainment is cut. Clothing is cut. Eating out is cut. Memberships of any sort are cut. We buy food as cheaply as possible. Clothing is second-hand. Toys for the kid are gifts from others. The car gets only essential repairs. Our kitchen fittings get none. We live in a featureless apartment in the middle of nowhere. And yet we accumulate no savings. We can economize as hard as we like and still we live paycheck to paycheck.

Where do the wages go?

Taxes. Rent. Insurance. Kindergarten.

And the rest is for essential purchases like food, gas and...and...no, that's it.

Of course it's Germany, not California. And we fail to do at least one thing that good Germans are supposed to do: Know every damn tax loophole and government handout available. I know, I know, it's a huge character flaw. Any welfare parasite knows his gibs better than I. But this is the difference between our miserable standard of living and being able to save up: Interfacing with the byzantine redistribution systems.

Where do the wages go?

Taxes.

Mood: Der Gesellschaftsvertrag.

It's solidarity, you know. Funding decadence and degeneracy is actually good for society. Don't be ignorant or cruel. You could be one of those poor unfortunates tomorrow! You're just privileged not to need that kind of assistance. Science proves that actually, people who receive welfare usually turn their lives around and become productive, and those who do not become terrible menaces to society. You can afford it. You can't just let them starve in the gutters. We have to pay for culture, else we'll suffer cultural decline, and it's only right that we do it via taxes because else nobody will consider it worthwhile. Be glad you don't have to endure American healthcare. Just emigrate to Somalia. Throwing billions at developing countries is the right thing to do, it makes us friends and buys us influence. The climate! The climate!

We live in the land of flesh pots, and Democracy, good and hard, is nothing more than a matter of deciding what boondoggle to waste everyone else's labor on. It's disgraceful.

Don't you have a one income household? What if your wife handled the benefits? I feel like that is the standard practice.

Anyway, sorry to hear man. I know Germany and the EU generally have it tough economically.

My wife, as well as she means, is somewhat less than consistent when pursuing tasks that cannot be completed in one sitting.

That said, I've given it a shot and asked her to try and get what she can from our taxes. We'll see.

But none of the positive economic indicators apply to European countries? No shit Scotts article on the US doesn't apply! They haven't had years of strong GDP growth or wage growth

Yes. I described my situation to give the Americans here another perspective on the economic malaise. The vibes are bad here, too, I say. Maybe the vibes are bad because the economy is bad, I imply. Maybe the Americans have the same problem, and their indicators are wrong.

I was disappointed, it didn't seem up to Scott's previous MMTYWTK posts. I'm not sure that I learned anything new, which is unfortunate, it seems like an interesting question.

Because of decreasing application friction, any given opportunity requires more effort to achieve than in earlier generations. Although this can’t lower the average society-wide success level (because there are still the same set of people competing for the same opportunities, so by definition average success will be the same), it can inflict deadweight loss on contenders and a subjective sense of underachievement.

I think people get quite upset about those who get ahead via unorthodox means too.

Bonnie Blue is spreading her legs and makes around 800,000 pounds a month, in the UK of all places. UK Warehouse Worker earns 26,000 annually, UK Chief Information Security Officer earns 130,000-170,000 pounds. She's not even that hot, wtf is going on? Maybe it's all lies and money-laundering but the point is that people believe it to be true. You are working hard and getting paid a miserly wage while someone else is doing fuck all and getting huge amounts of money.

Same with the guy who bought bitcoin early, I think this is why crypto is so widely hated online, people got rich in an 'unorthodox' way compared to hard work and high skill. Plus, crypto bros come off as low-status. Same with landlords, there's considerable bitterness towards boomers who bought a house that then 10xed while they were also getting decent yields off it. People see a boomer and think 'I am much more deserving but much poorer, the economy is terrible.' Same with 'billionaires' or 'tech-bros' in aspects of the popular imagination.

Of course it's always been this way. In the time of the Stuarts kings would give huge payments to their friends, the navy might be starved for shot while some sexy duchess was dripping with gems and titles. Good old fashioned sinecures and fraud is as old as civilization. But with social media this is rubbed in people's noses by algorithms deliberately trying to rage-bait them. There are people whose whole lifestyle is funded by rage-baiting and attention-grabbing for being obnoxious lowlifes. They are pushing everyone else down in social-economic hierarchy.

The economy feels fake and gay, in other words. To a large extent it is more fake and gay than before (SF venture capital especially) but even more so, it feels that way. Imagine being socially-bamboozled into taking on huge amounts of debt, studying and jumping through hoops to get a degree only to find it's mostly worthless. Now have fun interviewing with dozens of companies and jumping through endless hoops to get a meaningless job. HR makes a complete mess of things while you work, tiktok shows you the luxurious lifestyle of your unworthy betters... Very depressing.

I think a lot of people were taught growing up that society is run by a set of rules and if you follow those, if you are a good person in that sense, then you will be rewarded and life will work out. The realization that the rules are not what you were taught, if any hard rules at all even exist, is crushing. Especially if you believe that Bonnie Blue is not contributing much to society at all, even compared to the warehouse worker.

Bonnie Blue is spreading her legs and makes around 800,000 pounds a month, in the UK of all places. UK Warehouse Worker earns 26,000 annually, UK Chief Information Security Officer earns 130,000-170,000 pounds. She's not even that hot, wtf is going on?

Wait until you find out how much top entertainers in other disciplines make. Actors, models, sports stars... I get when this complaint is applied to how much the ordinary woman can make selling her body versus what an ordinary man would receive in return, but why cite someone who's literally at the top of their game? Yes, the genetic and mental abilities that let her perform in this narrow, highly competitive environment are unfair-- but it's unfair that Shaq is 7'1", too. And I would doubt that the work required to operate at her level is anything less than hard. No, not 3000x as hard as your average UK wagie... but not easy, either.

TBH I don't really disagree with the general thrust of your post... people are entitled to complain about the unfairness of life being shoved in their faces. But it bothers me when people prioritize their complaints by salience instead of by justice. The most unfair way to succeed is to adversely aquire the success of others; the second most unfair way to succeed is to be born into it. Everything else is downstream of criminals and old money, but people still spend a disproportionate amount of time worrying about social media thots.

I think people wouldn't have such a problem with supermodels earning large amounts of money (at least they're pretty hot) or top actors who've demonstrated some skill.

But sleeping with 1000 men in 24 hours is not an exceptional skill. Manipulating people's attention via social media and her own actions so that I know her name despite being on the other side of the world, that's not a worthwhile talent to hone. I think the game that she's top of is innately unworthy. She's not even really good at being a prostitute, she's good at manipulating people's attention. Like Hawk Tuah girl, except deliberate.

But sleeping with 1000 men in 24 hours is not an exceptional skill.

I mean... could you do it? And--

Manipulating people's attention via social media and her own actions so that I know her name despite being on the other side of the world, that's not a worthwhile talent to hone.

Have you been paying any attention to recent politics? Maybe you're speaking in a strictly moral sense, in which case, fine-- but let's be real, both of these things are hard to fake signals of a variety of qualities modern society de-facto promotes. I would be sympathetic to an argument that prostitutes should be less culturally influential as a class, but relative to the incentives society gave her I can't criticize her self-made bonafides. It's like... looking back at history, I strongly disapprove of the morality that drove Alexander the Great, but can't deny that he was truly Great within its constraints. Bonnie Blue isn't the Alexander of prostitutes, but I wouldn't mind comparing her to some lesser conqueror.

If you find it distasteful that a random rich naked woman on the internet got rich by manipulating attention, why do you choose to further give her attention by posting about her? I've never heard of her until this thread.

I am similarly baffled by aella-popularity hate on here. If she's so uninteresting then why do you keep hateposting about her? At least she is more famous for the texts she posts alongside her tits than her tits.

And why should I care that simp whales give her money, anyway. It's not like the alternative would be them donating it to me.

You can't raise the subject of attention-vampires without inadvertently feeding them. Sometimes you need to use the cursed spellbooks of the damned to fight demons and monsters - albeit with caution and care.

Wait until you find out how much top entertainers in other disciplines make. Actors, models, sports stars...

A significant amount of the resentment towards mainstream celebrities who are political opponents is caused by this too I feel. It's explicitly the justification for "shut up and dribble"

Ingraham said she was not interested in the political advice from "someone who gets paid $100 million a year to bounce a ball."

There's an additional wrinkle with Bonnie Blue (and some streamers who basically sell antisocial behavior like Johnny Somali or Logan Paul during his forest-exploring days also fall into the same bucket) because people probably think she represents a particularly corrosive mainstreaming of shamelessness. Is she significantly more attractive than some of the top pornstars over the last fifty years of the category? Not really. Is she more of a degenerate on camera? No. I'm not sure she's even richer than Jenna Jameson or others of that level. What she does exploit is the total breakdown of any cordon around this sort of behavior due to the internet and sites like Onlyfans.

Ingraham said

This isn't really related to anything, but in the process of reading that article I noticed the word "ungrammatical' used--

Ingraham responded to his comments Thursday, calling them "barely intelligible" and "ungrammatical" on her Fox News program The Ingraham Angle.

And I immediately wanted to complain that Ingram was using a coinage that mixes a germanic prefix ("un-") with a latinate root word ("grammar", from old french) and semi-redundant latinate suffixes ("ic" from the latin "icus" and "-al" from the latin "-alis"). I double checked and it turns out that "ungrammatical" really is the common form of the word, but now I'm irrationally pissed that 16th century british people didn't use the etymologically superior "ingrammatic/al". Anyways--

Without refuting your point (which I quite agree with) about why people are angry, I think delving one level deeper into the meta-cause of this anger requires understanding more generally that the entertainers people get the most heated about are the elites of particular subcultures generally excluded from what in victoria 3 terms I'd call america's "primary cultures." There's a particular sort of small landholder for which small-town america is traditionally famous for, and they're well respected and at least putatively represented by the agrobusiness lobby. Similarly, cops and soldiers have generals and astronauts in office; engineers have tech billionaires; schoolteachers have famous college professors; and so forth. When the elites of these accepted groups publicly speak about politics, people often complain about the content, but rarely seem to draw the connection that they're doing functionally the same thing as entertainers. Look at Black Science Guy, for example-- people hate the man fora variety of reasons, but the objects are typically specific to his personality and opinions rather than generally against the nation that he should have a right to speak at all. That's because even his political opponent acknowledge that the subculture for which he is an elite , (scientists in general), has the right to speak about politics in general. But there's far more vitriol when someone who is part of a non-accepted culture opines on politics, and the elite of a non-accepted culture opinion on politics is just a special case of that. People hate prostitutes/gooners, so they don't want to talk politics with Bonnie. Blue. They hate devout evangelicals so they don't want to hear from Tim Tebow. They hate "urban youth," so they don't want to hear Lebron or Johnny Somali. They hate the kind of people who have a collection of rare pepes or watch cheesy game shows (this is a supergroup of various red-tribers; middle-class retirees, unemployed trailer park dwellers, basement dwelling men, stay-at-home moms in rural areas, etc.) so they don't want to hear from Donald Trump.

That, I think, is the implicit complaint underlying, "this dumb entertainer that makes too much money making something stupid shouldn't talk about politics."

but why cite someone who's literally at the top of their game?

I think not all entertainment is created equal for this purpose, forms of entertainment in which talent is more legible usually face less of this kind of criticism. There is a sense in which Shaq has less input than Bonnie Blue for his success, but nobody has any doubt that he's one of the best to ever do it. As you go further down the chain here (actors, adult performers, influencers), the "unfairness" becomes more salient.

Thanks for writing this up, I have been wanting to write something very similar to this all day, but I have not had the chance.

My favorite comment from the SSC sub:

This was less than I wanted to know.

But my favorite substantive comment, from the Substack:

Something that gets hidden in the aggregate is that consumer sentiment among democrats is much higher than among republicans from 2021 until 2025, and then they switch. This seems relevant.

https://en.macromicro.me/charts/110438/us-michigan-consumer-sentiment-index-within-political-party

This feeds into the "media" argument, too, given that news and entertainment media are both aligned with the blue tribe. And this doesn't even just have to be a purely tribalistic thing; if you're an illegal immigrant from Mexico, there are probably very obvious reasons for you to have felt more optimistic about the state of things in 2022 than you do in 2025 (namely, in 2022 you probably weren't too worried about ICE raids, and in 2025 you probably are more worried about ICE raids, even if in absolute terms your risk hasn't actually changed much).

I kept wondering when Scott would finally ask, "is this the result of American society transitioning from a relatively homogeneous, high-trust society, to a fragmented, 'diverse,' mostly low-trust society?" I feel like he probably has a better grasp of the relevant data than I do, but that may also be why he didn't hit this angle? It would surely be outside the Overton window to suggest that the "vibecession" is just the natural result of decades of broadly unchecked immigration from low-trust societies, but to me that seems like the most obvious hypothesis. Economic "Brazilification" (as explained by Faceh and discussed by me) would also, presumably, underwrite "vibe" Brazilification. Whether the gaps between rich and poor actually widen, or are merely seen to widen, is irrelevant to the vibe. Whether politics is genuinely polarized, or only seems polarized: again, the vibe is the same. Whether public infrastructure really is garbage, or only seems to be garbage--and so on. Importing the attitudes of developing nations transforms those attitudes into a self-fulfilling prophecy concerning the state of things.

I think it doesn't help that the industries dominated by Democrats have far worse career prognoses as the American economy is consumed more and more by financial services and information technology. I recently read a book called What Design Can't Do, wherein the author, a graphic designer, basically says the wheels have completely fallen off the graphic design profession with the proliferation of easy design tools and AI and shares polls to show that morale has absolutely cratered. I'd imagine the same is true for many filmmakers, visual artists, authors, and even teachers. I'm speculating a bit, but many Democrat-majority careers have low wage ceilings, but are compensated instead with social prestige, artistry, and feelings of ownership. Economic metrics may be up, but the well of status that many careers once offered seems to be running dry, particularly for Democrats. The partisan media effect is definitely paying a role in the discrepancy, but I think there is genuine reason to believe Democrats will fare much worse, at least in social capital, after the economic transformations currently looming overhead.

For Scott in particular, and probably the majority of people here, the by-party consumer sentiment explains a lot. Republican consumer sentiment is back up to post-COVID pre-Biden levels. Democratic consumer sentiment is not only much lower than Republican (presumably because Trump) but lower than post-COVID pre-Biden levels And Scott pretty much has contact only with Democrats, so he's getting a skewed view of sentiment.

I'm going to back this one up- no one in my bubble thinks the economy is bad.

"is this the result of American society transitioning from a relatively homogeneous, high-trust society, to a fragmented, 'diverse,' mostly low-trust society?"

Maybe. But, the demographics of America have been stable through the last 10 years. Large transitions take generations. The viibecession was sudden 2020s phenomenon.

My hypothesis is that covid killed local offline life and America moved to the internet enmasse. Media was already in a negativity spiral, but now it affected the entire country rather than just the terminally online.

It amped up changes that were already in motion. Local politics became national politics, national politics because global politics. Freed from the shackles of institutional decorum, Tiktok influencers introduced a new level of hysteria.

Overall vibes = True vibes * social media negativity factor * % people engaging in social media

All 3 got worse after covid.

IDK about you but I feel like the internet is completely dead.

I moderate one of the 100 largest subreddits on the internet (/r/anime) we get 150-200k comments/month. That sounds like a lot, but we're a top 100 subreddit and we barely get 3 comments a minute. Even worse once we filter out the spambots we lose about 5% of that total.

This supposedly large forum has probably at most 300 actual regulars. (who make >30 posts per month remember most comments are really short and shallow.) 1 user (holofan4life) makes up >1.5% of all comments on the forum. (that's just 1 guy). The forum is dying (and it will be getting worse as LLM spam continues to get better I have to constantly find new ways to detect LLMs and LLM's are going to win sooner rather than later)

Even twitter feels weak, I can't get a conversation with anyone I reply to who isn't also a rationalist maybe I just don't have the ability to chat but it's like I have a higher chance of having a conversation with Matt yglesias or noah smith than I do with small accounts when I reply to them. it feels like the internet is a bunch of drive by posts with little to them.

Maybe it's the forums I use and the modes of conversation but like this is a tiny politics fourm in the middle of nowhere and it's pulling about 5% of the posts per day as the largest anime forum on the internet

I assume this may have something to do with Reddit being generally more optimized for use on desktops instead of smartphones and tablets, because people are increasingly accessing online content on the latter.

Yeah well phones are godawful for long form discussion which forums like this/reddit are for. The typing speed of the average phone user is somehow typing at 30 WPM? that seems really high to me, but desktop users easily reach well over 60 WPM on a regular basis. It is far faster to type with 10 fingers than with 2, which is a big reason for the shift away from text in general in phones. (also text is very much a medium of slow moving conversations while video is a much faster for the viewer form. There's also the new meta of talking directly to your phone and having your phone input the text which is probably significantly faster than typing to your phone)

Everyone moved to discord unfortunately. Why post anime memes on plebbit whem you can post them in a discord?

I absolutely hate the phenomenon but that's just how it is.

discord is a bunch of tiny microcommunties rather than 1 public square

I'm in the largest discord for the 3rd largest Yugioh yugioh format and we have approximately 20 regulars.

Maybe that makes sense though everyone is siloed and you "gotta be there' for everything in discord, there's no long public record for people who come in to really find easily (though you can search everything good luck finding the info) and discords are extremely hard to discover so you gotta find the place that links to the discord, but once you're in there's little value in leaving.

There's no way to have long form discussion on discord really.

also memes are banned on /r/anime consider posting on /r/goodanimemes instead

It finally clicked with me the other day why Discord drives me up the wall; it's because they took the worst parts of IRC with the worst parts of forums, slap them together, and called the unholy abortion a success.

I don't know how the internet is going to pull out of that goddamn spiral.

There's no way to have long form discussion on discord really.

Elsewhere in this thread I mentioned Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death--if you haven't read it, I recommend it. A lot of his concerns about television apply all the more so to the Internet, particularly as people shift to Discord.

I agree with you that LLM spam is well on its way to really wrecking the whole enterprise.

I kept wondering when Scott would finally ask, "is this the result of American society transitioning from a relatively homogeneous, high-trust society, to a fragmented, 'diverse,' mostly low-trust society?"

This doesn't explain why there's a step change in consumer sentiment after 2020. A society doesn't become low trust overnight, but the vibes basically shifted overnight (and remain low despite the end of covid). In fact, social trust has been declining since the seventies, but has been on the upswing for the past ten years. That's fatal to the social trust theory of the vibecession without stooping to something like "I know the trust measures are bogus because I disagree".

That fact alone is enough, in my view, to discount explanations founded on secular trends in community, etc that have been going on for sixty years or more. Perhaps only high mortgage rates and a frozen housing market remain as plausible explanations of "wtf happened in 2020".

In fact, social trust has been declining since the seventies, but has been on the upswing for the past ten years.

A bit of a tangent, but this is something that almost every study/article about anything skips over: Are those differences of opinion correct? Old, rich, educated, white people in safe homogeneous areas trust their neighbors more than young, poor, uneducated, non-white people in unsafe and diverse areas do. To what extent is that because the people they're interacting with are more trustworthy?

The findings are presented as psychological phenomena, but they only put a negligible amount of effort into arguing that the different trust scores are internally-driven instead of rational responses to different situations.

I mean, covid happened in 2020, and permanently smashed social trust for a huge percentage of the population.

And yet:

In fact, social trust has been declining since the seventies, but has been on the upswing for the past ten years.

I kept wondering when Scott would finally ask, "is this the result of American society transitioning from a relatively homogeneous, high-trust society, to a fragmented, 'diverse,' mostly low-trust society?"

This doesn't explain why there's a step change in consumer sentiment after 2020.

"Gradually, then suddenly." I like the metaphor of, say, super-cooled water suddenly crystalizing into ice on impact. All the ingredients for the trust collapse were there; various people have been sounding the alarm bells for decades, in various guises. Charles Murray's Coming Apart came out 15 years ago. Bowling Alone is a quarter century old. Amusing Ourselves to Death, older still. If you're old enough to remember Pat Buchanan and his crusade against "cultural Marxism," you might also be old enough to remember the John Birch Society. Once people might have suggested that this is a list of racist or conspiracy-theory-driven weirdos; today most people don't even seem to know what I'm referring to. The Postwar Consensus (as it is sometimes called) was firmly globalist; America played the role of Rome, and all along conservatives (usually, fringe conservatives) have been saying "this is going to end badly."

Well, it hasn't ended yet! In various ways things don't seem to be going well. And that itself may be an illusion--but it does seem to be the vibe.

Problem is that the US is higher trust than ten years ago. Maybe you can add more epicycles, perhaps some kind of inertial metaphor where we are paying suddenly for the decrease in trust that ended ten years ago, but it's getting to be a little much at this point.

By what metric? As far as I can tell people are ready to hurt each other physically in a way they simply were not ten years ago. That seems like a massive decrease in trust to me.

I already indicated the metric in my original post.

Gotcha, I missed that reading through the thread. Thanks!

Problem is that the US is higher trust than ten years ago.

That seems much more like an epicycle than anything I've suggested--your article shows 29% as a low point in the assertion "most people can be trusted," around 2014, but then suggests a rise to 34% in 2018--and then a flat line to 34% again in 2024. This, against a trend of clear decline since the 1970s, with no sign of a recent upward trend in sight--at best, it's flat (and still historically low) despite slight recovery from a local minimum. Your "upswing for the past ten years" seems like an exaggeration at best--and probably just tendentious. I have a variety of other concerns about this particular measure of social trust, which I suppose you would also call epicycles, but I'm not sure it matters, as it's not entirely clear to me what you're trying to actually say.

it's getting to be a little much at this point

If your point is something like "actually this 'vibecession' stuff is super complicated and certainly not attributable to a single influence" then, I mean, sure? I'm sure most people wouldn't even get through Scott's whole writeup before saying "it's getting to be a little much at this point." Sociological inquiry is often like that. I don't even think it would be wrong to say, as you did, "only high mortgage rates and a frozen housing market remain as plausible explanations of 'wtf happened in 2020.'" But those things still happened against a background of longer-term social developments that hadn't happened before. Mortgage rate and housing market problems aren't particularly novel. The slow but increasingly unmistakable unraveling of the American social fabric definitely is, and we're reaching levels of animosity I don't think we've really seen since the Civil War. I'd be much more persuaded if you tried to boil the whole conversation down to smartphones or social media, than to housing and mortgage rates. Or COVID, for that matter. But I think stuff like COVID and markets are things that shock our social system, at various times; they don't explain what happens in response to that shock. A different society would, presumably, have responded differently. That sort of thing seems, to me, worth thinking about.

wtf happened in 2020 is COVID happened in 2020?? I'm confused why you think that isn't a sufficient explanation.

Depending on who you ask, half the country decided the other half wanted them dead rather than doing simple common sense things, and the other half thought the first half wanted them unemployed or in camps. I could write paragraphs more on this but I feel like that simple fact explains a lot.

I admit this could be my bubble but nobody I know still cares about covid, or what people did during covid, despite me knowing several people who were very covid paranoid.

I see young Leftist Maskies every day.

The last time I went to a speed dating event (2025 summer) they required proof of vaccination and "encouraged" masks.

😑

All of your stories of your life are so fucking bizarre, man. Its like you have made it your life's mission to only interact with the insane.

I don't care much about Covid. I care a lot about what people did during Covid, to the point that I think people who claim they don't are lying to themselves and/or to others. Covid measures were too draconian, too partisan, and too clearly divorced from anything approaching neutral process or objective standards to be handwaved with an appeal to unspecified "systems" or generic "society". The pandemic response and related events permanently altered my relationship to my government and my nation.

The pandemic response and related events permanently altered my relationship to my government and my nation.

I gathered that. What I'm saying is, this isn't the case for the normies around me ("nobody I know still cares much about... What people did during covid"), so I am skeptical that it's driving the vibecession.

You don't have to actively care about something for it to have profoundly affected your life. In fact, I would guess that often the most disruptive things are the ones that people move on from, because that's how you get past it and move on with your life. But it will still have affected you!

Trauma reactions, both health and suppressed, can support this.

Healthy trauma survivors may be changed, but they don't think on it because they're trying to move on and focus on the rest of their lives instead. They can be physically / mentally scarred, but scar tissue isn't something you necessarily pick at.

Suppressed trauma survivors are also changed, and also don't think about it because avoidance is easier than the void in the sense of self/control/understanding. So they bottle it up and do not think about the bottle as much as possible.

I think it's not that COVID itself is still an issue, but that it carved paths in the sand that still have relevance today. Anecdotally, I don't know a single person who was partisan during COVID who didn't get much more partisan. Those changes in attitude didn't disappear once mask mandates were lifted.

A society doesn't become low trust overnight, but the vibes basically shifted overnight (and remain low despite the end of covid).

Sure, but preference cascades from the long term deterioration of trust can happen overnight, especially if there's a big inciting incident like COVID to trigger the cascade.

Very much cosign all of what you're saying here. The breakdown of societal trust and good will towards one another is another way to say that we are spiritually sick, to my mind.

The numbers are heavily manipulated. Very few people, especially in industry, actually look at them. I occasionally talk about accounting and metrics, e.g. imputed rent where the rental value of assets are included in economic growth without actually being measured - accounting for all of these, yearly growth numbers can be greatly reduced. Quality adjustments and awkward exclusions make CPI almost irrelevant - not counting housing/rent at all (while it's imputed to 10% of GDP). Healthcare and insurance are covered by CPI, but in a very distorted way (while this is 20-25% of total GDP... they only include out of pocket expenses, while employer-paid premiums skyrocket ... and are actual compensation, another 1-20% everyone forcibly allocates to the cartel):

In different periods, the proportions of spending vary greatly, e.g. 40% of income on food, 10% on housing, 20% on clothing etc. to 50% housing, 15% food, 20% mandatory car... Inflation calculations do not account for this, but measure the overall basket's change. My company buys people's personal budget histories to see what actual costs and spending habits look like. From my Christian perspective, consumption patterns have grown to 30% sin. From my growth-is-good perspective, people are using less molecules. When it costs millions of dollars to change an electrical pole because of increased bureaucracy, there's no increase in utility but everyone in the community is saddled with more debt.

At the core, utility is about ranking choices, preferences. Unfortunately, our society has shown preference for sin and our system enables wealth-destroying consumption and work-breaking with seductive choices, gambling, easy debt, taxation increases etc.

Describe what you mean by sin. Alcohol? Weed? Netflix subscriptions?

Healthcare and insurance are covered by CPI, but in a very distorted way (while this is 20-25% of total GDP... they only include out of pocket expenses, while employer-paid premiums skyrocket ... and are actual compensation, another 1-20% everyone forcibly allocates to the cartel):

PCE inflation includes these, and the trends aren't different. CPI actually tends to be higher when inflation spikes.

The entire idea of "disposable" income is, to me, the biggest mismatch between Boomers and today. We all agree on the "necessary" expenditures; housing, food, basic clothing, and utilities. Then, we have the modern additions to utilities; internet and cell service. It is not even possible for me to even search for a job if I don't have one or both of these things. Yes, yes, economists will tell you that the relative value or marginal utility or whatever of a cell phone is so much better than land line service in the 1970s. But I'm paying for it because I have to.

Then, however, we have things like clothing, consumer electronics, restaurants, and "cheap" entertainment (subscriptions). These seem basic but stack up and stack up in recursive ways (like I mentioned above) that aren't captured in traditional methods of inflation. Are these truly optional goods that I am choosing to spend on?

"Well sorry, snowflake" Bruno the Boomer says, "Maybe in stead of watching your TikyToks and Netflixes, you should just read a book!"

And Bruno the Boomer is right in that specific circumstance. These are, purely speaking, "optional" purchases. But it leads to much trickier problem: What am I supposed to do with my time if the jump between "basic" living and comfortable spending is so high? Incentives matter. You can find many interesting graphs out there that show how, in some cities in the US and many countries in Europe, there exist harsh tax cliffs that _DIS_incentivize making more money. If I lose $10,000 in benefits after increasing my income by less than $10,000, I've given myself a pay cut by earning more (yes that sentence is valid).

This same logic applies to marginal consumption and disposable income. If I can pay for all of my basic necessities, but leveling up to dinner out once or twice a week, guilt free streaming service subscriptions, a new-ish but not top of the line car, and a couple home goods (big couch, whatever) necessitates another $15,000k in annual income (on which I will be taxed substantially) .... then why even bother? Cheap beer, free or pirated porn movies and YouTube clips can sustain my entertainment needs and living in a shitty apartment is .... what all of my friends do. People are being asked not to take the next step on a steep trail, but to leap across a valley of income for ... marginal benefit.

And I think this is the common cause behind things like quiet quitting, the massive rise in the permanently non-working (disabled and NEETs etc.), inceldom, and the various flavors of nomadic forever-festival going weirdos, permanent expats, and semi-grifter YouTubers. It's interesting that I posted a top level comment on Shagbark earlier this week. Being a semi-bum in 2025 does seem to have roughly the same life satisfaction of every group up to about the top 20% income. And this is because we've eliminated real poverty -- not having enough to eat, being so unstable in housing that death from exposure might actually be on the menu.

Was consumerism really so different in years past? YesChad.jpeg. People forget that real, true poverty did exist, at least in pockets of the US, well into the 1970s. In extremely infrastructure-isolated places, it persisted even longer. After WW2, the consumer economy actually functioned as a compounding system for people to get out of poverty. Buying an electric oven meant a household was saving meaningful time and effort. The ever increasing reliability of cars (while maintaining price relative to inflation) meant people could get to and from work with high confidence - and, therefore, earn more. A television meant actual awareness of the outside world and a source of information that could lead to better decision making. A telephone allowed for the creation and sustainment of social relationships and communities outside of face to face interaction, which also meant the ability to generate more business relationships (i.e. find new jobs, find local customers etc.).

Today, my new oven has fun little chimes when it pre-heats. It's also more energy efficient (so I am told). New trucks are less reliable because of fuel emission fuckery and mostly cost more because the seats are heated and my phone connects to the radio for some fucking reason. My TV has a resolution I can't comprehend, with unlimited semi-AI slop available for consumption. It stays off unless sports are on. And my telephone, which lives in my pocket, mostly harasses me with beeps and dings to remind me to interact with apps so that my data can be sold to hedge funds.

Consumerism, today, has inverted its relationship with consumers. Before, consumer level products really did make your life better. Today, consumer products are like carnival rides; it's fun for a while and only costs a few dollars. It doesn't improve my life.

The Vibecession, to me, is a reaction to some harsh nonlinearities that have developed over the past 40 years. Before, you might never get into the upper class, but you could see your life improve just a bit almost every year. Now, we're asking kids exiting college (which didn't teach them anything and saddled them with debt) to live like a monk for 10 - 15 years so that, on the other side, they can move into a home they still can't afford. In the interim, they can enjoy consumer products that help dull this drudgery, but don't act as compounders. Who in the hell would take this deal?

Quibble with one of your examples - of the recent college grads I know well (<5 years out of college, with annual incomes ranging from ~$15k to more than $500k), none of them have any streaming service subscriptions. Only one or two of them have cable TV (and none of the rich ones!). At least in this example, it seems hard to assign any blame for the malaise to the notion that one will never "level up" to paid streaming when even the very-wealthy are pirates too.

Is your model that any absolute measure of life-ease is irrelevant and the only thing that matters is a feeling that tomorrow will be easier than today? If so, then we have to assume that living in a wealthy society is the problem in itself (as any additional dollar will buy less and less utility, and at a certain point all pressing needs are taken care of, as you note). If not, in what sense must the poorer of these recent grads be "living like monks" if their consumption habits are very similar (wrt streaming at least)?

If you discovered that some very cheap good is only slightly worse than some expensive good you could buy instead, why would you feel bad about buying the cheap good? Even if you could easily afford the expensive good, why shouldn't you still buy the cheap good and save the rest? Yes status signaling, but there's no solution to status signals being costly, a cheap signal is inherently worthless. Why shouldn't this situation make me feel wealthy beyond belief?

If this is what's happening, I would expect extremely positive vibes - not a vibecession. I think a materialist explanation for the vibecession has to lead from goods that are legitimately expensive, housing in choice locales for example, not things being too cheap!

Scott notes that the second derivative of various economic indicators does highly correlate with the vibecession, but questions "can people really sense the second derivative of GDP over decades-long timescales"? I think you give a pretty strong argument that yes, people can easily notice this second derivative. All your examples about consumerism not leading to increased real economic power seem pretty second derivativy to me.

my phone connects to the radio for some fucking reason

I use this feature every day and love it.

How much, and I'm requesting you express it quantitatively, more happy does this make you in terms of whole of life satisfaction than an ipod with an aux cord, or a collection of CDs?

Almost any clear improvement that I quite enjoy doesn't have a large impact on my whole life satisfaction. So I trivially answer not very much.

Radio is terrible. I like clicking up a podcast or music from my phone. I remember the pre-bluetooth days with CDs and ipods and GPS units. Tolerable but a step down from Bluetooth. I already own a phone and they already have to put a PCB in the console. Sticking a Bluetooth antenna in that is almost free. Certainly cheaper and less complicated than me buying a set of CDs.

For me quite significantly because aux cords were never a thing in regular car radios here. Given that radio has played pure shit for the last 20+ years, being able to conveniently play my own playlists is a rather significant feature.

Now, we're asking kids exiting college (which didn't teach them anything and saddled them with debt) to live like a monk for 10 - 15 years so that, on the other side, they can move into a home they still can't afford. In the interim, they can enjoy consumer products that help dull this drudgery, but don't act as compounders. Who in the hell would take this deal?

Generation X. It was the only one on offer. Well except we didn't have the consumer products.

GenX here. I got into this with my supposedly intelligent GenX peers, both PhDs, who simply couldn't believe that at 19 years in the early 1990's I could see that all of this housing stuff was an unaffordable nightmare. Maybe half (if I'm being generous) of my friends own their homes and most didn't buy until well into their 40's. People pretend like this is a new problem but it was well in play 30 years ago.

My supposedly intelligent Gen X peers were buying houses like mad during the bubble, using ARMs. I'm looking at them doing this and thinking they're crazy, using an ARM when interest rates were at historic lows (about where they are today, in fact).

My view of that is that we (as a cohort) couldn't really afford the houses either. I'd add it as another chit in the 'this isn't a new problem' bucket.

I think you're right.

This sets up a whole other piece about how they were hoodwinked into it. Probably something about the false promises being hard to see before 2008, as well as a lot more social pressure from Boomers to conform.

Oh, another thing that adds to bad vibes: the proliferation of cash discounts again. This happened during the big post-COVID inflation, but it's remained. Cash is a pain in the butt, but since 4% is 4%, eschewing the cash discount feels like throwing away money, and dealing with cash to get that little bit of money makes me feel poorer.

Although this can’t lower the average society-wide success level (because there are still the same set of people competing for the same opportunities, so by definition average success will be the same),

So he isn't taking into account the Indians (here, but more obviously in Call Centers overseas), the Latin Americans (and their growing remitance money to their countries of origin) and the Chinese (trained in american schools and and employed in chinese companies).

Your grandfather had to be the best of his city, your father the best of the state and you, you have to be the best in the world.

you, you have to be the best in the world.

Not actually as hard as it sounds, given patio11's "narrowing your professional Venn-diagram" thing -- it's hard to be the best software dev in the world, but "best available English speaking dev with deep domain expertise in X and track record of Y" is eminently acheivable.

what is the niche in which you are the best in the world?

That would be pretty obvious doxxing, now wouldn't it?

I would say that there's actually multiple in which I could be plausibly the best available person in the world, if I were available.

The Venn diagram starts with things like "located in North America", "speaks and writes excellent native English", "formal degree", "competent but not great programmer in languages X,Y,Z" -- this is still a pretty big set, but much smaller than "literally everyone in the world".

Now add "deep knowledge of areas X,Y,Z that are not typically things that programmers are into" plus maybe "experience solving problems in these domains with code" and the set shrinks dramatically -- for patio11 as I recall X,Y,Z were "finance blogging", "corporate Japan" and "bingo card generators"; last I looked he's some kind of emeritus with Stripe, so it seemed to work with him.

Niche areas are niche, of course -- so the intersection of "people who want to hire somebody with these skills" and "people who don't already have such a person on payroll" may be unhelpfully small -- that's where the networking comes in I guess.

located in North America", "speaks and writes excellent native English"

the first one is a non-factor in a global economy. Second one is less and less important as time moves forward, most everyone with an ounce of ambition studies english at one point or another and as American culture permeates your own, english becomes more common, and lets be honest here, the "excellent" qualifier is only important/needed/required if your career involves your language skills.

That just leaves "formal degree" "competent but not great programmer in languages X,Y,Z" in your diagram. With something like programming, formal degrees are less important than in other disciplines, for sure is a requirement for the code monkeys in the IT room, but for the rock stars? I would think projects done and repositories would be the deciding factor which leaves only "competent but not great programmer in languages X,Y,Z" on your upper level as relevant.

Now, you can add an arbitrary qualifiers and make yourself the best in the world in a artificial niche of "Northamerican with excellent english with a degree who is compentent in X,Y,Z language; with deep knowledge of areas X,Y,Z that are not typically things that programmers are into and experience solving problems in these domains with code etc, etc." but at the end of the day the only important thing (at least for a programmer in this example) would be the proficiency in the language and ability to parse tasks in it. Everything else isn't needed to be considered the best in the world programmer.

If we went with your logic "Best in the world" would be a useless category. Usain Bolt? nah I'm the fastest 15 year old chinese-canadian yiddish knowing conservative bald person in the world. Of course it's not as hard as it sounds that way; the normal way, the way most people associate with the term and most companies appreciate and would pay big bucks for is another story.

I would think projects done and repositories would be the deciding factor which leaves only "competent but not great programmer in languages X,Y,Z" on your upper level as relevant.

You would think wrong -- indeed you would be missing the entire point. None of the first few circles in the Venn diagram are all that important at all (as you point out, although you are quite mistaken about location/fluency not mattering) -- the important things are the "not typical programmer things". (ie. the opposite of what you will find in the code monkey room) Degrees are helpful here, or hands-on experience, depending on the specific nature of the thing -- but these are concrete skills, not identity groups.

Companies will not pay big bucks for being a bald chinese canadian -- they will however pay big bucks for somebody who writes acceptable code and already knows everything about their particular business niche. Because there are a lot of niches, and not many programmers who even realize that there's more to their job than "proficiency in the language and ability to parse tasks."

you are quite mistaken about location/fluency not mattering)

for best in the world, yeah I don't think those matter, there are Indians barely understandable in english employed in language critical roles right now.

Companies will not pay big bucks for being a bald chinese canadian -- they will however pay big bucks for somebody who writes acceptable code and already knows everything about their particular business niche. Because there are a lot of niches, and not many programmers who even realize that there's more to their job than "proficiency in the language and ability to parse tasks."

While this may be true in some circumstances, that doesn't mean that programmer is the best in the world in the metrics normally asociated with the moniker of "best in the world" regardless of how much he earns. They would be seen more as adequately skilled with some aditional skills, not "best in the world".

Your grandfather had to be the best of his city, your father the best of the state and you, you have to be the best in the world.

Yeah I think this is a huge part of it, having to compete with people from all over the world. He does talk about the instability of things at some point, but quickly brushes over it. That your grandfather could have a good life working 30 years at one company, now people have to hop from job to job to get a similar level of wealth.

I'll offer my pet theory (if you can call it that) as an explanation.

For decades the social life of Western nations was broadly based on four basic assumptions.

#1 - If you bust your ass, study hard, live a dull and normie life and finish college, you'll find a job in the field you majored in reasonably fast

#2 - Credit is reasonably cheap; even if your earnings are crap and you have no accumulated wealth, you'll still be able to get a house/flat and a car

#3 - There's pretty much no inflation; even if your earnings are sort of crap and you're working a crummy dead-end job, at least your money isn't depreciating and you can plan and buy accordingly

#4 - Consumer goods will become cheaper and cheaper as globalization spreads and the entire world becomes ever more interconnected and tariffs gradually disappear; maybe you're not earning much but the electronics and whatnot that you want are reasonably cheap

Number 1 and 2 crumbled into dust after 2008. Number 3 and 4 did so as a result of COVID restrictions and the Ukrainian War. Now the precariat of the West is staring into the abyss bereft of any illusions, with the threat of a new great war on the horizon to boot.

But two big factors here seem to describe only a portion of the economy for a portion period of time. College? It was only since the mid teens that the US got over 1/3rd college degree attainment. Now it's pushing toward 40%, but college as a social norm is relatively new. Truly cheap credit is a post-2008 phenomena; a lot of the politics of the 90s were about how the cost of credit was quite high and was a push behind the Clinton deficit reduction - the average mortgage interest rate was in the 8s as recent as 2000, hanging out in the 5s and 6s during the 2000s before 08. Inflation and rapidly improving consumer goods I will definitely grant have been good since the early 90s, but half of this western social life package being suggested is really about the post-Great Recession period, so I'm not really convinced this is the core of economic sentiment for people in their 40s and 50s.

In the last century there were fairly high paying manufacturing jobs that could give you a middle class lifestyle. So in the United States from about WWII to 2008, you could be middle class if you worked hard. The route gradually changed but the rule mostly held.

How does $26.50 an hour in 2024 dollars sound? And that was after the first big drop in manufacturing employment (circa 2000)

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1OtQZ

Where? In NYC or Silicon Valley, that's just barely acceptable. In Dothan Alabama, that's a comfortable living.

I used to post stuff like Scott's article before COVID, because from the viewpoint of an Xer who lived through the late 70s and early 80s, redditors complaining about how great things were for the Boomers were really annoying. It was true then, I think. But it's not true now. Before COVID, house prices were rising but more slowly and interest rates were crazy low. Now interest rates are higher and house prices even higher. Unemployment was falling then, it's rising now. Real wages had been rising for a long time then, they fell precipitously and are rising slightly more slowly now and are still below trend. And that's with higher unemployment, which typically makes wages look higher (because the unemployed aren't factored in and usually unemployment eats at the bottom of the market).

i do think there's some manipulation going on too -- both for financial reasons (the big uptick in "AI is a bubble" stories shortly before NVidia reported earnings seemed quite suspicious to me), and political reasons (Democrats want sentiment to be bad). I said earlier I think a good test is going to be holiday spending. So far, it looks better than sentiment, but only modestly so.

Spirit? Meaning? These have been dead longer than I've been alive. They're not what's causing bad vibes.

Spirit? Meaning? These have been dead longer than I've been alive. They're not what's causing bad vibes.

X to doubt. They have been dead for the intellectual class for a long time, the last few decades is when the same nihilistic worldview has spread to the masses.

Reading the article, I can't help but feel that Scott is doing that thing he does where he's very credulous of the official stats when it suits the article he wants to write.

Back in 2020 - 2023ish, when prices on everything were taking off like bottle rockets, the official inflation rate was fairly flat. Hell, various outlets even changed the definition of "recession" so we didn't have to admit to being in one. I'm not sure if those political moves ever got cleaned up in the data.

He gives lip service to that idea when discussing Noah Smith, but goes right back to it when talking about the CPI again.

Personally, my grocery bill has doubled in the last ten years. My house has more than doubled in value - I'm fairly well off, and I couldn't afford to live in my neighborhood now. A new model of the same car I'm driving (5 years old) would cost $20,000 more. My employment situation feels more precarious than ever, and the horror stories I hear from acquaintances who have been laid off recently make me wonder if I'd be better off eating a shotgun than going back on the job hunt if I end up unemployed. Even the clothes I buy are lower quality and fall apart in ways that they didn't less than a decade ago. Every retail center in my region has so many closed up shops that it looks like a mouth with missing teeth.

I'm sure Scott could disregard all this by saying that I'm making more money than I used to be, but if this is a healthy economy, maybe we should reevaluate what healthy looks like.

My employment situation feels more precarious than ever, and the horror stories I hear from acquaintances who have been laid off recently make me wonder if I'd be better off eating a shotgun than going back on the job hunt if I end up unemployed.


Padme: “Shotgun” is some colloquial term for a local dish, right?

Padme: “Shotgun” is some colloquial term for a local dish… right?

Job offers are like chicks, it’s easiest to pull more of them when you already have one.

Yet, nowadays, even when you’re just casually searching while still employed, it still feels like a massive pain spamming applications, doing the same monkeydances through interviews. If you receive an offer, there’s no guarantee it’d be more tempting than just staying at your current role.

I imagine jobhunting if/when you’re unemployed, especially when you actually need the money (as opposed to treating it like funemployment), is multitudes more unpleasant and stressful.

Also recently it came out that the algorithms used by hiring websites were effectively black-listing millions of applicants from getting hired by anyone. Which could explain some of the horror stories about putting out 600 applications and not getting a callback from anyone.

Personally, my grocery bill has doubled in the last ten years. My house has more than doubled in value - I'm fairly well off, and I couldn't afford to live in my neighborhood now. A new model of the same car I'm driving (5 years old) would cost $20,000 more

My understanding is that a lot of economic inflation models depend on "hedonic regression" adjustments for these prices. So they argue like, "sure the prices in nominal dollars are up. But now your groceries include Flamin' Hot Doritos instead of boring old potato chips, the new car has Automatic Lane Stabilization to keep you safe, and your neighborhood is much safer now that all the people there have gotten older."

Yes, "quality adjustments" are how economists lie about inflation. It's what leads people to look at alternative, objective measures like gold or Big Macs.

if I'd be better off eating a shotgun than going back on the job hunt if I end up unemployed

You could of course sell your assets, move to Asia or South America and live well...

You could of course sell your assets, move to Asia or South America and live well...

You can do that if you're a certain kind of person, who can be comfortable living in a foreign culture. Most people aren't; even most expatriates aren't, which is why there are expatriate communities.

But as you said you can just hang out in an ethnic enclave which exist for white westerners all over Asia. And the Philippines is barely a foreign culture anyway.

Personally, my grocery bill has doubled in the last ten years. My house has more than doubled in value - I'm fairly well off, and I couldn't afford to live in my neighborhood now. A new model of the same car I'm driving (5 years old) would cost $20,000 more. My employment situation feels more precarious than ever, and the horror stories I hear from acquaintances who have been laid off recently make me wonder if I'd be better off eating a shotgun than going back on the job hunt if I end up unemployed. Even the clothes I buy are lower quality and fall apart in ways that they didn't less than a decade ago. Every retail center in my region has so many closed up shops that it looks like a mouth with missing teeth.

It's this part. When I can see how my purchasing power has fallen in the past decade, or how it's gone off a cliff compared to what my parents had in 2000, I don't see much merit in arguments that life is great because Big Line Go Up and phones/weed/gambling/porn.

Indeed. There's something grimly funny in the guy who wrote "Getting Eulered" willingly getting Eulered.

"Inflation is actually fairly low" is a good example of this; the official measure of inflation is year over year rate of change; i.e. we're using the 1st derivative as the true measure of what's happening. The rate at which things are getting more or less expensive can be a useful thing to know, but it's not the whole story, especially in times of dramatic shocks to the market, like Covid. During Covid, particularly the lockdowns, we saw a massive spike in the costs of goods due to supply chain issues. Once these issues were resolved, the prices should have come down, but they did not! But because the official inflation rate went back down to normal levels, we are told that our worries over inflation are unfounded, never mind that I can look at what I am able to put in my shopping cart now, and what I was able to put in the cart just 5 years ago (usually, for even less money), and see there's a problem.

We did see the spikes due to supply chain issues get alleviated. What didn't go away was the price increases caused by the stimulus bills, nor would it be expected that they did so.

Back in 2020 - 2023ish, when prices on everything were taking off like bottle rockets, the official inflation rate was fairly flat.

No, it was not. It hit its highest value since the 1980s recession, 9.1%. During the GFC it hit 5.3%, in 1990 it hit 6.4%; inflation was really high, but it showed in the numbers.

Where did you find 9.1%? Looking at Fred, I didn't see it as reported above seven.

I got it from Investopedia, but the FRED data agrees. One correction: the GFC is at 5.6% and 1990 at 6.3%

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1OtOP

Thanks. On revisiting this, I realize that I am retarded and was looking at the wrong graph.

Yes, it's absolutely this. Inflation numbers are the main one, but I don't know how you can watch, for example, the job numbers be revised in the same direction every time and then go take the revisions as truth too, instead of the most plausible lie.

For inflation, we should be able to see it from M2 alone.

Price increase in the very basics of American life - fast food - have apparently outpaced official inflation since 2014 by about a factor of 3.

https://financebuzz.com/fast-food-prices-vs-inflation

Sure, food is just a small part of spending in a rich society, however..

Price increase in the very basics of American life - fast food - have apparently outpaced official inflation since 2014 by about a factor of 3.

Meanwhile, in California...

And minimum wages in general have been going up in urban areas.

Job numbers don't get revised in the same direction every time.

https://infogram.com/2023-to-2025-and-differences-1h7v4pdkqr1084k

This is missing the recent downard adjustment of 900k, but the trend is obvious - numbers are frequently adjusted up as well. In November 2021 job numbers were adjusted upwards by nearly half a million.

From January 2022 through October 2024, it was revised downward 21 times averaging 50k, and revised upward 13 times, averaging 25k. So, for every three times they revised downward, they revised upward twice, and across those average five revisions, they overestimated by 20k per month.

I picked the start date because that's when the numbers started to look normal after COVID nonsense. I picked the end date because of a certain something that happened in November 2024. It's even worse if you start from 2023, because from 1/23 through 8/24 (the vibes were shifting), we had 4 upward revisions and 16 downward revisions, averaging -36k per month.

The numbers were cooked, constantly, to make Biden look good.

From January 2022 through October 2024, it was revised downward 21 times averaging 50k, and revised upward 13 times, averaging 25k. So, for every three times they revised downward, they revised upward twice, and across those average five revisions, they overestimated by 20k per month.

Okay, I'm glad we agree it's not the same direction every time.

The numbers were cooked, constantly, to make Biden look good.

Huh?

Trump I, Jan 2017 - Dec 2020: Average revision -11k. 24 down, 24 up.

Biden, Jan 2021 - Dec 2024: Average revision +25k. 22 down, 26 up.

Trump II, Jan 2025 - Jul 2025 (latest data with 3rd revision available): Average revision -70k. 6 down, 0 up.

We've got a pretty balanced number of up and down revisions during Trump I and Biden. The average adjustment during Biden's term was up, and during Trump's terms it's down.

So if you think the initial numbers are cooked and the revision is more accurate, then in fact the cooked numbers were unfavorable to Biden and favorable to Trump.

If you think the initial numbers are more accurate and the revision is cooked, then it's not clear why it's even necessary to cook the revision. It should be just as easy to cook the initial number instead, and then there's no pesky revisions that people can point to.

I picked the start date because that's when the numbers started to look normal after COVID nonsense.

Is the BLS not able to cook the numbers due to COVID?

I agree that the Meaning Crisis is real for many young people, but that doesn't explain the Vibecession. Young people aren't complaining about being awash in material wealth with no direction in their lives, they're complaining that the economy is doing poorly and getting worse, that they have no opportunity to advance, that they earn less money than their parents and grand-parents, that housing has unaffordable while boomers could get a house on a single blue collar salary, etc., despite every single official statistic contradicting them.

they're complaining that the economy is doing poorly and getting worse, that they have no opportunity to advance

Is this not because this is the only source of meaning in their life? By and large, they have abandoned the Church, family (spouse, kids, often their parents), civic society (the mythology of the American Experience) and embraced the material as the principal metric of personal success and some form of nihilism as their guiding philosophy.

How could the framing of life you outlined possibly lead to peace? The Church’s paradigm is martyrdom in everything (serve God, love your neighbor and ignore life). Civil societies answer is to “ask what you can do for your country”. Family life offers “meaning through kids” - consider now, not only the rejection of having kids, but that someone could even be defined as their role as a parent! What did we replace those things with? Tinder, social media, college and a career for everyone…

housing has unaffordable while boomers could get a house on a single blue collar salary, etc., despite every single official statistic contradicting them.

It was the generation before the boomers who really had cheap houses. Fun fact: the 1940s jump from 75 to 110 on the inflation-adjusted Case-Shiller index was called a "housing shortage", and people back then expected to see prices eventually brought down again, in a decade or two tops, not further doubled.

To be fair, houses have also skyrocketed in average size (50% IIRC) and quality (part of that 1940s price increase was that luxuries like "indoor plumbing" were becoming universal) since that time. We can also naturally afford to spend more of our income on houses than we could during the Great Depression or WW2, and we tend to still have more disposable income left over.

I'd still cut the kids some slack on this one. We're still (hopefully!) at a housing price peak today, despite mortgage rates more than doubling a few years ago. Double the cost of their houses, then double the cost of borrowing the cost of their houses, and pretty soon we're talking about serious money!

The mortgage-cost chart in Scott's article shows we've almost reached the early 1980s peak of unaffordability. As in the 1940s, I do expect this to go down again, but for a different reason; back then we were building and thus increasing supply, but in the next decade or two, the boomers will be dying and thus reducing demand. That's a pretty long time though. It would be better if we could build but decades of anti-growth, anti-sprawl propaganda, along with (and partially causing) the re-centralization of employment in cities, has worked its magic.

The economy is basically the stand-in for God for many people in modern consumerist America. I'm saying that they don't know what they're talking about, and that they would be happy with even less material wealth if they were spiritually sound.

If you read the article, Scott tears all the economic arguments to pieces. Even housing is not really THAT expensive, and you can own a house on less than $100k combined income in a decent area if you don't blow your money and spend wisely. I don't buy the economic arguments at all.

"Even housing is not really THAT expensive, and you can own a house on less than $100k combined income in a decent area if you don't blow your money and spend wisely."

Absolutely not, not even close. I don't even live in a particularly expensive area - Hampton Roads - and 100k combined would be far beyond my ability to afford. Where are you people pulling these numbers from? No, Scott did not "tear the economic arguments to shreds;" he, like you, are just naively accepting blatantly fraudulent employment and inflation numbers as gospel truth, and demanding I believe you and not my empty bank account.

Absolutely not, not even close. I don't even live in a particularly expensive area - Hampton Roads - and 100k combined would be far beyond my ability to afford.

Scott's saying that if you made $100k (or some undefined amount less), you could afford to buy a house. Which seems to be true in the area of Hampton Roads.

he, like you, are just naively accepting blatantly fraudulent employment and inflation numbers as gospel truth

As Scott points out

Every so often, someone makes a site with a name like TruthStats.org claiming that all government economic statistics are lies, and inflation is 10,000% higher than reported.

It's never true, these sites typically turn out to be either numbers pulled out of the person's ass or government statistics plus some factor pulled out of the person's ass. The latest figures may be suspect (because they're based on incomplete data) but outside of that the stats are actually pretty good.

Dude, this is where I live. I see the house listings, I know what I can be approved for in a home loan, and I know i can never even save up enough for a down payment on 100k a year. Why do people insist on telling me to stop believing my lying eyes?

Because you could just be bad at math. Or finance.

The other thing is that people aren't comparing like for like. NYC in the 1960s was a much smaller city than NYC today. If you look at similar sized cities as NYC was in the 60s today the pricing of housing in a similar area in real terms is basically the same as it was in NYC in the 60s.

EDIT: This is wrong.

The second largest city in the US, by population, is Los Angeles, at 3.9 million to NYCs 8.5 million. NYC's population in the 1960s was about 7.8 million, considerably larger than Los Angeles today. There are no US cities of similar size to New York City in the 1960s today, so your comment is utter nonsense that you obviously didn't even bother to check.

IIRC the population of Manhattan specifically is down substantially over the last century, even if NYC has grown slightly as a whole. It's hard to compare like-to-like.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Manhattan

Manhattan's population is down a lot since the 1920s, but it's about equal to the 1960s population.

so your comment is utter nonsense that you obviously didn't even bother to check

Fair enough, I remember reading something like this somewhere on the internet a few years ago and so brought it up. I fully accept that I didn't even bother to check, and yes, I should have done that.

Let nobody say that I don't admit to making bad points when I actually make bad points.

Props, man.

Eh, technically true, but Manhattan in particular was more populous and much more dense in the first half of the 20th century. Not that anyone really wants to go back to that level of housing quality, though.

My father bought a property at CAD $200k in 2000 (approximately $375k today at 2.5% annualized inflation) when he was my age. The property today is worth $2500k today, in actual numbers. It was a 5 bed 2 bath with an unfinished basement, and a backyard - so a very good place to raise a family of 5.

I bought a condo in a cheaper city this year for $500k. It is a 2 bed 2 bath with about 800sq feet of space, and I only got it because recent Airbnb regulations made it need to be sold in a hurry. It has no yard, and is in a much worse neighborhood than my father purchased.

The median private sector wage in Canada in 2000 was approximately $45k a year (approximately $83k a year today at 2.5% annualized inflation). The median private sector wage in Canada in 2025 is approximately $69k a year.

It's not a vibe-session. That's just what the government and economists claim so we don't mount their heads on pikes as a warning to others.

You're talking about Canada, not the US, which has had much stronger economic growth compared to nearly every other developed country, and yet the economic vibes don't reflect that.

To be fair, our former finance minister Christina Freeland refered to Canada’s woes as a “vibesession” too.

To be fair, I think the Canadian economy is in a much different place than the United States. Off the top of my head you guys are dealing with much stronger demographic and labor issues, not to mention absolute housing insanity. At least in the U.S., I can still feel some semblence of economic growth even if much of it comes from tenuous/unsatisfying/rent-seeking pursuits and the areas that were hollowed out over the past 30 years (i.e. Rust Belt) seem to have at least stabilized in their decline. It feels much more like stagnation than outright collapse. The Canadian situation appears to be inching toward the latter.

I bought a condo in a cheaper city this year for $500k. It is a 2 bed 2 bath with about 800sq feet of space

As an non Canadian, what the fuck?

That's about normal, if not low in major US cities. See Zillow

This probably deserves a bit of explanation.

So an important thing to note is that Canada is a resource-intensive economy that refuses to actually exploit our resources; we're kind of dumb that way.

Way back (around 20+ years ago), Canada created a program called the "Temporary Foreign Workers" program, which was intended for seasonal agricultural workers. The thought was that our farmers could not necessarily make enough profit to bother growing their own fruit if they had to deal with pesky things like living wages and human rights, so Canada created a program that was designed for temporary people to show up, do some work, get paid better than they would be back in whatever country they hailed from, but way worse than a Canadian would be in the same position.

Our prime minister twice ago, Harper, decided to expand this program - basically, he upped the number of entries by a fairly large portion (I think it went from about 30000 a year to 60000, but these numbers are off the top of my head). We also started really getting into what would eventually become woke around this point, which culminated in electing a Trudeau in 2015.

A very important thing to note is that Trudeau, for us, is kind of like a Bush or a Kennedy for you Americans - he has a trust fund that is around 0.1% of the size of our entire GDP. The first Trudeau, Pierre, was a very controversial Prime Minister, as he spent like a drunken sailor and invoked the War Measures act after some Quebecois separatists abducted and murdered a MP.

Not wanting to be outdone by his father, Justin Trudeau immediately began spending money at an absolutely unprecedented rate; the amount of debt generated by every other Prime Minister, put together, is less than the amount of debt he generated over his term. He also appointed a large amount of judges who have been pushing a rather expansive view of human rights; namely, that everyone but Canadians are entitled to them. Combined, we ended up in a situation where Trudeau absolutely nuked our economy.

Rather than let the country fall into a recession, Trudeau came up with the bright idea of simply importing enough new voters potential generators of corporate value that the number would still go up. Roughly 20% of the population of the country arrived within the last 5 years. The judges, meanwhile, decided that if the imported workers were non-Canadian, obviously they deserved a full pathway to citizenship - and that even if a person came in as a student then declared himself a refugee when the student visa expired, he still needed to be given a lengthy chance to protest the issue.

Now, one problem with going from a country of 37.5 million to 43 million over such a short timeframe is that houses can physically not be built that fast; the immigrants we pulled in tend to be happier living 10 to a bedroom (not even exaggerating - look up Brampton some time), so a lot of old stock Canadians realized that they could make bank by leveraging their existing property into buying more, then renting it out for exorbitant prices. As a result, our housing costs went up by around 100% over the course of a decade, then did the same again over the next decade. When I graduated university, my friend bought a condo for $300k. That condo is now worth around $750k.

It's hilarious you're shocked by this because (I'm also Canadian) the fact there even exists a <$500k condo period, let alone a 2bed, in 2025 is absolutely insane to me

#JustTorontoThings

I have a bit more sympathy for Canadians given that their country isn't dotted coast-to-coast with small cities and large towns. If you can't affort Toronto or Vancouver, where do you go? Calgary?

Literally anywhere in Canada (OK, maybe not Winnipeg) would be nicer that those two places, so yeah, if you work in O&G you would go to Calgary. Or you realize that Ottawa doesn't give a shit about you anyways (unless you go to Montreal I guess) and just move out to the country somewhere.

That's positively cheap for even the outskirts of London or even 2nd tier UK cities, remember the figure is CAD.

Yeah 500k CAD is cheap unless one is living in a complete shithole. It wasn't expensive even a decade ago...

Sometimes I forget just how urban this site skews. I live in an "expensive" area for my region. My house is a basic, 1300 sq ft, 1950s cape cod on a quarter acre, and it would probably sell for $300k - $350k. If you were willing to drive 20 minutes, that much money would buy you 50% more square footage.

So in my defense, I actually did move to a nearby city around 30 minutes away; the places that I were looking at in my hometown were either incredibly outside my price range (think like, $700k+ for around the same square footage), or were "purpose built rentals" that had been re-appropriated for the market when BC banned AirBnBs (one of the places I toured was $550k, and consisted of a bedroom that was pretty much exactly big enough for a queen sized bed, a tiny living room/kitchen/entryway, and a single bathroom with only a shower - I think it was around 500 square feet).

My friend has a home further outside the cities - her commute down to the city was around 2 hours a day. Her home is bigger than mine, but to be fair, it's also more expensive (she's also working with two incomes, whereas I only have the one).

Some of the most productive cities in the US are space-constrained by bays, mountains, etc and there isn't a "drive 20 minutes" cheaper option. There's "Drive 2 hours each way" cheaper options.

My "starter home" was a 500 sq ft condo, 1br, in a sketchy area, that ran $680k a decade ago. Sigh, urbanity.

In my neighborhood -- a middling NYC suburb -- such a Cape would be half a million. And have taxes to knock your socks off.

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Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


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