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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   14834 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.

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.

"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.

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".

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! And 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.

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 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!

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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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