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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   15147 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.

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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