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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   15148 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'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

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