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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   14991 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.

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.

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.

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