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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   14709 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.

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.

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.

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