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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:
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:
But my favorite substantive comment, from the Substack:
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.
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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.
I'm going to back this one up- no one in my bubble thinks the economy is bad.
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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.
All 3 got worse after covid.
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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 mean, covid happened in 2020, and permanently smashed social trust for a huge percentage of the population.
And yet:
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"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! 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.
Problem is that the US is higher trust than ten years ago. Maybe you can add more epicycles, perhaps some kind of inertial metaphor where we are paying suddenly for the decrease in trust that ended ten years ago, but it's getting to be a little much at this point.
That seems much more like an epicycle than anything I've suggested--your article shows 29% as a low point in the assertion "most people can be trusted," around 2014, but then suggests a rise to 34% in 2018--and then a flat line to 34% again in 2024. This, against a trend of clear decline since the 1970s, with no sign of a recent upward trend in sight--at best, it's flat (and still historically low) despite slight recovery from a local minimum. Your "upswing for the past ten years" seems like an exaggeration at best--and probably just tendentious. I have a variety of other concerns about this particular measure of social trust, which I suppose you would also call epicycles, but I'm not sure it matters, as it's not entirely clear to me what you're trying to actually say.
If your point is something like "actually this 'vibecession' stuff is super complicated and certainly not attributable to a single influence" then, I mean, sure? I'm sure most people wouldn't even get through Scott's whole writeup before saying "it's getting to be a little much at this point." Sociological inquiry is often like that. I don't even think it would be wrong to say, as you did, "only high mortgage rates and a frozen housing market remain as plausible explanations of 'wtf happened in 2020.'" But those things still happened against a background of longer-term social developments that hadn't happened before. Mortgage rate and housing market problems aren't particularly novel. The slow but increasingly unmistakable unraveling of the American social fabric definitely is, and we're reaching levels of animosity I don't think we've really seen since the Civil War. I'd be much more persuaded if you tried to boil the whole conversation down to smartphones or social media, than to housing and mortgage rates. Or COVID, for that matter. But I think stuff like COVID and markets are things that shock our social system, at various times; they don't explain what happens in response to that shock. A different society would, presumably, have responded differently. That sort of thing seems, to me, worth thinking about.
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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 see young Leftist Maskies every day.
The last time I went to a speed dating event (2025 summer) they required proof of vaccination and "encouraged" masks.
😑
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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.
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!
Trauma reactions, both health and suppressed, can support this.
Healthy trauma survivors may be changed, but they don't think on it because they're trying to move on and focus on the rest of their lives instead. They can be physically / mentally scarred, but scar tissue isn't something you necessarily pick at.
Suppressed trauma survivors are also changed, and also don't think about it because avoidance is easier than the void in the sense of self/control/understanding. So they bottle it up and do not think about the bottle as much as possible.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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