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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   15154 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.

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:

This was less than I wanted to know.

But my favorite substantive comment, from the Substack:

Something that gets hidden in the aggregate is that consumer sentiment among democrats is much higher than among republicans from 2021 until 2025, and then they switch. This seems relevant.

https://en.macromicro.me/charts/110438/us-michigan-consumer-sentiment-index-within-political-party

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 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?"

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".

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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