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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.
I think Scott hit the nail on the head when he said that people feel like they need to do more to keep up. People are nostalgic for the times where you could get hired in the town you were raised and make a good life for yourself. Now you have to compete against the world. I started feeling this way in the 2000's and it's only gotten worse.
Where I disagree with Scott is that CPI is the wonderful and infallible marker of how expensive things have gotten. It's not capturing people's necessary expenses, because necessary expenses have inflated. CPI does hedonistic adjustments.
A flat-screen TV that cost $5,000 in 2000 costs $300 today, and CPI calculations include this decline. But no lower-income family was buying $5,000 flat screens in 2000. Families in 2000 were buying the $300 small boxes. The amount of money a lower-income family spends on TV hasn't gone down, it's stayed flat. They may be getting better bang for their buck and that's significant. But when the question is, "Do you feel like you can afford more than your parents?" The answer is "no." I don't even know where to buy a new CRT TV. Maybe they're cheaper now, but I don't have that option when I go to the electronics store.
The same kinds of adjustments are made for things that legally aren't available anymore. In the past people bought cars without airbags and now we need to buy cars with airbags. The price increase from airbags is factored into the CPI and the CPI says the cost is flat given the upgrade, even if in real dollars it's 5k more. I like having airbags, don't get me wrong. But the previous option is not available. The real cost of car ownership went up, even if that's not, strictly, "Inflation."
The cost of participating in a Middle Class Life has gone up - due to lots of things. High speed internet, computers, and phones are new entrants into "Bare Minimum to participate in the current economy." Cars with more environmental and safety features, mandatory insurance costs, mandatory home features. Meanwhile jobs feel precarious - one wrong move and you'll be replaced by a foreigner or an AI chatbot and no one else will be hiring. Are we right or wrong to think so? I don't know. But that's the vibes part of the vibecession.
They're nostalgic, then, for a time their parents don't remember.
You can't get a new CRT TV. But I see that Best Buy and Amazon have flat screen TVs (24") for $50. These are strictly superior to the old 20" CRT TVs. $300 gets you up to 50".
This is interesting but kind of besides the point. The point is, Economists are able to say something like, "The cost of TVs has gone down from $5,000 to $300, offsetting the increase of the cost of quality cotton shirts increasing from $10 to $50 (quality meaning of the same threadcount/fabric weight as was common before the 2000s) and the increase of quality jeans from $40 to $130. And so the true cost of things has only increased slowly.
But in reality, people in the middle class in the 1990s bought the $10 shirts and $40 jeans and the $300 CRT and were happy enough, while people in the middle class in the 2020s still spend $300 on TV hardware but also buy jeans and t-shirts that fall apart after 20 wears and feel like it's all a sham.
The numbers that will reflect how people feel about the economy - the vibes - will be the minimum amount it takes to purchase a middle-class lifestyle. Middle class lifestyle is what bundle of goods they feel socially obligated to purchase as reflected to them by their parents, relatives, employers, and the TV. I don't think CPI really tracks this and so CPI isn't going to tell us much about vibes and whether people think they're struggling or not.
I get the impression that Scott used to talk to poor people as their psychiatrist sometimes, listen empathetically to their vibes, and end up with some insight usually unavailable to people in his situation. Lately he listens to people like Bryan Caplan, hires a second nanny, and wonders what the fuss is about. Of course, what with the having a wife and twins and employing servants, it would be unreasonable to hope he would actually go spend some time in a community where the vibes are bad, like Orwell. But then it's unsurprising that he has little of value to add to the conversation, aside from looking at the official statistics, and mostly agreeing with the official narrative.
It would be interesting to hear more interviews by someone fair and not given to ragebait. We bought a second car because the house we could afford is very far from public transport, but when we looked into it, it was post Covid, and the used cars actually cost more than ordering a new car but with worse financing, so we did buy a new car. It then had to fit three car seats across and go down rutted dirt roads, so it's a small SUV not a sedan. Apparently my grandmother, a very respectable person, put her fourth child in the hatchback, but we wouldn't be equally respectable if we couldn't fit the third car seat until our oldest is 7. Both the car and the car seats are certainly better, but also more mandatory.
Yep, my parents were able to have three kids fit in a sedan, and when they bought an SUV it was a choice they made in their 40s because they had the extra cash for the luxury. Meanwhile, the second I got a positive pregnancy test for my third kid, my husband did his research and we traded in our two cars (we each had a car before we married) for a used minivan.
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"Strictly superior" may be a very slight overstatement, since IIRC these super-cheap televisions are subsidized by built-in advertisements. Maybe "strictly superior in 95 percent of graded areas (all except built-in advertisements)" would be more accurate.
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