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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.
Well not really. It moved from one kind of cost (some probability of splattering your brains on the steering wheel) to another kind of cost (at most 2% at most the cost of a new car).
There was never getting around the cost.
Right, but that doesn't change the fact that the car is now, in fact, more expensive than it was before, which is what a measure of inflation is supposed to capture.
This fraud is revealed when the same discounting principle isn't applied to, say, GDP, or other "good numbers". Oh yes, you bet your ass the extra dollars get counted there. With this neat trick, you get to double, triple, maybe even quadruple count the benefits of a technology or innovation.
Things in the past were going well enough for the common man that there wasn't much to notice here, but now that John Everyman is getting squeezed from all angles, the official numbers are starting to look suspicious. Hard to ignore the dissonance when your typical bag of groceries jumps 20% and the official numbers are still like "3% :)". Becomes clear that the numbers aren't about you or people like you. There's so much witchcraft that goes into these numbers anyway that they are essentially a matter of interpretation rather than fact, and it's becoming clear to a lot of people that it's a picture painted by a club they're not in. And yeah, I guess if you're an upperclassman like Scott is now, it's easy to believe everything's great. But if you're a member of the Rent Food Gas class, you have been getting obliterated.
It's actually difficult for me to believe the level of condescension that these people are speaking to the working class. I couldn't imagine biting the hand that feeds me that hard. Maybe we need a little bit of rising Bolshevism to remind these people who actually runs the place.
Inflation is supposed to compare like-for-like. You can't switch from a Big Mac to a NY Strip and call it inflation, it has to be a fundamentally comparable good.
Gas is impossible to game, a gallon is a gallon
Cool, so base the numbers on comparing like goods and stop fucking with them. How is a bureaucrat supposed to measure how much more better the Philly Cheese-steak is? This also doesn't solve the double counting problem. The BLT doesn't count for less dollars in the GDP line go up so shut up data.
EDIT: It also doesn't solve the problem that, in a lot of cases, consumers stopped buying the Big Mac because it was outlawed.
Unfortunately, you cannot eat or live in gas.
Buddy, you can't tell people to shut up.
Yes. This is a problem on the regulatory side. And I'm very sympathetic to the claim that a given regulation (say, for backup cameras or whatever) has an unfavorable cost/benefit ratio -- in many cases it's absolutely true. So it's completely valid to say that shitty regulation makes things more expensive, but that isn't inflation.
I think he is saying that the economists are telling the data to go away and stop bothering them, not telling you to shut up.
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This is like that "Mandatory booster seats reduce the birth rate" study. A feature that saved the lives of 1:100 prevents the entrance into he middle-class of 10:100.
Don't get me wrong, it's better to be financially stressed than dead. But I am explaining why people's experiences of the economy is not matching up with the markers economists are paying attention to. If economists actually want to figure it out, they need to start here. What is the minimum basket of goods someone needs to buy in order to achieve a "middle class lifestyle" this decade and how many people in each generation can afford it today?
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