For whatever it's worth, I've been trying to get a job all year and have had only a pile of rejection letters to show for it since January, the last time I managed to get an interview. And I have a Ph.D. in applied mathematics!
So at least as far as I can tell from where I am, the hiring market is still quite bad.
I think there are many posts to be written following up on "most Millennials are more comfortable than their parents were"... I am unsure if that is true - and I am pretty confident it is not how Millennials themselves see the situation. That gap is worth debugging.
I'm GenX, so perfectly happy to see the Millennials as ungrateful and whiny :)
But I also see that regardless of what aggregate income/wealth data might say, something like buying your first house really does look harder. I bought my first NYC apartment for ~$90k in the late 1990s, and the official inflation numbers would expect that to be $180k now. But in fact this exact unit sold in 2024 for almost $360k! That's a lot of price increase - and no way I could have come up with close to $100k as a down payment in my 20s. So I think there is more going on than just whining.
I'm a millennial and I can confirm that millennials are ungrateful and whiny. I can't count the number of times I have heard people who make as much or more money than me idly complaining about how they are struggling financially. This has held exactly as true as I have made more and more money (100->500K ish) and the whole time I have never for one second felt in any way that I am anything but rich. The time and place of this complaining is especially galling sometimes. Out for $100+ dinners and $20 cocktails, expensive ski vacations, abroad at destination weddings, it doesn't matter. I remember once hearing a couple that makes probably low 7 figures between them talking about how the US is turning into a 3rd world country. And of course they bitch about billionaires as it that were the cause of their woes. The complaining never stops, and there is never any reflection on how obscenely rich we are.
The millennial generation, for whatever reason, seems to be packed to the gills with these people. I have come to the conclusion it is a fundamental personality defect. It doesn't matter how much money these people have, the Warren / Sanders personality type will always be focused on what other people have rather than on themselves. They will never appreciate their own situation. They are doomed to suffer eternally. I would feel sorry for them if they suffered alone instead of trying to drag all the rest of us down with them with their idiotic envy based money grab policies, but as it is I can only feel contempt.
I mean you can confirm that a small and anecdotal group of people you know (who are clearly unrepresentative anyway) are whiny - if you are representing them correctly.
I read a pretty good article about Avocadoism; the jist being that although millennials are indeed a lot wealthier, housing costs are several times more expensive than they were for boomers, which means no amount of sacrificing avocado toast is going to enable homeownership.
Right, the "basket of goods" really matters for comparing past and present. In my 20s I think it was mostly rent + food + car.
I can think of a few more variables to add, like how more people (I think) are living alone, versus 30 years ago I had married young so two of us were sharing the rent.
I think the college debt issue is overstated, but surely it plays some factor - especially for people in their 20s. My loan payments were very manageable but I hear horror stories these days, especially with these "private loans" that were rare in my time.
Here we have the problem of mistaking College goers - Entire Generation (stats say 60% are non-college [4 yr degree]) - one of the major errors of Democrats online and general 2020-2024 discourse was making that Fallacy of Composition error
And then of course also the composition of college degree holders (which ones) and then finally the weighting of what degree of Millenial Whiners that are Very Visible Online who are weighted to sub-sub-democgraphic of college degree holers that have majors / profiles that gave them high-expections but actually lower than expectations economics potential - giving us very skewed ideas I would wager relative to overall
Yes. And rent has increased in cost higher than base inflation as well. So unless that is being accounted for it’s not a great statistic. That said millennial house ownership is about the same as Gen X, at the same age.
Can I gently challenge you on that home ownership stat? I'm looking at articles like this one that say the opposite, that Millennials have really lagged in hitting ownership milestones: https://www.fool.com/money/research/millennial-homebuying/
I was surprised when I looked this up as well. Your link is slightly misleading. Obviously comparing Gen X and boomers - completed house ownership - with millennials who are still in the process isn’t apples to apples.
But the link did say that house ownership is already 55% for millennials. Although we have moved on from seeing millennials as totally young, they aren’t old either. The age range of the generation is 29-45. Most aren’t middle aged. Some are actually young!
Surprisingly a large cohort of people still buy for the first time after 40, so even boomers and Gen X didn’t have their present ownership rates at 40.
ChatGPT estimates that Gen X homeownership rates were 64-66% aged 40. Millennials are 60-62%. (I found that low actually, given the 55% overall but it looks like millennials are definitely buying later).
It’s not all good news. I first did a dive on this a few years ago and back then I expected it to be higher by now, but house buying has stalled for millennials in the past year or two.
These things are tricky though because timing is everything. Real estate has always had booms and busts. That apartment you bought for $90k in the late 90s probably had a completely stagnant value for the 10 years prior to that. Not sure about regional differences but my guess is you bought toward the end of a decade-long housing recession.
This is anecdotal, but I bought my first condo for $90k in 1987 ($265k in 2026 $) right at the top of a housing peak. Due to a job transfer, I sold it in 1989 for $70k ($190k in 2026 $) after the crash and I bought a home for $210k ($567k in 2026 $). I reasoned that even though I lost a bunch on the condo, at least I can't be buying at a high. I sold that home in 1998 for $195k ($400k in 2026). So basically 9 years of negative returns on real estate.
Obviously, things have gone much better since then, so I'm not complaining, but us olds haven't always had an easy time with real estate. I definitely get that it's very hard right now for young people buying their first property, but I can't help but wonder if we're now sitting in a market that's more like 1987 than 1998 and we're on the cusp of an overdue correction that like all previous corrections, will greatly help out with the affordability crisis.
I'm not saying we shouldn't also do all the YIMBY supply side stuff people are talking about just in case, but if history is a guide, home prices are likely to come down significantly vs income over the next decade or two.
Noah, you’re missing the WAY more obvious fact that AI is dragging down *hiring processes* to a halt. Hirers have been reduced to unicorn-hunting for needles in haystacks due to the illusion of perfect choice that larger application pools have presented. It’s the same failure that’s happened in dating markets.
This article may not be as amusing to people with straight sensibilities, but it points out an interesting feature of how dating apps might help solve problems for gay people (who are in a relatively symmetric dating market where discovery is the biggest problem) while causing more problems for straight people (who are in an asymmetric market, such that improved discovery exacerbates asymmetries): https://substack.com/home/post/p-195165382
The hiring market has a lot of asymmetries that might make it more similar to straight dating than gay dating.
That’s a good point. Not just AI, but before that, sites like LinkedIn have made it so easy to “spray and pray” with resumes, that there is that illusion of perfect choice on the part of employers; additionally it is easier for people to apply from out of the area. I am Old, and remember when one had to actually *fax* or even *snail mail* a resume and cover letter. And if you wanted to “cold apply” (which WAS done - I actually got a couple of jobs just cold applying) you had to go to the library and find the Yellow Pages for that city and track down the address. There were specialized job boards/newsletters for professionals, but you had to pay sometimes big bucks to post an ad for a job opening; likewise you had to pay to subscribe to the newsletter. Even if you put a want ad in the paper it still cost some money, and you were limited to the candidates who saw the ad and applied.
This layer of effort meant that companies often just decided to go with the bird in the hand when they needed someone. (I remember getting a job after “cold applying” to a company that sounded promising because their admin assistant had just quit! I happened to be a “good enough” applicant and they were saved an ad and job interview.) Unless it was a very competitive position or a well-known great company, most ads got 10 or 20 resumes, out of which 5 or 10 might go on to be interviewed.
Now there’s an unlimited amount of choice and companies, run by people with human brains, just think “well maybe I can hold out for the perfect candidate…”
On 1, there are two points that could be driving it (honestly haven't fully checked the data on it). First, the trade deficit is small in terms of overall GDP. It's only 1% of GDP. Second, the trade deficit with China specifically could be due to taking over imports that we were previously getting from elsewhere. For those other countries in the article, they really were losing manufacturing share to China.
Is Ukraine attacking the oil export infrastructure in Russia? I know they are attacking refineries, but nobody much cares if Russians are unable to fill up their cars. Attacking oil exports will raise the price of gas all over the world, though, including in places that Ukraine can't afford to piss off.
Ust Luga and the one in the South, back when the Iran war started iirc. They pivoted to hitting refineries to avoid disrupting the global oil market more and hit the Russians in a more targeted way.
(Ref. Point 1, and somewhat Point 4) While it is true that income stagnated in the mid-70s and rose in real terms since then, the economy as a whole did so well that workers should have earned even more but did not. The “labor share,” the proportion of an economy’s total income that is allocated to workers as compensation for their labor, has declined since the 1980s, reaching its lowest level since the Great Depression. The fact that labor share continues to decline may account for vibecession/consumer sentiment. Source: Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, June 4, 2026, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PRS84006173
It is interesting that economists look at top-down aggregate measure of economic activity to assess the accuracy of individuals’ views about economic conditions. Many Americans are negative about the economy because they can afford less, have less job security and upward mobility is frozen. Rather than looking at GDP or stock market indices, which largely matter only to the wealthy, look at credit card debt, auto loan delinquencies and dropped home insurance.
The things you list largely matter only to the poor! Things like median income and median disposable income will get the middle.
But probably, you actually need to understand conditions at *all* points in the spectrum to know how things are going overall - any one point in the spectrum is only part of the story.
Basically, yes, Millennials and even Gen Z are doing well, but there’s a difference between those who are doing well by themselves and those who are “second generation UMC” and the latter have their wealthy parents buying houses, paying for or providing childcare, and the like. So even the 30-somethings earning six figures get outbid on housing by 30-somethings earning six figures but with parents who are millionaires through investments and will subsidize their adult children. (Hill does not mention this at all, but, tangentially, could this be part of why so many younger people are saying no to kids? They envision not just putting the kids through college and providing room and board if the kid doesn’t get a job, but…a lifetime of being as enmeshed with your kids as they are when they are actual children, a responsibility that never ever ends?)
Elizabeth Warren, whatever one thinks of her now, was dead right when she wrote The Two Income Trap back in 2004, noting that the big expenses now are housing, health care and child care (and soon to be college). These are not things you can just shuffle expenses for by eating ramen or foregoing lattes/avocado toast/dormice rolled in poppy seeds/whatever trendy food item the Olds think the Youngs spend too much on.
I do think the “bad vibes” partly boil down to Hill’s nepo theory, partly to the exorbitant cost of housing, partly to a job market that seems determined to exclude anyone they possibly can screen out (too young, too old, wrong degree…).
I think you left off the last sentence on point 5.
“So, while Americans are loathe to pay more for a bicycle made in America, they are more than willing to pay extra for experiences like having a bear deliver their DoorDash order (on a one-speed bike, since they can’t get drivers licenses or shift gears).”
When it comes to existential AI risk, I actually view quick human extinction as less bad than a catastrophe where humanity survives after massive losses and limps through a slow, uncertain recovery. I'm not a misanthrope, as I support medical research targeting aging biology to achieve increased (and potentially indefinite) healthy lifespan. But human extinction would mean the end of human suffering, and I don't view that as worse than a catastrophic future full of human suffering. Obviously my preference would be for the human condition to improve, but if I had to choose between catastrophe and extinction, I'd choose extinction, even though it's not my choice to make. I'm sure my thinking is clouded with biases, and it's entirely subjective, but I'm curious what others may think from a philosophical standpoint.
Based on my experience with humanity so far, any surviving humans will just work their way back to the same level of technological capability, then do the same thing all over again. We'll do it even if the time gap is only a dozen years, and we have high-quality documentaries to explain to us why we shouldn't repeat our mistake.
That’s the argument of many vegans: that the total number of years lived by all farm animals is less important than the quality of their lifestyles. If people stopped eating beef and dairy, millions of cows that would have been born will never come into existence, and would eventually become extinct. Everyone being vegan wouldn’t save cows, it would end them. But I think humans are different in that if AI ends up enslaving humanity it would be better than it eliminating all humans, because the hope of a human rebellion and overthrow of the machines would remain. At least in science fiction, anyway.
GLPs will help make America healthier. For most Americans, I think, the proper solution is simply diet and exercise. We should teach kids how to eat healthy. Provided school lunches and breakfasts and snacks should be healthy. It's not that hard to provide a healthy lunch. Grilled chicken (or poached chicken) and rice with a single vegetable would be great. Turkey sandwiches on wheat bread would be great. Yogurt with fruit and nuts would be great. There should be a nutrition class as part of learning.
The solution is simple even if the execution is hard.
A solution whose execution is hard isn't really a solution.
There is, for example, a very simple solution for STDs: let us just all be faithful to our long-term partners and don't engage in risky sex. Fewer than 20 words in total, simple, right? But you cannot rely on this for extirpation of STDs in any extant country, because there will be too many exceptions.
I can imagine school lunches being healthier, some countries in Europe actually do their best in this regard, but even though their kid obesity levels are lower, they are still way too high. You cannot fully control the fact that parents or relatives will deviate from your recommendations and feed kids highly processed crap, and older kids can buy such crap themselves.
And if you push too hard from above, you are bound to create a backlash where people feeding their kids fries will feel like Sons of Liberty defying the Evil Overbearing Government and organize themselves into voting blocs to stop you.
You're a philosophy prof, do you have any insights into this mindset?
I see this attitude all the time in discussions of GLP-1 drugs; as best I can tell there is some theory of morality under which people are offended by easy solutions to problems that otherwise require discipline to solve.
I think there's several related attitudes of this sort that affect thinking about ethics, philosophy of mind, and epistemology. If something is just doing what you know you're supposed to do, then it's not praiseworthy behavior. If something is just following instructions, then it can't be a form of thinking. If something is implied by a definition, then it can't be a discovery.
Nobody thinks it's your fault, but just telling people to diet & exercise isn't working. Providing access to GLP-1 drugs does seem to help with getting people to at least diet.
Telling people to just take a magic pill to fix your problems is a crappy way to solve an issue. We should teach proper living. We don’t want to be the Capitol in hunger games
I legitimately don't grok the opposing viewpoint; as best I can tell there's some deep-seated instinct in a lot of humans that making self-improvement easy is somehow immoral.
If a diet results in less calorie intake than before, then a side effect of that diet is still feeling hungry after eating the specified amount. GLP-1 drugs successfully treat that side effect.
I think you are not understanding me. Diet and exercise are not an alternative to GLP1s and their necessity is in no way changed by the presence of GLP1s. If you take the drugs but do not change your diet or exercise habits you will not lose a single pound.
You are right that telling people to diet and exercise is not effective. It is not effective because maintaining a calorie deficit has brutal side effects and exercise without diet will not make you lose weight (though it will have other benefits). With GLP1s what we are doing is saying "diet and exercise, but here is something to help you with the diet part" and that is why it is effective.
bluntly I think this is stupid. We succeeded in cutting down tobacco, and are working on alcohol. I find the idea that we can't get people to start eating healthier absurd
But hey lets put everyone on a permanent drug with unclear long term side effects that eats at your lean muscle if you don't eat right anyway!
I love the idea of healthy AND tasty school lunches. I really do. I think kids would benefit, especially low-income ones. But as we found out when Michelle Obama launched her healthy kids movement - school cafeterias cheap the hell out on lunch. If it’s healthy it won’t be tasty because it’s *expensive* to have healthy tasty food. So the kids will just dump their mealy apples and unseasoned poached in plain water chicken in the trash. (They won’t dump Honeycrisp or grilled chicken with lime!) They don’t want plain steamed veggies, but roasted with some herbs and lemon juice, yum. We shouldn’t ask kids to eat (metaphorical) prison loaf we wouldn’t eat ourselves. And there’s the rub. We *can* provide healthy, delicious school food but waah, it costs too much and is too much effort, so we’ll give the kids “lab blocks” they don’t want to eat.
I didn’t say anything about pills for kids. I said “healthy food has to taste good or the kids won’t eat it.” I really do not think that “food should taste good” is a big ask. Maybe it was for Oliver Twist, but we’ve moved beyond the era of orphanages and gruel, I hope.
Designing communities that are non-car dependent would dramatically change obesity rates. It’s not accidental that people who live in NYC or European cities are less obese: they walk more. Over time, we could transform suburbs to be more walkable and of course allow commercial blocks (to have a place to walk to).
I’ve heard estimates that we are still in the early innings of the AI rollout. I don’t believe we know yet two things. Where are the productivity gains and the subsequent profits? Every day, that is what people are saying on Bloomberg. Microsoft has lost $600 billion in stock value. Down 24% this year.
All due to two questions: Will AI put software companies out of business, and/or how well will AI help expand their software business?
I also don’t hear evidence either way about job gains or losses. We haven’t seen new claims rise dramatically; in fact, the only companies that seem to have large layoffs are in the tech industry.
Until we have definitive proof that AI is dramatically increasing productivity, the only business AI is helping is in the construction of Data Centers.
There has been a large increase in single person businesses in the last year, undoubtedly AI assistants have contributed to making this possible, as described in this article.
Yeah I read about the increase the other day. A new business is certainly much easier with AI help. As for a new job I guess it depends on what’s being sold.
I’ve actually thought of starting a business with the help of AI. At my age probably easier than finding wage-slave type employment and AI would make it a lot easier.
The data deconstrution on the Michigin survey was quite interesting and convincing that there's very solid signs that methodological change had an unexpected influence (maybe expectable but on their side unexpected)
To what extent do you think the raw number of Russian men dying is going to be medium-term bad for the Russian gas industry? It feels like a substantial challenge for a country that won’t be able to automate production out anytime soon!
Not Noah, but Russia has had problems with “excess male mortality” since at least the 90’s, and I’d say this can’t possibly be good for the society as a whole. (People forget that societies that are misogynist are usually misandrist in some way as well; if women are tradwives, men are cannon fodder.) I remember the surprised Pikachu of that guy Darren or Darryl Something who defected to Russia because the US was “too woke” and whoops, he’s a soldier now. They’re resorting to rounding up homeless alcoholics to send to the front lines. I suppose that IS one way to take care of the homeless problem (I’ll try not to give any MAGA mayor ideas) but…
Yeah this completely tracks with my experience. Also I was just in Ukraine and all the dudes were basically like “the modal Russian soldier is an NPC” and that is completely commensurate with this.
Regarding the generational wealth distributions, I understand that it's hard to track incomes above 140k, but be hiding a significant differences in inequality between the different generations which could influence perspectives even if the income distribution is shifting right overall. Second, I wonder what these distributions look like if you consider wealth rather than income, since again at the upper end of these distributions a lot of what people receive is in the form of inherited wealth rather than income.
For whatever it's worth, I've been trying to get a job all year and have had only a pile of rejection letters to show for it since January, the last time I managed to get an interview. And I have a Ph.D. in applied mathematics!
So at least as far as I can tell from where I am, the hiring market is still quite bad.
It is bad...the question is why!
I blame uncertainty over Trump administration policies. 😉
DM me your resume — my company often hires applied math PhDs
Sent; thanks for taking a look even if it turns out to not be a good fit.
You actually get rejection letters? Lucky. That's way better than being ghosted.
I think there are many posts to be written following up on "most Millennials are more comfortable than their parents were"... I am unsure if that is true - and I am pretty confident it is not how Millennials themselves see the situation. That gap is worth debugging.
I'm GenX, so perfectly happy to see the Millennials as ungrateful and whiny :)
But I also see that regardless of what aggregate income/wealth data might say, something like buying your first house really does look harder. I bought my first NYC apartment for ~$90k in the late 1990s, and the official inflation numbers would expect that to be $180k now. But in fact this exact unit sold in 2024 for almost $360k! That's a lot of price increase - and no way I could have come up with close to $100k as a down payment in my 20s. So I think there is more going on than just whining.
I'm a millennial and I can confirm that millennials are ungrateful and whiny. I can't count the number of times I have heard people who make as much or more money than me idly complaining about how they are struggling financially. This has held exactly as true as I have made more and more money (100->500K ish) and the whole time I have never for one second felt in any way that I am anything but rich. The time and place of this complaining is especially galling sometimes. Out for $100+ dinners and $20 cocktails, expensive ski vacations, abroad at destination weddings, it doesn't matter. I remember once hearing a couple that makes probably low 7 figures between them talking about how the US is turning into a 3rd world country. And of course they bitch about billionaires as it that were the cause of their woes. The complaining never stops, and there is never any reflection on how obscenely rich we are.
The millennial generation, for whatever reason, seems to be packed to the gills with these people. I have come to the conclusion it is a fundamental personality defect. It doesn't matter how much money these people have, the Warren / Sanders personality type will always be focused on what other people have rather than on themselves. They will never appreciate their own situation. They are doomed to suffer eternally. I would feel sorry for them if they suffered alone instead of trying to drag all the rest of us down with them with their idiotic envy based money grab policies, but as it is I can only feel contempt.
I mean you can confirm that a small and anecdotal group of people you know (who are clearly unrepresentative anyway) are whiny - if you are representing them correctly.
I read a pretty good article about Avocadoism; the jist being that although millennials are indeed a lot wealthier, housing costs are several times more expensive than they were for boomers, which means no amount of sacrificing avocado toast is going to enable homeownership.
https://martinrobbins.substack.com/p/waspinomics-and-the-magic-avocado?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=4pc64t
Right, the "basket of goods" really matters for comparing past and present. In my 20s I think it was mostly rent + food + car.
I can think of a few more variables to add, like how more people (I think) are living alone, versus 30 years ago I had married young so two of us were sharing the rent.
I think the college debt issue is overstated, but surely it plays some factor - especially for people in their 20s. My loan payments were very manageable but I hear horror stories these days, especially with these "private loans" that were rare in my time.
Here we have the problem of mistaking College goers - Entire Generation (stats say 60% are non-college [4 yr degree]) - one of the major errors of Democrats online and general 2020-2024 discourse was making that Fallacy of Composition error
And then of course also the composition of college degree holders (which ones) and then finally the weighting of what degree of Millenial Whiners that are Very Visible Online who are weighted to sub-sub-democgraphic of college degree holers that have majors / profiles that gave them high-expections but actually lower than expectations economics potential - giving us very skewed ideas I would wager relative to overall
Yes. And rent has increased in cost higher than base inflation as well. So unless that is being accounted for it’s not a great statistic. That said millennial house ownership is about the same as Gen X, at the same age.
Can I gently challenge you on that home ownership stat? I'm looking at articles like this one that say the opposite, that Millennials have really lagged in hitting ownership milestones: https://www.fool.com/money/research/millennial-homebuying/
I was surprised when I looked this up as well. Your link is slightly misleading. Obviously comparing Gen X and boomers - completed house ownership - with millennials who are still in the process isn’t apples to apples.
But the link did say that house ownership is already 55% for millennials. Although we have moved on from seeing millennials as totally young, they aren’t old either. The age range of the generation is 29-45. Most aren’t middle aged. Some are actually young!
Surprisingly a large cohort of people still buy for the first time after 40, so even boomers and Gen X didn’t have their present ownership rates at 40.
ChatGPT estimates that Gen X homeownership rates were 64-66% aged 40. Millennials are 60-62%. (I found that low actually, given the 55% overall but it looks like millennials are definitely buying later).
It’s not all good news. I first did a dive on this a few years ago and back then I expected it to be higher by now, but house buying has stalled for millennials in the past year or two.
Indeed one needs to compare same age status cohort to cohort.
Millennials are also getting married much less and much later. I would expect the home ownership curve to lag for that reason alone.
These things are tricky though because timing is everything. Real estate has always had booms and busts. That apartment you bought for $90k in the late 90s probably had a completely stagnant value for the 10 years prior to that. Not sure about regional differences but my guess is you bought toward the end of a decade-long housing recession.
This is anecdotal, but I bought my first condo for $90k in 1987 ($265k in 2026 $) right at the top of a housing peak. Due to a job transfer, I sold it in 1989 for $70k ($190k in 2026 $) after the crash and I bought a home for $210k ($567k in 2026 $). I reasoned that even though I lost a bunch on the condo, at least I can't be buying at a high. I sold that home in 1998 for $195k ($400k in 2026). So basically 9 years of negative returns on real estate.
Obviously, things have gone much better since then, so I'm not complaining, but us olds haven't always had an easy time with real estate. I definitely get that it's very hard right now for young people buying their first property, but I can't help but wonder if we're now sitting in a market that's more like 1987 than 1998 and we're on the cusp of an overdue correction that like all previous corrections, will greatly help out with the affordability crisis.
I'm not saying we shouldn't also do all the YIMBY supply side stuff people are talking about just in case, but if history is a guide, home prices are likely to come down significantly vs income over the next decade or two.
Noah, you’re missing the WAY more obvious fact that AI is dragging down *hiring processes* to a halt. Hirers have been reduced to unicorn-hunting for needles in haystacks due to the illusion of perfect choice that larger application pools have presented. It’s the same failure that’s happened in dating markets.
Good point
This article may not be as amusing to people with straight sensibilities, but it points out an interesting feature of how dating apps might help solve problems for gay people (who are in a relatively symmetric dating market where discovery is the biggest problem) while causing more problems for straight people (who are in an asymmetric market, such that improved discovery exacerbates asymmetries): https://substack.com/home/post/p-195165382
The hiring market has a lot of asymmetries that might make it more similar to straight dating than gay dating.
My gosh I hadn’t thought of it that way but that’s a very interesting article! Thank you for linking to it. (It’s also very funny.)
That’s a good point. Not just AI, but before that, sites like LinkedIn have made it so easy to “spray and pray” with resumes, that there is that illusion of perfect choice on the part of employers; additionally it is easier for people to apply from out of the area. I am Old, and remember when one had to actually *fax* or even *snail mail* a resume and cover letter. And if you wanted to “cold apply” (which WAS done - I actually got a couple of jobs just cold applying) you had to go to the library and find the Yellow Pages for that city and track down the address. There were specialized job boards/newsletters for professionals, but you had to pay sometimes big bucks to post an ad for a job opening; likewise you had to pay to subscribe to the newsletter. Even if you put a want ad in the paper it still cost some money, and you were limited to the candidates who saw the ad and applied.
This layer of effort meant that companies often just decided to go with the bird in the hand when they needed someone. (I remember getting a job after “cold applying” to a company that sounded promising because their admin assistant had just quit! I happened to be a “good enough” applicant and they were saved an ad and job interview.) Unless it was a very competitive position or a well-known great company, most ads got 10 or 20 resumes, out of which 5 or 10 might go on to be interviewed.
Now there’s an unlimited amount of choice and companies, run by people with human brains, just think “well maybe I can hold out for the perfect candidate…”
Two comments:
1. If the decline in manufacturing in the US is mainly decreased demand for manufactured goods, why do we have a huge trade deficit with China?
2. Noah didn’t mention Ukrainian attacks on Russian oil infrastructure as a cause of declining output
On 1, there are two points that could be driving it (honestly haven't fully checked the data on it). First, the trade deficit is small in terms of overall GDP. It's only 1% of GDP. Second, the trade deficit with China specifically could be due to taking over imports that we were previously getting from elsewhere. For those other countries in the article, they really were losing manufacturing share to China.
Is Ukraine attacking the oil export infrastructure in Russia? I know they are attacking refineries, but nobody much cares if Russians are unable to fill up their cars. Attacking oil exports will raise the price of gas all over the world, though, including in places that Ukraine can't afford to piss off.
They've attacked oil depots & ports around St. Petersburg and on the Black Sea coast
Yeah, Tuapse is basically destroyed and it was the most important export facility in the south.
Ust Luga and the one in the South, back when the Iran war started iirc. They pivoted to hitting refineries to avoid disrupting the global oil market more and hit the Russians in a more targeted way.
(Ref. Point 1, and somewhat Point 4) While it is true that income stagnated in the mid-70s and rose in real terms since then, the economy as a whole did so well that workers should have earned even more but did not. The “labor share,” the proportion of an economy’s total income that is allocated to workers as compensation for their labor, has declined since the 1980s, reaching its lowest level since the Great Depression. The fact that labor share continues to decline may account for vibecession/consumer sentiment. Source: Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, June 4, 2026, https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PRS84006173
58% of Americans own stocks, returns to capital are returns to most Americans retirement funds.
But the top 10% own 90% of all stocks, so the return is HUGELY skewed towards the already-rich.
But that's wealth in the future.
It largely doesn't help with meeting day to day expenses
It is interesting that economists look at top-down aggregate measure of economic activity to assess the accuracy of individuals’ views about economic conditions. Many Americans are negative about the economy because they can afford less, have less job security and upward mobility is frozen. Rather than looking at GDP or stock market indices, which largely matter only to the wealthy, look at credit card debt, auto loan delinquencies and dropped home insurance.
The things you list largely matter only to the poor! Things like median income and median disposable income will get the middle.
But probably, you actually need to understand conditions at *all* points in the spectrum to know how things are going overall - any one point in the spectrum is only part of the story.
Somebody, somewhere (Cartoons Hate Her, Slow Boring or The Argument) shared this substack post by Zac Hill which might well explain at least some of the “vibecession” - he called it the Nepo Theory: https://zachill.substack.com/p/the-nepo-theory-of-vibecession?r=1qxjyc&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web
Basically, yes, Millennials and even Gen Z are doing well, but there’s a difference between those who are doing well by themselves and those who are “second generation UMC” and the latter have their wealthy parents buying houses, paying for or providing childcare, and the like. So even the 30-somethings earning six figures get outbid on housing by 30-somethings earning six figures but with parents who are millionaires through investments and will subsidize their adult children. (Hill does not mention this at all, but, tangentially, could this be part of why so many younger people are saying no to kids? They envision not just putting the kids through college and providing room and board if the kid doesn’t get a job, but…a lifetime of being as enmeshed with your kids as they are when they are actual children, a responsibility that never ever ends?)
Elizabeth Warren, whatever one thinks of her now, was dead right when she wrote The Two Income Trap back in 2004, noting that the big expenses now are housing, health care and child care (and soon to be college). These are not things you can just shuffle expenses for by eating ramen or foregoing lattes/avocado toast/dormice rolled in poppy seeds/whatever trendy food item the Olds think the Youngs spend too much on.
I do think the “bad vibes” partly boil down to Hill’s nepo theory, partly to the exorbitant cost of housing, partly to a job market that seems determined to exclude anyone they possibly can screen out (too young, too old, wrong degree…).
I think you left off the last sentence on point 5.
“So, while Americans are loathe to pay more for a bicycle made in America, they are more than willing to pay extra for experiences like having a bear deliver their DoorDash order (on a one-speed bike, since they can’t get drivers licenses or shift gears).”
When it comes to existential AI risk, I actually view quick human extinction as less bad than a catastrophe where humanity survives after massive losses and limps through a slow, uncertain recovery. I'm not a misanthrope, as I support medical research targeting aging biology to achieve increased (and potentially indefinite) healthy lifespan. But human extinction would mean the end of human suffering, and I don't view that as worse than a catastrophic future full of human suffering. Obviously my preference would be for the human condition to improve, but if I had to choose between catastrophe and extinction, I'd choose extinction, even though it's not my choice to make. I'm sure my thinking is clouded with biases, and it's entirely subjective, but I'm curious what others may think from a philosophical standpoint.
Based on my experience with humanity so far, any surviving humans will just work their way back to the same level of technological capability, then do the same thing all over again. We'll do it even if the time gap is only a dozen years, and we have high-quality documentaries to explain to us why we shouldn't repeat our mistake.
That’s the argument of many vegans: that the total number of years lived by all farm animals is less important than the quality of their lifestyles. If people stopped eating beef and dairy, millions of cows that would have been born will never come into existence, and would eventually become extinct. Everyone being vegan wouldn’t save cows, it would end them. But I think humans are different in that if AI ends up enslaving humanity it would be better than it eliminating all humans, because the hope of a human rebellion and overthrow of the machines would remain. At least in science fiction, anyway.
We'd have about as much chance as cows do of overthrowing humans.
Noah lost a bear-related bet
He must be beary sad now
I asked LLM about bear metaphors -
So there you have it:
🐻 Bear on a bike = survival mode, stagflation angst.
🐂 Bull on a bike = animal spirits, irrational exuberance, and zero fear.
So maybe we have more bull on a bike
GLPs will help make America healthier. For most Americans, I think, the proper solution is simply diet and exercise. We should teach kids how to eat healthy. Provided school lunches and breakfasts and snacks should be healthy. It's not that hard to provide a healthy lunch. Grilled chicken (or poached chicken) and rice with a single vegetable would be great. Turkey sandwiches on wheat bread would be great. Yogurt with fruit and nuts would be great. There should be a nutrition class as part of learning.
The solution is simple even if the execution is hard.
A solution whose execution is hard isn't really a solution.
There is, for example, a very simple solution for STDs: let us just all be faithful to our long-term partners and don't engage in risky sex. Fewer than 20 words in total, simple, right? But you cannot rely on this for extirpation of STDs in any extant country, because there will be too many exceptions.
I can imagine school lunches being healthier, some countries in Europe actually do their best in this regard, but even though their kid obesity levels are lower, they are still way too high. You cannot fully control the fact that parents or relatives will deviate from your recommendations and feed kids highly processed crap, and older kids can buy such crap themselves.
And if you push too hard from above, you are bound to create a backlash where people feeding their kids fries will feel like Sons of Liberty defying the Evil Overbearing Government and organize themselves into voting blocs to stop you.
It’s not my fault that people lack the will to actually put the work in
I don't care whose fault it is! I just want a solution. And that solution has to start by acknowledging the facts about humans.
You're a philosophy prof, do you have any insights into this mindset?
I see this attitude all the time in discussions of GLP-1 drugs; as best I can tell there is some theory of morality under which people are offended by easy solutions to problems that otherwise require discipline to solve.
I think there's several related attitudes of this sort that affect thinking about ethics, philosophy of mind, and epistemology. If something is just doing what you know you're supposed to do, then it's not praiseworthy behavior. If something is just following instructions, then it can't be a form of thinking. If something is implied by a definition, then it can't be a discovery.
Nobody thinks it's your fault, but just telling people to diet & exercise isn't working. Providing access to GLP-1 drugs does seem to help with getting people to at least diet.
Telling people to just take a magic pill to fix your problems is a crappy way to solve an issue. We should teach proper living. We don’t want to be the Capitol in hunger games
A magic pill to fix problems would be amazing.
I legitimately don't grok the opposing viewpoint; as best I can tell there's some deep-seated instinct in a lot of humans that making self-improvement easy is somehow immoral.
Except GLPs aren’t just magic they have side effects and you have to constantly take them
OK, let us accept your premise that it is a behavioral issue (actual endocrinologists don't agree, but anyway).
Is it their fault that they lack the will? Where do you shop for will?
Is "having the will" modifiable or is it something closer to "having a talent for maths"?
If you are sure that it is modifiable, why?
Yes it’s their fault they lack the will.
I disagree on this, so we are probably going nowhere.
Ultimately, no one knows what is happening within other people and what they have to fight against.
Maybe your putative strong will is just an aftereffect of not experiencing the same suffering as person X whom you judge to be a weakling.
Exercise isn’t an optional part of life
Diet and exercise are still the solution. GLP1s are just a treatment for the side effects of diet.
GLPs regulate appetite. They don’t regulate side effects of a diet
If a diet results in less calorie intake than before, then a side effect of that diet is still feeling hungry after eating the specified amount. GLP-1 drugs successfully treat that side effect.
GLPs just make you eat less. They also attack your muscles. They’re not good for most people
Can you cite any evidence that eating less because of a GLP-1 drug is any less healthy that eating the same amount less without a GLP-1 drug??
ya, the weight loss of GLPs stops the second you stop taking the drug. Behavior modification is the only long term solution
GLPs don't attack your muscle
People losing weight will naturally lose muscle unless they eat enough protein and do strengths training along with it
Diet and exercise obviously aren't the solution at a population level
We've spent decades telling people to diet and exercise and people keep getting fatter
I think you are not understanding me. Diet and exercise are not an alternative to GLP1s and their necessity is in no way changed by the presence of GLP1s. If you take the drugs but do not change your diet or exercise habits you will not lose a single pound.
You are right that telling people to diet and exercise is not effective. It is not effective because maintaining a calorie deficit has brutal side effects and exercise without diet will not make you lose weight (though it will have other benefits). With GLP1s what we are doing is saying "diet and exercise, but here is something to help you with the diet part" and that is why it is effective.
sounds like we are in agreement then. GLP's work because they make it possible for the average person to eat less and thus lose weight.
You don’t need to be in a calorie deficit to maintain weight
We have spent decades informing people about dieting and exercise
It's quite clear that it will not work at a population level
People know what junk food is. They know what is unhealthy.
It's not knowledge that's the problem
bluntly I think this is stupid. We succeeded in cutting down tobacco, and are working on alcohol. I find the idea that we can't get people to start eating healthier absurd
But hey lets put everyone on a permanent drug with unclear long term side effects that eats at your lean muscle if you don't eat right anyway!
I have a CPA and an MBA. I was also in the military and enjoy working out.
Losing weight and keeping it off is by far.The hardest thing that i've ever done
And it's not sustainable, long term, I can keep it up for a year, maybe two, but eventually I slide back
And the only way i'm able to do that is I have to go on strict high protein lo
So I can't have a cookie.I can't have cake at my son's birthday.I can't do any of that stuff
And literally every single celebration we do revolves around food that's bad for you
Losing weight isn't like stopping smoking or quitting, cocaine or mass, or anything like that.
Because you have to eat.
I legitimately think that finding shortcuts around willpower is just somehow viscerally offensive to a fraction of the population.
Yes, and its usually the people that never really struggled with it
FWIW I've never really struggled with weight but I'm very pro-GLP1-drug.
I think you’re choosing to give up on any solution besides popping a magic pill and acting like that’s equivalent
Who is giving up on any solution? Diet and exercise are always important.
I just think it's OK for people to use a GLP-1 drug to make it easier to follow a healthy diet.
I love the idea of healthy AND tasty school lunches. I really do. I think kids would benefit, especially low-income ones. But as we found out when Michelle Obama launched her healthy kids movement - school cafeterias cheap the hell out on lunch. If it’s healthy it won’t be tasty because it’s *expensive* to have healthy tasty food. So the kids will just dump their mealy apples and unseasoned poached in plain water chicken in the trash. (They won’t dump Honeycrisp or grilled chicken with lime!) They don’t want plain steamed veggies, but roasted with some herbs and lemon juice, yum. We shouldn’t ask kids to eat (metaphorical) prison loaf we wouldn’t eat ourselves. And there’s the rub. We *can* provide healthy, delicious school food but waah, it costs too much and is too much effort, so we’ll give the kids “lab blocks” they don’t want to eat.
So the solution is to just hand out pills to solve everyone’s problem
Sorry but this is just a pathetic answer
I didn’t say anything about pills for kids. I said “healthy food has to taste good or the kids won’t eat it.” I really do not think that “food should taste good” is a big ask. Maybe it was for Oliver Twist, but we’ve moved beyond the era of orphanages and gruel, I hope.
You can make healthy food taste good. The idea that healthy food tastes bad is a myth
Designing communities that are non-car dependent would dramatically change obesity rates. It’s not accidental that people who live in NYC or European cities are less obese: they walk more. Over time, we could transform suburbs to be more walkable and of course allow commercial blocks (to have a place to walk to).
This would help and I support this but I don’t think it’s a requirement
I’ve heard estimates that we are still in the early innings of the AI rollout. I don’t believe we know yet two things. Where are the productivity gains and the subsequent profits? Every day, that is what people are saying on Bloomberg. Microsoft has lost $600 billion in stock value. Down 24% this year.
All due to two questions: Will AI put software companies out of business, and/or how well will AI help expand their software business?
I also don’t hear evidence either way about job gains or losses. We haven’t seen new claims rise dramatically; in fact, the only companies that seem to have large layoffs are in the tech industry.
Until we have definitive proof that AI is dramatically increasing productivity, the only business AI is helping is in the construction of Data Centers.
There has been a large increase in single person businesses in the last year, undoubtedly AI assistants have contributed to making this possible, as described in this article.
https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/careers/starting-your-own-business-is-all-the-rage-again-61763b95
Yeah I read about the increase the other day. A new business is certainly much easier with AI help. As for a new job I guess it depends on what’s being sold.
I’ve actually thought of starting a business with the help of AI. At my age probably easier than finding wage-slave type employment and AI would make it a lot easier.
GenX, we still don't exist ;^))
The data deconstrution on the Michigin survey was quite interesting and convincing that there's very solid signs that methodological change had an unexpected influence (maybe expectable but on their side unexpected)
To what extent do you think the raw number of Russian men dying is going to be medium-term bad for the Russian gas industry? It feels like a substantial challenge for a country that won’t be able to automate production out anytime soon!
Not Noah, but Russia has had problems with “excess male mortality” since at least the 90’s, and I’d say this can’t possibly be good for the society as a whole. (People forget that societies that are misogynist are usually misandrist in some way as well; if women are tradwives, men are cannon fodder.) I remember the surprised Pikachu of that guy Darren or Darryl Something who defected to Russia because the US was “too woke” and whoops, he’s a soldier now. They’re resorting to rounding up homeless alcoholics to send to the front lines. I suppose that IS one way to take care of the homeless problem (I’ll try not to give any MAGA mayor ideas) but…
Yeah this completely tracks with my experience. Also I was just in Ukraine and all the dudes were basically like “the modal Russian soldier is an NPC” and that is completely commensurate with this.
Regarding the generational wealth distributions, I understand that it's hard to track incomes above 140k, but be hiding a significant differences in inequality between the different generations which could influence perspectives even if the income distribution is shifting right overall. Second, I wonder what these distributions look like if you consider wealth rather than income, since again at the upper end of these distributions a lot of what people receive is in the form of inherited wealth rather than income.