Not sure how to test this or prove it, but I think the precariousness is the biggest issue. It's almost like people emotionally "feel" their wealth as including their anticipated future cash flows - and they know those future flows are very uncertain.
I've been wondering if this is why the old Boomer model of a steady job with a modest salary made people happy. You might not get a Ferrari, but you also saw financial ruin as unlikely (barring reckless choices - gamblers etc).
Curious if the professional economists have ever investigated this.
My theory is that most people are happier with a guaranteed $50K a year for life than they are with $100K but they may lose their job and have to find another at any time. But they will also take the less certain $100K over the stable $50K when both are on the table.
I’m curious about how much of the real or perceived precarity is self-inflicted. There’s not much you can do about losing your job, but you can make it much less consequential by making wise financial choices such that you have a buffer for the unexpected downturns of life. But that requires working hard and spending less than you make. Surveys seem to suggest that even many well-to-do Americans are living “paycheck-to-paycheck” because they spend as much or more than they make every month. You don’t have to be poor to do that, you just have to spend your whole paycheck. Then you’re one missed paycheck due to a lost job away from financial ruin. And you feel financially precarious because you are. But this condition wasn’t meted out by god, it’s a choice.
I think that is possibly true. The other related issue is if you feel you can give your children (if you have them) opportunities and a quality of life you didn't have (ever improving circumstances). This will often include an aspect of stability - in terms of jobs and housing.
Many parents are facing situation where that seems highly uncertain, and their children will be lucky to have a life 'as good' as their parents did. This often seems to be at root of many people's objections to immigration - the sense that children's futures have been in some sense 'robbed' by new arrivals. (Not an opinion I share but I can find it more understandable)
Definitely related in that these are expectations about the future, and there is a lot of pessimism. Some warranted, but I personally think some of it is self-inflicted in the culture. So much negativity out there for so many different reasons, versus an attitude that all this is solvable and the future can be better than the past.
It's an interesting hypothesis, but I'm not sure how much it actually explains the data. Most polls find that people are happy about their own finances, while they are very pessimistic about their country's economy (see https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/many-people-are-individually-optimistic for an example, which shows that this trend goes beyond economics). If your hypothesis was true, then people would feel negatively about their own finances instead.
Social media may be responsible for the negative economic sentiment, but most likely because its algorithms have been optimised to push negative stories into us, as we are more likely to engage with them.
The 'Gen Z' survey (although the source is one I would treat deeply skeptically given such firms), seems indicative of some real effect.
I suppose journalistic attention to the demystification of "influencers" - in pre-social media terms, 'hucksters' and the degree to which presentation is borderline fraudulent and/or highly leveraged debt fueled pretense (nothing new in that,except visibility and scale).
More attention to this could help. But I confess I am inclined to view the entire 'influencer' phenomena across the board as a negative.
Gen Z is a lost generation. Yes, our society is sick, sick in many ways. Apparently, Pornhub has screwed up the minds of American males who think swiping left or right is all you have to do to get laid. The desire to have a relationship, get married, and have kids is all but gone in that generation.
Trump has made our politics caustic; this generation has been ruined by social media. Granted. Far-left-wing lunacy has also warped their brains. Granted
But I’m going to say this one more time. The cost of the big things you need in America has gotten far beyond most people's ability to afford. The average price of a new vehicle is now over $50,000 it is unimaginable for most Americans.
Housing, if you live near a major metropolitan area, is hard for the average American to buy. In the NYC area where I live, the median price, according to Google, is $635,000. The general 20% downpayment would be $127,000. Even if you could save $10,000 a year toward the cost of a home, it would take 12 years, at which point the price would be even higher.
Most homes that work for first-time buyers would not be new. They would be old and busted. Dated, nothing that would look cool. In the NYC area, you might have asbestos shingles, need a new roof and possibly have 1970s colors like avocado green along with Formica countertop kitchen counters. In other words, you’d have to make updates, and you’d have to spend another fortune doing the work.
I am remodeling a modest bathroom, it will likely cost me what a new car would cost. For the people who want what the well-off have, it will be out of reach unless you double or triple your salary.
The cost of a good lifestyle based on what social media feeds you is out of reach. It has gone beyond the cost of eggs. The working poor are no doubt suffering, and the modest, or what we call the middle class, is struggling to afford a new car, let alone the repairs for the car you are driving. Just before COVID, in February 2020, I bought a used 2016 BMW 328 for $19,000. I got lucky, but with 115,000 miles, I had to replace a head gasket along with a few other do-dads. $2900 later, it went to the credit card.
This is now life in America. This is not life for Donald Trump, his Cabinet Officers, his friends, and probably not for most successful bloggers, pundits, and influencers. Joe Rogan doesn’t know the first thing about what it costs people to live today.
I'm sorry, but if you're paying $50K for a car, it's because you can afford to. You can buy a new 2025 Honda Accord for MSRP $31K, which means you can probably get it for $28K. It's reliable family transportation, much, much better than anything you could buy for any amount of money when I was growing up in the early 1970s. You can buy a used Honda even cheaper, of course, and Hondas, like Toyotas, are mind bogglingly reliable, so even a used car can last many years.
And yes, NYC is expensive. There are other areas that are not. Pittsburgh's area -- Allegheny county -- in PA has a median house price in the $200Ks. Philadelphia is less expensive than NYC. Lots of places are less expensive.
Add in a couple of grand for license and registration, 7.25% for taxes. Dealers are not giving the kind of discounts you imagine anymore. We need an SUV not a sedan.
Ubiquitous free online porn has certainly done a lot to fuel misogyny among Gen Z men, especially given the prevalence of practices like choking that are not popular among general consumers of porn, but ARE popular among the small minority of customers who actually PAY for porn.
(And it makes it even worse that many of them will have been hit during their time of peak sex drive by Covid lockdowns that prevented them from having real-world relationships.)
I'm increasingly of the opinion also that the rise of MAGA (and to a lesser extent its equivalents in other countries) is a case of "end-stage car culture". The extreme spatial inefficiency of private cars as a mode of transport is coming to roost, and that is driving both the car industry's trend towards larger and more luxurious vehicles (if they can't increase their volume of sales they'll want to increase their profit margins instead: a similar logic is why the Japanese Big 3 introduced new luxury marques in the 1980s after the Plaza Accords) and also the rising clamor for mass deportations, which (as I see it) is likely driven by resentment of traffic congestion and a yearning for Fahrensraum.
Do people seriously expect that they will always get to buy a new house, especially for their first house? That's insane.
I bought a 1967 house in Houston (am Millennial) and am perfectly happy with my old cabinets, salmon pink kitchen tiles, and old fans. I will update them someday probably and it will be nice, but I value my space and privacy much more than having trendy decor. The water pressure is terrible but manageable. I've finally begun to save enough money I can probably get all the pipes replaced in the next few years.
I bought my 1967 house in 2016 for 150K. I moved from California to Houston in 2014. In California I paid ~$1200 a month in Westwood for a studio apartment in 2011-2013. My mortgage in Texas was ~1200 for a 3-bedroom house in 2016.
Market value now is around 250k-300k, which, yes, is a huge jump and we need to keep building housing to keep up with all the people moving here. However, there are a handful of housing markets which are particularly insane and people can relocate to cheaper ones.
I'm all for building more housing, but also it takes years to do that and nobody *has* to live in San Francisco or New York or such places in the meantime.
Here in Europe, older homes are cheaper, but also have much worse insulation, which means that whatever you saved on the buying price you will spend on energies, and then some.
I live in a 2022 house. My friend who inherited a 1970s house pays twice as much for energies, and the main difference is heating. And even though I spend less, my house feels warmer right now. I can walk around in a T-shirt, while I would need a sweater at her place.
Sure, I live in South Texas, so my expense is cooling and not heating. I also have terrible insulation, but energy prices tend to be pretty cheap here.
The median price for a car in the US is now $50,000, but the current median income is now $83,730. In 2000 the income was only $42,148 but the average new car was then $21,850 - so the car now costs you a bigger chunk of your income, but new cars are much safer, comfortable and efficient now and last longer. Inflation hits wages and prices, and doesn’t account for quality.
I'm pessimistic because my power cost quintupled in the past year, my gas cost went up almost as much, the cost of formerly staple groceries like beef and eggs has become completely beyond my ability to afford, my homeowner's insurance has gone up by 30% per year for three years... I don't know who reads this, or what kind of people you know, but out here in the Midwest, costs have gone up across the board, and the middle class is being forcibly pushed down into poverty.
Oh and because when AI doesn't exponentially increase revenue, the economy is going to crash and things are going to get MASSIVELY worse.
Oh and our dictator's personal domestic military is murdering anyone they want, every day.
I have the same questions as you in where Noah is coming from. I know anecdotal information is often worthless, but I also think that the professional economists, like Noah, rely far, far too much on generalized official numbers that may be using the wrong criteria for their inflation formulas and ignoring the real mass of people who fall below the median, as if half the country who you never encounter in your personal life aren't really out there, paying higher prices on insurance and food and other essential expenses with every renewal period or grocery trip.
Where did you read they went up 5X? Costs are going up in most of our larger annual expenses, and it's been quite a while since I've seen my annual premiums for any insurances not go up each year far more than the official government inflation rate. If your major expenses go up significantly every year but a few dozen other categories that are a degree of magnitude cheaper than insurance costs or rent costs or home purchase costs go down to lower the number the formula for inflation derives, I'm not convinced that the formula applies to the actual expenses most people pay. I don''t trust the official formula, though I realize it gives economists a number they get to play with.
Thanks, that made me laugh. I mistook the other reply to the O.P. as being made to my comment on O.P. My bad. I actually have the same question he queried about where power costs would have quintupled!
Residential electricity rates in the Midwest are among the lowest in the country at $0.10 - $0.15 per kWh and have only gone up 5% in the last year. By gas, if you mean gasoline, prices have also not increased in the last year. In no way have either gone up by double let alone 5x.
> So neither redistribution nor growth nor any combination of the two will give regular folks the kind of lifestyle they see on TikTok and Instagram.
I think perceived distance between "me" and "them" also matters. If I have a decent life myself, looking at a slightly above-decent life might be interesting. If I am barely scraping by, constantly stressed about paying the next rent, looking at someone ostentatiously flaunting their insane wealth is going to make me depressed/pissed off. Isn’t the US characterized by a high level of inequality? Also, isn’t the US characterized by an exceptionally strong perceived connection between wealth and personal value, which makes shortcomings in this area particularly painful?
The median American has decent house, some savings and can afford to take a nice vacation once a year. It has hard to reconcile the vibes with reality.
A lot of the inequality is overblown, the luxury version of goods barely adds any utility. I would like to see a more clever survey to see how people actually value these things. Would you accept a coin flip; that if you won you traded your house for a mansion and if you lost your traded your house for a tent? that if you won you could take a private jet anywhere, anytime but if you lost you could only travel to another city on a bicycle?
So are you saying that since (as Noah points out ) redistribution can’t make everyone rich, redistribution should instead aim to make the wealthy as poor as everyone else just to let others feel less depressed/pissed off? Or maybe just ban anyone who has above median wealth from pos on social media.
No. I am saying that perhaps Noah (and now you) see only black and white when there are shades of gray. Redistribution doesn’t need to make everyone rich. You could also redistribute to make the distance between the bottom and top of the society smaller. I am not sure it would solve the problem, but I believe it might help. If you disagree with it, great, but let’s not pretend that if we can’t make everyone rich, the only other option is to make everyone poor.
Our health care is as good as theirs, it just costs more. Most of the cost is paid by either the government or employers, not out of pocket. Our problem with health care is cost, not availability of care.
Just out of curiosity, as a self employed person who is presumably not on a government form of healthcare (Medicare/Medicaid slightly less than 40% of the US) and without an employer (45% of the US) what do you do for your own healthcare coverage?
COBRA is expensive because it is required to charge you the same rate your employer was paying for the same insurance, which is why healthcare coverage is considered a benefit. It would be good if the government taxed it just like income, because that would make the costs clear and improve the system.
It's very unevenly distributed. If you're middle class, now that the Republicans have killed off ACA premium subsidies for the middle class, the only source of *affordable* health insurance for you is employment-based insurance.
And given anemic hiring since last May, that's going to make people nervous.
There is something to this, but the effect will be most powerful on the childish people who are well off but bored out of their minds. The solution for most Americans has very little to do with material wealth and a lot to do with maturity. Functional adults, with some sense of obligation to their families, communities, etc. probably don’t spend lots of time on Instagram and certainly don’t pay attention to this type of ‘influencer’. But there are a huge number of adult-aged people who haven’t reached this level of maturity, and maybe never will.
America will continue to squander its wealth until there is a cultural expectation for adult-aged people to grow up.
This reads a lot like 'the committee has decided to dissolve the people and elect another'. You aren't going to make any changes to society by changing the moral character of people. Causality runs the other way.
"Since the incentives to work hard are increasingly failing to overcome people's perception of the opportunity cost of working hard, we need to remind people it's a vital, forever, intrinsic part of the human condition that you need to spend as much of your life as possible doing tedious labor you hate mostly for other people's benefit."
Yes, this will definitely inspire people who would rather play video games than take care of screaming infants or do Excel spreadsheets.
It's certainly better than an abacus, but the real issue is I have to keep working 8 hours a day even though me + Excel can do the work of a dozen or more people with an abacus.
I think the answer to why people are unhappy with the economy is much simpler than Instagram jealousy. Starting the month after Trump's 'liberation day' in April, job growth has been crappy: only one month (9/25) exceeded 100K jobs added (108K that month), and three months actually had job losses. Considering that about 80-100K new jobs are required to absorb population growth, these are terrible numbers.
So, jobs feel a lot less secure these days, and that's going to make people very, very nervous.
My guess is that job growth is crappy because of tariffs, both their actual effects making buying *and* manufacturing random products more expensive, and their potential effects, which is unpredictable because tariffs are imposed based on the whims of a senile old man sitting in the White House.
Yes, I think uncertainty over Trump’s behavior. However with businesses I think a lot of it is a correction to a mentality of over-hiring in the 2010s.
There's that, too. I joined a Mag 7 tech company in early 2023, and they did a moderate sized layoff because they hired very aggressively during the pandemic, and then after Elon demonstrated that you could get rid of a lot of people without destroying the company, a lot of boards pressed other tech companies to do *something* to reduce head count.
Google, for example, laid off about 5% of their headcount in early 2023, but by early 2025, they had reached the same head count again. My guess is that if it weren't for board peer pressure, they'd have skipped the whole layoff-rehire exercise.
Edited: used to say 'laid off about 10%' but I misremembered the numbers. Went from about 190K to 180K
I would agree and put the emphasis on the salience of the disconnect between effort and outcomes. Like you were saying luck may have rankled us before, but a sense of upward mobility made people feel like they were better off focusing on working hard to improve their lot. When gambling takes over every aspect of life (here including things like crypto investing or going viral and making money as an influencer) people get resentful due to an intuition that the world is less fair. This aligns with disgruntlement in the workplace at earning less than the median because the assumption is that you do similar amounts of work but are compensated less.
I'm not sure how much of this explains feelings on recent economic trends - Instagram launched in 2010 and the degree of hyperconsumerism and wealth display that happens today has been around since at least precovid.
More broadly though, your point of the toxicity of comparison is poignant. Ressentiment is evergreen. Liberal structures may produce notable gains across the board but people value relative status more than absolute. I wish we could just point to people how their absolute wealth has increased and they're better off in absolute terms, but the existence of those massively rewarded few just kills the vibe, man.
This piece makes me think of the other good “it’s the phones” arguments I’ve read by Jonathan Haidt, Matt Yglesias and Abigail Shier.
Social media/phone use causes distorted thinking far beyond money/class issues. The “never-ending algorithmic feeds” also chip away at our attention and this shows up reduced willingness to go out, sit with other people, and deal with the small annoyances of real public life because the phone is always easier and more rewarding. The constant availability of porn warps what people think sex and relationships are supposed to look like. And in politics, the feed is exposing us to way more of the loudest and strangest people around the world, until it starts to feel like that’s the norm whether you agree or you hate those people.
I’m late to the game in realizing this, even for myself, but when you mainline the most extreme, curated, and attention-grabbing parts of society all day, it pulls you further away from what ordinary life actually looks like, and that mostly leaves people worse off mentally and physically.
I think many people are becoming less tolerant of concentrated wealth in general. When times felt better and many (erroneously) believed they could make it big, inequality was okay because one day it wouldn’t matter. With economic precariousness proliferating and the naked self interest of oligarchs on full display now, the game is up.
Personally, I hope we redistribute gains much more widely in the future. Societal cohesion would improve and it’s better for those who help to increase wealth to benefit.
It's bad enough when you look at the influence of social media within the US. Now consider the effect of Instagram on, say, someone in a small town in India looking at these videos. This has resulted in an almost desperate urge to emigrate in Indians
I know what makes *me* feel miserable. It's the opportunity cost of working keeps rising - more books, more games, more Netflix shows, more good restaurants, etc. but I still have to slavishly keep doing boring crap I don't want to do for 8+ hours, 5+ days a week until I'm 65 no matter how much productivity grows. Like if AI lets me do the work of 10 people in the future as one example:
1) My salary will not get even an iota of the massive windfall this gives my employer
2) More importantly, I would still be required to work 8+ hours a day, 5+ days a week until I'm 65
Why am I still working 40 hours+ a week and until the age of 65+ when productivity has improved by some ludicrous amount over the years? I don't want more freaking money. I want more *time* to enjoy all the fun and useful things that have been invented.
I don't resent these rich people's stuff. I resent the perception that they get to spend huge amounts of their time doing things they enjoy.
I don't feel insecure. I feel like 33 -50% of my allotted waking time on Earth is being wasted and am mad that I will only have my freedom when I'm old and sick and will have hard limits on what I can enjoy because of that.
(Am Millennial and I don't watch influencers. I have worked many kinds of jobs - blue and white collar, brain work and work with hands, public facing and not public facing, well paid and poorly paid. They are *all* a waste of my time).
Maybe it was very boring to sit at home all day in 1957 or 1983 and so going out anywhere (work, church, etc). was better. This just isn't true anymore.
I feel this way and don't have kids, so heaven help the people who also have to do the ludicrous amount of tedious crap that people expect of modern parenting.
Not sure how to test this or prove it, but I think the precariousness is the biggest issue. It's almost like people emotionally "feel" their wealth as including their anticipated future cash flows - and they know those future flows are very uncertain.
I've been wondering if this is why the old Boomer model of a steady job with a modest salary made people happy. You might not get a Ferrari, but you also saw financial ruin as unlikely (barring reckless choices - gamblers etc).
Curious if the professional economists have ever investigated this.
My theory is that most people are happier with a guaranteed $50K a year for life than they are with $100K but they may lose their job and have to find another at any time. But they will also take the less certain $100K over the stable $50K when both are on the table.
I’m curious about how much of the real or perceived precarity is self-inflicted. There’s not much you can do about losing your job, but you can make it much less consequential by making wise financial choices such that you have a buffer for the unexpected downturns of life. But that requires working hard and spending less than you make. Surveys seem to suggest that even many well-to-do Americans are living “paycheck-to-paycheck” because they spend as much or more than they make every month. You don’t have to be poor to do that, you just have to spend your whole paycheck. Then you’re one missed paycheck due to a lost job away from financial ruin. And you feel financially precarious because you are. But this condition wasn’t meted out by god, it’s a choice.
No reasonable amount of savings can withstand a major health event in the US.
Which is why health insurance is a smart thing to have in addition to emergency savings.
Proposed search term: "can you be bankrupted in a medical event in the United States even if you have good health insurance".
I think that is possibly true. The other related issue is if you feel you can give your children (if you have them) opportunities and a quality of life you didn't have (ever improving circumstances). This will often include an aspect of stability - in terms of jobs and housing.
Many parents are facing situation where that seems highly uncertain, and their children will be lucky to have a life 'as good' as their parents did. This often seems to be at root of many people's objections to immigration - the sense that children's futures have been in some sense 'robbed' by new arrivals. (Not an opinion I share but I can find it more understandable)
Definitely related in that these are expectations about the future, and there is a lot of pessimism. Some warranted, but I personally think some of it is self-inflicted in the culture. So much negativity out there for so many different reasons, versus an attitude that all this is solvable and the future can be better than the past.
It's an interesting hypothesis, but I'm not sure how much it actually explains the data. Most polls find that people are happy about their own finances, while they are very pessimistic about their country's economy (see https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/many-people-are-individually-optimistic for an example, which shows that this trend goes beyond economics). If your hypothesis was true, then people would feel negatively about their own finances instead.
Social media may be responsible for the negative economic sentiment, but most likely because its algorithms have been optimised to push negative stories into us, as we are more likely to engage with them.
Reasonable hypothesis.
The 'Gen Z' survey (although the source is one I would treat deeply skeptically given such firms), seems indicative of some real effect.
I suppose journalistic attention to the demystification of "influencers" - in pre-social media terms, 'hucksters' and the degree to which presentation is borderline fraudulent and/or highly leveraged debt fueled pretense (nothing new in that,except visibility and scale).
More attention to this could help. But I confess I am inclined to view the entire 'influencer' phenomena across the board as a negative.
Gen Z is a lost generation. Yes, our society is sick, sick in many ways. Apparently, Pornhub has screwed up the minds of American males who think swiping left or right is all you have to do to get laid. The desire to have a relationship, get married, and have kids is all but gone in that generation.
Trump has made our politics caustic; this generation has been ruined by social media. Granted. Far-left-wing lunacy has also warped their brains. Granted
But I’m going to say this one more time. The cost of the big things you need in America has gotten far beyond most people's ability to afford. The average price of a new vehicle is now over $50,000 it is unimaginable for most Americans.
Housing, if you live near a major metropolitan area, is hard for the average American to buy. In the NYC area where I live, the median price, according to Google, is $635,000. The general 20% downpayment would be $127,000. Even if you could save $10,000 a year toward the cost of a home, it would take 12 years, at which point the price would be even higher.
Most homes that work for first-time buyers would not be new. They would be old and busted. Dated, nothing that would look cool. In the NYC area, you might have asbestos shingles, need a new roof and possibly have 1970s colors like avocado green along with Formica countertop kitchen counters. In other words, you’d have to make updates, and you’d have to spend another fortune doing the work.
I am remodeling a modest bathroom, it will likely cost me what a new car would cost. For the people who want what the well-off have, it will be out of reach unless you double or triple your salary.
The cost of a good lifestyle based on what social media feeds you is out of reach. It has gone beyond the cost of eggs. The working poor are no doubt suffering, and the modest, or what we call the middle class, is struggling to afford a new car, let alone the repairs for the car you are driving. Just before COVID, in February 2020, I bought a used 2016 BMW 328 for $19,000. I got lucky, but with 115,000 miles, I had to replace a head gasket along with a few other do-dads. $2900 later, it went to the credit card.
This is now life in America. This is not life for Donald Trump, his Cabinet Officers, his friends, and probably not for most successful bloggers, pundits, and influencers. Joe Rogan doesn’t know the first thing about what it costs people to live today.
I'm sorry, but if you're paying $50K for a car, it's because you can afford to. You can buy a new 2025 Honda Accord for MSRP $31K, which means you can probably get it for $28K. It's reliable family transportation, much, much better than anything you could buy for any amount of money when I was growing up in the early 1970s. You can buy a used Honda even cheaper, of course, and Hondas, like Toyotas, are mind bogglingly reliable, so even a used car can last many years.
And yes, NYC is expensive. There are other areas that are not. Pittsburgh's area -- Allegheny county -- in PA has a median house price in the $200Ks. Philadelphia is less expensive than NYC. Lots of places are less expensive.
Add in a couple of grand for license and registration, 7.25% for taxes. Dealers are not giving the kind of discounts you imagine anymore. We need an SUV not a sedan.
Ubiquitous free online porn has certainly done a lot to fuel misogyny among Gen Z men, especially given the prevalence of practices like choking that are not popular among general consumers of porn, but ARE popular among the small minority of customers who actually PAY for porn.
(And it makes it even worse that many of them will have been hit during their time of peak sex drive by Covid lockdowns that prevented them from having real-world relationships.)
I'm increasingly of the opinion also that the rise of MAGA (and to a lesser extent its equivalents in other countries) is a case of "end-stage car culture". The extreme spatial inefficiency of private cars as a mode of transport is coming to roost, and that is driving both the car industry's trend towards larger and more luxurious vehicles (if they can't increase their volume of sales they'll want to increase their profit margins instead: a similar logic is why the Japanese Big 3 introduced new luxury marques in the 1980s after the Plaza Accords) and also the rising clamor for mass deportations, which (as I see it) is likely driven by resentment of traffic congestion and a yearning for Fahrensraum.
I have to admit, if I tried choking my wife, she’d beat me to death.
On PornHub I don’t think that you swipe left or right, if you’re swiping it’s probably up and down.
LOL, oh I didn’t know....he he he. Actually I was thinking of Tinder
Do people seriously expect that they will always get to buy a new house, especially for their first house? That's insane.
I bought a 1967 house in Houston (am Millennial) and am perfectly happy with my old cabinets, salmon pink kitchen tiles, and old fans. I will update them someday probably and it will be nice, but I value my space and privacy much more than having trendy decor. The water pressure is terrible but manageable. I've finally begun to save enough money I can probably get all the pipes replaced in the next few years.
I bought my 1960's starter track home for $200k in 2010. Which I believe was reasonable. Now it's going for $600k.
3x price increase in 15 years. That's not reasonable. and I can assure you income didn't 3x in that period of time.
This is one of the homes for sale in that neighborhood.
https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1588-Calle-Portos-Lompoc-CA-93436/15926837_zpid/
This is the very definition of a starter track home, and yet is out of reach for basically all families/first time home buyers.
We've royally screwed the next generation.
I bought my 1967 house in 2016 for 150K. I moved from California to Houston in 2014. In California I paid ~$1200 a month in Westwood for a studio apartment in 2011-2013. My mortgage in Texas was ~1200 for a 3-bedroom house in 2016.
Market value now is around 250k-300k, which, yes, is a huge jump and we need to keep building housing to keep up with all the people moving here. However, there are a handful of housing markets which are particularly insane and people can relocate to cheaper ones.
I'm all for building more housing, but also it takes years to do that and nobody *has* to live in San Francisco or New York or such places in the meantime.
I agree that moving is a good idea if you can make it work. Of course some can't because of job or family or whatever.
note though, I wasn't in a major metropolitan area though. I was in a crappy little town. If I was in a bigger city the numbers would be even crazier.
Here in Europe, older homes are cheaper, but also have much worse insulation, which means that whatever you saved on the buying price you will spend on energies, and then some.
I live in a 2022 house. My friend who inherited a 1970s house pays twice as much for energies, and the main difference is heating. And even though I spend less, my house feels warmer right now. I can walk around in a T-shirt, while I would need a sweater at her place.
Sure, I live in South Texas, so my expense is cooling and not heating. I also have terrible insulation, but energy prices tend to be pretty cheap here.
The median price for a car in the US is now $50,000, but the current median income is now $83,730. In 2000 the income was only $42,148 but the average new car was then $21,850 - so the car now costs you a bigger chunk of your income, but new cars are much safer, comfortable and efficient now and last longer. Inflation hits wages and prices, and doesn’t account for quality.
Technology is supposed to get better.
I'm pessimistic because my power cost quintupled in the past year, my gas cost went up almost as much, the cost of formerly staple groceries like beef and eggs has become completely beyond my ability to afford, my homeowner's insurance has gone up by 30% per year for three years... I don't know who reads this, or what kind of people you know, but out here in the Midwest, costs have gone up across the board, and the middle class is being forcibly pushed down into poverty.
Oh and because when AI doesn't exponentially increase revenue, the economy is going to crash and things are going to get MASSIVELY worse.
Oh and our dictator's personal domestic military is murdering anyone they want, every day.
I have the same questions as you in where Noah is coming from. I know anecdotal information is often worthless, but I also think that the professional economists, like Noah, rely far, far too much on generalized official numbers that may be using the wrong criteria for their inflation formulas and ignoring the real mass of people who fall below the median, as if half the country who you never encounter in your personal life aren't really out there, paying higher prices on insurance and food and other essential expenses with every renewal period or grocery trip.
Not to mention they massage those numbers to make them look lower than they really are.
For example, when technology gets better then pretend that means costs have come down.
Technology is supposed to get better. But that doesn't mean my rent got cheaper.
Are you in the US? If so I so don't believe you that your power and gas costs went up 5x. Please name one location in the US where that is true.
Where did you read they went up 5X? Costs are going up in most of our larger annual expenses, and it's been quite a while since I've seen my annual premiums for any insurances not go up each year far more than the official government inflation rate. If your major expenses go up significantly every year but a few dozen other categories that are a degree of magnitude cheaper than insurance costs or rent costs or home purchase costs go down to lower the number the formula for inflation derives, I'm not convinced that the formula applies to the actual expenses most people pay. I don''t trust the official formula, though I realize it gives economists a number they get to play with.
Quintuple:
adjective.
quin·tu·ple | \ kwin-ˈtü-pəl , -ˈtyü-, -ˈtə- , ˈkwin-tə- \
Definition (Entry 1 of 2)
1 : being five times as great or as many
Thanks, that made me laugh. I mistook the other reply to the O.P. as being made to my comment on O.P. My bad. I actually have the same question he queried about where power costs would have quintupled!
Residential electricity rates in the Midwest are among the lowest in the country at $0.10 - $0.15 per kWh and have only gone up 5% in the last year. By gas, if you mean gasoline, prices have also not increased in the last year. In no way have either gone up by double let alone 5x.
> So neither redistribution nor growth nor any combination of the two will give regular folks the kind of lifestyle they see on TikTok and Instagram.
I think perceived distance between "me" and "them" also matters. If I have a decent life myself, looking at a slightly above-decent life might be interesting. If I am barely scraping by, constantly stressed about paying the next rent, looking at someone ostentatiously flaunting their insane wealth is going to make me depressed/pissed off. Isn’t the US characterized by a high level of inequality? Also, isn’t the US characterized by an exceptionally strong perceived connection between wealth and personal value, which makes shortcomings in this area particularly painful?
The median American has decent house, some savings and can afford to take a nice vacation once a year. It has hard to reconcile the vibes with reality.
A lot of the inequality is overblown, the luxury version of goods barely adds any utility. I would like to see a more clever survey to see how people actually value these things. Would you accept a coin flip; that if you won you traded your house for a mansion and if you lost your traded your house for a tent? that if you won you could take a private jet anywhere, anytime but if you lost you could only travel to another city on a bicycle?
So are you saying that since (as Noah points out ) redistribution can’t make everyone rich, redistribution should instead aim to make the wealthy as poor as everyone else just to let others feel less depressed/pissed off? Or maybe just ban anyone who has above median wealth from pos on social media.
No. I am saying that perhaps Noah (and now you) see only black and white when there are shades of gray. Redistribution doesn’t need to make everyone rich. You could also redistribute to make the distance between the bottom and top of the society smaller. I am not sure it would solve the problem, but I believe it might help. If you disagree with it, great, but let’s not pretend that if we can’t make everyone rich, the only other option is to make everyone poor.
I notice that "Good healthcare" wasn't in the list of public goods.
Places like Japan and Taiwan have it and it is to america's great discredit that we do not.
Our health care is as good as theirs, it just costs more. Most of the cost is paid by either the government or employers, not out of pocket. Our problem with health care is cost, not availability of care.
Just out of curiosity, as a self employed person who is presumably not on a government form of healthcare (Medicare/Medicaid slightly less than 40% of the US) and without an employer (45% of the US) what do you do for your own healthcare coverage?
Probably the exchanges created by the Affordable Care Act.
I've been involved in very early stage startups a few times, and our family has always done a mix of COBRA and more recently the ACA exchanges.
COBRA is pricey, though.
COBRA is expensive because it is required to charge you the same rate your employer was paying for the same insurance, which is why healthcare coverage is considered a benefit. It would be good if the government taxed it just like income, because that would make the costs clear and improve the system.
It's very unevenly distributed. If you're middle class, now that the Republicans have killed off ACA premium subsidies for the middle class, the only source of *affordable* health insurance for you is employment-based insurance.
And given anemic hiring since last May, that's going to make people nervous.
Unemployment is around 4% that's a really low number. People aren't that worried about it.
There is something to this, but the effect will be most powerful on the childish people who are well off but bored out of their minds. The solution for most Americans has very little to do with material wealth and a lot to do with maturity. Functional adults, with some sense of obligation to their families, communities, etc. probably don’t spend lots of time on Instagram and certainly don’t pay attention to this type of ‘influencer’. But there are a huge number of adult-aged people who haven’t reached this level of maturity, and maybe never will.
America will continue to squander its wealth until there is a cultural expectation for adult-aged people to grow up.
This reads a lot like 'the committee has decided to dissolve the people and elect another'. You aren't going to make any changes to society by changing the moral character of people. Causality runs the other way.
Translated:
"Since the incentives to work hard are increasingly failing to overcome people's perception of the opportunity cost of working hard, we need to remind people it's a vital, forever, intrinsic part of the human condition that you need to spend as much of your life as possible doing tedious labor you hate mostly for other people's benefit."
Yes, this will definitely inspire people who would rather play video games than take care of screaming infants or do Excel spreadsheets.
hey I love excel it's one of the best programs every invented...
It's certainly better than an abacus, but the real issue is I have to keep working 8 hours a day even though me + Excel can do the work of a dozen or more people with an abacus.
I definitely think as AI takes off we will need to look at the 8 hour work day.
I'm thinking 4 days a week, 6 hours a day sounds about right. Enough to keep people busy, but with more free time.
"Functional adults, with some sense of obligation to their families, communities, etc. probably don’t spend lots of time on Instagram"
this is obviously not true unless your definition of functional is REALLY REALLY small. In 2025 73% of adults used social media.
I think the answer to why people are unhappy with the economy is much simpler than Instagram jealousy. Starting the month after Trump's 'liberation day' in April, job growth has been crappy: only one month (9/25) exceeded 100K jobs added (108K that month), and three months actually had job losses. Considering that about 80-100K new jobs are required to absorb population growth, these are terrible numbers.
So, jobs feel a lot less secure these days, and that's going to make people very, very nervous.
My guess is that job growth is crappy because of tariffs, both their actual effects making buying *and* manufacturing random products more expensive, and their potential effects, which is unpredictable because tariffs are imposed based on the whims of a senile old man sitting in the White House.
Yes, I think uncertainty over Trump’s behavior. However with businesses I think a lot of it is a correction to a mentality of over-hiring in the 2010s.
There's that, too. I joined a Mag 7 tech company in early 2023, and they did a moderate sized layoff because they hired very aggressively during the pandemic, and then after Elon demonstrated that you could get rid of a lot of people without destroying the company, a lot of boards pressed other tech companies to do *something* to reduce head count.
Google, for example, laid off about 5% of their headcount in early 2023, but by early 2025, they had reached the same head count again. My guess is that if it weren't for board peer pressure, they'd have skipped the whole layoff-rehire exercise.
Edited: used to say 'laid off about 10%' but I misremembered the numbers. Went from about 190K to 180K
I would agree and put the emphasis on the salience of the disconnect between effort and outcomes. Like you were saying luck may have rankled us before, but a sense of upward mobility made people feel like they were better off focusing on working hard to improve their lot. When gambling takes over every aspect of life (here including things like crypto investing or going viral and making money as an influencer) people get resentful due to an intuition that the world is less fair. This aligns with disgruntlement in the workplace at earning less than the median because the assumption is that you do similar amounts of work but are compensated less.
Yeah, I think the apps to blame are RobinHood and the all the sports gambling apps, not TikTok and Instagram.
I'm not sure how much of this explains feelings on recent economic trends - Instagram launched in 2010 and the degree of hyperconsumerism and wealth display that happens today has been around since at least precovid.
More broadly though, your point of the toxicity of comparison is poignant. Ressentiment is evergreen. Liberal structures may produce notable gains across the board but people value relative status more than absolute. I wish we could just point to people how their absolute wealth has increased and they're better off in absolute terms, but the existence of those massively rewarded few just kills the vibe, man.
Yes, and inflation may make the Zoomers financially successful numbers work out eventually, the median income is already $83,730.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N
This piece makes me think of the other good “it’s the phones” arguments I’ve read by Jonathan Haidt, Matt Yglesias and Abigail Shier.
Social media/phone use causes distorted thinking far beyond money/class issues. The “never-ending algorithmic feeds” also chip away at our attention and this shows up reduced willingness to go out, sit with other people, and deal with the small annoyances of real public life because the phone is always easier and more rewarding. The constant availability of porn warps what people think sex and relationships are supposed to look like. And in politics, the feed is exposing us to way more of the loudest and strangest people around the world, until it starts to feel like that’s the norm whether you agree or you hate those people.
I’m late to the game in realizing this, even for myself, but when you mainline the most extreme, curated, and attention-grabbing parts of society all day, it pulls you further away from what ordinary life actually looks like, and that mostly leaves people worse off mentally and physically.
I think many people are becoming less tolerant of concentrated wealth in general. When times felt better and many (erroneously) believed they could make it big, inequality was okay because one day it wouldn’t matter. With economic precariousness proliferating and the naked self interest of oligarchs on full display now, the game is up.
Personally, I hope we redistribute gains much more widely in the future. Societal cohesion would improve and it’s better for those who help to increase wealth to benefit.
They have great equality and social cohesion in North Korea, even their oligarchs aren’t as rich as Trump.
Thank you for the reminder, Comrade.
It's bad enough when you look at the influence of social media within the US. Now consider the effect of Instagram on, say, someone in a small town in India looking at these videos. This has resulted in an almost desperate urge to emigrate in Indians
interesting observation.
You made me look up deracination and now I can’t find where you used it in this post.
I know what makes *me* feel miserable. It's the opportunity cost of working keeps rising - more books, more games, more Netflix shows, more good restaurants, etc. but I still have to slavishly keep doing boring crap I don't want to do for 8+ hours, 5+ days a week until I'm 65 no matter how much productivity grows. Like if AI lets me do the work of 10 people in the future as one example:
1) My salary will not get even an iota of the massive windfall this gives my employer
2) More importantly, I would still be required to work 8+ hours a day, 5+ days a week until I'm 65
Why am I still working 40 hours+ a week and until the age of 65+ when productivity has improved by some ludicrous amount over the years? I don't want more freaking money. I want more *time* to enjoy all the fun and useful things that have been invented.
I don't resent these rich people's stuff. I resent the perception that they get to spend huge amounts of their time doing things they enjoy.
I don't feel insecure. I feel like 33 -50% of my allotted waking time on Earth is being wasted and am mad that I will only have my freedom when I'm old and sick and will have hard limits on what I can enjoy because of that.
(Am Millennial and I don't watch influencers. I have worked many kinds of jobs - blue and white collar, brain work and work with hands, public facing and not public facing, well paid and poorly paid. They are *all* a waste of my time).
Maybe it was very boring to sit at home all day in 1957 or 1983 and so going out anywhere (work, church, etc). was better. This just isn't true anymore.
I feel this way and don't have kids, so heaven help the people who also have to do the ludicrous amount of tedious crap that people expect of modern parenting.