I remember back in the 60s my mother commenting that she thought that television made people dissatisfied because it allowed them to see what "everyone" else had.
I think she was on the right track. People seek not only survival and security from their possessions, but also status, and the stuff they have is one of the prime markers of that status.
As I was hearing her then, television displayed a world of people with better material lives than theirs. And better than that possessed by the best off people they knew. And those two facts together led to dissatisfaction and frustration.
I have since realized the extent to which this was deliberate. The business of television depended on advertising, and advertisers wanted to sale their products to viewers in an acute state of dissatisfaction, thus the shows portrayed especially affluent lives to be envious towards. And not just for the shear entertainment value of it.
However, and I think this is crucial, it was more than that. Television vastly expanded viewers' sense of the portion of the world that was their business. I am highly skeptical that the natural state of human beings is that of a libertarian; we are born to think that behavior in our family and immediate community IS our business, and ought to be conducted in accordance with our values. The trouble was that television vastly expanded peoples' sense of "immediate community" -- nationally and even internationally.
This appeared to be a good thing when large numbers of distant Whites showed up to protest injustice faced by Blacks. And probably still good when Americans protested against US military treatment of Vietnamese civilians. But this new principle of life -- the world is my neighborhood, so my values ought to rule the world -- was a time bomb. Because if your values ought to rule the world, it followed that the whole world wanted their values to rule you.
That's a dark, zero-sum world, too.
(In fact, it is no accident that the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War remain deep-seated scars in many conservative quarters. And not because we ought to return to Jim Crow, but because these two impositions of distant liberal values on conservatives implies that conservatives have an equal right to impose their values nationally on liberals.)
In these regards, the line from the network television to today's dominant means of communication is less a matter of abrupt sea changes, and more a geometric progression.
The somewhat less engaged are still concerned with the material, but this is usually comparative. Setting aside the small percentage that actually worry about getting enough to survive, the vast number are pissed that there is little hope of ever getting enough stuff to improve (or more crucially maintain) their status. They see it online, their kids see it online. Masses of other people, other kinds of people, are leaving them behind, looking down on them.
However, the more engaged, the kind of people who follow politics and world events online, they see a national neighborhood out of their rightful control. They and everyone they interact with agrees that life right in front of their eyes is being lived immorally, and they are pissed and want angry leaders to rectify the situation. Parallel to the network TV situation, making people more angry is good business, but the inherent nature of the media would tend strongly in that direction anyway.
This is something that a colleague who travelled around Africa 20 years ago told me:
* people in Egypt are unhappy, because they have TVs and they see all the soap operas there, which makes them think that this is how a normal Westerner lives and they are left out,
* people in Sudan are happy because they don't have TVs and thus nothing to compare their lives against. Even though objectively they are much worse off than Egyptians.
People compare themselves to their reference group and care about the group’s business because it IS THEIR business too. Humans are a social species and we rely on the group for our survival. For most of human history, that group was your immediate clan, tribe, neighborhood, etc. They were your reference for how you were doing in the world. Writing and journalism allowed people to hear about and fantasize about faraway places and things, but they still saw their reference group as highly local. Early American TV shows (50s, 60s, & 70s) were broadly middle class focused and therefore allowed people to feel satisfied when comparing themselves to the fictional characters they saw on TV.
It wasn’t until the 80s and 90s, with shows like 90210 and Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous that the status dissatisfaction really started to creep in. And then with social media and its total curating of online life combined with the parasocial nature of online influencers, that dissatisfaction has exploded.
Great point about the connection to advertising that has an incentive to keep people perpetually dissatisfied and angry.
If TV has been bad, social media has been an absolute disaster for society.
Two things. Firstly, there's a point which I will continue to make about people being told to be dissatisfied on social media by both American and non-American sources. But I've flogged that horse a few times here, so lets spare it today.
Secondly, theres a point about millenials still being much worse off despite all the economic stats saying they are not. I was stood chatting in a neighbours group the other day. Most of the people were in their 70's, I'm in my 50's and there was one millenial. From what I could discern, our income trajectories had followed the same path.
Here's the issue - the older people were in paid-for mansions they had bought for a song in the late 70's and early 80's, when they were in their late 20's and early 30's. I'm extending my finances to buy a lesser house in the same neighbourhood and the millenial is living with her mum. She has no prospect of ever being able to afford one of these houses unless her mum leaves it to her.
They are lovely houses in a nice place. We have similar careers. But today, similar houses can only be bought by much wealthier people. House price inflation over the last 40 years has materially changed the lives of the people born after and breeds resentment. Resentment at government, at corporates, at immigrants (must be a source of demand pressure, right?), at each other. House price inflation has broken the social compact.
I drive by my old town and look at the tiny houses the middle class and upper middle class and working class (all living more or less together) lived in during the 1960s and 70s. Corporate execs, doctors, lawyers, etc along with “normal” people, most of whom didn’t have two nickels to rub together and an unreliable car.
Some of my kids and most of their friends would be very disappointed to live in those houses, let alone to raise a (much smaller) family in one. Not sure they’d like the idea of 2 weeks vacation a year, either (and only within driving distance), and going out to eat once a month (with pizza or Chinese once a week).
One can build a rich life for oneself living in an ordinary house in an ordinary town. Arts, nature, family, friends- all affordable. Have a church, a hobby or volunteer work, a garden, a sports team. A couple of my kids could handle this- avoid living on the coasts and build a quality life at reasonable cost. One absolutely could not (and he’s the least hard working). They did grow up around (and went to school with) a lot of rich people and lived in nice places in “elite” locations so I can’t blame him for thinking that is “normal” when really it is the product of luck (being in the right industry at the right time- a rising tide…:in the right port…..lifts most boats there, even if their captains attribute it to helmsmanship) and hard work and rising asset prices.
I bought a tiny house in Baltimore in my twenties. Rowhouse with three tiny bedrooms and no heat upstairs, postage stamp yard. It was fine for us childless and even with one small kid (though two would have been cramped). Living in a small house is not a problem, and actually great for young people because the compensation is greater neighborhood density and more access to walkable amenities. The problem today is not square footage but the price for even tiny houses. That tiny house sold for 70k in 1998, 145k when I bought it in 2004, 225k when I sold it in 2009, and the Zestimate peaked at $400k this year.
Unrealistic expectations now includes “living near the place you work in a home you own” unfortunately. I also agree that people sometimes want bigger houses than their grandparents grew up in, but we’re not even meeting the bare expectations anymore.
And this is hard to teach one's kids, who are used to having more, even if not thoroughly elite conditions.
My parents were both professionals, but our first home bought when I was 3yo was 900 sq. ft. I have no problem with living in that size of home again, but if they did, they might be resentful about it.
By the time my 4 kids arrived, we lived in a 2100 sq. ft. home, which I deliberately didn't enlarge so they lived with at least some constraints. They recognize their peers expect more than they do, which is healthy, but only gets them so far.
What most don't fully grasp is that my parents moved outward from city cores, towards less density, as did I. That we made trade-offs.
If you want to live in a city core, or even just have job that demands you work in a city core, it will be costly one way or another, and therefore require compromises. They key for young people is not to be resentful about this, but recognize a historical progression that has affected multiple generations.
Always remember that the reason those house were going for a song in the late 70a and early 80s was because mortgage rates were hovering between 16% and 18% which made monthly payments very high even for a modest principal. There's a rough, but consistent inverse relationship between mortgage rates and housing prices. And sure, after a few years they were able to refinance at 9%, then at 7% a few years after that but when they made the purchase it wasn't at all clear rates were ever coming down.
Remember, there were 240 million Americans in 1986, and there are 340 million now. That's probably an additional 40M households. When I use Gemini to see how many more housing units there are, the number is 49.5 million.
So, it sounds like we should have enough houses. Perhaps they're not where we want to live. In '86 the population was about 75% urban, while today it's 82% or so, but that still doesn't sound too bad. As long as everyone doesn't want to live in NYC or SF.
I think there is a version of this that is just, "it's the housing, stupid!" but for that to be the case, it still have to be a VERY loud minority doing all the moving of sentiment. Almost 60% of millennials own homes now. And for Americans overall I think it's closer to 70%.
Which means the phenomenon that we are positing might be causing all this unrest is also making 2/3rds of Americans...rapidly much wealthier...
It might still be the cause! But I feel like it's rarely looked at in terms of what homeownership rates actually are the flip-side of the price increases (wealth for the majority of people who are already owners).
Imagine this claim in another context. Headline: "401ks and Pension balances double overnight...Americans broadly furious!" It's not impossible that could be pieced together. But it would be weird!
strong agreement, I believe the median home was around 2.1x the median income in 1950 and today it's closer to 6x
So the wife was sent to work to barely struggle to afford to get into the same house
My anecdote, you could get a 1960's track home for $100k in my neighborhood in the late 90's. In 2010, it was $200k, now it's $600. Obviously incomes didn't 6x in 25 years, they didn't even 3x
All of what you say is right, but our malaise stems from factors far deeper than status and power disparities or distress over foreign affairs. What’s changed most profoundly in America during the last quarter century is that our lives have become more separate and stratified, more socially, politically, and culturally siloed. The center cannot hold because there is no center, it has evaporated, sucked into the technosphere and atomized into the tiny, disconnected bubbles in which we now live. I don’t know what the remedy for this is, but it feels as if it has to be more spiritual and cultural than political or economic.
Millennials also grew up with the old style of social order, in-person interaction and land lines, saw the Internet promise to enhance the social order and it ended up completely fragmenting and the social interaction online enshittified.
I was surprised this post didn't include any mention of the phones. I subscribe to the theory that the newer generation is harder to please because they are constantly bombarded with images of incredible wealth (rich TikTokers) and incredible tragedy (Gaza, Ukraine etc) and feel uniquely powerless to do anything about either situation.
People in the 30s around me walk around staring at their phones. Actually, it's not just when they're walking. When they're sitting and in the company of others, they are still staring at their phones.
What do you think we used to do? Stop strangers on the street and start engaging in meaningful conversation? Maybe when folks had 2 hour daily commutes they listened to poetry on their CD players? Some did, many listened to Rush Limbaugh and other destroyers of democracy.
“ the world is changing way too fast relative to my ability to keep up. This causes me anxiety, fear about the future, and loss of status.” this seems like a fairly adequate explanation for a big chunk of what’s going on. Traditionally on the right, but also on the left.
The more uncertain I feel about the future, the bigger the financial cushion I need to feel adequate about riding it out. This may explain unrealistically high expectations for “adequate income“ that Gen Z has.
The more uncertain I feel about the future, the more likely am to hold onto my existing entitlements. This may explain the virulence of resistance to entitlements and congressional deadlock.
Technology is changing the world faster than our society can effectively metabolize. It has happened before, most recently 1870-1930. It did not end well.
I think “metabolize” is exactly the interesting word here.
I’ve been wondering whether the problem is really the speed of technological change itself, or the growing gap between that speed and people’s ability to feel that they are still participating in the future it creates.
I recently wrote about this as an Acceleration Gap. My argument is that people may tolerate extraordinary speed when acceleration still feels like a vehicle they are riding in. The political problem begins when acceleration continues, but more and more people experience themselves as passengers being left behind.
I also think there is a deeper social imbalance emerging in the age of acceleration: real public life and real-world relationships are shrinking, while virtual public life and virtual relationships are expanding extremely quickly. The result is not only a subjective feeling of loneliness or discomfort. It may be changing the deeper structure of how people relate to one another, including how political relationships are formed.
That is where I think this connects to another piece I recently wrote, Why Is a Lonely Society So Good at Mass Politics? My argument there was that mass politics can provide identity, belonging, and a sense of participation remarkably efficiently, especially when ordinary relational communities have weakened.
So perhaps the two problems are connected:
The faster the world changes beyond our ability to metabolize it, and the more real-world social life is displaced by virtual forms of association, the more attractive political belonging may become as a substitute for agency and relationship.
Your comment helped me see the connection between those two arguments more clearly.
It will do all of those things with the caveat that lifespan is very hard to change.
There was a paper published a few years ago measuring what factors have caused the increase in average lifespan since 1900.
Better public sanitation and improved nutrition were half of the gain. Better pre and post natal care was almost the entirety of the rest.
Antibiotics, x rays, cancer drugs, the polio vaccine, and the entire 20th century of medical improvements bought humanity an extra 2 years of lifespan on average.
When real income has increased 25-30% over the past 40 years while real housing, health care, and college education costs have increased by 150-250% you might still have an economics problem.
I know how some people here feel about Elizabeth Warren, BUT, her Two Income Trap that came out in 2004 really, really nailed why people were feeling like they could not get ahead even if their on-paper income has increased. Large, fixed expenses, specifically, housing, health care, child care and college have increased SO MUCH more than income has. We definitely pay less for food, clothing, electronics and so on; but we are stuck paying through the nose for housing and child care. College became a necessity for a middle-class life rather than an option, and also much, much more expensive.
Democrats felt better about Joe Biden as President, while Republicans were horrified by his policies, especially the millions of economic refugees crossing the border. The “woke” mob is demanding that white employees answer for their crime of being white.
For Democrats, especially those who have been indoctrinated at colleges that preached colonial settler framing, socialism, and race-based politics, money isn’t the thing that motivates them. It is the destruction of the institutions they feel support the above.
For Republicans, especially the blue-collar types, they hear the above, and their eyes roll. The Latinx stupidity, biological men playing in women's sports; they believe Trump’s rhetoric about countries ripping off America. They believe his garbage that immigrants are all rapists and murderers.
I moved from Manhattan Beach, California to Manhattan in 1987. My salary was $33,000. My first home, the cheapest in the town, cost me $212,000. My daughter, a millennial, is an occupational therapist. She will start a new job in September, making $90,000 in Jersey City.
Buying any type of home near New York City will cost around $800,000.
Inflation, along with the shortage of housing, has kept rents high. She has moved into a one-bedroom apartment in a non-gentrified area of Jersey City for $1900 a month. That was likely what I was paying back in 1992 at my first house.
For some people, it is just knowing that your tribe is in political power, not thinking much beyond that. Joe Biden’s economy got punished at the polls, not in 2022 however. There was no red wave. By 2024, the economy, the border the crazy woke stuff, helped Independence give themselves permission to vote for Trump.
Democrats, given the issues, may have a wave election in the midterms,or, due to redistricting, a ripple. The midterms will be a vote on Trump; it’s not like Democrats are held in high esteem.
I have a theory about this. Anger about or over Trump’s actions is the defining issue. Anger is not a policy position. Anger doesn’t provide more housing. It won’t provide more good-paying jobs. It’s not about economics; it is about Trump.
$90k today is quite a bit less than you were making, in real terms. And back in the 1980s I didn’t know anyone who was living in a one bedroom- not even trust fund kids.
By the way one can get a decent 2 or 3 bedroom town house in suburban Jersey in the $500s in towns with good school districts and acceptable commutes to NYC, but as an OT she might do better working locally.
Re the idea that politics has risen up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, I remain of the opinion that the further you go up that hierarchy, the more it behoves you to solve those problems for yourself rather than relying on the government to do it for you.
It is incumbent on the government to make sure everyone has a roof over their heads. But if you're lonely, what's the government meant to do - find friends for you?
Excellent comment. We are in a confused time. The machine is working fairly well but the mind is searching for purpose and meaning. As you say doing positive things in your own life is a way out but not promoted. There is a future where, with a percentage of people doing this, it becomes attractive and spreads. Purpose and meaning beyond this issue or that is required.
> I remain of the opinion that the further you go up that hierarchy, the more it behoves you to solve those problems for yourself rather than relying on the government to do it for you.
Not sure relying on government to solve your problems but also religion, populist figures, podcasters, etc. People need to start looking inward and deciding for themselves what gives their life meaning. I think for so long people were used to x input = y output and they didn't get the results they wanted so they are just perpetually unhappy.
Although wages have risen, housing costs, childcare costs, healthcare costs, elder care, and higher education costs have outpaced that growth. People are unhappy in the US because they cannot afford a decent place to live and raise children. Most people have almost no vacation time or sick leave. No maternity leave. No paternity leave. They are one medical emergency away from bankruptcy.
Great points. Honestly, cheaper housing, medicare for all, and 3 months of parental leave would make people a lot happier I think. Of course there are also people that would probably be resentful of people getting those benefits that they don't think deserve it, but overall I think it would be a huge net benefit and happiness mover!
One interesting thing about status is that it can be pursued on many dimensions: wealth and income, fitness, athletic skill, education, knowledge about specific subjects, gardening, stamp collecting, youtube views, etc. So, in theory, everyone could all achieve high status in something. Maybe there's a path there to achieving a more satisfied population, even given the zero-sum nature of status pursuits.
Natalie Wynn of ContraPoints did a video where she brought up the same idea, albeit on a much smaller scale than “the world” - she was talking about all the social media cancellation frenzies during Woke 1. She argued they were at least partly driven by envy of others’ successes and feeling like there was not enough to go around. Envy fuels the crab bucket.
Peter Turchin has studied this question extensively. The pattern he’s found in all kinds of state societies going back thousands of years goes as follows:
1. Some kind of wealth pump arises, that funnels money from the poor to the rich
2. The number of rich people explodes, which dramatically increases status competition among their ranks
3. War, revolution, or major political reform create a new equilibrium.
Here in the US, we have housing scarcity funneling money from the poor to the rich. We have an overabundance of overly-credentialed, downwardly-mobile wannabe elites—the children of the homeowners who’ve benefited from land scarcity. As a result, we have a burgeoning group of angry, spurned people with too much education looking to mobilize the immiserated poor in support of their revolutionary aims, on both the MAGA right and the woke/socialist left.
Great post. This is something we think about a lot in our work with Abundant America. We are trying to broaden abundance politics to include more than just economic abundance by talking explicitly about civic and social abundance.
"A republic cannot be sustained by consumers alone. A broad, holistic and durable politics of abundance answers this in three ways:
Economic abundance reduces the desperation that makes civic life untenable. When individuals and families cannot afford homes, childcare, healthcare, transportation, or stable communities, they become trapped in a race for private survival. Scarcity makes people anxious, competitive, transient, tribal and zero-sum. Abundance creates the material room for rootedness, generosity, and public participation.
Civic abundance gives people agency instead of spectatorship. Early liberal thinkers, like Tocqueville, admired American local government because it taught citizens how to govern by making them do it. A renewed culture of civic abundance should revive that habit: local leaders, mayors, churches, nonprofits, schools, neighborhood groups, business owners, and citizens defining needed outcomes and working to deliver tangible results together. People learn citizenship not by being lectured about democracy or presented with facts, but by practicing responsibility in common projects and delivering tangible results to improve their communities.
Social abundance seeks to rebuild the institutions that form citizens and give connection and purpose to our lives. Families, churches and faith institutions, schools, unions, clubs, civic associations, sports leagues, libraries, public squares, and local newspapers are not decorative. They are where people learn duty, trust, awe, humility, compromise, and belonging. Holistic abundance should include concern for increasing the supply of these formative settings, not only increasing GDP.
America needs a politics that keeps liberalism’s commitment to freedom, growth, and innovation but restores the preconditions of that freedom."
Odd that the premise of the essay seems to be that economic woes aren't what's driving dissatisfaction at its core, but the proposed solution is to try and reduce feelings of economic inequality. It seems that trying to increase participation in common institutions that bring community and engagement - civic institutions, church and other spiritual groups, etc - would combat the proposed ills better. Along with curbing social media use and the 24-7 media rage cycle.
Many problems - individual, psychological, spiritual, or even some social -- are not issues that republican or even democratic forms government can or should solve. So these are indeed challenges, but they are not anything that we need JD Vance or Elizabeth Warren to put on their to-do lists.
I remember back in the 60s my mother commenting that she thought that television made people dissatisfied because it allowed them to see what "everyone" else had.
I think she was on the right track. People seek not only survival and security from their possessions, but also status, and the stuff they have is one of the prime markers of that status.
As I was hearing her then, television displayed a world of people with better material lives than theirs. And better than that possessed by the best off people they knew. And those two facts together led to dissatisfaction and frustration.
I have since realized the extent to which this was deliberate. The business of television depended on advertising, and advertisers wanted to sale their products to viewers in an acute state of dissatisfaction, thus the shows portrayed especially affluent lives to be envious towards. And not just for the shear entertainment value of it.
However, and I think this is crucial, it was more than that. Television vastly expanded viewers' sense of the portion of the world that was their business. I am highly skeptical that the natural state of human beings is that of a libertarian; we are born to think that behavior in our family and immediate community IS our business, and ought to be conducted in accordance with our values. The trouble was that television vastly expanded peoples' sense of "immediate community" -- nationally and even internationally.
This appeared to be a good thing when large numbers of distant Whites showed up to protest injustice faced by Blacks. And probably still good when Americans protested against US military treatment of Vietnamese civilians. But this new principle of life -- the world is my neighborhood, so my values ought to rule the world -- was a time bomb. Because if your values ought to rule the world, it followed that the whole world wanted their values to rule you.
That's a dark, zero-sum world, too.
(In fact, it is no accident that the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War remain deep-seated scars in many conservative quarters. And not because we ought to return to Jim Crow, but because these two impositions of distant liberal values on conservatives implies that conservatives have an equal right to impose their values nationally on liberals.)
In these regards, the line from the network television to today's dominant means of communication is less a matter of abrupt sea changes, and more a geometric progression.
The somewhat less engaged are still concerned with the material, but this is usually comparative. Setting aside the small percentage that actually worry about getting enough to survive, the vast number are pissed that there is little hope of ever getting enough stuff to improve (or more crucially maintain) their status. They see it online, their kids see it online. Masses of other people, other kinds of people, are leaving them behind, looking down on them.
However, the more engaged, the kind of people who follow politics and world events online, they see a national neighborhood out of their rightful control. They and everyone they interact with agrees that life right in front of their eyes is being lived immorally, and they are pissed and want angry leaders to rectify the situation. Parallel to the network TV situation, making people more angry is good business, but the inherent nature of the media would tend strongly in that direction anyway.
This is something that a colleague who travelled around Africa 20 years ago told me:
* people in Egypt are unhappy, because they have TVs and they see all the soap operas there, which makes them think that this is how a normal Westerner lives and they are left out,
* people in Sudan are happy because they don't have TVs and thus nothing to compare their lives against. Even though objectively they are much worse off than Egyptians.
Though that is clearly not true now what with the civil war and all. Someone in Sudan had reason to want more than the other guy.
Neil Postman wrote amusing ourselves to death which in part was a good discussion on this idea.
Your comment is spot on.
People compare themselves to their reference group and care about the group’s business because it IS THEIR business too. Humans are a social species and we rely on the group for our survival. For most of human history, that group was your immediate clan, tribe, neighborhood, etc. They were your reference for how you were doing in the world. Writing and journalism allowed people to hear about and fantasize about faraway places and things, but they still saw their reference group as highly local. Early American TV shows (50s, 60s, & 70s) were broadly middle class focused and therefore allowed people to feel satisfied when comparing themselves to the fictional characters they saw on TV.
It wasn’t until the 80s and 90s, with shows like 90210 and Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous that the status dissatisfaction really started to creep in. And then with social media and its total curating of online life combined with the parasocial nature of online influencers, that dissatisfaction has exploded.
Great point about the connection to advertising that has an incentive to keep people perpetually dissatisfied and angry.
If TV has been bad, social media has been an absolute disaster for society.
What a great comment
Two things. Firstly, there's a point which I will continue to make about people being told to be dissatisfied on social media by both American and non-American sources. But I've flogged that horse a few times here, so lets spare it today.
Secondly, theres a point about millenials still being much worse off despite all the economic stats saying they are not. I was stood chatting in a neighbours group the other day. Most of the people were in their 70's, I'm in my 50's and there was one millenial. From what I could discern, our income trajectories had followed the same path.
Here's the issue - the older people were in paid-for mansions they had bought for a song in the late 70's and early 80's, when they were in their late 20's and early 30's. I'm extending my finances to buy a lesser house in the same neighbourhood and the millenial is living with her mum. She has no prospect of ever being able to afford one of these houses unless her mum leaves it to her.
They are lovely houses in a nice place. We have similar careers. But today, similar houses can only be bought by much wealthier people. House price inflation over the last 40 years has materially changed the lives of the people born after and breeds resentment. Resentment at government, at corporates, at immigrants (must be a source of demand pressure, right?), at each other. House price inflation has broken the social compact.
I drive by my old town and look at the tiny houses the middle class and upper middle class and working class (all living more or less together) lived in during the 1960s and 70s. Corporate execs, doctors, lawyers, etc along with “normal” people, most of whom didn’t have two nickels to rub together and an unreliable car.
Some of my kids and most of their friends would be very disappointed to live in those houses, let alone to raise a (much smaller) family in one. Not sure they’d like the idea of 2 weeks vacation a year, either (and only within driving distance), and going out to eat once a month (with pizza or Chinese once a week).
One can build a rich life for oneself living in an ordinary house in an ordinary town. Arts, nature, family, friends- all affordable. Have a church, a hobby or volunteer work, a garden, a sports team. A couple of my kids could handle this- avoid living on the coasts and build a quality life at reasonable cost. One absolutely could not (and he’s the least hard working). They did grow up around (and went to school with) a lot of rich people and lived in nice places in “elite” locations so I can’t blame him for thinking that is “normal” when really it is the product of luck (being in the right industry at the right time- a rising tide…:in the right port…..lifts most boats there, even if their captains attribute it to helmsmanship) and hard work and rising asset prices.
I bought a tiny house in Baltimore in my twenties. Rowhouse with three tiny bedrooms and no heat upstairs, postage stamp yard. It was fine for us childless and even with one small kid (though two would have been cramped). Living in a small house is not a problem, and actually great for young people because the compensation is greater neighborhood density and more access to walkable amenities. The problem today is not square footage but the price for even tiny houses. That tiny house sold for 70k in 1998, 145k when I bought it in 2004, 225k when I sold it in 2009, and the Zestimate peaked at $400k this year.
Don’t disagree that asset price inflation is a problem. My point is that unrealistic expectations are also a problem.
Unrealistic expectations now includes “living near the place you work in a home you own” unfortunately. I also agree that people sometimes want bigger houses than their grandparents grew up in, but we’re not even meeting the bare expectations anymore.
And they get those unrealistic expectations from social media, and to a lesser extent, TV.
Except those 1960's built homes are still out of reach for most people.
My last home was a crappy 1960's starter home (1200 sq ft). It's now going for $600k,. What family starting out can afford something like that
It’s priced for what people in the area can afford.
$500k mortgage is less than $3k a month, which works on a two earner salary of just over $100k.
And I just saw a very nice 4000 sq ft home in TX for $300k.
My 335k mortgage is $2200. And that's at 4.25%
There's no way you are getting a $500k mortgage for $3k a month
Nor can you possibly afford that on $100k a year salary
The payment on a 500K mortgage at 6.75% is about $3200
Does this include the PMI, homeowners insurance, and property tax? Those can easily add hundreds of dollars to the payment.
And this is hard to teach one's kids, who are used to having more, even if not thoroughly elite conditions.
My parents were both professionals, but our first home bought when I was 3yo was 900 sq. ft. I have no problem with living in that size of home again, but if they did, they might be resentful about it.
By the time my 4 kids arrived, we lived in a 2100 sq. ft. home, which I deliberately didn't enlarge so they lived with at least some constraints. They recognize their peers expect more than they do, which is healthy, but only gets them so far.
What most don't fully grasp is that my parents moved outward from city cores, towards less density, as did I. That we made trade-offs.
If you want to live in a city core, or even just have job that demands you work in a city core, it will be costly one way or another, and therefore require compromises. They key for young people is not to be resentful about this, but recognize a historical progression that has affected multiple generations.
Always remember that the reason those house were going for a song in the late 70a and early 80s was because mortgage rates were hovering between 16% and 18% which made monthly payments very high even for a modest principal. There's a rough, but consistent inverse relationship between mortgage rates and housing prices. And sure, after a few years they were able to refinance at 9%, then at 7% a few years after that but when they made the purchase it wasn't at all clear rates were ever coming down.
Yes- the biggest issue right now is that mortgage rates have doubled from the Covid era….and house prices have still risen in most places.
Unsustainable - either we earn our way into the prices over the next decade or house prices or interest rates have to fall
Remember, there were 240 million Americans in 1986, and there are 340 million now. That's probably an additional 40M households. When I use Gemini to see how many more housing units there are, the number is 49.5 million.
So, it sounds like we should have enough houses. Perhaps they're not where we want to live. In '86 the population was about 75% urban, while today it's 82% or so, but that still doesn't sound too bad. As long as everyone doesn't want to live in NYC or SF.
If housing was one third, the cost, then people could put a much bigger down payment or even buy the home outright
Why stop at 1/3? If it were free, you wouldn't even have to worry about it at all.
No such thing as free
But much cheaper housing is possible with more supply
I think there is a version of this that is just, "it's the housing, stupid!" but for that to be the case, it still have to be a VERY loud minority doing all the moving of sentiment. Almost 60% of millennials own homes now. And for Americans overall I think it's closer to 70%.
Which means the phenomenon that we are positing might be causing all this unrest is also making 2/3rds of Americans...rapidly much wealthier...
It might still be the cause! But I feel like it's rarely looked at in terms of what homeownership rates actually are the flip-side of the price increases (wealth for the majority of people who are already owners).
Imagine this claim in another context. Headline: "401ks and Pension balances double overnight...Americans broadly furious!" It's not impossible that could be pieced together. But it would be weird!
And real income measures do not capture that change in asset price.
strong agreement, I believe the median home was around 2.1x the median income in 1950 and today it's closer to 6x
So the wife was sent to work to barely struggle to afford to get into the same house
My anecdote, you could get a 1960's track home for $100k in my neighborhood in the late 90's. In 2010, it was $200k, now it's $600. Obviously incomes didn't 6x in 25 years, they didn't even 3x
Housing is one of those positional goods that Noah mentions, and as such, is a source of great frustration for those who cannot afford to get in.
All of what you say is right, but our malaise stems from factors far deeper than status and power disparities or distress over foreign affairs. What’s changed most profoundly in America during the last quarter century is that our lives have become more separate and stratified, more socially, politically, and culturally siloed. The center cannot hold because there is no center, it has evaporated, sucked into the technosphere and atomized into the tiny, disconnected bubbles in which we now live. I don’t know what the remedy for this is, but it feels as if it has to be more spiritual and cultural than political or economic.
Millennials also grew up with the old style of social order, in-person interaction and land lines, saw the Internet promise to enhance the social order and it ended up completely fragmenting and the social interaction online enshittified.
I was surprised this post didn't include any mention of the phones. I subscribe to the theory that the newer generation is harder to please because they are constantly bombarded with images of incredible wealth (rich TikTokers) and incredible tragedy (Gaza, Ukraine etc) and feel uniquely powerless to do anything about either situation.
People in the 30s around me walk around staring at their phones. Actually, it's not just when they're walking. When they're sitting and in the company of others, they are still staring at their phones.
What do you think we used to do? Stop strangers on the street and start engaging in meaningful conversation? Maybe when folks had 2 hour daily commutes they listened to poetry on their CD players? Some did, many listened to Rush Limbaugh and other destroyers of democracy.
“ the world is changing way too fast relative to my ability to keep up. This causes me anxiety, fear about the future, and loss of status.” this seems like a fairly adequate explanation for a big chunk of what’s going on. Traditionally on the right, but also on the left.
The more uncertain I feel about the future, the bigger the financial cushion I need to feel adequate about riding it out. This may explain unrealistically high expectations for “adequate income“ that Gen Z has.
The more uncertain I feel about the future, the more likely am to hold onto my existing entitlements. This may explain the virulence of resistance to entitlements and congressional deadlock.
Technology is changing the world faster than our society can effectively metabolize. It has happened before, most recently 1870-1930. It did not end well.
I think “metabolize” is exactly the interesting word here.
I’ve been wondering whether the problem is really the speed of technological change itself, or the growing gap between that speed and people’s ability to feel that they are still participating in the future it creates.
I recently wrote about this as an Acceleration Gap. My argument is that people may tolerate extraordinary speed when acceleration still feels like a vehicle they are riding in. The political problem begins when acceleration continues, but more and more people experience themselves as passengers being left behind.
I also think there is a deeper social imbalance emerging in the age of acceleration: real public life and real-world relationships are shrinking, while virtual public life and virtual relationships are expanding extremely quickly. The result is not only a subjective feeling of loneliness or discomfort. It may be changing the deeper structure of how people relate to one another, including how political relationships are formed.
That is where I think this connects to another piece I recently wrote, Why Is a Lonely Society So Good at Mass Politics? My argument there was that mass politics can provide identity, belonging, and a sense of participation remarkably efficiently, especially when ordinary relational communities have weakened.
So perhaps the two problems are connected:
The faster the world changes beyond our ability to metabolize it, and the more real-world social life is displaced by virtual forms of association, the more attractive political belonging may become as a substitute for agency and relationship.
Your comment helped me see the connection between those two arguments more clearly.
Universal health insurance is still a very good idea and the norm of every other wealthy country on the planet.
That it won't solve status inequality is true, but kind of beside the point.
What will it really change? I doubt it will even measurably affect lifespan or health. I bet it won’t change household finances appreciably either.
It will do all of those things with the caveat that lifespan is very hard to change.
There was a paper published a few years ago measuring what factors have caused the increase in average lifespan since 1900.
Better public sanitation and improved nutrition were half of the gain. Better pre and post natal care was almost the entirety of the rest.
Antibiotics, x rays, cancer drugs, the polio vaccine, and the entire 20th century of medical improvements bought humanity an extra 2 years of lifespan on average.
https://share.gemini.google/prrHXJoC4taf
When real income has increased 25-30% over the past 40 years while real housing, health care, and college education costs have increased by 150-250% you might still have an economics problem.
I know how some people here feel about Elizabeth Warren, BUT, her Two Income Trap that came out in 2004 really, really nailed why people were feeling like they could not get ahead even if their on-paper income has increased. Large, fixed expenses, specifically, housing, health care, child care and college have increased SO MUCH more than income has. We definitely pay less for food, clothing, electronics and so on; but we are stuck paying through the nose for housing and child care. College became a necessity for a middle-class life rather than an option, and also much, much more expensive.
Attitudes are very difficult to explain.
Democrats felt better about Joe Biden as President, while Republicans were horrified by his policies, especially the millions of economic refugees crossing the border. The “woke” mob is demanding that white employees answer for their crime of being white.
For Democrats, especially those who have been indoctrinated at colleges that preached colonial settler framing, socialism, and race-based politics, money isn’t the thing that motivates them. It is the destruction of the institutions they feel support the above.
For Republicans, especially the blue-collar types, they hear the above, and their eyes roll. The Latinx stupidity, biological men playing in women's sports; they believe Trump’s rhetoric about countries ripping off America. They believe his garbage that immigrants are all rapists and murderers.
I moved from Manhattan Beach, California to Manhattan in 1987. My salary was $33,000. My first home, the cheapest in the town, cost me $212,000. My daughter, a millennial, is an occupational therapist. She will start a new job in September, making $90,000 in Jersey City.
Buying any type of home near New York City will cost around $800,000.
Inflation, along with the shortage of housing, has kept rents high. She has moved into a one-bedroom apartment in a non-gentrified area of Jersey City for $1900 a month. That was likely what I was paying back in 1992 at my first house.
For some people, it is just knowing that your tribe is in political power, not thinking much beyond that. Joe Biden’s economy got punished at the polls, not in 2022 however. There was no red wave. By 2024, the economy, the border the crazy woke stuff, helped Independence give themselves permission to vote for Trump.
Democrats, given the issues, may have a wave election in the midterms,or, due to redistricting, a ripple. The midterms will be a vote on Trump; it’s not like Democrats are held in high esteem.
I have a theory about this. Anger about or over Trump’s actions is the defining issue. Anger is not a policy position. Anger doesn’t provide more housing. It won’t provide more good-paying jobs. It’s not about economics; it is about Trump.
$90k today is quite a bit less than you were making, in real terms. And back in the 1980s I didn’t know anyone who was living in a one bedroom- not even trust fund kids.
By the way one can get a decent 2 or 3 bedroom town house in suburban Jersey in the $500s in towns with good school districts and acceptable commutes to NYC, but as an OT she might do better working locally.
Re the idea that politics has risen up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, I remain of the opinion that the further you go up that hierarchy, the more it behoves you to solve those problems for yourself rather than relying on the government to do it for you.
It is incumbent on the government to make sure everyone has a roof over their heads. But if you're lonely, what's the government meant to do - find friends for you?
Excellent comment. We are in a confused time. The machine is working fairly well but the mind is searching for purpose and meaning. As you say doing positive things in your own life is a way out but not promoted. There is a future where, with a percentage of people doing this, it becomes attractive and spreads. Purpose and meaning beyond this issue or that is required.
Facts!
> I remain of the opinion that the further you go up that hierarchy, the more it behoves you to solve those problems for yourself rather than relying on the government to do it for you.
Not sure relying on government to solve your problems but also religion, populist figures, podcasters, etc. People need to start looking inward and deciding for themselves what gives their life meaning. I think for so long people were used to x input = y output and they didn't get the results they wanted so they are just perpetually unhappy.
Although wages have risen, housing costs, childcare costs, healthcare costs, elder care, and higher education costs have outpaced that growth. People are unhappy in the US because they cannot afford a decent place to live and raise children. Most people have almost no vacation time or sick leave. No maternity leave. No paternity leave. They are one medical emergency away from bankruptcy.
Great points. Honestly, cheaper housing, medicare for all, and 3 months of parental leave would make people a lot happier I think. Of course there are also people that would probably be resentful of people getting those benefits that they don't think deserve it, but overall I think it would be a huge net benefit and happiness mover!
One interesting thing about status is that it can be pursued on many dimensions: wealth and income, fitness, athletic skill, education, knowledge about specific subjects, gardening, stamp collecting, youtube views, etc. So, in theory, everyone could all achieve high status in something. Maybe there's a path there to achieving a more satisfied population, even given the zero-sum nature of status pursuits.
Maybe this is an indirect effect of general social withdrawal (a la Bowling Alone).
Being the best at X in your local area may have been meaningful at one point, but now it is irrelevant and provides no social status benefit.
Might Charlie Munger have been right: that ‘The world is not driven by greed, it’s driven by envy’?
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2022/12/10/billionaire-charlie-munger-world-is-driven-by-envy-not-greed.html
Natalie Wynn of ContraPoints did a video where she brought up the same idea, albeit on a much smaller scale than “the world” - she was talking about all the social media cancellation frenzies during Woke 1. She argued they were at least partly driven by envy of others’ successes and feeling like there was not enough to go around. Envy fuels the crab bucket.
I hadn't seen this before. It is interesting though.
Peter Turchin has studied this question extensively. The pattern he’s found in all kinds of state societies going back thousands of years goes as follows:
1. Some kind of wealth pump arises, that funnels money from the poor to the rich
2. The number of rich people explodes, which dramatically increases status competition among their ranks
3. War, revolution, or major political reform create a new equilibrium.
Here in the US, we have housing scarcity funneling money from the poor to the rich. We have an overabundance of overly-credentialed, downwardly-mobile wannabe elites—the children of the homeowners who’ve benefited from land scarcity. As a result, we have a burgeoning group of angry, spurned people with too much education looking to mobilize the immiserated poor in support of their revolutionary aims, on both the MAGA right and the woke/socialist left.
Great post. This is something we think about a lot in our work with Abundant America. We are trying to broaden abundance politics to include more than just economic abundance by talking explicitly about civic and social abundance.
An excerpt from our America 250 essay is below, and available here: https://abundanceproject.substack.com/p/towards-an-abundant-america
"A republic cannot be sustained by consumers alone. A broad, holistic and durable politics of abundance answers this in three ways:
Economic abundance reduces the desperation that makes civic life untenable. When individuals and families cannot afford homes, childcare, healthcare, transportation, or stable communities, they become trapped in a race for private survival. Scarcity makes people anxious, competitive, transient, tribal and zero-sum. Abundance creates the material room for rootedness, generosity, and public participation.
Civic abundance gives people agency instead of spectatorship. Early liberal thinkers, like Tocqueville, admired American local government because it taught citizens how to govern by making them do it. A renewed culture of civic abundance should revive that habit: local leaders, mayors, churches, nonprofits, schools, neighborhood groups, business owners, and citizens defining needed outcomes and working to deliver tangible results together. People learn citizenship not by being lectured about democracy or presented with facts, but by practicing responsibility in common projects and delivering tangible results to improve their communities.
Social abundance seeks to rebuild the institutions that form citizens and give connection and purpose to our lives. Families, churches and faith institutions, schools, unions, clubs, civic associations, sports leagues, libraries, public squares, and local newspapers are not decorative. They are where people learn duty, trust, awe, humility, compromise, and belonging. Holistic abundance should include concern for increasing the supply of these formative settings, not only increasing GDP.
America needs a politics that keeps liberalism’s commitment to freedom, growth, and innovation but restores the preconditions of that freedom."
Odd that the premise of the essay seems to be that economic woes aren't what's driving dissatisfaction at its core, but the proposed solution is to try and reduce feelings of economic inequality. It seems that trying to increase participation in common institutions that bring community and engagement - civic institutions, church and other spiritual groups, etc - would combat the proposed ills better. Along with curbing social media use and the 24-7 media rage cycle.
Many problems - individual, psychological, spiritual, or even some social -- are not issues that republican or even democratic forms government can or should solve. So these are indeed challenges, but they are not anything that we need JD Vance or Elizabeth Warren to put on their to-do lists.
Agreed. Perhaps the initial mistake was expanding government involvement into areas where it is best handled via other means.