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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Quite useful probably to think of the US situation as being heavily informed particularly on its upper-half of the income demographic by strong vein of Status Resentments - which probably are some bundle of hard to fully separate social and material.
The housing market resent perception particularly in 'GenZ" and younger-end "Millenial" age cohorts is one that perhaps understood partially via this lens, sense of status (reading myself of people bemoaning their housing situations when from journalistic description they seem benchmarked off of TV unreality - 1990s NYC Friends as reality). It's not particularly useful to scold this at least not in a political sense.
Of course equally the Woke 1 was clearly quite massively off-putting outside of its core audience (left-leaning college degree (4yr+) socio-economiic brackets) notably to non-college America (which in all demographic buckets remains majority on national average and of course even more so in some geographies).
From a Status Resentment / Anxiety lens, then perhaps one can see an Abundance lens that is not entirely pure economic but also "Opportunity and Status" - Americans put a lot of social status into square footage of liviing space (and owning it over renting).
Opportunity may be not purely about 'good income jobs" but social status there.
It's not pure economics but it is also not divorced from economics - we are after all Supped-up Primates so some reflection on primate-band type relative status that's a blend of resource and on How I See My Position relative to the overall. (with my position possibly being not just Me as Me...)
JD Vance may be right: our institutions have failed us, whether the institution in question is church, club, school/university, the financial establishment, or institutions of governance.
Millennials don’t trust either party much to do what they said they’d do if elected.
On the right, we have the obvious case of a person famous for stiffing his business partners — no one is surprised that he’s corrupt to the core and stealing as much wealth from the public as he can.
More broadly, they don’t trust the old-line GOP and their “starve the beast,” “trickle-down” fiscal and tax policies to promote the general welfare.
On the left, we have the broad failure of Obamacare to make healthcare affordable (I lay this almost entirely at the feet of being unable to make the mandate stick; whether we could do it politically or not, Switzerland shows us already how “Obamacare done right” is supposed to work, and the mandate lurks in the foundation of that system, keeping everybody participating and allowing the law of large numbers to make the risk pool adequate and keep premiums down…there’s also how much we pay doctors & hospitals here — any collectivized system change will have to take this into account — no word from any stakeholder on that).
Further, we have the demonstrated failure of the Liz Warren faction to bring about neo-Brandiesian, MMT-based, more-equal, broad prosperity, and reversing Trump’s asylum policy acted like a gravy-train bell for migrants all over the world to spam our asylum system — an open border by any other name: not what we asked for!
Yes — these are economic matters. Specifically, they’re economic matters where what the politicians promised, and what actually happened, were visibly, obviously, opposite each other.
Who would trust such leaders?
So we have to rebuild trust. It will be very hard: it will, for one, require that we tell the truth about some pretty bad stuff, most especially our federal fiscal situation…and put in place some policies that, at least in the short run, will feel pretty shitty: BROAD-BASED tax increases (otherwise the gains won’t make it through the next biz cycle down-turn) AND lots of spending cuts and spending shifts to state and local control, where those governing bodies are better-incentivized to be cost-conscious and do oversight better over improper payments.
But there is no shortcut. The budget is the budget; the deficit is what it is; the revenue available DOES NOT MATCH the aspirations of ANY part of the American people at the moment — not MAGA, not the DSA, not anyone in between.
Economic? Sure! But specifically “I don’t trust you on economics.”
The worst and hardest part: we no longer HAVE the social, non-economic, institutional support we had 50 years ago. So we have to build trust at retail. Each of us has to participate; the fewer participants, the less trust built. And ya know what that means? It means we don’t get to ignore politics any time soon. Sucks, I know. To paraphrase Joe Mantegna: So…our job is harder.
Too much politics and viewing everything through a divisive, partisan lens - this is not the path to happiness. Neither is competitive consumption. Both politics and consumption are amplified by social media. Meanwhile; tech enables isolation from actual humans.
This is not about Trump (or socialism). Elites steeped in their political bubbles can’t see the wood for the trees.
There’s at least one economist who has something to say about some of this and even a policy prescription to boot. I’m referring to Robert Frank and his progressive consumption tax proposal which can “dampen positional goods arms races” and raise a bunch of tax dollars while at it.
There is something to be said about the excessive individualisation that has accompanied economic 'progress', though not necessarily caused by it. Religion provided another sense of community - that's all but gone.
Class differences, income inequality.... yes but throw in racism, misogyny, authoritarianism and evangelical pro-life issues exacerbated by the current regime and we have a psychological mess.
In the film of the Handmaid's Tale the Commander, played by Robert Duvall, talking about the time before the revolution says:
The country was crazy. I mean, nobody felt anything, men or women. All they had was, like how can I put it? Like itches. Sex itches, money itches, power itches. But that's not enough. There was no common purpose. Nothing to believe in, nothing to fight for. Nobody really knew how to feel anything anymore.
In the film, this plus a collapse in fertility (albeit actual biological fertility rather than just the behavioural fertility rate) produced a right wing revolution.
(The film was poorly received and many thought it was implausible).
I'd say there's also a big technology aspect that Hayes, Farrell, and Fukuyama have seperately written recently on, but Avent and Lindsey both take an economist's perspective on what economics is missing.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And real income measures do not capture that change in asset price.
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.
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.
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.
Quite useful probably to think of the US situation as being heavily informed particularly on its upper-half of the income demographic by strong vein of Status Resentments - which probably are some bundle of hard to fully separate social and material.
The housing market resent perception particularly in 'GenZ" and younger-end "Millenial" age cohorts is one that perhaps understood partially via this lens, sense of status (reading myself of people bemoaning their housing situations when from journalistic description they seem benchmarked off of TV unreality - 1990s NYC Friends as reality). It's not particularly useful to scold this at least not in a political sense.
Of course equally the Woke 1 was clearly quite massively off-putting outside of its core audience (left-leaning college degree (4yr+) socio-economiic brackets) notably to non-college America (which in all demographic buckets remains majority on national average and of course even more so in some geographies).
From a Status Resentment / Anxiety lens, then perhaps one can see an Abundance lens that is not entirely pure economic but also "Opportunity and Status" - Americans put a lot of social status into square footage of liviing space (and owning it over renting).
Opportunity may be not purely about 'good income jobs" but social status there.
It's not pure economics but it is also not divorced from economics - we are after all Supped-up Primates so some reflection on primate-band type relative status that's a blend of resource and on How I See My Position relative to the overall. (with my position possibly being not just Me as Me...)
#1: we must rebuild trust.
JD Vance may be right: our institutions have failed us, whether the institution in question is church, club, school/university, the financial establishment, or institutions of governance.
Millennials don’t trust either party much to do what they said they’d do if elected.
On the right, we have the obvious case of a person famous for stiffing his business partners — no one is surprised that he’s corrupt to the core and stealing as much wealth from the public as he can.
More broadly, they don’t trust the old-line GOP and their “starve the beast,” “trickle-down” fiscal and tax policies to promote the general welfare.
On the left, we have the broad failure of Obamacare to make healthcare affordable (I lay this almost entirely at the feet of being unable to make the mandate stick; whether we could do it politically or not, Switzerland shows us already how “Obamacare done right” is supposed to work, and the mandate lurks in the foundation of that system, keeping everybody participating and allowing the law of large numbers to make the risk pool adequate and keep premiums down…there’s also how much we pay doctors & hospitals here — any collectivized system change will have to take this into account — no word from any stakeholder on that).
Further, we have the demonstrated failure of the Liz Warren faction to bring about neo-Brandiesian, MMT-based, more-equal, broad prosperity, and reversing Trump’s asylum policy acted like a gravy-train bell for migrants all over the world to spam our asylum system — an open border by any other name: not what we asked for!
Yes — these are economic matters. Specifically, they’re economic matters where what the politicians promised, and what actually happened, were visibly, obviously, opposite each other.
Who would trust such leaders?
So we have to rebuild trust. It will be very hard: it will, for one, require that we tell the truth about some pretty bad stuff, most especially our federal fiscal situation…and put in place some policies that, at least in the short run, will feel pretty shitty: BROAD-BASED tax increases (otherwise the gains won’t make it through the next biz cycle down-turn) AND lots of spending cuts and spending shifts to state and local control, where those governing bodies are better-incentivized to be cost-conscious and do oversight better over improper payments.
But there is no shortcut. The budget is the budget; the deficit is what it is; the revenue available DOES NOT MATCH the aspirations of ANY part of the American people at the moment — not MAGA, not the DSA, not anyone in between.
Economic? Sure! But specifically “I don’t trust you on economics.”
The worst and hardest part: we no longer HAVE the social, non-economic, institutional support we had 50 years ago. So we have to build trust at retail. Each of us has to participate; the fewer participants, the less trust built. And ya know what that means? It means we don’t get to ignore politics any time soon. Sucks, I know. To paraphrase Joe Mantegna: So…our job is harder.
Too much politics and viewing everything through a divisive, partisan lens - this is not the path to happiness. Neither is competitive consumption. Both politics and consumption are amplified by social media. Meanwhile; tech enables isolation from actual humans.
This is not about Trump (or socialism). Elites steeped in their political bubbles can’t see the wood for the trees.
There’s at least one economist who has something to say about some of this and even a policy prescription to boot. I’m referring to Robert Frank and his progressive consumption tax proposal which can “dampen positional goods arms races” and raise a bunch of tax dollars while at it.
If progressives achieve Medicare for All, that will put Trump in charge of administering my health care, and that will make me extremely unhappy.
There is something to be said about the excessive individualisation that has accompanied economic 'progress', though not necessarily caused by it. Religion provided another sense of community - that's all but gone.
I suspect that's where the problem lies
Class differences, income inequality.... yes but throw in racism, misogyny, authoritarianism and evangelical pro-life issues exacerbated by the current regime and we have a psychological mess.
In the film of the Handmaid's Tale the Commander, played by Robert Duvall, talking about the time before the revolution says:
The country was crazy. I mean, nobody felt anything, men or women. All they had was, like how can I put it? Like itches. Sex itches, money itches, power itches. But that's not enough. There was no common purpose. Nothing to believe in, nothing to fight for. Nobody really knew how to feel anything anymore.
In the film, this plus a collapse in fertility (albeit actual biological fertility rather than just the behavioural fertility rate) produced a right wing revolution.
(The film was poorly received and many thought it was implausible).
Buckle up for those mid-terms!
What is your point? No one is buying JD Vance’s handmaid’s tale liberalism because it plainly sucks. A blue wave is coming
I think this post is right on the money (or the post- material). For two great recent books on this topic, I recommend:
* Brink Lindsey's the Permanent Problem, which is stat heavy and goes deep into how the educational divide plays into all of this. https://brinklindsey.substack.com/p/the-book-is-out
* Ryan Avent's in Good Faith https://ryanavent.substack.com/p/whats-your-book-about-anyway
I'd say there's also a big technology aspect that Hayes, Farrell, and Fukuyama have seperately written recently on, but Avent and Lindsey both take an economist's perspective on what economics is missing.