You see that peak back in 1981? That was ME, when I bought my first house with a VA loan, with 20% down, and about 17% interest. You see that dip in 2021? That was also me, refinancing my 7th house for the second time, at 2.625%. I have owned 7 homes, on 2 continents, with about 12 mortgages, over this time. One of them was a boat, and most of the time, there were overlaps with ownership of multiple homes with miultiple mortgages and all the attending hassle of maintenance. I figure I will die before the last mortgage gets paid off. Because the cost of the current mortgage is lower than it would cost me to rent a slip for the sailboat that sits in the canal behind the house right now.
What you won't see, however, is that during this time period there are NO children in my life to support. My wife and I are DINKs, paying LOTS of money in places like Montgomery County MD and Florida to pay for the re-education of other people's kids.
When I was in the Navy and was single I used to complain about the married officers who were doing the same job as me, but got more money as a non-taxable "allowance" to help them support their wives and kinds. They would use that money to make a down payment on a house with a VA mortgage, and then would deduct the cost of the interest (which was paid out of the non-taxable "allowance" income) from their taxable income. Which was taxed at a lower rate than I paid (married vs unmarried), and they got to rollover the profit they made every few years as the sold their houses and bought new, while all I had was rent receipts (or nothing, because I was living on a ship).
There are a lot of things in life that are "unfair". Get over it.
> paying LOTS of money in places like Montgomery County MD and Florida to pay for the re-education of other people's kids.
I'm not as old as you I guess but I'm single middle aged and also no kids. Low income but I do pay about 10% of that each year for school tax. I don't mind doing this, because its a societal investment on two fronts 1) those kids will ultimately be better able to get jobs that will help keep society well-off and maybe even pay for my social security/medicare (if those still exist later), and maybe some of them will even go into health care directly and take care of my aging ass (if I can afford it of course), 2) if we didn't educate the kids the more miscreant ones might be trying to break into my house during the day, which would be rather bad for me and no doubt bad for them too long term
I agree with you. I am a product of an American public school system before it was taken over by the unions, and I got a very good education. I don't understand why the charter schools can do such a good job with the kids they teach, while the unionized schools fail so miserably. I can understand the argument that it is all about the parents and the environment the kids live in. But the politicians and the unions are very content to keep their students on board the public money machine.
So, my complaint is about the whining of the young people these days (I really sound like a geezer). They need to stop paying attention to influencers and start reading books and thinking about what they are reading. Stop spending money on movies and fashion and fads and spend more time in the local public libraries, where the books are free (they are free in Florida, and used to be free in PA when I lived there). Stop socializing on your phones, and learn how to create those devices, instead. Learn how to be a welder or a plumber or an electrician or an engineer or a farmer, and make something, instead of complaining about how unfair the world is that you don't own a house of your own at age 22, free and clear with no obligations.
It is important, reading this from the UK, to constantly remind myself that this is for the US. In the UK, I think the declinist narrative has a more direct claim to the pure economic facts. It's not the way some of my "it all went wrong in '73" friends claim, but straightforwardly the stagnation here is much more real on a pure economic level. Of course, in the UK we have much the same cultural shifts and changes in expectation, delegitimising or outright banning of cheaper options, etc., as I'm sure you're about to cover as the other half of the story in the US - perhaps we have it even worse. So, while coming to your nuanced position for the US, please do shed a tear for the UK. Basically imagine the US situation but with flat productivity and close to flat real wages since 2005.
About 12 years ago, a friend moved to Hungary, and an acquaintance to Poland not long after. I thought they were a bit mad, moving somewhere with such a lower standard of living. Now I'm wondering if it's a bit mad not to join them.
Healthcare is more affordable for most people in the UK. Not that our healthcare system doesn't have problems at the consumer end, but they're different problems- more to do with waiting than money.
Housing is just as bad. Worse on average, actually, quite a lot worse (and the houses are much smaller, to boot). Although it might be that the US has it worse at the extreme upper end.
Poland is pretty rich these days. I don't think it's quite caught up to the UK, but its definitely on a better trajectory.
You seem to have an issue where the quote format of ‘orange line to left of words’ shorts out at the ‘1.’ when quotes (I.e. from x) end with numbered bullet points.
1. Opportunity continues to aggregate in limited centers of economic activity.
2. We should outsource clothes production.
I think these two things create some tension. There can only be one Silicon Valley (you aren't going to clone Palo Alto in rural Nebraska). So if you offshore too much production to mine every efficiency upgrade available, you end up crippling your own economy in a roundabout way, as everyone is 'forced' to move to where the economic action is because you don't want to make high value textiles in rural Nebraska (or whatever).
I'm tradepilled from a billion Econtalk episodes, but I'm also Mt:G pilled which has shown me enough times that if your deck is hyperlinear, it lets your opponent utterly crush you in unexpected ways. You lose antifragility.
You seem to be against the housing theory of everything but then your points here are looking like it lines up with it.
At this point, we’re in a death spiral. The jobs that pay decently are in expensive regions. Thus, you can’t afford a home there. If you do manage, you’re probably on the border of making it and therefore kids is really hard to do. Add on that you’ve likely dedicated a huge portion of your life to making that career happen in a hyper competitive hellscape - you just can’t even get much time to think about kids. By the time you’re feeling more settled, you have some money in the bank, and you’re feeling more financially secure because you hit middle manager at big co - too late to have kids and you’ve completely built your whole life around not having kids.
Comparatively, you live in BFE. You’re gonna struggle to find *any* kind of job. Jobs don’t just happen in the middle of nowhere and they don’t hire just anyone. So, maybe homes are a lot cheaper but now you’re dealing with the fact that it’s so god damn hard to find a job and that if you lose that job you’re massively fucked. Your local economy goes through a little tumble due to whatever - the jobs don’t ever come back. Housing might be cheaper but your wages are also rock bottom. Costs of every good are way higher as a percentage. You’re left with buying shit clothes off of SHEIN and microplastics filling your balls. Some people with remote jobs moved in, your local region didn’t want to build housing for some stupid reason. Your housing costs just went up 50%. The remote workers had to go back to office but the housing costs never went down. Why? Sticky prices. People stuck in low rate mortgages. The remote people didn’t need to sell and decide to turn the property into a rental. Local housing market now in shambles and your wages are going up a little but the economy is still shaky. The only reason you have 3 kids with 4 different women is because you keep getting blackout drunk at the single bar in town and are too stupid to get a vasectomy.
I don't know if that narrative is correct or comprehensive, but I think you're generally right that there's different modes in the distribution, and different non-ergodic properties, such that comparing medians and averages of different metrics is going to give a really poor understanding of "how it feels to live in this".
Like, the median earner can't buy the median house because these are actually different populations that can't be compared directly. In that case, it's obvious, such that we're able to learn something by explaining the difference, but what about the cases where it's not obvious and we're just comparing apples to oranges? That seems to be happening everywhere.
My strong suspicion is that it's impossible to have good housing policy when a majority are homeowners. In the abstract I'd like housing costs to come down, but it would be a bitter pill to swallow if they came down *here* and *now*, when I recently paid so much and have a mortgage.
My guess is that it's a subset of the age group that's working full time. Looking at the chart linked below that's what the BLS used. $622 a week for the 16-19 year olds. Throw in some tax credits and an ACA subsidy, that's about $35,000. And the $771 a week for everyone working full time 16-24 is about $40,000 before any tax breaks/subsidies. But it's also only about 11 million out of 69 million Gen Z in the US (which might not exactly match the population in the BLS survey given generation definitions vary).
It definitely feels misleading to not have that included because it makes it sound like a high schooler working 20 hours a week has a lot more money than they do. I also wonder how it accounts for the various gig economy jobs like Uber/Instacart where they aren't working a traditional hourly job.
Good post. Glad to see someone digging into "vibecession" at a deeper level. Too many economists just seem to say "bro, real incomes going up!" and dismiss it.
On health care, as an ACA/Obamacare subscriber I do feel for the the people who aren't getting subsidies. I'm about 200% FPL so I do get one and its pretty substantial - if I actually had to pay the full cost it would be 30-40% of my income just for premiums, before I even used it for anything. Especially next year (and beyond?) is going to be rough as the enhanced subsidies are gone and also they eliminated the subsidies entirely for people making >400% FPL. I've downgraded my plan to keep my premiums steady but if I use much more healthcare than this year it will cost me more in the end, no doubt.
The "most people pay zero" thing is kind of a head fake though IMO. I'm fortunate that my state exchange doesn't send out many emails touting that, but I think its because when I've looked at those plans (mostly in the bronze tier) - they seem to be total crap. Really high copays, deductibles and restricted coverage networks, and bad drug coverage. Basically if anything goes somewhat wrong the out of pocket costs will easily blow through what I would have paid in premiums on a higher tier plan. I do wonder how many of those zero premium subscribers end up getting shocked by mid-year medical bills and extra red tape (insurance denials, etc).
Yeah, it was kind of shocking once I finally transferred out of <mumble> self-employed consulting <mumble> with insurance through the ACA exchanges, to the typical employer-provided plan. Remove those subsidies, and I'd have been paying more out of pocket...for worse care...despite making a lot less money. Even though I'm currently happy with my job and don't have particularly acute health needs, the distortionary effects are quite large indeed. Think it's harder for people to appreciate that if they've only ever been on the one or the other. Definitely makes me think twice about ever going solo again. It's Good, Acktually to maintain preventative care through a major hospital chain and utilize specialists for special problems in a timely manner! Can't imagine how things might have gone if I'd gotten same level of rib injury as happened earlier this year, but was too cowed by insurance shenanigans to actually get an x-ray. Those actuarial days of Invincible Youthful Vigour are increasingly in the rearview mirror...health "x-risk" happens slowly, and then all at once. Considering how much worse the median American's health is wrt mine, I am not surprised they aren't feeling the arc of healthcare cost curve being successfully bent towards justice!
I think there might be a bigger issue with the median earner vs median house cost comparison. As I understand the median house cost number it does not include rental apartments, but the earners group includes people who rent. The issue there would seem to be that the low end of the earner distribution are predominantly renters, but the low end of the housing distribution is missing the small apartments they rent. That should make the median house price be what the above median earner buys.
I don't know how much of an affect that has, or even if that is accounted for in the numbers somewhere, but if say the bottom 20% of earners are not buying houses but rather renting, the bottom 20% of houses are being purchased by people over the 20% of earnings so we shouldn't expect the medians to line up at all.
A three-part series? Given the setup, I kinda expected this one to either be much longer, or cover the Untelevised Revolutions in the inches allotted (which mostly went towards graphs and pull quotes instead). Not that I'm complaning about more content, it just hinders coherence a bit to spread the central theses over more posts. One can already mostly grok what the Revolutions are gonna be about, given other DWATV themes, but it's better to nail down precisely rather than guess. Especially when it's so much a qualitative rather than quantitative complaint.
I don't do it for every garment category, but my days of buying bargain-bin clothing are largely over. It just kinda sucks to own a lot of things, but they don't even last a year of regular wear before meaningfully falling apart...since search and transactions costs are a nontrivial part of acquiring clothing, particularly for those of particular fits or styles. I just don't like the schlubby "I'm actually poor and/or performatively disdainful of Capitalism, Man" look that thrifting results in! It's a weak social hand to play! Plenty of excellent Pareto value to be found in the mid-tier range of clothing these days. If more of life's essential expenditure categories were like clothing, we'd be in a better place...you can, in fact, buy (sometimes literally) 1985's clothes, it's neither illegal nor necessarily prohibitively expensive to produce stuff the old fashioned way, the floor tier stuff gets increasingly cheaper, and if anything the social expectations for Adequate Dress are trending downward over time. It'd be great if the same could be said of housing, higher education, childcare, healthcare...
Don't you think that boats float to the level of the water?
Happiness/unhappiness is an internal setting, not an external one. Put a person who has an unhappiness setting of "x" into a better situation and, over time, the internal setting will go back to "x". It's not in the stars, dear Brutus...
A couple of other people touched on the vibes of non-developed countries, specifically about going from UK to Poland.
I'll corroborate this - I've spent a lot of time overseas, and moreso lately, and spending time in Peru or Vietnam or Singapore or Malaysia is just a whole different vibe and feeling. Things are prospering and improving, average people are largely happy, new buildings are getting built, standards of living are good or improving.
And every time I come back to the US? It's all doomerism and despair and costs going up and groceries costing twice as much and people feeling like the world is on fire. A big part of that is politics, sure - everyone hates ~half the country and wants to talk about nothing else, which is a big part of WHY I spend most of my time overseas. But also it's inflation and housing and healthcare and all the other stuff.
And on the Exchange insurance - good lord is it ridiculously bad!
The ACA shouldn't be considered "health care" in my opinion. I retired young about 4 years ago and my COBRA from my last company finally ran out ~2-3 years ago, so I had to look for an ACA plan.
Literally every single plan available leaves you uncovered in every state but your home state. You are uncovered in 98% of states in the US with any available Exchange plan, AND it's illegal / impossible to just buy multiple plans in multiple states so you have coverage.
What? So plebs who have to buy on the Exchange never travel? They never live or work in different states? They'd better not if they don't want a medical bankruptcy!
That's just the tip of the iceberg too, IMO. There's a reason the entire nation was applauding when an insurance executive got assassinated.
It's easy to see the status upside of being a Khan without considering how stressful and terrifying it would be. I'd (probably) love to have the status role of Top Dog, but actually being a Top Dog would suck and I would not even consider trading it for my current life as Lowly Subordinate.
Only thing I'll add to your astute callouts Zvi: everyone is watching everyone else live a perfect life on social media, and there is a jealousy baked into the cultural norms today that you really only ever experienced if you got in a car and drove to the other side of town to experience. That's much more of a vibe-centric argument to the one you're making, so I would offer it as a highly subjective compliment to the article.
Podcast episode for this post:
https://open.substack.com/pub/dwatvpodcast/p/the-140k-question-cost-changes-over
You see that peak back in 1981? That was ME, when I bought my first house with a VA loan, with 20% down, and about 17% interest. You see that dip in 2021? That was also me, refinancing my 7th house for the second time, at 2.625%. I have owned 7 homes, on 2 continents, with about 12 mortgages, over this time. One of them was a boat, and most of the time, there were overlaps with ownership of multiple homes with miultiple mortgages and all the attending hassle of maintenance. I figure I will die before the last mortgage gets paid off. Because the cost of the current mortgage is lower than it would cost me to rent a slip for the sailboat that sits in the canal behind the house right now.
What you won't see, however, is that during this time period there are NO children in my life to support. My wife and I are DINKs, paying LOTS of money in places like Montgomery County MD and Florida to pay for the re-education of other people's kids.
When I was in the Navy and was single I used to complain about the married officers who were doing the same job as me, but got more money as a non-taxable "allowance" to help them support their wives and kinds. They would use that money to make a down payment on a house with a VA mortgage, and then would deduct the cost of the interest (which was paid out of the non-taxable "allowance" income) from their taxable income. Which was taxed at a lower rate than I paid (married vs unmarried), and they got to rollover the profit they made every few years as the sold their houses and bought new, while all I had was rent receipts (or nothing, because I was living on a ship).
There are a lot of things in life that are "unfair". Get over it.
> paying LOTS of money in places like Montgomery County MD and Florida to pay for the re-education of other people's kids.
I'm not as old as you I guess but I'm single middle aged and also no kids. Low income but I do pay about 10% of that each year for school tax. I don't mind doing this, because its a societal investment on two fronts 1) those kids will ultimately be better able to get jobs that will help keep society well-off and maybe even pay for my social security/medicare (if those still exist later), and maybe some of them will even go into health care directly and take care of my aging ass (if I can afford it of course), 2) if we didn't educate the kids the more miscreant ones might be trying to break into my house during the day, which would be rather bad for me and no doubt bad for them too long term
I agree with you. I am a product of an American public school system before it was taken over by the unions, and I got a very good education. I don't understand why the charter schools can do such a good job with the kids they teach, while the unionized schools fail so miserably. I can understand the argument that it is all about the parents and the environment the kids live in. But the politicians and the unions are very content to keep their students on board the public money machine.
So, my complaint is about the whining of the young people these days (I really sound like a geezer). They need to stop paying attention to influencers and start reading books and thinking about what they are reading. Stop spending money on movies and fashion and fads and spend more time in the local public libraries, where the books are free (they are free in Florida, and used to be free in PA when I lived there). Stop socializing on your phones, and learn how to create those devices, instead. Learn how to be a welder or a plumber or an electrician or an engineer or a farmer, and make something, instead of complaining about how unfair the world is that you don't own a house of your own at age 22, free and clear with no obligations.
Learn math, instead of social justice.
I think if your argument amounts to "life is unfair, get over it" you got to do a more convincing impression of a guy who cares.
It is important, reading this from the UK, to constantly remind myself that this is for the US. In the UK, I think the declinist narrative has a more direct claim to the pure economic facts. It's not the way some of my "it all went wrong in '73" friends claim, but straightforwardly the stagnation here is much more real on a pure economic level. Of course, in the UK we have much the same cultural shifts and changes in expectation, delegitimising or outright banning of cheaper options, etc., as I'm sure you're about to cover as the other half of the story in the US - perhaps we have it even worse. So, while coming to your nuanced position for the US, please do shed a tear for the UK. Basically imagine the US situation but with flat productivity and close to flat real wages since 2005.
About 12 years ago, a friend moved to Hungary, and an acquaintance to Poland not long after. I thought they were a bit mad, moving somewhere with such a lower standard of living. Now I'm wondering if it's a bit mad not to join them.
Healthcare is more affordable for most people in the UK. Not that our healthcare system doesn't have problems at the consumer end, but they're different problems- more to do with waiting than money.
Housing is just as bad. Worse on average, actually, quite a lot worse (and the houses are much smaller, to boot). Although it might be that the US has it worse at the extreme upper end.
Poland is pretty rich these days. I don't think it's quite caught up to the UK, but its definitely on a better trajectory.
Importantly, house prices *also* went crazy in the UK but the houses are tiny pieces of shit here (signed , an immigrant who otherwise likes it here)
You seem to have an issue where the quote format of ‘orange line to left of words’ shorts out at the ‘1.’ when quotes (I.e. from x) end with numbered bullet points.
I'm looking forward to the follow up to all of these. Thank you.
I've sort of just figured everyone is miserable because of their phones/social media. But I bet your explanation will be more interesting.
A lot to think about.
You wrote:
1. Opportunity continues to aggregate in limited centers of economic activity.
2. We should outsource clothes production.
I think these two things create some tension. There can only be one Silicon Valley (you aren't going to clone Palo Alto in rural Nebraska). So if you offshore too much production to mine every efficiency upgrade available, you end up crippling your own economy in a roundabout way, as everyone is 'forced' to move to where the economic action is because you don't want to make high value textiles in rural Nebraska (or whatever).
I'm tradepilled from a billion Econtalk episodes, but I'm also Mt:G pilled which has shown me enough times that if your deck is hyperlinear, it lets your opponent utterly crush you in unexpected ways. You lose antifragility.
You seem to be against the housing theory of everything but then your points here are looking like it lines up with it.
At this point, we’re in a death spiral. The jobs that pay decently are in expensive regions. Thus, you can’t afford a home there. If you do manage, you’re probably on the border of making it and therefore kids is really hard to do. Add on that you’ve likely dedicated a huge portion of your life to making that career happen in a hyper competitive hellscape - you just can’t even get much time to think about kids. By the time you’re feeling more settled, you have some money in the bank, and you’re feeling more financially secure because you hit middle manager at big co - too late to have kids and you’ve completely built your whole life around not having kids.
Comparatively, you live in BFE. You’re gonna struggle to find *any* kind of job. Jobs don’t just happen in the middle of nowhere and they don’t hire just anyone. So, maybe homes are a lot cheaper but now you’re dealing with the fact that it’s so god damn hard to find a job and that if you lose that job you’re massively fucked. Your local economy goes through a little tumble due to whatever - the jobs don’t ever come back. Housing might be cheaper but your wages are also rock bottom. Costs of every good are way higher as a percentage. You’re left with buying shit clothes off of SHEIN and microplastics filling your balls. Some people with remote jobs moved in, your local region didn’t want to build housing for some stupid reason. Your housing costs just went up 50%. The remote workers had to go back to office but the housing costs never went down. Why? Sticky prices. People stuck in low rate mortgages. The remote people didn’t need to sell and decide to turn the property into a rental. Local housing market now in shambles and your wages are going up a little but the economy is still shaky. The only reason you have 3 kids with 4 different women is because you keep getting blackout drunk at the single bar in town and are too stupid to get a vasectomy.
I don't know if that narrative is correct or comprehensive, but I think you're generally right that there's different modes in the distribution, and different non-ergodic properties, such that comparing medians and averages of different metrics is going to give a really poor understanding of "how it feels to live in this".
Like, the median earner can't buy the median house because these are actually different populations that can't be compared directly. In that case, it's obvious, such that we're able to learn something by explaining the difference, but what about the cases where it's not obvious and we're just comparing apples to oranges? That seems to be happening everywhere.
My strong suspicion is that it's impossible to have good housing policy when a majority are homeowners. In the abstract I'd like housing costs to come down, but it would be a bitter pill to swallow if they came down *here* and *now*, when I recently paid so much and have a mortgage.
Can someone explain this graph to me? I must be misunderstanding it because it looks obviously fake? The median 15-20 year old makes 35k+??
https://x.com/StatisticUrban/status/1878541425039876250
My guess is that it's a subset of the age group that's working full time. Looking at the chart linked below that's what the BLS used. $622 a week for the 16-19 year olds. Throw in some tax credits and an ACA subsidy, that's about $35,000. And the $771 a week for everyone working full time 16-24 is about $40,000 before any tax breaks/subsidies. But it's also only about 11 million out of 69 million Gen Z in the US (which might not exactly match the population in the BLS survey given generation definitions vary).
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/wkyeng.t03.htm
It definitely feels misleading to not have that included because it makes it sound like a high schooler working 20 hours a week has a lot more money than they do. I also wonder how it accounts for the various gig economy jobs like Uber/Instacart where they aren't working a traditional hourly job.
Good post. Glad to see someone digging into "vibecession" at a deeper level. Too many economists just seem to say "bro, real incomes going up!" and dismiss it.
On health care, as an ACA/Obamacare subscriber I do feel for the the people who aren't getting subsidies. I'm about 200% FPL so I do get one and its pretty substantial - if I actually had to pay the full cost it would be 30-40% of my income just for premiums, before I even used it for anything. Especially next year (and beyond?) is going to be rough as the enhanced subsidies are gone and also they eliminated the subsidies entirely for people making >400% FPL. I've downgraded my plan to keep my premiums steady but if I use much more healthcare than this year it will cost me more in the end, no doubt.
The "most people pay zero" thing is kind of a head fake though IMO. I'm fortunate that my state exchange doesn't send out many emails touting that, but I think its because when I've looked at those plans (mostly in the bronze tier) - they seem to be total crap. Really high copays, deductibles and restricted coverage networks, and bad drug coverage. Basically if anything goes somewhat wrong the out of pocket costs will easily blow through what I would have paid in premiums on a higher tier plan. I do wonder how many of those zero premium subscribers end up getting shocked by mid-year medical bills and extra red tape (insurance denials, etc).
Yeah, it was kind of shocking once I finally transferred out of <mumble> self-employed consulting <mumble> with insurance through the ACA exchanges, to the typical employer-provided plan. Remove those subsidies, and I'd have been paying more out of pocket...for worse care...despite making a lot less money. Even though I'm currently happy with my job and don't have particularly acute health needs, the distortionary effects are quite large indeed. Think it's harder for people to appreciate that if they've only ever been on the one or the other. Definitely makes me think twice about ever going solo again. It's Good, Acktually to maintain preventative care through a major hospital chain and utilize specialists for special problems in a timely manner! Can't imagine how things might have gone if I'd gotten same level of rib injury as happened earlier this year, but was too cowed by insurance shenanigans to actually get an x-ray. Those actuarial days of Invincible Youthful Vigour are increasingly in the rearview mirror...health "x-risk" happens slowly, and then all at once. Considering how much worse the median American's health is wrt mine, I am not surprised they aren't feeling the arc of healthcare cost curve being successfully bent towards justice!
I think there might be a bigger issue with the median earner vs median house cost comparison. As I understand the median house cost number it does not include rental apartments, but the earners group includes people who rent. The issue there would seem to be that the low end of the earner distribution are predominantly renters, but the low end of the housing distribution is missing the small apartments they rent. That should make the median house price be what the above median earner buys.
I don't know how much of an affect that has, or even if that is accounted for in the numbers somewhere, but if say the bottom 20% of earners are not buying houses but rather renting, the bottom 20% of houses are being purchased by people over the 20% of earnings so we shouldn't expect the medians to line up at all.
A three-part series? Given the setup, I kinda expected this one to either be much longer, or cover the Untelevised Revolutions in the inches allotted (which mostly went towards graphs and pull quotes instead). Not that I'm complaning about more content, it just hinders coherence a bit to spread the central theses over more posts. One can already mostly grok what the Revolutions are gonna be about, given other DWATV themes, but it's better to nail down precisely rather than guess. Especially when it's so much a qualitative rather than quantitative complaint.
I don't do it for every garment category, but my days of buying bargain-bin clothing are largely over. It just kinda sucks to own a lot of things, but they don't even last a year of regular wear before meaningfully falling apart...since search and transactions costs are a nontrivial part of acquiring clothing, particularly for those of particular fits or styles. I just don't like the schlubby "I'm actually poor and/or performatively disdainful of Capitalism, Man" look that thrifting results in! It's a weak social hand to play! Plenty of excellent Pareto value to be found in the mid-tier range of clothing these days. If more of life's essential expenditure categories were like clothing, we'd be in a better place...you can, in fact, buy (sometimes literally) 1985's clothes, it's neither illegal nor necessarily prohibitively expensive to produce stuff the old fashioned way, the floor tier stuff gets increasingly cheaper, and if anything the social expectations for Adequate Dress are trending downward over time. It'd be great if the same could be said of housing, higher education, childcare, healthcare...
Don't you think that boats float to the level of the water?
Happiness/unhappiness is an internal setting, not an external one. Put a person who has an unhappiness setting of "x" into a better situation and, over time, the internal setting will go back to "x". It's not in the stars, dear Brutus...
I think this is it. Plus cultural changes (particularly atomization) tend to lower the set point, on average.
A couple of other people touched on the vibes of non-developed countries, specifically about going from UK to Poland.
I'll corroborate this - I've spent a lot of time overseas, and moreso lately, and spending time in Peru or Vietnam or Singapore or Malaysia is just a whole different vibe and feeling. Things are prospering and improving, average people are largely happy, new buildings are getting built, standards of living are good or improving.
And every time I come back to the US? It's all doomerism and despair and costs going up and groceries costing twice as much and people feeling like the world is on fire. A big part of that is politics, sure - everyone hates ~half the country and wants to talk about nothing else, which is a big part of WHY I spend most of my time overseas. But also it's inflation and housing and healthcare and all the other stuff.
And on the Exchange insurance - good lord is it ridiculously bad!
The ACA shouldn't be considered "health care" in my opinion. I retired young about 4 years ago and my COBRA from my last company finally ran out ~2-3 years ago, so I had to look for an ACA plan.
Literally every single plan available leaves you uncovered in every state but your home state. You are uncovered in 98% of states in the US with any available Exchange plan, AND it's illegal / impossible to just buy multiple plans in multiple states so you have coverage.
What? So plebs who have to buy on the Exchange never travel? They never live or work in different states? They'd better not if they don't want a medical bankruptcy!
That's just the tip of the iceberg too, IMO. There's a reason the entire nation was applauding when an insurance executive got assassinated.
It's easy to see the status upside of being a Khan without considering how stressful and terrifying it would be. I'd (probably) love to have the status role of Top Dog, but actually being a Top Dog would suck and I would not even consider trading it for my current life as Lowly Subordinate.
Only thing I'll add to your astute callouts Zvi: everyone is watching everyone else live a perfect life on social media, and there is a jealousy baked into the cultural norms today that you really only ever experienced if you got in a car and drove to the other side of town to experience. That's much more of a vibe-centric argument to the one you're making, so I would offer it as a highly subjective compliment to the article.