Important tl;dr for the article: it's not economic anxiety that drives voters, it's status anxiety.
> Just as the great challenge of the 20th century was to provide broad-based material plenty, the great challenge of the 21st century may be to make everyone feel high-status at the same time — or at least to create a world where status differences don’t lead to mass resentment.
(I feel like almost all the commenters here did not read to the end of the article, because they are all missing that point.)
Anyway, I am skeptical of Noah's solution here. I worked for Big Tech for over a decade. Big Tech has become fabulously wealthy by personalizing the information you get so every single person can feel superior to everybody else. They give everybody a different reality, and in your reality, you are the center of your own story, more important than everyone else. And because they can give you a reality that is nicer and grants you more social status than actual reality does, you keep coming back, and you keep spending money.
I think a lot of our political problems actually stem from this. Everybody's told that they are more enlightened and their tribe more powerful than all the other ones. Well, one famous result from international relations studies is that when everybody thinks they have the upper hand, wars result. We're probably going to end up killing each other because the algorithms tell us that of course we're gonna win, we have righteousness and numbers on our side, when really we're all kinda weak and pathetic tools of Big Tech.
> Big Tech has become fabulously wealthy by personalizing the information you get so every single person can feel superior to everybody else. They give everybody a different reality, and in your reality, you are the center of your own story, more important than everyone else. And because they can give you a reality that is nicer and grants you more social status than actual reality does, you keep coming back, and you keep spending money.
You see it after every election... a zombie-like disbelief that reality failed to match expectations shaped by highly curated social media algorithms, narrow perspectives, and filtered views of events and news.
I very much agree with the general thrust of this piece and think we've gotten way too wrapped up in the most crass notions of "wealth" as a proxy for human flourishing. Nice cars and houses and food and gadgets are pretty meager consolation for living in a world of increasing disconnection with crumbling communities and social bonds or any real sense of purpose in our lives. Unfortunately, we've all been so thoroughly conditioned as neoliberal subjects that we struggle to take these sorts of concerns seriously simply because they're not as easily quantified as, say, GDP per capita or whatever.
That said, I'd caution against considering these things to live in a separate non "economic" realm. One of the central critiques of capitalism (woefully underappreciated today in my opinion) isn't just about the purely material ramifications of, say, labor exploitation or spiraling inequality, but of the alienation the system produces. In short, meet our most base requirements for survival and some minimal level of comfort and most of us actually need to feel some kind of meaning in our lives in order to find contentment, but capitalism forces us to do so much work whose products we are utterly disconnected from on any kind of direct, personal level (unlike that of an artisan whose work is deeply integrated into their own sense of self) and provide no immediate benefit for our communities. It's actually terribly corrosive to the human soul to find ourselves toiling-away for most of our lives selling away our precious time and labor for no deeper purpose beyond feeding the profit-maximizing algorithm that drives the capitalist system — nor is it conducive to a harmonious or democratically-ordered society more broadly.
This is a big part of the reason why many socialists are keen to differentiate their ideology from that of "social democrats". Advancing beyond redistribution and into a more wholesale restructuring of the economic system has profound benefits that take us much further than calling it a day at making it easier for people to afford shit or access healthcare.
I also think we need a more meaningful system that takes human psychology and the need for genuine connection.
I always find it fascinating how many psychological disorders improve when we live in a more community-oriented society. Just think about how much PPD improves when new moms have help from people around them.
Not only do they improve, but anthropologists will tell you that mental illness as we generally understand it is virtually non-existent in small scale tribal societies.
Honestly, source required. It seems like an extremely difficult thing to measure as tribal societies aren't exactly keeping accurate records or even have the vocabulary/concepts to properly express the experience of mental illness.
This is precisely the point though. These communities have not had a need historically to document, or remember in an ongoing way, an observed phenomenon that has gone largely unnoticed or unobserved.
Just because they didn't acknowledge it doesn't mean it didn't exist. We didn't and still don't acknowledge mental illness in "the west" all the time. It is swept under the rug or passed off as personal weakness all the time.
The missing leg of the table is organized religion. It provides a lot of value to human needs for connection and hope.
The absence of this established core of beliefs and norms is not easily replaced with something else. There's not a secular habit that gets large numbers of people into regular contact with each other in the same numbers as organized religion.
Problem is, for educated people, literal belief in God's Word is just silly, and metaphorical extrusions are, (a) extrusions, (b) numerous, and (c) often spiced unpalatably with (more seriously), untruths about the world (e.g. Christofascism) and (less seriously), bad aesthetics (e.g. Jesus Rock) . I can see the appeal of new tradCaths, even as the line of adherents grows more ghastly (e.g. Thiel, Vance).
So I dunno, really. I take religion seriously enough to not participate if I don't believe in its core tenets, and I can see that my hobbies and clubs and work don't fall into as socially cohesive an order as religion, but I don't know if they have to, either. Times change, and we're guaranteed problems, but not solutions.
Maybe feeling a bit of disconnection is a better solution than losing half of every weekend to droning stories about miracle lunches and getting knocked up by angels.
There have been attempts at this, starting with Comte's "Religion of Humanity" in the 19th Century. More recently, "The Sunday Assembly" was launched in London in 2013.
These ideas have included sacraments for significant life transitions, talks on philosophy and science, and emphasis on community involvement. Alain de Botton's 2012 book, "Religion for Atheists" has many ideas on how it should be structured.
I want aware of most of this until I searched for it, but now I'm intrigued.
Good comment. It's completely normal in history for people to look at their religious options and choose "none of the above" and do something new. These sound like interesting paths.
The absence of the role of the church has been studied a ton. The biggest loss that we see from people who don't participate as a natural experiment to their family members that do is typically the absence of community.
Faith in God and being driven by ministry is very rare. The motivation and the gains of the tradition is the community it fosters.
Having a large group of dozens or hundreds of people with a shared purpose and tradition would be very valuable to secular people. We can't even sacrifice an hour for the Moose Lodge.
The Boomers knew that the hassle and the schlep of church and civic organizations was the cost of admission for community. Milennials and GenZ retreat to the family unit and small group of friends atomized from larger community.
We don't have people to help us and we can't help people. We aren't learning more about our selves and one another. And as is well documented the young people ain't fuckin'. We gotta get the young people fuckin'. I'm and older millenial. I am concerned that the youth ain't livin'.
I'm looking forward to retirement just so I can join the Moose! (or another similar group). Nearly all of them around here meet midday during the week. ROMEOs are a fun community - Retired Old Men Eating Out.
I'm still a bit puzzled by what my parents got out of church. I think it was part reputation - what a good person does, part community, part belief, and part edification - there's always a religious scholar in the family, often the father. Seemed more habit than belief, and definitely was not something that gave them solace in their last days - neither had much to say about prayer or god at all at the end.
I think it gave them a community and structure that was useful if not fervent. It's a curious thing, to have non-fervent beliefs about something so cosmologically momentous.
I'm with you to some extent, but I'm getting off before politics becomes a religion.
Economic hardship creates incentives. Maybe to afford a house you have to become an influencer, and to hit your numbers you have to generally be a menace to society. Then it will become difficult to trace all the knock-on effects back to housing. The economics provides leverage to all the other ways society isn't perfectly organized. But there's no "system" which solves alienation by itself, and trying to create one leads to other places.
Obviously no economic system is going to produce utopia in which nobody ever suffers or feels any kind of aliention whatsoever in all senses and forms of that word, but it seems pretty obvious at very least that capitalism seems to exacerbate many of these issues, and that pursuing a different means of structuring the economy may well relieve that burden and produce the conditions for a far greater share of the population to feel like they're flourishing.
> products we are utterly disconnected from on any kind of direct, personal level (unlike that of an artisan whose work is deeply integrated into their own sense of self) and provide no immediate benefit for our communities
With the same stupid 19th century bar of "self-actualization", any kind of scientific enterprise should have the people working on that alienated. From vaccines to rocket science.
.. people for real, can you stop to quote marx 300 years later, and start to read social science?
Dog, read the article. The social science agrees with me that satisfaction is found in more than material accumulation. Rising rates of suicide, addiction, loneliness, and dissatisfaction in concert with rising wealth very much suggests there's more to this picture.
Also, scientists generally aren't likely to feel alienated because they're among the few who actually get to pursue their passions and generally have a significant amount of agency over their own labor even if they're still technically "exploited" in the most strict sense of the term. That might even have something to do with the fact that so many of them don't actually work for capitalist enterprises and that most of the pure research that goes into breakthroughs comes from the public sector.
> that satisfaction is found in more than material accumulation.
Nobody was arguing otherwise, material accumulation has nothing even to do with the kind of job one has, and it's crazy to have such low amount of text comprehension that a communist-sounding thesis is said to agree with *Noah Smith*.
> Rising rates of suicide, addiction, loneliness, and dissatisfaction in concert with rising wealth very much suggests there's more to this picture.
Literally not, if you even know the slightest about statistics. The aggregate growing says absolutely nothing about the median or the bottom 10%.
> Also, scientists generally aren't likely to feel alienated because they're among the few who actually get to pursue their passions and generally have a significant amount of agency over their own labor
No shit? So maybe your kids not having to eat with any literal product of your theoretical physics studies has nothing to do with it, and job satisfaction is just about the usual things of being treated fairly on the premise plus a decent work–life balance and wage?
> many of them don't actually work for capitalist enterprises and that most of the pure research that goes into breakthroughs comes from the public sector.
Btw I can assure you that there are also data scientists working for banks, insurers or engineering firms, that with their 6 digits stipend have a much higher life satisfaction than researchers forced to bend over backwards for some meagre grant.
To be honest, man, it really seems like you're just sort of triggered by the fact that I brought up some concepts from socialism and are going off half-cocked, making a shitload of unfounded assumptions and refusing to even read the article that set the context for my reply (obvious from the fact that you just baselessly attacked me for allegedly relying on mean averages, here when I'm not), and I'm just not interested in having an unpleasant exchange with someone acting so needlessly aggressive. Later.
It doesn't take much to see the riddle behind "median market income and posttax, posttransfer income by age and generation", even if adjusted for inflation.
First, if you open the linked paper, you see that insofar as generational spending as a share of their income has remained steady it's because rising "housing and utilities" have been counterbalanced by nearly twice as relatively cheap food. But (putting even aside Trump's sheningans) since that's based on Owners’ Equivalent Rent to standardize both legit homeowners and lessees, the figure is heavily biased against people currently on the market looking for a new one.
Second and most importantly the statistics is completely skewed by the income distribution: up to around the third quartile younger people today are poorer than their parents were, while from the top 25% and above they start instead to be a fuckton richer (I'm not really sure why that's only showing in the PSID data, but I'm guessing that asking point blank for the total wealth one owns is a better indicator that doesn't incur in the "boomerang children" problem).
Even then, you or him being wrong on a single datum wouldn't really be a big deal, if the entire framing wasn't nut and bended over backwards rather than ask any of the right followup questions.
You say that as though homelessness doesn't exist. In any case, if the forces of capitalism restructure the world around us such that the hedonic treadmill seems to be the only real choice available to most people, then that's what they'll chose rather than seemingly hopelessly raging against the machine. You get born into the rat race, essentially, and most of us end up too busy to consider how things might be better.
Jeff Bezos famously said "When the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right." I'm more inclined to think that the data being presented in the article isn't capturing what it thinks it is than that the overwhelming sentiment of anecdotes from millennials is wrong.
I’m the exact millennial that he’s talking about in the article. And I was reading it thinking, “This is not my reality or the one of anyone in my age group that I know”.
We ARE mad about the raw economic deal we got. We’re mad we’re the most productive generation in America, but we don’t have anything that our parents had, and won’t. Many of us are struggling, and it seems to be getting worse. My partner and I have had more conversations about money in the last two years than I think I’ve ever had. It’s a constant thought now, and the thought of “the future” is terrifying so I avoid it.
“
The vast majority of Americans now possess not only the basic necessities of life, but a degree of economic security unimaginable to their forebears a century ago.” And yet they are angry because they didn’t get something they thought they were somehow owed just because someone else got it.
I know this will upset you, but you are exactly the people he is talking about. Somewhere, somehow, someone convinced you that life was fair. And it’s not. It never has been and it never will be.Life is scary based primarily on perspective. I don’t think you’ll like this either, but we are all scared about something. There is always something that will scare us as human beings. Particularly when people have a scarcity mindset. When you expect nothing then anything seems better than that.
And the data can be doctored. The old Fed "data" on the homeownership rate counted adult children living with their parents as "homeowners" if their parents own the home.
As is widely known, a larger % of people age 18-34 are living with their parents than at any time since the Great Depression (I wonder why. Could this possibly be an ECONOMIC concern?)
The Minneapolis Fed corrected the data, and 53.4% of adults are actually homeowners, NOT the 62%-63% we have been told. The old "data" for Millennials and Gen Z was even more inflated.
So, basically what you are saying is more than half of adults are homeowners. At what age do you think that most people should be homeowners? Are they a loser if they don’t own their own home by the time they reach the age of 25? 35?
My toddler doesn’t own their own home at this point. Does that mean they never will - assuming they will want to at some point? Neither of us have any idea. Statistics are always a snapshot of the past.
Regardless of whether it’s 63% or 53.4% it’s still more than half. It could be zero. Are you making the point that some people were “tricked” into thinking they should be more entitled than they are?
noah’s entire schtick is trolling people who live in reality with random factoids that appear to disagree with human experience. he plays half too smart and half too stupid, and it lets him get away with distorting the plain truth while pretending not to get it.
Without commenting on the quality of the conclusions he draws from the economic data that he quotes, the author suddenly spins from reading graphs to vibe-based affirmation that what people want is social status. No data, even anecdotal, is quoted to support that claim. That alone makes this article pretty much useless.
Then, what the author seems to never consider is that economic indicators might just be bad at describing what really affects people's quality of life, a bias very common among economically liberal people. Sure, your median wealth maybe larger than for the previous generations at the same age (though I've seen other statistics drawing different conclusions), but if you feel that your whole life might be put in jeopardy if your health insurance suddenly decides not to cover for a life-saving medical intervention, that's not gonna make feel any better.
If you have a job but feel that the political system in which you leave doesn't listen to you but always obeys to what the powerful want (be it wealth distribution, military involvement in the world, funding a genocide, etc.), you won't be happy.
There is so much more to describe quality of life than naked economic indicators and the author seem to think that it only is "social status" rather than feeling part of a society that values you, being part of a larger community in which you play a role, being human rather than being a disposable cog in a machine, no matter how gilded that cog is.
I mean I think it's pretty obvious. Angry voters on the left are mad at the corruption in government, unabated climate change, Ai, and generally a government that doesn't work for the people.
Angry voters on the right are mad about the dissolution of the patriarchy and whatever other crisis du jure that has been astroturfed.
In a lot of ways, no, these are not strictly economic. A decent job finally at the age of 40 will not make someone happy about all the other shit falling apart around them. No, the evidence that tarrifs are bad won't help some conservative guy that is mad his wife left him or all the women in his class are gay.
Of course it's not economic, per se. But as the neoliberals tried to push for so many decades, people no longer believe that the economy and politics are separate. The guys robbing the country blind are using a war of choice and tarrifs of choice to enrich themselves. And yes, economic opportunities for women have meant women aren't trapped into marriage like they'd been for centuries.
I've read the article and this is just an amazing straw man. Right wing men aren't upset over the patriarchy being dissolved, they're probably angry over double standards with gender based DEI.
Submission statement: Americans are increasingly dissatisfied with their personal lives, despite economic improvements. This suggests that the root of the country’s malaise might not be purely economic, but rather a deeper social challenge. While economic policies are often proposed as solutions, evidence suggests that other factors, such as cultural and sociopolitical issues, might be more significant in driving this dissatisfaction.
As I was reading this excellent article I thought again and again about the concept that expectations and reality that are mismatched drive a great deal of human dissatisfaction.
The issue will always be how relative life is. Quality of living has noticeably gone down. It doesn't matter im not in some shithole eating mud cookies, I still feel entitled and robbed for not having a house and rv in spite having a full time job.
There is such a thing as entitlement. It isn't a bad thing to have if it's realistic. My previous generations had these expectations honored, meanwhile I make more than my mom did and I live in an apartment where I hear my neighbors alarm every morning and a jet fly over.
Jobs have become more precarious as the long neoliberal age has dragged on. This too is an ECONOMIC concern.
This has had the silver lining of increasing public support for Medicaid to a solid majority. Most people know they could lose their job and healthcare coverage with it at any time.
The income is meaningless if the outcome is meaningless. There are so many things that could be cheap or free and we aren't letting them.
Covid showed us that we only need 1/4 or 1/3 labor participation to keep costs steady and inflation becomes a supply bottleneck issue. We saw that we don't need to rely on the job markets of few and fewer cities. We could all work in rust belt mill towns and farm towns far away from them in the same tax juridiction and thrive. Make new houses in those markets we can actually afford. We could have.
Having more and more hours worked is not the flex you think it is. Having the same income and more freedom is more valuable.
Yes our money goes farther than ever now. Cool. We don't want to spend money on enshittified everything. We do it because we have to.
If one more graph of inflation leveling out without mentioning how meaningless it is when prices never go down I'm going to scream. Dollar Tree will never be Dollar Tree again. The price pegs mean a lot for us.
The data doesn't support the feeling. because the feelings exist over one fiscal quarter.
nostrademons | a day ago
Important tl;dr for the article: it's not economic anxiety that drives voters, it's status anxiety.
> Just as the great challenge of the 20th century was to provide broad-based material plenty, the great challenge of the 21st century may be to make everyone feel high-status at the same time — or at least to create a world where status differences don’t lead to mass resentment.
(I feel like almost all the commenters here did not read to the end of the article, because they are all missing that point.)
Anyway, I am skeptical of Noah's solution here. I worked for Big Tech for over a decade. Big Tech has become fabulously wealthy by personalizing the information you get so every single person can feel superior to everybody else. They give everybody a different reality, and in your reality, you are the center of your own story, more important than everyone else. And because they can give you a reality that is nicer and grants you more social status than actual reality does, you keep coming back, and you keep spending money.
I think a lot of our political problems actually stem from this. Everybody's told that they are more enlightened and their tribe more powerful than all the other ones. Well, one famous result from international relations studies is that when everybody thinks they have the upper hand, wars result. We're probably going to end up killing each other because the algorithms tell us that of course we're gonna win, we have righteousness and numbers on our side, when really we're all kinda weak and pathetic tools of Big Tech.
Alatarlhun | 13 hours ago
> Big Tech has become fabulously wealthy by personalizing the information you get so every single person can feel superior to everybody else. They give everybody a different reality, and in your reality, you are the center of your own story, more important than everyone else. And because they can give you a reality that is nicer and grants you more social status than actual reality does, you keep coming back, and you keep spending money.
You see it after every election... a zombie-like disbelief that reality failed to match expectations shaped by highly curated social media algorithms, narrow perspectives, and filtered views of events and news.
mojitz | a day ago
I very much agree with the general thrust of this piece and think we've gotten way too wrapped up in the most crass notions of "wealth" as a proxy for human flourishing. Nice cars and houses and food and gadgets are pretty meager consolation for living in a world of increasing disconnection with crumbling communities and social bonds or any real sense of purpose in our lives. Unfortunately, we've all been so thoroughly conditioned as neoliberal subjects that we struggle to take these sorts of concerns seriously simply because they're not as easily quantified as, say, GDP per capita or whatever.
That said, I'd caution against considering these things to live in a separate non "economic" realm. One of the central critiques of capitalism (woefully underappreciated today in my opinion) isn't just about the purely material ramifications of, say, labor exploitation or spiraling inequality, but of the alienation the system produces. In short, meet our most base requirements for survival and some minimal level of comfort and most of us actually need to feel some kind of meaning in our lives in order to find contentment, but capitalism forces us to do so much work whose products we are utterly disconnected from on any kind of direct, personal level (unlike that of an artisan whose work is deeply integrated into their own sense of self) and provide no immediate benefit for our communities. It's actually terribly corrosive to the human soul to find ourselves toiling-away for most of our lives selling away our precious time and labor for no deeper purpose beyond feeding the profit-maximizing algorithm that drives the capitalist system — nor is it conducive to a harmonious or democratically-ordered society more broadly.
This is a big part of the reason why many socialists are keen to differentiate their ideology from that of "social democrats". Advancing beyond redistribution and into a more wholesale restructuring of the economic system has profound benefits that take us much further than calling it a day at making it easier for people to afford shit or access healthcare.
Ok-Spinach-6529 | a day ago
I agree
I also think we need a more meaningful system that takes human psychology and the need for genuine connection.
I always find it fascinating how many psychological disorders improve when we live in a more community-oriented society. Just think about how much PPD improves when new moms have help from people around them.
serpentjaguar | 19 hours ago
Not only do they improve, but anthropologists will tell you that mental illness as we generally understand it is virtually non-existent in small scale tribal societies.
AdmirableBattleCow | 15 hours ago
Honestly, source required. It seems like an extremely difficult thing to measure as tribal societies aren't exactly keeping accurate records or even have the vocabulary/concepts to properly express the experience of mental illness.
church-rosser | 13 hours ago
This is precisely the point though. These communities have not had a need historically to document, or remember in an ongoing way, an observed phenomenon that has gone largely unnoticed or unobserved.
How does one source to that?
AdmirableBattleCow | an hour ago
Just because they didn't acknowledge it doesn't mean it didn't exist. We didn't and still don't acknowledge mental illness in "the west" all the time. It is swept under the rug or passed off as personal weakness all the time.
tepidlymundane | 16 hours ago
The missing leg of the table is organized religion. It provides a lot of value to human needs for connection and hope.
The absence of this established core of beliefs and norms is not easily replaced with something else. There's not a secular habit that gets large numbers of people into regular contact with each other in the same numbers as organized religion.
Problem is, for educated people, literal belief in God's Word is just silly, and metaphorical extrusions are, (a) extrusions, (b) numerous, and (c) often spiced unpalatably with (more seriously), untruths about the world (e.g. Christofascism) and (less seriously), bad aesthetics (e.g. Jesus Rock) . I can see the appeal of new tradCaths, even as the line of adherents grows more ghastly (e.g. Thiel, Vance).
So I dunno, really. I take religion seriously enough to not participate if I don't believe in its core tenets, and I can see that my hobbies and clubs and work don't fall into as socially cohesive an order as religion, but I don't know if they have to, either. Times change, and we're guaranteed problems, but not solutions.
Maybe feeling a bit of disconnection is a better solution than losing half of every weekend to droning stories about miracle lunches and getting knocked up by angels.
DelightfullyDivisive | 14 hours ago
There have been attempts at this, starting with Comte's "Religion of Humanity" in the 19th Century. More recently, "The Sunday Assembly" was launched in London in 2013.
These ideas have included sacraments for significant life transitions, talks on philosophy and science, and emphasis on community involvement. Alain de Botton's 2012 book, "Religion for Atheists" has many ideas on how it should be structured.
I want aware of most of this until I searched for it, but now I'm intrigued.
tepidlymundane | 13 hours ago
Good comment. It's completely normal in history for people to look at their religious options and choose "none of the above" and do something new. These sound like interesting paths.
DHFranklin | 13 hours ago
The absence of the role of the church has been studied a ton. The biggest loss that we see from people who don't participate as a natural experiment to their family members that do is typically the absence of community.
Faith in God and being driven by ministry is very rare. The motivation and the gains of the tradition is the community it fosters.
Having a large group of dozens or hundreds of people with a shared purpose and tradition would be very valuable to secular people. We can't even sacrifice an hour for the Moose Lodge.
The Boomers knew that the hassle and the schlep of church and civic organizations was the cost of admission for community. Milennials and GenZ retreat to the family unit and small group of friends atomized from larger community.
We don't have people to help us and we can't help people. We aren't learning more about our selves and one another. And as is well documented the young people ain't fuckin'. We gotta get the young people fuckin'. I'm and older millenial. I am concerned that the youth ain't livin'.
tepidlymundane | 12 hours ago
I'm looking forward to retirement just so I can join the Moose! (or another similar group). Nearly all of them around here meet midday during the week. ROMEOs are a fun community - Retired Old Men Eating Out.
I'm still a bit puzzled by what my parents got out of church. I think it was part reputation - what a good person does, part community, part belief, and part edification - there's always a religious scholar in the family, often the father. Seemed more habit than belief, and definitely was not something that gave them solace in their last days - neither had much to say about prayer or god at all at the end.
I think it gave them a community and structure that was useful if not fervent. It's a curious thing, to have non-fervent beliefs about something so cosmologically momentous.
mao_intheshower | 15 hours ago
I'm with you to some extent, but I'm getting off before politics becomes a religion.
Economic hardship creates incentives. Maybe to afford a house you have to become an influencer, and to hit your numbers you have to generally be a menace to society. Then it will become difficult to trace all the knock-on effects back to housing. The economics provides leverage to all the other ways society isn't perfectly organized. But there's no "system" which solves alienation by itself, and trying to create one leads to other places.
mojitz | 14 hours ago
Obviously no economic system is going to produce utopia in which nobody ever suffers or feels any kind of aliention whatsoever in all senses and forms of that word, but it seems pretty obvious at very least that capitalism seems to exacerbate many of these issues, and that pursuing a different means of structuring the economy may well relieve that burden and produce the conditions for a far greater share of the population to feel like they're flourishing.
mirh | 15 hours ago
> products we are utterly disconnected from on any kind of direct, personal level (unlike that of an artisan whose work is deeply integrated into their own sense of self) and provide no immediate benefit for our communities
With the same stupid 19th century bar of "self-actualization", any kind of scientific enterprise should have the people working on that alienated. From vaccines to rocket science.
.. people for real, can you stop to quote marx 300 years later, and start to read social science?
mojitz | 14 hours ago
Dog, read the article. The social science agrees with me that satisfaction is found in more than material accumulation. Rising rates of suicide, addiction, loneliness, and dissatisfaction in concert with rising wealth very much suggests there's more to this picture.
Also, scientists generally aren't likely to feel alienated because they're among the few who actually get to pursue their passions and generally have a significant amount of agency over their own labor even if they're still technically "exploited" in the most strict sense of the term. That might even have something to do with the fact that so many of them don't actually work for capitalist enterprises and that most of the pure research that goes into breakthroughs comes from the public sector.
mirh | 12 hours ago
> that satisfaction is found in more than material accumulation.
Nobody was arguing otherwise, material accumulation has nothing even to do with the kind of job one has, and it's crazy to have such low amount of text comprehension that a communist-sounding thesis is said to agree with *Noah Smith*.
> Rising rates of suicide, addiction, loneliness, and dissatisfaction in concert with rising wealth very much suggests there's more to this picture.
Literally not, if you even know the slightest about statistics. The aggregate growing says absolutely nothing about the median or the bottom 10%.
> Also, scientists generally aren't likely to feel alienated because they're among the few who actually get to pursue their passions and generally have a significant amount of agency over their own labor
No shit? So maybe your kids not having to eat with any literal product of your theoretical physics studies has nothing to do with it, and job satisfaction is just about the usual things of being treated fairly on the premise plus a decent work–life balance and wage?
> many of them don't actually work for capitalist enterprises and that most of the pure research that goes into breakthroughs comes from the public sector.
Btw I can assure you that there are also data scientists working for banks, insurers or engineering firms, that with their 6 digits stipend have a much higher life satisfaction than researchers forced to bend over backwards for some meagre grant.
mojitz | 11 hours ago
To be honest, man, it really seems like you're just sort of triggered by the fact that I brought up some concepts from socialism and are going off half-cocked, making a shitload of unfounded assumptions and refusing to even read the article that set the context for my reply (obvious from the fact that you just baselessly attacked me for allegedly relying on mean averages, here when I'm not), and I'm just not interested in having an unpleasant exchange with someone acting so needlessly aggressive. Later.
mirh | 7 hours ago
It doesn't take much to see the riddle behind "median market income and posttax, posttransfer income by age and generation", even if adjusted for inflation.
First, if you open the linked paper, you see that insofar as generational spending as a share of their income has remained steady it's because rising "housing and utilities" have been counterbalanced by nearly twice as relatively cheap food. But (putting even aside Trump's sheningans) since that's based on Owners’ Equivalent Rent to standardize both legit homeowners and lessees, the figure is heavily biased against people currently on the market looking for a new one.
Second and most importantly the statistics is completely skewed by the income distribution: up to around the third quartile younger people today are poorer than their parents were, while from the top 25% and above they start instead to be a fuckton richer (I'm not really sure why that's only showing in the PSID data, but I'm guessing that asking point blank for the total wealth one owns is a better indicator that doesn't incur in the "boomerang children" problem).
Even then, you or him being wrong on a single datum wouldn't really be a big deal, if the entire framing wasn't nut and bended over backwards rather than ask any of the right followup questions.
ouyawei | 19 hours ago
> capitalism forces us to do so much work
Only if you want things that go beyond that minimal level of comfort.
mojitz | 16 hours ago
You say that as though homelessness doesn't exist. In any case, if the forces of capitalism restructure the world around us such that the hedonic treadmill seems to be the only real choice available to most people, then that's what they'll chose rather than seemingly hopelessly raging against the machine. You get born into the rat race, essentially, and most of us end up too busy to consider how things might be better.
nonexistentnight | a day ago
Jeff Bezos famously said "When the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right." I'm more inclined to think that the data being presented in the article isn't capturing what it thinks it is than that the overwhelming sentiment of anecdotes from millennials is wrong.
Delores_Herbig | 20 hours ago
I’m the exact millennial that he’s talking about in the article. And I was reading it thinking, “This is not my reality or the one of anyone in my age group that I know”.
We ARE mad about the raw economic deal we got. We’re mad we’re the most productive generation in America, but we don’t have anything that our parents had, and won’t. Many of us are struggling, and it seems to be getting worse. My partner and I have had more conversations about money in the last two years than I think I’ve ever had. It’s a constant thought now, and the thought of “the future” is terrifying so I avoid it.
horseradishstalker | 2 hours ago
“ The vast majority of Americans now possess not only the basic necessities of life, but a degree of economic security unimaginable to their forebears a century ago.” And yet they are angry because they didn’t get something they thought they were somehow owed just because someone else got it.
I know this will upset you, but you are exactly the people he is talking about. Somewhere, somehow, someone convinced you that life was fair. And it’s not. It never has been and it never will be.Life is scary based primarily on perspective. I don’t think you’ll like this either, but we are all scared about something. There is always something that will scare us as human beings. Particularly when people have a scarcity mindset. When you expect nothing then anything seems better than that.
Livid_Village4044 | 23 hours ago
And the data can be doctored. The old Fed "data" on the homeownership rate counted adult children living with their parents as "homeowners" if their parents own the home.
As is widely known, a larger % of people age 18-34 are living with their parents than at any time since the Great Depression (I wonder why. Could this possibly be an ECONOMIC concern?)
The Minneapolis Fed corrected the data, and 53.4% of adults are actually homeowners, NOT the 62%-63% we have been told. The old "data" for Millennials and Gen Z was even more inflated.
horseradishstalker | 2 hours ago
So, basically what you are saying is more than half of adults are homeowners. At what age do you think that most people should be homeowners? Are they a loser if they don’t own their own home by the time they reach the age of 25? 35? My toddler doesn’t own their own home at this point. Does that mean they never will - assuming they will want to at some point? Neither of us have any idea. Statistics are always a snapshot of the past.
Regardless of whether it’s 63% or 53.4% it’s still more than half. It could be zero. Are you making the point that some people were “tricked” into thinking they should be more entitled than they are?
geekwonk | 2 hours ago
noah’s entire schtick is trolling people who live in reality with random factoids that appear to disagree with human experience. he plays half too smart and half too stupid, and it lets him get away with distorting the plain truth while pretending not to get it.
Assmaday | a day ago
Can't focus on fixing world problems if I. Worrried I can't afford dinner or paying rent
Shark_in_a_fountain | 20 hours ago
Without commenting on the quality of the conclusions he draws from the economic data that he quotes, the author suddenly spins from reading graphs to vibe-based affirmation that what people want is social status. No data, even anecdotal, is quoted to support that claim. That alone makes this article pretty much useless.
Then, what the author seems to never consider is that economic indicators might just be bad at describing what really affects people's quality of life, a bias very common among economically liberal people. Sure, your median wealth maybe larger than for the previous generations at the same age (though I've seen other statistics drawing different conclusions), but if you feel that your whole life might be put in jeopardy if your health insurance suddenly decides not to cover for a life-saving medical intervention, that's not gonna make feel any better. If you have a job but feel that the political system in which you leave doesn't listen to you but always obeys to what the powerful want (be it wealth distribution, military involvement in the world, funding a genocide, etc.), you won't be happy.
There is so much more to describe quality of life than naked economic indicators and the author seem to think that it only is "social status" rather than feeling part of a society that values you, being part of a larger community in which you play a role, being human rather than being a disposable cog in a machine, no matter how gilded that cog is.
horseradishstalker | 3 hours ago
I think you make some good points, however, they are pretty much the same points that the author made.
Unfair_Scar_2110 | a day ago
I mean I think it's pretty obvious. Angry voters on the left are mad at the corruption in government, unabated climate change, Ai, and generally a government that doesn't work for the people.
Angry voters on the right are mad about the dissolution of the patriarchy and whatever other crisis du jure that has been astroturfed.
In a lot of ways, no, these are not strictly economic. A decent job finally at the age of 40 will not make someone happy about all the other shit falling apart around them. No, the evidence that tarrifs are bad won't help some conservative guy that is mad his wife left him or all the women in his class are gay.
Of course it's not economic, per se. But as the neoliberals tried to push for so many decades, people no longer believe that the economy and politics are separate. The guys robbing the country blind are using a war of choice and tarrifs of choice to enrich themselves. And yes, economic opportunities for women have meant women aren't trapped into marriage like they'd been for centuries.
UsedStrawberry9045 | a day ago
I've read the article and this is just an amazing straw man. Right wing men aren't upset over the patriarchy being dissolved, they're probably angry over double standards with gender based DEI.
[OP] UnscheduledCalendar | a day ago
Submission statement: Americans are increasingly dissatisfied with their personal lives, despite economic improvements. This suggests that the root of the country’s malaise might not be purely economic, but rather a deeper social challenge. While economic policies are often proposed as solutions, evidence suggests that other factors, such as cultural and sociopolitical issues, might be more significant in driving this dissatisfaction.
horseradishstalker | a day ago
As I was reading this excellent article I thought again and again about the concept that expectations and reality that are mismatched drive a great deal of human dissatisfaction.
RexDraco | a day ago
The issue will always be how relative life is. Quality of living has noticeably gone down. It doesn't matter im not in some shithole eating mud cookies, I still feel entitled and robbed for not having a house and rv in spite having a full time job.
There is such a thing as entitlement. It isn't a bad thing to have if it's realistic. My previous generations had these expectations honored, meanwhile I make more than my mom did and I live in an apartment where I hear my neighbors alarm every morning and a jet fly over.
juliana-crain | a day ago
Yep, and if you lose your job, you could lose your home and your healthcare. The constant existential dread wears you out.
Livid_Village4044 | 22 hours ago
Jobs have become more precarious as the long neoliberal age has dragged on. This too is an ECONOMIC concern.
This has had the silver lining of increasing public support for Medicaid to a solid majority. Most people know they could lose their job and healthcare coverage with it at any time.
sririrachacha | 16 hours ago
I can't help but think of this framing: https://www.reddit.com/r/PolymathReading/s/6qVlTE77ur
DHFranklin | 13 hours ago
This is really missing the mark.
The income is meaningless if the outcome is meaningless. There are so many things that could be cheap or free and we aren't letting them.
Covid showed us that we only need 1/4 or 1/3 labor participation to keep costs steady and inflation becomes a supply bottleneck issue. We saw that we don't need to rely on the job markets of few and fewer cities. We could all work in rust belt mill towns and farm towns far away from them in the same tax juridiction and thrive. Make new houses in those markets we can actually afford. We could have.
Having more and more hours worked is not the flex you think it is. Having the same income and more freedom is more valuable.
Yes our money goes farther than ever now. Cool. We don't want to spend money on enshittified everything. We do it because we have to.
If one more graph of inflation leveling out without mentioning how meaningless it is when prices never go down I'm going to scream. Dollar Tree will never be Dollar Tree again. The price pegs mean a lot for us.
The data doesn't support the feeling. because the feelings exist over one fiscal quarter.