Money Dysmorphia or “The Economy”
People are talking about “the economy” again, which is never a good sign. And people are asking me about “the economy”, which is even worse. Though it’s all hard to parse. I’m not sure I remember a “good economy” in this millennium. I recollect the late nineties as a very halcyon time, but then again, I wasn’t even a teenager, so really what did I know.
As a forecaster, people will approach me for my opinion on “the economy” and I have to remind them I have an arts degree. I may have a strong understanding of people’s desires—a refined gut instinct for where the cultural winds are blowing—but I really do not have any firm recommendations about “the economy” or “the market” for that matter. I’m not Pelosi Tracker. I’m not even Inverse Cramer. (They’re both investment bots, one of which mimics Nancy Pelosi’s publicly disclosed positions, the other trades against CNBC pundit Jim Cramer’s advice.)
My general heuristic is the more people talk about “the economy” the worse it is. People began talking about “the economy” in 2023. That was the year the tech layoffs began and the COVIDbucks boost slowed to a trickle. By 2024, the press (I never heard anyone use this term in real life) began talking about a “vibecession” which I suppose was meant to mean the economy was good and people responding to surveys just thought it was bad.
Post-election, people have stopped insisting “the economy” was good a few months ago. When pressed, they admit “the economy” has been in a malaise for years and add that Trump’s tariffs will make “the economy” far, far worse, which even tariff supporters admit—if only in the short term—will be true.
The Times riffed on my post-election take that people voted for boom boom over doom. The subheader to the article reads: “The ‘boom boom’ aesthetic meets the gloom and doom of market turmoil.” It’s unclear if people are getting what they voted for. Times opinion writer Michelle Goldberg dropped a piece today—“The Vibe Shift Against the Right”—covering dissatisfaction with a variety of Trump administration policies, least among them the economy.
Time will tell.
People tend to misremember “the economy”. We think of the Reaganite eighties as very boom boom, but forget that his tenure was bracketed by two very bad “economies”—the high unemployment of The Last Days of Disco and the stock market crash of 1987. Gen Z nostalgia for the twenty-tens tends to forget that technically we were in “The Great Recession” and most of my friends were under- or unemployed.
Money dysphoria is transhistorical. We not only think our peers are wealthier than we are, we think people in the past were wealthier, too.
I have a feeling though that the markets may not matter. Rises in prices for non-essential consumer goods might not even matter. Food prices (see: eggs) and gas prices matter. They always come to the fore because these essentials are highly variable. People see them every week at the gas pump and the grocery store.
But what really matters is housing, healthcare, and education. These prices aren’t highly variable at the individual level. The average American has one mortgage and one college diploma, if they’re lucky. When people talk about “the economy” usually that’s a proxy for wages versus housing costs, healthcare costs and student loan debt.
If there were a world in which you could crash the stock market but raise wages and lower rents, I think that world would be popular. Now, as someone who knows nothing about “the economy” I can’t say if that world is possible. As we learned with COVID, the second-order effects of big policy decisions come out of nowhere, often as a total surprise. Remember how the lockdowns caused a toilet paper shortage? Not due to hoarding, but because half of the toilet paper used in America is “industrial-grade” i.e. for offices, cafes, restaurants, etc. Places no one was frequenting during the lockdowns.
My gut instinct about the second order effects of whatever is going on in “the economy” is that it will be good for a very small number of people, bad for the urban upper-middle classes, who are The New York Times readership and Donald Trump’s sworn enemies. It may be moderately good for the middle and working classes. That’s certainly the intention of the tariffs. Maybe. Time will tell.
Rockwellmaxxing or Small Town Revivalism
As a small town boy myself, I really enjoyed this post from Ryan B. Anderson:
I go home quite frequently and muse about moving back someday. He’s correct that we have made ourselves believe living in a small town is low status. But perhaps, young people are changing that…
The New York Post reports:
During the 2010s, 90% of the growth in the young adult population was concentrated in the nation’s largest metros with over 4 million residents. But since 2020, 75% of the growth in the 25-to-44 demographic has been seen in cities with populations of less than 1 million, or in rural enclaves.
Remember: living in Brooklyn was a very downmarket thing to do not so long ago. It was the ‘bridge’ in the ‘bridge-and-tunnel’ epithet.
#money #dysmorphia #Sean #Monahan
