Time for the other American political party to pick up the "nah it's just negative media, people still have money and food" drum!
Sure, many people (in an absolute-number sense) are in no immediate risk of crisis. But many are.
Economic policy for 40+ years has been shifting both income and wealth largely to the already-haves with massive knock-on effects on the general affordability and comfort for everybody else. The flow of money into small sets of assets and investments distorts the "inflation" measurements and we find ways to ignore it. Buy groceries instead of eating out! Just let the median household's kids work more too, in some red states! That part of the story has been going on for a long time, and the actual-Covid-inflation just drew more attention to the trend.
People were talking about it long before Covid, but the Covid bullwhip and the complete lack of foresight or management[0] of the situation pushed it into a new, noticably-worse-normal overnight. While before we were just boiling the frog and blaming avocado toast for millenials not buying houses or having kids yet. Some good math in the post about the concrete part of this vs just "vibe" parts, especially re: the behavior of the lower-income end of the economy.
But you can't have a viable consumer economy when everyone with power is squeezing the consumer tighter and tighter. We've been papering over this problem by making stuff free-with-ads but eventually there won't be enough buying power left in a large enough non-broke cohort to keep the system working for anybody.
[0] "you think maybe people will want more of the stuff they bought before, and less Pelotons, in a two years?? No way! Buy Zoom stock!"
I saw a thing in Wall Street Journal today about how millennials are "splurging on rotisserie chicken."
> “Gen Zers and millennials are swimming in student debt and may never own homes, but they’re splurging on gut-healthy juices and rotisserie chickens.”
https://offthefrontpage.com/the-wall-street-journal-gets-com...
Yeah, that's been the typical attitude for well over a decade now from the older generations who didn't have the same struggles and don't imagine that things have actually changed.
Even if we read that as generously as possible - "wow, look at how many millennials buy $20 Erewhon smoothies" - it's a wildly stupid play to couple that to how many millennials are in debt and can't afford homes.
Nobody said no millennials can afford homes. Nobody said they are all broke. Plenty of businesses out there are still capitalizing off the higher end of the range.
But at almost every percentile they're worse off than their parents were, economically. And probably working more hours to get there.
If you are <30 and are not in a trade related field, you will likely be unable to purchase a home in your life time.
Banks in Australia are now denying University Graduates, including those like myself in IT Industries, home loans due to increased risk of AI replacement in various workforces.
Where I shop, rotisserie chickens are 1/2 the price of a raw whole chicken..
Is the largest produced (by volume) source of animal protein in the US considered a luxury item?
Aren’t rotisserie chickens one of the #1 grocery store loss leaders?
Some places like Costco - yes.
Other places have them priced high enough that I think they make money on them.
(The trick is they take the unsold ones and strip the meat off and sell it in the deli/sandwiches.)
It's a good way for a grocer to minimize waste. When raw chicken gets close to sell by date, turn it into rotisserie chicken, when it doesn't sell - turn it into sandwiches and other products.
My kids just remarked to me that a Costco rotisserie chicken was $4. I didn't believe them but I do now. I wonder how freezing that will thaw. That's a cheap food option.
On the /r/costco subreddit they talk about deboning it the moment they get home and then setting aside the bits for pre planned meals(here’s where one would slice then freeze). The bones can be used for making stock.
Rotisserie chickens are a great deal. Lots of calories and protein, and you can save the carcass to make stock. They're cheap relative to restaurant food as well.
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It's weird I was having a conversation with a contractor the other day, and he mentioned how in 1970, contractors earned ~9k/year and a truck cost ~2k. He was making the comparison about how he made 50K this year and the truck he financed was also around 50K..
I don't think it's a coincidence a lot of problems are happening at the same time in the US.
Part of the economic distortion, and difficulty in making these comparisons, is that a 1970 Ford F-100 and 2025 Ford F-150 are pretty radically different. Both by design, government mandate, and customer demands.
2 door single row -> 4 door two rows
drum brakes -> anti-lock disc brakes
lap belts only -> shoulder belts with airbags,
normally aspirated V-8, no catalytic converter -> twin turbo v6 and dual catalytic converter
manual transmission -> 10 speed automatic
If you wanted to make a Ford F-100 today, without the modern safety, emissions, fuel efficiency, and comforts, you could probably do it for less than $17,000, which is what $2,000 adjusted for inflation is.
And a computer in 1970 would've been way more expensive and far crappier than a hundred dollar Android tablet today. It's not exactly in dispute that there has been technological development between 1970 and 2025. But it's also not the central issue.
In America the personal vehicle is a necessity in the vast majority of the country, and it's relatively more expensive today. As are many other necessities.
(If you want we can quibble further and say a 17k used Rav 4 or Tacoma would be more reliable than a 1970 F-100 anyway blah blah blah blah the increased lifespan and availability of used cars causes new cars to have to go more upmarket blah blah blah... but the hedonic treadmill is also real and if you would've been living it up with a new car and a nice home with a 30min commute in the 70s, but today have a 10 year old car and an apartment with a 70min commute, you're not gonna feel good.)
Yes I agree they are MUCH more expensive relatively. But they are more expensive entirely by choice, not because of inflation or stagnant wages. People want better cars, and that costs more. The government demands lower emissions, that costs more. Safety costs more. There is no world where you get all that for the same percentage of income.
you would've been living it up with a new car and a nice home with a 30min commute
And you be killed or paralyzed after a fender bender. Death rate per 100,000,000 miles dropped from 5 in 1970 to 1.4 in 2023.
> People want better cars, and that costs more. The government demands lower emissions, that costs more. Safety costs more. There is no world where you get all that for the same percentage of income.
Hell, we did it with computers. Let's figure out how to do it in more places.
Isn't that supposed to be the main job of the economy? Increase productivity? So that we all get more for less? Make the pie bigger, don't just make your own slice bigger?
If there's "no world" where all that can happen, most of the "taxes will hurt innovation, actually" arguments fall EXTREMELY hollow. Let's connect a few dots:
- Streets are in disrepair
- You can't afford the lifestyle you used to (by "choice")
- It's far harder for people, especially the young, to find a job (many end up hiding on disability and such that didn't exist much several decades ago in the first place)
- The wealthy have more money, and proportionally more money, than any time in the last century
Maybe instead of choosing the more expensive car we should start choosing to put some of that money to use repairing our basic infrastructure and trying to increase whole-society productive output instead of bottom-line ROI.
It is happening with cars too, it just that features are being added even faster than the price can come down. If you wanted Ford F-150 in 1970, you could do most of it, but it would have been a multi-million dollar car. You get all that for 50k. You are getting a lot more per dollar.
This reminds me the housing discussing - a part of the affordability problem is that houses have gotten much bigger. And have air conditioning. And have to comply with strict building codes. And have to be fire safe.
> houses have gotten much bigger
Which is a problem. I know a people who would be happy with a smaller house, but there just aren't enough on the market, and the scarcity of them leads to bidding wars that drive the price up. Meanwhile huge houses sit on the market for months, because no one can afford them.
I don’t think this is true. Advancements in technology often make things possible that previously were not at any price. Engines, for example, are better than ever in part due to computer modeling that would have been impossible in the 70s. Same deal with aerodynamics, safety features, and a million other things. In the 70s, you couldn’t have those things for any price. They required decades of development in other sectors to open possibilities for automobiles.
Most technology on cars existed years or decades before the became commonplace and affordable enough to use outside racing or exotic cars.
Airbags were patented in the 1950s. Modern ABS in 1971. Fist electronic fuel injector in 1957. You could take the Formula 1 level technology of 1970, and with enough money, apply it to a pickup truck. It would be shockingly expensive - and not as good. T
hat's my point! You are getting so much more for your dollar today, even though prices have risen faster than inflation. You are getting a multi-million dollar truck for $50k.
> You are getting a multi-million dollar truck for $50k.
You’re not, though, because that truck never did and never could exist. A modern F-150 isn’t a 70s F1 car made cheap by new tech. This isn’t something you can wave away with an argument equivalent to “we put 1000 research points in the tech tree.”
When the US economy was working well, products got better and cheaper over time. Tech and increased labor productivity drove that. Now, tech and labor productivity has continued to increase, yet consumer prices have far outpaced inflation.
"A modern F-150 isn’t a 70s F1 car made cheap by new tech. "
Yes, it pretty much is. You have to consider technology in cars is moving on two seperate/distinct paths.
1: improving manufacturing processes, materials, quality, which is lowering prices over time. Megacasting aluminum car parts is an example.
2: Adding totally new complex parts and systems that cars didn't have. This is things like airbags, antilock breaks, infotainment system, catalytic converters. This adds to the total cost.
#2 is far outpacing #1, which is why prices of cars are going up faster than inflation, wages, etc.
And 3D printing helped a lot too. Not as much as computer modelling, but still.
> There is no world where you get all that for the same percentage of income.
There is if we are comparing 2026 to the 70s. Technology has increased productivity overall. If those gains were distributed more evenly, it is more likely that the cost of, say a car, would be similar to the same percentage of income.
Productivity is up ~3x since 1970, but the car price has gone up 25x. It is driven by the massive increase in features/complexity on cars, and that means it will cost a bigger percentage of income. There is no possible redistribution of gains that would have driven income up 25x to match the car prices.
> There is no world where you get all that for the same percentage of income.
This is only true because real income has barely budged since the 1970s.
If real income had tracked productivity during that time, we would have plenty. But it didn't. All the increases have been siphoned off to feed the ultra-wealthy, in a variety of ways.
real income has barely budged since the 1970s
This is not true. Real income has more than doubled since 1970.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=o1gV
All the increases have been siphoned off to feed the ultra-wealthy
No, the productivity gains are eaten up by expensive items with low perceived value. You don't think about the $1000 catalytic converter in your car, or $5,000 set of airbags. You just think you are paying more to do the exact same drive to work that you could have done in a $2,000 1970s car. And that's true! Nonetheless, there is real added cost and value to the car.
I don't think this is an example of the hedonic treadmill. People who believe that a new 2026 Tacoma is the hedonic equivalent of a new 1970 F-100 are simply wrong, in the same way that people who imagine taking all the flights they take today with the level of service provided on 1970s passenger planes are wrong. The extreme increase in reliability and build quality has shifted the dynamics of the car market, with essentially all new vehicle sales pushed upscale as budget-conscious buyers have no reason to buy new with even an infinite time horizon.
My $15k used car with 100k miles on it is just as reliable, just as stylish, and sparks just as much joy in me as the new cars my grandparents could have bought in 1970.
It's one of the problems with saying healthcare prices have "gone up". An x-ray in 1976 cost like $100 in 1976 dollars and one today costs like $100 in 2026 dollars, so it's significantly cheaper. But you couldn't get an MRI for any price in 1976 and you can get one in 2026 for $800, so the cost of "imaging" has gone up notionally.
There are more vehicles in the US than the F150 right? in Australia this would be seen as an absurdly over the top vehicle for almost all contractors and construction workers.
Some amount of this issue must be marketing and propaganda making people buy massively over spec vehicles than their actual needs require. Most of these workers could get by with basically any car but get marketed and peer pressured in to spending $50,000 on the biggest one.
Yes, but there are no ~17k pickups in the US, which would be the inflation adjusted price of the F-100. The cheapest truck is the Maverick which starts at 28k.
> $50,000 on the biggest one
You can easily run into trucks in the $120,000-$150,000 range in the car lots now.
The shift to 4 doors seems to be just because now a single vehicle has to do it all.
(AT is because Americans can't drive? Partially kidding, but due to the car dependency that requires everyone being able to drive)
Not entirely, the problems are also that wages haven't kept up with inflation; $9,000 salary in 1970 would be $75,000 today, and the automakers realized they make more profit in financing than on the vehicle itself, optimizing the maximum they can squeeze someone who needs a vehicle, hence 96 months for an auto loan.
$9,000 salary in 1970 would be $75,000 today
That's actually in the range of what contractors make today.
Some sources:
GLassdoor: 67k https://www.glassdoor.com/Salaries/contractor-salary-SRCH_KO...
Finturf: 75k https://finturf.com/blog/how-much-do-contractors-make/
BLS: 91k https://www.bls.gov/ooh/management/construction-managers.htm...
Also if we are going to say the truck of yesterday is better now, productivity today is 2x what it was, so that $75,000 should be more like $150,000 (since we have to account for things improving for their higher price, we can't ignore productivity improving, that would make for warped comparisons).
And the $9,000 salary adjust for inflation would be $75,000 today. Then adding in the difference (since we did that with the truck, and since worker productivity has doubled) that $9,000 should be $150,000 today.
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The wage gap between black and white Americans is nearly the same today as in 1970.
If you're going to reply to people can you actually reply to then instead of editing your comment? You probably shouldn't reply to people who tell you to kill yourself anyway but the fact that comment is (presumably) deleted illustrates the kind of confusion this causes.
The 80s-and-on story of America is not a story of women and minorities getting on more solid economic footing at the cost of some additional costs for white male Americans. Almost everybody is worse off - higher debt, less property ownership among the youth, etc.
I wouldn't agree with a position of "white people aren't going to stop being racist, just separate everyone and let them be" (we could call this the Clarence Thomas position, as Corey Robin has written about[0]). But it's wildly misleading to say that the slippage of the American economy is because of less overt discrimination. It's universal. The economy itself is broken compared to how it used to be. (Personally, I'd point at the oligarch-fighting "soak the rich" taxes passed in the early 20th century as a key point here.)
[0] https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781627793834/theenigmaofclar...
So your thesis is that the segregationists were right and there’s a causal link between the decline in conditions for white American workers and the success of the civil rights movement?
Why must anyone be content to be poor and equal to only the poor?
The civil rights movement broke the New Deal coalition and ended popular support for many of the policies that had maintained the socioeconomic status of working and lower middle class whites. Today, neither party seriously entertains extending social programs for anyone.
Not to justify this, but is this possibly the reason why those opportunities existed?
> Yet we do not pay poll taxes today. We are not getting lynched in the streets. We are not being directly racially discriminated from employment.
No thanks to the present government, who post about deporting slightly less than 1/3 the US population.
> But the first step is to believe that what people have been screaming about their lives for the past several years actually exists. Even a representative agent, forward-looking and fully aware of all the parameters surrounding them, can feel the vibecession.
Gee. Who would have fucking thought.
When people, en masse, are saying they're in pain, *believe them*. They have very real fears or stressors, even if "you" can't understand them.
Indeed. The problems exist. The Republicans have absolutely batshit and counterproductive explanations and proposed solutions for those problems, but at least they acknowledge them. The Democrats only offered condescending denial.
(Until Mamdani's campaign. But even then the DNC tried their hardest to ratfuck him, as they always do with candidates to the left of Dick Cheney.)
Exactly. People all over America are saying that illegals are taking their jobs and a bunch of coastal liberals are trying to convince them it’s not real? Maybe believe them to start with. Talk to them. Don’t just start ivory tower intellectualizing like you’re Matt Yglesias talking about how Biden is in terrific shape.
Well, okay, so just like this article talks about, people often find it easier to declare a source of a problem, rather than describing a symptom they're having.
Illegals aren't taking their jobs - there's plenty of studies evidencing that that's not true. *BUT*, people are feeling:
1. under-employed
2. under-paid
3. in some level of pain, economically
4. feeling insecure, financially
Sure, propaganda plays a part of the experienced pain people have; but it's often not all of it. Propaganda is less effective when people are comfortable.
It is hard to understand how we can import unskilled labor and not have that impact the value of unskilled labor domestically.
Unskilled labor is a myth. When we kicked out all the agricultural workers, it wasn’t just that it’s hard to find replacements, the replacements also learned how hard it is to actually do that kind of actually skilled work.
We're going with "unskilled labor is a myth"? Really? You could have given me 1 million guesses and I never would have come up with that. Unskilled labor is not a myth. It's a description of work that requires a shorter amount of training time for someone to be able to do the work, as opposed to, say, a dentist who needs years of schooling. Jobs where the primary requirements are physicality often qualify, with professional sports being a notable exception.
And if the work is really hard so no one wants to do it, labor markets generally have a pretty reliable mechanism for correcting that situation by raising prices. You could argue that higher food prices would be a problem, but you can't argue that imported labor doesn't impact it. No "study" will ever prove that importing labor doesn't suppress wages or that "unskilled labor is a myth".
It's looking a lot like when you say "believe them", you mean "rewrite what they say and believe that thing instead". Yeah, I can do that for any political affiliation.
Not at all. I believe the experience they're expressing, when expressed in the most positive light. I'm not going to entertain a racist perspective, such as "there's too many brown people here" or similar; but I will entertain a more favorable perspective: "I feel like I can't get a different job if I lost mine", "I can't afford groceries", "My rainy day fund isn't large enough for a rainy day and this makes me scared". "It doesn't feel like there's enough jobs to go around". All of these could be very real, underlying statements to the statement "Illegal immigrants are taking all the jobs". Obviously more conversation would be necessary to get the exact issue they're actually experiencing.
But just like a patient coming to a doctor and saying "my back hurts, I must have a herniated disk"; or a customer coming and saying "your website sucks, you should rewrite it in React", there's not enough information there to get to the true, underlying cause; *BUT* you can wholly believe the patient that they are in pain, or at that there is something about the website that isn't meeting this user's needs. That's step 1. Believe the person in their experience, then investigate and address the real root cause of their pain.
Sometimes the patient says that the arm they no longer have hurts, or that everything hurts but the opiates you gave them last time did the trick, more opiates please, or that the world is sad and empty and the only way out is offing themself. And sure, you can rightly believe that they're in pain in all three situations, but not in a way that is informative about which side to take on vibecession.
They’re usually quite clear that people who violate the laws of the nation are taking jobs that were meant for them. If you’re giving their jobs to criminals and claiming that they’re just feeling anxiety. The US isn’t an economic zone. It’s a country. If there is no American that the job can be done by then the job shouldn’t be done.
These people are clear about what they want. But you rewrite that in a patronizing tone. “You’re just afraid for your job”. No they’re angry that you’re using the country they built as an economic machine.
"They" built? Who is this "they"? I don't know of any people of 250 plus years of age. And workers, no matter one generation or ten generations of lineage in the country have "built" it.
They're saying gas is too expensive.
They're saying rent is too high.
They're saying houses cost too much.
They're saying a cocktail shouldn't cost double digits.
They're saying they can't afford doctors or health insurance.
The complaints are specific about specific changes in affordability, not 80's AM radio talking points. They mostly aren't suddenly saying illegal immigrants are taking their jobs.
(Certainly some people are, but it's not really a bigger contingent than any other time in the last... 30? 40? years...)
But they are also saying no to build more houses. They are also screaming and clamoyring to tariff the world 500 percent and then some more. Many people say many things, many people are also economically and mathematically illiterate and or pretending to be due to some vested interest.
That’s them attempting to solve problems. The pain they experience is still experienced pain.
Is some of it trauma-related? Sure! But that’s a lot of people experiencing a real or perceived hurt that we should pay attention to.
I think there comes a point when people are so adamantly illiterate and antimathematical (and a good helping of other fun things like racism), they are beyond help.
Agreed. The DOW is over 50,000, what's not to celebrate about the current economy?
We shouldn't be giving participation trophies to people who slept through world history class and then fall for recycled demagoguery about how it's the poor who are sucking up all the wealth and not the rich.
Well “believe them” seems to have been a system that survived a few hours. Unsurprising.
White Americans’ feelings of being “last place” are associated with anti-DEI attitudes, Trump support, and Trump vote during the 2024 U.S. presidential election - https://advances.in/psychology/10.56296/aip00046/ | https://doi.org/10.56296/aip00046
Abstract: Due to racial wealth inequality in the U.S.—inequality that benefits White Americans on average—many Americans associate White people with wealth. Yet, many White Americans report feeling like they, personally, are “falling behind.” We conducted a five-wave longitudinal study with a representative quota sample of non-Hispanic, White Americans (N = 506) during the 2024 U.S. presidential election. We found that White Americans who feel they are falling behind White and Asian Americans, while also being close to being passed by Black and Hispanic Americans, within a perceived tight status hierarchy, reported the most support for DEI bans and Trump, controlling for objective status. Further, White Americans with these status perceptions were most likely to vote for Trump in the 2024 election. We conclude that White Americans’ subjective perceptions of their position in the racial economic hierarchy meaningfully relate to political attitudes and behavior.
The Findings: Using a statistical technique called Latent Profile Analysis (LPA), we identified distinct groups based on where people subjectively ranked themselves and other racial groups on the American status ladder.
* We found a specific group of White Americans (~15% of our sample) who perceived themselves as "tied for last place" with Black Americans.
* Crucially: This group was the most likely to vote for Donald Trump and support bans on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives.
* Importantly, this effect held true even when we controlled for their actual income, education, age, and gender. In other words, feeling like you are losing status predicted voting behavior more strongly than actually having low status.
Reddit AmA with the authors: https://old.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/1qz9158/we_are_pr...
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I think it would be beneficial to conduct such analysis at a subnational level, becuase the reality is the market dynamics in (eg.) the Bay are distinct from those in Chicagoland.
A similar macro-level analysis by the FT highlighted how certain states are in the midst of a positive economic expansion and others have fallen into a deep recessionary cycle [0].
I've also noticed HN cycles of pessimism and optimism shift significantly based on time zone - which could be attributed to this subnational malaise.
[0] - https://www.ft.com/content/e9be3e3f-2efe-42f7-b2d2-8ab3efea2...
"is the US in a depression? 540$ for your first year to read FT!"
> "is the US in a depression? 540$ for your first year to read FT!"
Honestly, if you want good information, you need to pay for it. I've been subscribed to the FT for almost a decade now, and it's definitely helped me a lot. For context, I also subscribed to all the other newspapers people suggest (NYT/WSJ/WaPo/Guardian etc) and find the FT to be the most useful for me.
I do agree that it's really expensive, but for me it makes sense.
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Not really. Different demographics and different subeconomies are feeling better or worse than others. CPI is also calculated at a subnational level as well.
Insurance, Rent, Food, and other fundamentals are all differently priced in different regions and subregions of the US.
Edit: cannot reply
> The racial diversion ...
This comment was not about race - both Oregon and West Virgina are majority white, but have entirely different demographics (urban heavy Oregon with the population centered around Portland versus rural primary WV with microagglomerations on the border of DMV and Huntington-Ashland).
And more critically, the fact that you assumed it as such betrays a lot about you.
The racial diversion is tiring and hedging by "it's all relative" is boring. The article is about zeitgeist..
Where is there anything about race in that comment? How on earth did you hallucinate that?
This guy isn’t wrong: https://youtu.be/Ub585Pn4yro
“When metrics and anecdotes differ, believe the anecdotes.”
It's not an economic effect. The news is all awful. If you're in the US and on the left, or outside the US, the world is descending into autocratic chaos and police state violence. If you're in the US and on the right, the country is descending into chaos at the hands of the anarchist left and the invasion of a horde of immigrants who need to be suppressed by autocratic chaos and police state violence.
Yeah yeah, there's food on the shelves and money in your pocket. But it's scary out there for everyone, and that trumps (heh) rationality.
The solution is to get Washington and partisan media to, ahem, shut the fuck up and just let people be happy. But that doesn't put bribes in their pockets or advertisers on their screens, so on with the autocratic chaos.