Kyla, Your approach to this question of modern economics is just genius. Like Jimmy, meet people where they are at. Making this understandable and actionable is crazy difficult to be sure, but we have to start with understanding it. I wish every Congress Person and every Senator and really everyone would/could read this objectively (as much as anyone really can) and see that this problem of our own making is also fixable if we can simply sit down and admit it is a problem and break it down into its component parts and start fixing them. My biggest take away is a certain level of hope that we actually can confront this next wave of Anthropocene evolution and do it smart. It puts me in mind of the Amish. They are not Luddites as many people think, they just consider what technology and practices they want to let into their community. We need a similar approach and realize that components of AI are truly amazing (medical, space, virology - targeted disciplines), but unfortunately we are confronted with a 10 different bots and options every day that no on really wants and the combined specter of it taking your job. Keep it up and thanks!
Many of your newsletters have certainly influenced this: the more I've read/thought about these problems, the more I keep coming back to the solution needing to start with tuning down algorithmically curated content. We are all SO mad, all the time, fight or flight response every time you open your phone because the algorithms know anger drives engagement and makes us FEEL, even if we feel bad. Feeling bad also uses so much bandwidth. I remember a time where I would open social media (then chronologically sorted), scroll until I saw a post I had already seen, and then closed my phone and moved on. I used to think I was "caught up", like you were done reading the paper for the day. We underestimate the addiction to scrolling to the next thing. The timeline for when it feels like things really started falling apart coincides pretty well with the time where you stopped having quite as much say in what came across your desk (the algoritms know what you like more than you do, after all). Ironically, that is when the serious echo-chamber formation actually accelerated and it's compounded at an alarming rate ever since.
Hands down the best article I've read to date in meeting the current moment, as this is the first I've seen that really ties together the social, cultural, and economic forces that are contributing to a sense of hopelessness and listlessness many of us feel.
Really enjoyed reading this! This post, in some ways, feels like a post-mortem of your 'Gamblemerica' piece mixed with a sprinkle of *enshittification*.
A more critical question arising from this piece is how the disillusionment facing the younger generation will continue to erode trust in institutions. This issue is starkly illustrated in housing, where the average age of first-time home ownership has now reached 56. The lack of realistic homeownership prospects fosters a sense of detachment from society at large, contributing to gambling and other social problems. The path forward remains unclear, pointing only toward greater instability.
Agreeing with Kyla here, I would like to believe first time owning a house is a monumental moment, as you feel accomplished and it gives you a physical space within the community. It also gives new home owners a new sense of responsibility to their own homes, and the community around them. As bad as it sounds, young renters usually are pretty poor on keeping their places up-kept. Mostly only out of fear of losing a deposit, or some other punishment from a landlord. This is not freedom. The freedom to make their own mistakes.
True, I suppose I wrote with the expectation that they would be financially stable, assuming that they could then also make a mistake and have the ability to stay safe.
A few disjointed comments, mostly to see if my experience and thought jive with others:
“He’s a nice guy. I like him just fine . . . but he’s a mouth breather.” The Jesus Lizard
Noah Smith’s response to Michael Green’s 140k poverty line was telling. While I think his analysis was mostly correct, he talked about childcare being “more like college — a big but temporary one-time expense for each kid,” and “the cost of college, which adds a few more years of high costs for some families.” Spoken like someone who doesn’t have children. If you have two kids that are about three years apart you will be paying for childcare for eight years. Those two children, should they attend college will bring an additional five years of tuition (etc) in costs. This is 13 years of substantial payments. And, I can assure you from personal experience, that if you are only paying for college while your kid is actually in college you are either wealthy or a relative is paying for it. You are either a) saving for college for many years prior to college, or b) taking out loans to pay for college, or c) both. And let me tell you if you don’t know already, college, even at a “low-cost state school,” is jaw-droppingly, nut-munchingly expensive.
I have watched both of my teenagers become absorbed by their phones. I keep thinking they are going to get fed up or bored or just see the bullshit of it all, but, as I have come to see it, all of the time on phones has resulted in far less reading. And reading, as far as I can tell, is the one sure-fire way to develop a bullshit detector. Or a self.
Unique, well said, and thought-provoking as always. This Reddit post is an interesting read alongside your article:
“It’s not just Blackjack, it's everything. Just like everything else run into the ground by corporate America, it's just shittier across the board. They failed to understand that I don't have to sit down and gamble.
Roulette in Europe has 36 numbered red/blue slots and one green zero. In America we had two green zeros (0 and 00). Now that two number design is largely the bigger one everywhere because it benefits the house.
But that wasn't enough. Now there is a 000 space. Usually it has the casino logo or some kind of emblem specific to them. Still has 36 numbered spaces that are red or black.
You wouldn't think it should matter that much, but it does a lot.
Roulette was my favorite game. I know it was the worst odds in the casino but I liked roulette. I had fun playing it, drinking, and betting on the colors, odds/evens, or occasionally groups of 12, either numerically or the columns. Every now and then for fun I'd throw a 20 onto the 0/00 for a 17 to one payout. Even hit on that one a few times for an obscene amount of money (at the time, I was in my early 20s) and had a blast.
I went to Vegas a few years ago. Relatively shortly before the pandemic and these three zero tables were fucking everywhere. And I noticed that just slightly more often, green came up and no one on the table won unless they bet there. And it just seemed so spiteful. They obviously made just a little more money off of it...but the odds were already strongly in the house' favor! It was the worst odds in the house and I sat down anyway. I wanted to have fun and lose some money. Maybe walk away with some. Probably not, who cares. But you know what happened? I ran out of money faster, and I left. Less time ordering drinks. Less time getting food and refreshment nearby and coming back for a continued thrill. Just an empty feeling.
And that's what Corporate America misses every time. They look at simple numbers. I can make the idiot give me money faster so I make more money in the same amount of time. But they ignore things like the fact that if I'm not having fun, I won't come back. If I'm not having fun, I will spend less time in your business buying other things. If I'm not having fun, I'm not going to tell my friends how great it is at your place of business…
You have quickly become one of my favorite writers on the economy. Thank you for exploring this topic and putting together a really nuanced perspective (and linking to pieces and new rabbit holes to go down).
societies function coordination. there is competition but things like public health, grid reliability, air quality, emergency response require collective behavior. so it's a system design thing, they shouldn't be expected to act that way right now - but the incentives should shift
It's a balancing act between capitalism and government regulation/social subsidies. Our politics want to make it seem like it's one way or the other. A bird needs a left AND right wing to fly and they damn well better cooperate or the bird ain't going nowhere. When you look back on when the country was doing well moderates generally ran both parties---heck Eisenhower was courted by both parties to be on their ticket! The Democrats have the opportunity to regain that middle ground, unless they keep listening to the bleeding heart far left loonies who are really just as toxic as Trumpers.
"We ran this big experiment - can people have unlimited and unregulated access to millions of things that can make them lose their mind - and the answer is no, not really, it cooks the population like an egg."
This hit home. I'm an internet optimist, there's so much BS I have to wade through to get to the signal.
Great work, as usual Kyla. I couldn't help but think that there is a lot of wealth from Silicon Valley that is invested in creating greater divisions and class wars...to keep the focus off of the Broligarchy. None of this is by chance. It is a well thought out plan where gambling helps to seed the clouds of distrust.
The government spends trillions of dollars of thin-air money on things nobody wants... they might as well spend a few billion on things we desperately need. Like housing subsidies, gambling regulations, childcare assistance, and a crackdown on health insurance scams.
I mean, it seems like a no-brainer to me. "Fixing" the economy, as you said, is a long and daunting prospect. But making unbelievably meaningful progress would be dead simple. Like, very, very easy.
The United States is a machine for inflating the prices of assets. Assets are held mostly by the old. So... it needs to stop being that. It needs to go back to being a game people can actually compete in. Or there will be no economy left to extract from.
The government spends many billions on housing subsidies. The mortgage interest deduction alone is like $30 billion in housing subsidy. That doesn't even account for the Fannie/Freddie subsidy.
Real problem here is supply-side growth restrictions at the local level.
In my opinion, all the deterioration in economic confidence and social dislocation you describe can be attributed to one overriding trend; the accelerating concentration of of wealth, income, and opportunity in the top 1% - 10% of the population.
After WWII the US built perhaps the most egalitarian society in world history. The US benefited from the destruction of most economic competitors and built a powerhouse manufacturing economy with benefits that were widely shared. Jobs were plentiful and paid wages that allowed one wage earner to support a family, buy a house, educate their kids, and lead a middle class life style with optimism about the future.
Over the past 45 years, beginning with the Regan Administration this society has been intentionally, incrementally, and systematically destroyed, by a increasingly corrupt political system bent on transferring benefits; wealth and power to business corporations and the economic elite, while costs, obligations and economic dislocation has been transferred the working and middle classes.
The deleterious effects of this intentional destruction of the middle class have been building over time. It infuriates me that economists blame the negativity of the populace to "bad vibes."
Maybe the economy is growing, but the benefits of that growth is not being shared by the middle class. Perhaps the problem is not "bad vibes", but economic models that cannot capture the destruction of the middle class caused be the concentration of income, wealth, and power enjoyed by the political elite.
Kyla, Your approach to this question of modern economics is just genius. Like Jimmy, meet people where they are at. Making this understandable and actionable is crazy difficult to be sure, but we have to start with understanding it. I wish every Congress Person and every Senator and really everyone would/could read this objectively (as much as anyone really can) and see that this problem of our own making is also fixable if we can simply sit down and admit it is a problem and break it down into its component parts and start fixing them. My biggest take away is a certain level of hope that we actually can confront this next wave of Anthropocene evolution and do it smart. It puts me in mind of the Amish. They are not Luddites as many people think, they just consider what technology and practices they want to let into their community. We need a similar approach and realize that components of AI are truly amazing (medical, space, virology - targeted disciplines), but unfortunately we are confronted with a 10 different bots and options every day that no on really wants and the combined specter of it taking your job. Keep it up and thanks!
Thank you!! Agree, too much noise and too many competing objectives. Things are tools - we can choose how to use them.
Many of your newsletters have certainly influenced this: the more I've read/thought about these problems, the more I keep coming back to the solution needing to start with tuning down algorithmically curated content. We are all SO mad, all the time, fight or flight response every time you open your phone because the algorithms know anger drives engagement and makes us FEEL, even if we feel bad. Feeling bad also uses so much bandwidth. I remember a time where I would open social media (then chronologically sorted), scroll until I saw a post I had already seen, and then closed my phone and moved on. I used to think I was "caught up", like you were done reading the paper for the day. We underestimate the addiction to scrolling to the next thing. The timeline for when it feels like things really started falling apart coincides pretty well with the time where you stopped having quite as much say in what came across your desk (the algoritms know what you like more than you do, after all). Ironically, that is when the serious echo-chamber formation actually accelerated and it's compounded at an alarming rate ever since.
“smartphone-induced micro-solipsism” 👏🏽
Reading furiously to save the world
Hands down the best article I've read to date in meeting the current moment, as this is the first I've seen that really ties together the social, cultural, and economic forces that are contributing to a sense of hopelessness and listlessness many of us feel.
Thank you!
Really enjoyed reading this! This post, in some ways, feels like a post-mortem of your 'Gamblemerica' piece mixed with a sprinkle of *enshittification*.
yes!! Cory is so great, I think he captures the platform + antitrust component so well.
kyla i love and admire your newsletter so much! solidarity from new orleans x
<3
insightful [in-sahyt-fuhl] (adjective) - showing a clear and usually original understanding of a complicated problem or situation; see Kyla Scanlon.
Thank you!
A more critical question arising from this piece is how the disillusionment facing the younger generation will continue to erode trust in institutions. This issue is starkly illustrated in housing, where the average age of first-time home ownership has now reached 56. The lack of realistic homeownership prospects fosters a sense of detachment from society at large, contributing to gambling and other social problems. The path forward remains unclear, pointing only toward greater instability.
solving housing would solve about half of our problems
Agreeing with Kyla here, I would like to believe first time owning a house is a monumental moment, as you feel accomplished and it gives you a physical space within the community. It also gives new home owners a new sense of responsibility to their own homes, and the community around them. As bad as it sounds, young renters usually are pretty poor on keeping their places up-kept. Mostly only out of fear of losing a deposit, or some other punishment from a landlord. This is not freedom. The freedom to make their own mistakes.
Agreeing - but you have to have some financial breathing room to make a mistake.
True, I suppose I wrote with the expectation that they would be financially stable, assuming that they could then also make a mistake and have the ability to stay safe.
A few disjointed comments, mostly to see if my experience and thought jive with others:
“He’s a nice guy. I like him just fine . . . but he’s a mouth breather.” The Jesus Lizard
Noah Smith’s response to Michael Green’s 140k poverty line was telling. While I think his analysis was mostly correct, he talked about childcare being “more like college — a big but temporary one-time expense for each kid,” and “the cost of college, which adds a few more years of high costs for some families.” Spoken like someone who doesn’t have children. If you have two kids that are about three years apart you will be paying for childcare for eight years. Those two children, should they attend college will bring an additional five years of tuition (etc) in costs. This is 13 years of substantial payments. And, I can assure you from personal experience, that if you are only paying for college while your kid is actually in college you are either wealthy or a relative is paying for it. You are either a) saving for college for many years prior to college, or b) taking out loans to pay for college, or c) both. And let me tell you if you don’t know already, college, even at a “low-cost state school,” is jaw-droppingly, nut-munchingly expensive.
I have watched both of my teenagers become absorbed by their phones. I keep thinking they are going to get fed up or bored or just see the bullshit of it all, but, as I have come to see it, all of the time on phones has resulted in far less reading. And reading, as far as I can tell, is the one sure-fire way to develop a bullshit detector. Or a self.
Love your commentary. Keep on keepin’ on.
Pro tip — Noah Smith can be relied upon to defend the indefensible. Be very, very careful with that guy.
Unique, well said, and thought-provoking as always. This Reddit post is an interesting read alongside your article:
“It’s not just Blackjack, it's everything. Just like everything else run into the ground by corporate America, it's just shittier across the board. They failed to understand that I don't have to sit down and gamble.
Roulette in Europe has 36 numbered red/blue slots and one green zero. In America we had two green zeros (0 and 00). Now that two number design is largely the bigger one everywhere because it benefits the house.
But that wasn't enough. Now there is a 000 space. Usually it has the casino logo or some kind of emblem specific to them. Still has 36 numbered spaces that are red or black.
You wouldn't think it should matter that much, but it does a lot.
Roulette was my favorite game. I know it was the worst odds in the casino but I liked roulette. I had fun playing it, drinking, and betting on the colors, odds/evens, or occasionally groups of 12, either numerically or the columns. Every now and then for fun I'd throw a 20 onto the 0/00 for a 17 to one payout. Even hit on that one a few times for an obscene amount of money (at the time, I was in my early 20s) and had a blast.
I went to Vegas a few years ago. Relatively shortly before the pandemic and these three zero tables were fucking everywhere. And I noticed that just slightly more often, green came up and no one on the table won unless they bet there. And it just seemed so spiteful. They obviously made just a little more money off of it...but the odds were already strongly in the house' favor! It was the worst odds in the house and I sat down anyway. I wanted to have fun and lose some money. Maybe walk away with some. Probably not, who cares. But you know what happened? I ran out of money faster, and I left. Less time ordering drinks. Less time getting food and refreshment nearby and coming back for a continued thrill. Just an empty feeling.
And that's what Corporate America misses every time. They look at simple numbers. I can make the idiot give me money faster so I make more money in the same amount of time. But they ignore things like the fact that if I'm not having fun, I won't come back. If I'm not having fun, I will spend less time in your business buying other things. If I'm not having fun, I'm not going to tell my friends how great it is at your place of business…
This gets cut off, so more here: https://substack.com/@tjwtjwtjw/note/c-185334859
Earns them 50% more, not a little more
You have quickly become one of my favorite writers on the economy. Thank you for exploring this topic and putting together a really nuanced perspective (and linking to pieces and new rabbit holes to go down).
I love gambling!!
serious note though, why should Americans be expected to act collectively when our economic system actively invites competition?
societies function coordination. there is competition but things like public health, grid reliability, air quality, emergency response require collective behavior. so it's a system design thing, they shouldn't be expected to act that way right now - but the incentives should shift
It's a balancing act between capitalism and government regulation/social subsidies. Our politics want to make it seem like it's one way or the other. A bird needs a left AND right wing to fly and they damn well better cooperate or the bird ain't going nowhere. When you look back on when the country was doing well moderates generally ran both parties---heck Eisenhower was courted by both parties to be on their ticket! The Democrats have the opportunity to regain that middle ground, unless they keep listening to the bleeding heart far left loonies who are really just as toxic as Trumpers.
"We ran this big experiment - can people have unlimited and unregulated access to millions of things that can make them lose their mind - and the answer is no, not really, it cooks the population like an egg."
This hit home. I'm an internet optimist, there's so much BS I have to wade through to get to the signal.
Great work, as usual Kyla. I couldn't help but think that there is a lot of wealth from Silicon Valley that is invested in creating greater divisions and class wars...to keep the focus off of the Broligarchy. None of this is by chance. It is a well thought out plan where gambling helps to seed the clouds of distrust.
The government spends trillions of dollars of thin-air money on things nobody wants... they might as well spend a few billion on things we desperately need. Like housing subsidies, gambling regulations, childcare assistance, and a crackdown on health insurance scams.
I mean, it seems like a no-brainer to me. "Fixing" the economy, as you said, is a long and daunting prospect. But making unbelievably meaningful progress would be dead simple. Like, very, very easy.
The United States is a machine for inflating the prices of assets. Assets are held mostly by the old. So... it needs to stop being that. It needs to go back to being a game people can actually compete in. Or there will be no economy left to extract from.
The government spends many billions on housing subsidies. The mortgage interest deduction alone is like $30 billion in housing subsidy. That doesn't even account for the Fannie/Freddie subsidy.
Real problem here is supply-side growth restrictions at the local level.
In my opinion, all the deterioration in economic confidence and social dislocation you describe can be attributed to one overriding trend; the accelerating concentration of of wealth, income, and opportunity in the top 1% - 10% of the population.
After WWII the US built perhaps the most egalitarian society in world history. The US benefited from the destruction of most economic competitors and built a powerhouse manufacturing economy with benefits that were widely shared. Jobs were plentiful and paid wages that allowed one wage earner to support a family, buy a house, educate their kids, and lead a middle class life style with optimism about the future.
Over the past 45 years, beginning with the Regan Administration this society has been intentionally, incrementally, and systematically destroyed, by a increasingly corrupt political system bent on transferring benefits; wealth and power to business corporations and the economic elite, while costs, obligations and economic dislocation has been transferred the working and middle classes.
The deleterious effects of this intentional destruction of the middle class have been building over time. It infuriates me that economists blame the negativity of the populace to "bad vibes."
Maybe the economy is growing, but the benefits of that growth is not being shared by the middle class. Perhaps the problem is not "bad vibes", but economic models that cannot capture the destruction of the middle class caused be the concentration of income, wealth, and power enjoyed by the political elite.