The bad vibes economy

A vibecession is the idea of a disconnect between consumer sentiment and economic data. So basically, the economy is doing fine, but people are absolutely not feeling fine.

Her concept has more depth than those theories. I would characterize economic vibes as collective feelings in the digital age. Almost all previous versions of economic theory around consumer sentiment have been formed in a pre-internet world. Until now, no one had updated those frameworks for the age of algorithms. When I emailed Scanlon about how ... See more

Work in ProgressAmerica’s Most Important Economic Storyteller Is ConfusedAn old economy is dying, and a new economy is struggling to be born. Now is the time of monstrously confusing data.By Derek ThompsonAn illustration of the dollar-bill portrait of George Washington shrugging in confusionThe Atlantic; GettyJune 17, 2022About the author: Derek Th... See more

This is a very human impulse, I think — to assign culprits to things that go wrong. When the economy is sluggish, it’s always due to bad policies and the bad people who make them, rather than hideously complex market interactions that even economists don’t understand.

Put it all together—diagnostic inflation in medicine; prevalence inflation in media; negativity inflation in news—and one gets the distinct sense that Americans might be making themselves sick with pessimism, anxiety, and gloom. But that’s not all. Just as the U.S. has long been the global economy’s chief cultural exporter—from Coca-Cola to Mickey

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And the thing is — everything is changing: how we communicate with one another, how we think about ourselves, how we think about job prospects, how we even think about what constitutes success. And even good change is hard.

Almost anyone can tell you the cost of living has increased between the onset of the pandemic and today. Implying anything else is, as my younger colleagues would say, legit gaslighting, or at least missing the point. Now, in recent months, headline after headline proclaims “inflation has cooled.” But does that mean we are out of the water?

This cha... See more

as diagnostic inflation and prevalence inflation combined to raise the salience of our neuroses, something else was happening behind the scenes. The general tenor of America’s political and economic news discourse got much more negative in a very short period of time. To match diagnostic and prevalence inflation, let’s call this negativity inflatio

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