Scott Alexander

Throw in the hedonic treadmill and the fact that you can't price shop schools or hospitals the way you can TVs, and public alarm is all but inevitable."

Scott writes, Still, did Balmore or the other economists who first discussed the effect in the 1960s predict it would make people feel like things were outright worse, as opposed to just getting better less than would be expected from raw productivity numbers?

Seems strange.

Also, hasn't the barmol effect been basically constant since at least the Industrial Revolution?

And isn't the vibe session only 5 to 20 years old?

Matt Brunig has his own response to Green.

Why do people feel like they're falling behind?

He bases his argument around this graph.

He's a graph that says median personal earnings of prime age married men who work 50 plus weeks as a percent of median family income, 1963 to 2024.

And it's a chart that shows at the beginning, 1963, over 80%, and a steady decrease to just over 50% by 2020.

It also has some cartoons, sort of 1950s-style housewife and suit-wearing man with two children.

Scott writes, which is just making the common sense point that as society shifts from one income to two income families, the husband's share of family income drops from around 100% to around 50%.

So, Brunig argues, if everyone is trying to keep up with the Joneses, and the Joneses are a dual-earner family, then this single working man has gone from making 100% of his comparison point to making only 50%.

This is a cool potential cognitive bias, but is anyone really making this mistake?

Vibe session complaints hardly seem limited to men in traditional one-earner households wondering why they're not making as much as the neighbours whose wife is a fancy lawyer.

My impression is that they include both two owner families who still feel like they're falling behind, and most of all, young singles who are comparing themselves to their young single friends where this issue never comes up in the first place.

Matt Iglesias uses a similar strategy in You Can Afford a Trad Life.

Here's a cartoon image that shows a housewife at home opening the door where small children are spilling out down the front path along with a dog and greeting a man who seems to be returning home from work.

He captions it, This is what they took from you.

They should never have passed the Make it illegal to wear hair gel and marry a white woman act back in 1959.