Scott Alexander
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
Once you take away those two sources of anxiety, people tend to act a lot more relaxed.
Citizen Penrose writes, quote, On the Brooklyn theory, if media sentiment was the main factor, wouldn't you expect it to vary in English-speaking versus non-English-speaking countries?
Whereas you get the same phenomena in all the developed countries, as far as I know.
End quote.
Scott writes, I don't know which direction this pushes.
I think the UK is having the same problem with London that we have with Brooklyn, and China has their tier one cities.
I don't know what the situation is with France or Germany, but I'm also not sure the vibe session is happening in those places.
JBB 23 writes, quote, To the extent you believe the large consumer confidence surveys, Conference Board and Umich, accurately measure sentiment, there are dozens of sub-indices which shed light on the actual reasons people feel bad.
A few things to note.
There's no obvious differentiation by either age or income, so any hypothesis relying on things being especially bad for young or poor or middle class is not showing up in this data.
The sub-indices on labour markets, income and the stock market are strong, as they should be.
The sub-indices that are weak are related to inflation, buying conditions for durables, inflation again, buying conditions for homes, and vibier questions like expectations for retirement, expectations for future income, etc.
The OECD also produces consumer confidence surveys, and the US is pretty middle of the pack compared to other advanced countries for the past three years.
US, Australia, Western Europe, UK, Japan are all in the negative 1 to negative 1.5 Z score range historically.
China is the worst, around negative 2 Z scores.
Interestingly, Mexico is one of the few places with high consumer confidence right now.
So for me, the synthesis should be any explanation is pretty global and pretty widespread across demographic groups.
That suggests inflation and media negativity.
End quote.
Five, comments on rent and housing.