Scott Alexander

2.

Vehicle space per household member, meaning both size and number of vehicles.

My perception is also that cars as status goods has made its way further down the socioeconomic ladder than it used to be, but that's wild speculation.

3.

Frequency, duration and distance of vacations.

I blame this one, perhaps unfairly, on the prevalence of travel vloggers, but there is some data.

Here's a link to some tourism data on ourworldindata.org.

Basically, while people have gotten wealthier over time, the standard of living they're pursuing has increased even more, which can come out as feeling poorer on net.

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Mika writes, I think the low friction of applications is a big driver of this, both in jobs, college, dating, etc.,

I am in my final year of an electrical engineering degree and applied to around 500 full-time jobs this fall.

I'm a reasonably economically minded person.

I try to avoid pessimism, know the stats on how everything has gotten better over time, pro-capitalism, etc.

But even I was having trouble mentally reconciling what I knew about the numbers with my feeling from the inside of like being rejected over and over again while being in a pretty in-demand field.

Additionally, my algorithm started to pick up on this and fed me content about how the sky was falling, no one was getting hired, etc.

Things got pretty dark for me mentally for about a month.

And mostly on the other side of it now, I got some offers, ones I probably won't take and because I think they're in the wrong EE field...

and a lot of interviews scheduled, etc., but I just don't think humans are built to mentally understand you will have to be rejected multiple hundreds of times over a month or two to get a job, even if it's relatively guaranteed if you put in that effort.

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Scott writes, I hadn't considered the bad experience to complain online to algorithm shows you pessimistic content trapped prior loop.