Scott Alexander

Nobody has ever taken him up on it, except the Amish, but he doesn't like them and doesn't want to sell to them.

Would young people today be happier if they chose that lifestyle?

Very possible, but they don't want to, even if they can.

End quote.

Scott writes, If you disagree and think this sounds like a great offer, you can message Jay Nicholas here, link in post, and see if he'll put you in touch with the butcher.

Be sure to email me too, so I can check up later on how it went.

And Jay has written more about what he calls the myth of the cost of living crisis on his own blog, linked here.

10.

Updates and Conclusions

My strongest update is on the stories about vibe session-like sentiments in China, where incomes clearly, obviously, grew by a factor of 5-10 times in the past generation.

This demonstrates that vibes can be totally divorced from the real economic situation, and makes me less neurotic about searching for some way that the US vibes could be correct.

My second strongest update comes from Alex's chart showing wild swings in partisan ratings of economic health when a president from a different party gets elected, which again show vibes totally divorced from reality.

The strongest counter-argument is that housing, not rent, situation has genuinely been awful since about 2020.

If you want to argue that the bad vibes began then, and are entirely about not-yet-homeowners despairing at their chances of ever owning a home, then those bad vibes would be fully justified.

I'm also more open to taking the consumer confidence chart seriously, limiting the vibe session proper to 2022-2024, and saying it was mostly about inflation, plus a side of high housing prices.

All of the pessimism before 2022 was something else, mostly coming from a few disenfranchised or chronically pessimistic groups, and not having as much to do with the economy in particular.

I would like to see someone seriously investigate an average 1955 couples budget versus an average modern couples budget, discuss how far each one would go, and do a more careful analysis of who is getting the better deal and by how much.

This is an audio version of Astral Codex X, Scott Alexander's Substack.

Additionally, if you like having audio versions of Scott's posts, you can support my work on Patreon at patreon.com slash sscpodcast.

To reference this post, please link to the original on Substack.