{"id":1209772,"date":"2023-12-08T09:30:00","date_gmt":"2023-12-08T14:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/?p=1209772"},"modified":"2023-12-08T09:30:00","modified_gmt":"2023-12-08T14:30:00","slug":"what-people-are-getting-wrong-this-week-the-vibecession","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/?p=1209772","title":{"rendered":"What People Are Getting Wrong This Week: The 'Vibecession'"},"content":{"rendered":"

This week, the publishers of the Oxford English Dictionary named \u201crizz\u201d as 2023\u2019s word of the year<\/a> partly for its \u201cpotential as a term of lasting cultural significance or providing a snapshot of social history.\u201d But they got it wrong. The real word that provides a cultural picture of 2023 is \u201cvibecession.\u201d<\/p>\n

Coined by Kyla Scanlon<\/a>, vibecession has come to mean something like \u201cwidespread pessimism about the economy regardless of the economy itself.\u201d We\u2019re currently in the middle of a huge vibecession.<\/p>\n

According to a recent poll from the Pew Research Center, 81% of Americans\u00a0<\/a> think the gap between the rich and poor will grow between now and 2050, despite the fact that it\u2019s (finally) shrinking<\/a>. Total consumer confidence in the US<\/a> is lower now than it was in the middle of the Covid lockdown, and 71% of Americans <\/a>say economic conditions in the country are \u201cpoor\u201d or \u201cvery poor\u201d with 38% of respondents going with \u201cvery poor.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

In the real world, unemployment is hovering around 3.5%, down from 14.7% during the lockdown. The median household income<\/a> in the US has risen from a pandemic low of $65,100 a year to $74,600. That number doesn\u2019t reflect the \u201crich getting richer\u201d either. It\u2019s driven from the bottom: In 2022, people in the lower half of income distribution in the U.S. saw their earnings increase<\/a> by 4.5%, where the average rate for all Americans was 1.2%. The rate of inflation has been steadily falling too: It\u2019s currently\u00a03.24% compared to 3.70% last month and 7.75% last year. The GDP increased by 2% in 2022<\/a> and 5% the year before. Despite the constant drumbeat of doom from social media, all major economic indicators suggest things are going pretty well.\u00a0<\/p>\n

America is longing for the good old days\u2014of 1973<\/h2>\n

In researching the vibecession, one data point stuck out to me most: 58% of Americans say that life for \u201cpeople like them\u201d is worse today than it was 50 years ago<\/a>\u2014in 1973<\/em>, a year that was way shittier for way more people than 2023 in just about any way that can be measured. <\/p>\n

To further both realism and optimism, here are the hard numbers on the shittiness of 1973:<\/p>\n

In 1973, more than half the population of the earth<\/a> lived in autocracies, compared to about 13% today. Almost 60% of humans live in democracies today, compared to 25% in the early 1970s. About half of the world lived in extreme poverty<\/a> in 1973, compared to about 8% in 2023. A total of 988,892 people died in war between 1970 and 1973<\/a>, where 394,375 died between 2019 and 2022, the most recent years for which we have complete statistics.<\/p>\n

In terms of domestic economics, unemployment was at 4.9% in 1973, compared to our current 3.5%. The economy grew at a rate of 5.6% in 1973 compared to 9.2% in 2022. Inflation was at 8.7% in 1973, compared to our current rate of 3.24%. The federal interest rate was 8.74% in 1973, compared to 5.25% today. Women earned about 56.6 cents per dollar<\/a> of mens\u2019 pay in 1973, compared to 83.7 today.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In 1973, 55,984\u00a0Americans died in car accidents<\/a> compared to 42,795 in 2022, and there are about three times<\/a> as many cars on the roads. There was more crime of every type in 1973<\/a>. People lived on average to 71 years in 1973<\/a>, compared to 79 in 2023. A 20-inch television cost around $500<\/a> in 1973 and could probably pick up three blurry channels. Adjusted for inflation, that\u2019s around $3,300. A Chrysler LeBaron cost $7541 in 1973 and could be expected to last around 100,000 miles. That\u2019s $52,255.56 in today\u2019s money, to purchase a vehicle you can expect to drive for twice as long. <\/p>\n

Every year is a bad year<\/h2>\n

I could keep going, but you get the point. It\u2019s not like 1973 was a particularly terrible year either\u2014things really start really going south in 1974, and they kept going south until the early 80s, when the interest rate was nearly 20% and unemployment was near 10%. At the time, I\u2019m sure people looked longingly back to the \u201cgood old days\u201d of 1936.<\/p>\n

This lack of historical context is at the heart of the vibecession and illustrates its danger. Tangible progress is made through trying to force the real world toward the perfect one we imagine could exist, but misremembering the past and convincing ourselves we let a utopia slip from our fingers does the opposite. It leads to pessimism, inaction, and defeat. People are feeding on that defeatism, too\u2014politicians scaring people into voting for them, corporations profiting from selling comfort to an unsettled populace, social media companies monetizing angst, and more. But buying into to doomerism is not only depressing, it dishonors the people who devoted their lives to making 2023 marginally less shitty than 1973. I mean, who wants to pay $52,000 for a Chrysler LeBaron?<\/p>\n


\n
\nSource: LifeHacker – What People Are Getting Wrong This Week: The ‘Vibecession’<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week, the publishers of the Oxford English Dictionary named \u201crizz\u201d as 2023\u2019s word of the year partly for its \u201cpotential as a term of lasting cultural significance or providing a snapshot of social history.\u201d But they got it wrong. … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[91,110],"tags":[92],"class_list":["post-1209772","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lifehacker","category-unfiltered-rss","tag-lifehacker"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1209772","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1209772"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1209772\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1209772"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1209772"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.prime-wow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1209772"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}