I really enjoyed reading this. it jives very well with my sentiment. When you go to a grocery store and see the stacks of sodas and chips while our country has an obesity epidemic, you need to wonder if the sale of these products should count towards or against our economic wellbeing. If products can have positive value, surely products can have negative value as well.
In an absurd way, if you were obese and bought a 12 pack of soda and a bag of chips, rationally it would be more valuable for you to throw the products away instead of consuming them. similarly an alcoholic that buys alcohol is doing a negative purchase.
gambling has zero silver lining — its straight up negative value.
And then there’s the leverage per dollar aspect of our economy. If the average american is convinced they need an enormous car, gigabit internet, and streaming services, then yes our economy will be growing, but with things that aren’t fundamentally changing our well being.
Give me child care, healthcare, great education and more leisure time, not a gambling addiction, larger screens and diabetes.
Surprisingly I tried to look at economic indicators that tried to quantify growth aligned with some subjective societal wellbeing metric and couldn’t find anything serious
So many economic indicators are perverse - economically it would often be better for a family to get divorced, split into two homes, and then pay each other child support. Heck, economically it would be advantageous to divorce your stay-at-home wife and turn around and hire her to take care of the kids. You could even pay her more and charge her for room and board! You could charge the kids! Financialize everything!
We need metrics that are actually tied to human happiness, not human suffering.
You jest, but that's what I suggested to protect my ex's mother twenty years ago. She was a stay at home mom raising four children after an early divorce without alimony or child care, then long term caretaker for her parents until their deaths in their 90s. She managed two households, worked her entire life, and has no retirement, no pension, no social security to show for it.
The money was being spent, but the system didn't account for who was spending it. When her parents died, they had just gotten out of bankruptcy from taking out a second mortgage to cover late life and end of life care costs. She was left destitute and houseless.
Now, her daughters are paying to care for their mother. Per the article, these expenses, perversely, are proof of a successful economy under the current measurements.
The example he gave of GDP metrics going up when banks underpay interest on savings was wild. “Wow, these customers are effectively paying billions to the banks by accepting low interest rates, they must be receiving so much value in return!!”
I have a rolodex of quirky contrarian facts I like to whip out at dinner parties and this one is definitely a new one I'm adding to the stack. I'm still shocked at the mental gymnastics needed to make it sound rational, but from an economist's perspective it's the "rational actor" argument. "Surely they must love the service, why else would someone settle for less?"
.gov requires cars to have so many features that the incentives push them further and further towards higher margin vehicles.
> gigabit internet
Why should this be a guilty pleasure when gigabit internet approaches a basic commodity that's broadly available in developed countries that built internet infra out after us and aren't captured by ancient telcos? Gig, multigig, 10G is going to start being available in places like South Korea. US lags behind on Speedtest charts: https://www.speedtest.net/global-index
>Give me child care, healthcare, great education and more leisure time
If you stop working and maybe are in the right demographic, this can all be yours and have more provided if you just apply for it. Work with other families doing the same thing and you can get very creative with it.
>There’s an item in the personal consumer expenditure data called Financial services furnished without payment (107), on which Americans are going to spend roughly $600 billion this year, or $2k per person. That’s not a small amount, and it’s also growing very quickly. So what is this item? Basically, it’s “free” checking. When you keep your savings in a bank, and that bank pays you much less than the market rate of interest, that’s a cost you don’t necessarily see, but a cost nonetheless. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) assumes the $2k a year you send banks by receiving too little on your deposits is tallied as “buying” free check and banking apps. That’s considered more consumer spending, and more consumer spending means a happier consumer. Aka, BLS thinks you really like your banking app.
I had absolutely no idea. This makes a lot of sense now - “consumer spending” keeps going up, but anecdotally I don’t see or hear of people with more disposable income
My home insurance jumped from $600 a year to $2300 a year from 2019 - 2025. A big boost for consumer spending indexes, but I feel really ripped off. (I shopped around last year and every company was charging the same amount)
There is a lot to discuss there but I find this paragraph interesting.
> What we are seeing here is the replacement of normal human relationships with virtual monetized relationships.
> It could be argued that virtual prostitutes have seen an increase in their living standards, but in reality, they have likely just replaced being in a relationship in which a man pays for gifts, trips, and other things with virtual prostitution.
The classic incel meme involves a sort of diagram where there is small fraction of men getting the lions share of the sexual attention from women.
But there is this sort of dual one where an extremely small number of women on onlyfans, who themselves are a small fraction of all women in total, make up the majority of all income/attention.
There's no question that AI also part of the dynamic. Again it appears to be growing the economy on paper but that's just because the things it costs weren't and aren't measured.
Microsoft makes money on AI. Of course every single one of their products now makes you want to tear your hair out by the roots while screaming, but there's no metric for Windows being unusable or for the massive wave of AI-assisted cheating sapping value from education and science...
This is by far the biggest failing of capitalism. The entire world contributes to economical growth, but almost all of this value is captured by a tiny group of the rich elite.
> By contrast, everyone who matters has agreed we should ignore whether monopolies contribute to prices, even though plenty of economic models treat tariffs and monopolies similarly.
Who? Obviously they are ignoring monopolies but I thought that was more of a quiet corruption thing.
> There’s a lot to say about the politics of the Fed, but a contact of mine in Trump-world told me the way these guys understand political success or failure is pretty simple. Are the wages of middle class Americans increasing? That’s it.
Not very far in and this seems like a propaganda piece already. I’m not even gonna claim they don’t care about middle class wages going up, but they have way too many side quests to claim that’s all they care about.
Propaganda for whom? “The current government is intently focused on increasing middle-class wages” doesn’t seem like an aggressively partisan statement.
I really enjoyed reading this. it jives very well with my sentiment. When you go to a grocery store and see the stacks of sodas and chips while our country has an obesity epidemic, you need to wonder if the sale of these products should count towards or against our economic wellbeing. If products can have positive value, surely products can have negative value as well.
In an absurd way, if you were obese and bought a 12 pack of soda and a bag of chips, rationally it would be more valuable for you to throw the products away instead of consuming them. similarly an alcoholic that buys alcohol is doing a negative purchase.
gambling has zero silver lining — its straight up negative value.
And then there’s the leverage per dollar aspect of our economy. If the average american is convinced they need an enormous car, gigabit internet, and streaming services, then yes our economy will be growing, but with things that aren’t fundamentally changing our well being.
Give me child care, healthcare, great education and more leisure time, not a gambling addiction, larger screens and diabetes.
Surprisingly I tried to look at economic indicators that tried to quantify growth aligned with some subjective societal wellbeing metric and couldn’t find anything serious
So many economic indicators are perverse - economically it would often be better for a family to get divorced, split into two homes, and then pay each other child support. Heck, economically it would be advantageous to divorce your stay-at-home wife and turn around and hire her to take care of the kids. You could even pay her more and charge her for room and board! You could charge the kids! Financialize everything!
We need metrics that are actually tied to human happiness, not human suffering.
You jest, but that's what I suggested to protect my ex's mother twenty years ago. She was a stay at home mom raising four children after an early divorce without alimony or child care, then long term caretaker for her parents until their deaths in their 90s. She managed two households, worked her entire life, and has no retirement, no pension, no social security to show for it.
The money was being spent, but the system didn't account for who was spending it. When her parents died, they had just gotten out of bankruptcy from taking out a second mortgage to cover late life and end of life care costs. She was left destitute and houseless.
Now, her daughters are paying to care for their mother. Per the article, these expenses, perversely, are proof of a successful economy under the current measurements.
The example he gave of GDP metrics going up when banks underpay interest on savings was wild. “Wow, these customers are effectively paying billions to the banks by accepting low interest rates, they must be receiving so much value in return!!”
I have a rolodex of quirky contrarian facts I like to whip out at dinner parties and this one is definitely a new one I'm adding to the stack. I'm still shocked at the mental gymnastics needed to make it sound rational, but from an economist's perspective it's the "rational actor" argument. "Surely they must love the service, why else would someone settle for less?"
Yea, the reframing in the post is quite good
My free checking account counts towards consumer spending, wtf?
The number of examples the author provides is impressive
>need an enormous car,
.gov requires cars to have so many features that the incentives push them further and further towards higher margin vehicles.
> gigabit internet
Why should this be a guilty pleasure when gigabit internet approaches a basic commodity that's broadly available in developed countries that built internet infra out after us and aren't captured by ancient telcos? Gig, multigig, 10G is going to start being available in places like South Korea. US lags behind on Speedtest charts: https://www.speedtest.net/global-index
>Give me child care, healthcare, great education and more leisure time
If you stop working and maybe are in the right demographic, this can all be yours and have more provided if you just apply for it. Work with other families doing the same thing and you can get very creative with it.
Yes, it's true that GDP just measures economic activity (without judging it) and it actually matters what people spend money on.
But this doesn't change that richer countries really are better off than poorer countries, and GDP is a reasonable measure of that.
>There’s an item in the personal consumer expenditure data called Financial services furnished without payment (107), on which Americans are going to spend roughly $600 billion this year, or $2k per person. That’s not a small amount, and it’s also growing very quickly. So what is this item? Basically, it’s “free” checking. When you keep your savings in a bank, and that bank pays you much less than the market rate of interest, that’s a cost you don’t necessarily see, but a cost nonetheless. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) assumes the $2k a year you send banks by receiving too little on your deposits is tallied as “buying” free check and banking apps. That’s considered more consumer spending, and more consumer spending means a happier consumer. Aka, BLS thinks you really like your banking app.
I had absolutely no idea. This makes a lot of sense now - “consumer spending” keeps going up, but anecdotally I don’t see or hear of people with more disposable income
My home insurance jumped from $600 a year to $2300 a year from 2019 - 2025. A big boost for consumer spending indexes, but I feel really ripped off. (I shopped around last year and every company was charging the same amount)
This is a good essay. I especially liked reading the linked articles.
This one in particular, where I really resonate with the whole thesis of we aren't spending money the same way anymore.
https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2025/05/the-limits-of-con...
There is a lot to discuss there but I find this paragraph interesting.
> What we are seeing here is the replacement of normal human relationships with virtual monetized relationships.
> It could be argued that virtual prostitutes have seen an increase in their living standards, but in reality, they have likely just replaced being in a relationship in which a man pays for gifts, trips, and other things with virtual prostitution.
The classic incel meme involves a sort of diagram where there is small fraction of men getting the lions share of the sexual attention from women.
But there is this sort of dual one where an extremely small number of women on onlyfans, who themselves are a small fraction of all women in total, make up the majority of all income/attention.
Someone on here posted a link to this index:
https://www.unitedforalice.org/essentials-index
Which was new to me, but puts some numbers behind the non-discretionary discretionary spending concept raised by this article.
There's no question that AI also part of the dynamic. Again it appears to be growing the economy on paper but that's just because the things it costs weren't and aren't measured.
Microsoft makes money on AI. Of course every single one of their products now makes you want to tear your hair out by the roots while screaming, but there's no metric for Windows being unusable or for the massive wave of AI-assisted cheating sapping value from education and science...
> Growth has been pretty good from 2021-2025, but the public is really mad.
"Growth" is based on GDP. Look who captured the lion's share by looking at the "growth" in income inequality.
It's not hard to see why people are mad, the rich get way richer, we get higher prices and tariffs
Generally I found this a good read
This is by far the biggest failing of capitalism. The entire world contributes to economical growth, but almost all of this value is captured by a tiny group of the rich elite.
> By contrast, everyone who matters has agreed we should ignore whether monopolies contribute to prices, even though plenty of economic models treat tariffs and monopolies similarly.
Who? Obviously they are ignoring monopolies but I thought that was more of a quiet corruption thing.
Nobody talk about the dollar.
> There’s a lot to say about the politics of the Fed, but a contact of mine in Trump-world told me the way these guys understand political success or failure is pretty simple. Are the wages of middle class Americans increasing? That’s it.
Not very far in and this seems like a propaganda piece already. I’m not even gonna claim they don’t care about middle class wages going up, but they have way too many side quests to claim that’s all they care about.
Propaganda for whom? “The current government is intently focused on increasing middle-class wages” doesn’t seem like an aggressively partisan statement.
If what you said, and what I quoted, were the same sentence, then perhaps you would be correct.