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‘Money dysmorphia’ traps millennials and gen Zers – mixed signals about the economy have made it tough for some younger adults to know where they stand financially
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Who benefits from these articles? Why do they exist? That's a question that's eating me lately.
So many millennials and zoomers are locked out of the housing market and can't even afford a beater car in areas where driving is a requirement. Many don't have affordable health insurance and have no meaningful way to save for retirement. How many are even able to start a savings account?
Nevermind the student loans. There's been progress but they're still crippling us.
The economy is not good for the average person. Worse if they're younger. I absolutely hate these articles because they're just denying a very real fury that many of us feel every single day. It's so fucking stressful to be raising a child right now and barely scraping by.
And every time I've tried to mention this, I always get responses where people set up these strawman arguments referencing financially irresponsible people making 400k/year. That's not me. That's not most of us.
It honestly made me angry reading it. It is not dysmorphia... the people writing just seem totally unaware of their own privilege. The capitalist class wants the working class to keep spending their money, and keep making babies so they don't have a labor shortage. They will tell us any lie that they can to convince us our situations are actually not so bad. I have a decent paying job, have been paying my student loans since 2009 and there is no end in sight. I am lightyears away from home ownership (how can one save money when rent is 50% of my income), and will probably have to work until my death. This is WITH a salaried job, and honestly I am better off than so many other millenials. I am doing really great compared to where I was 5 years ago, but still 2 bad months would push me out of my home. I am not irresponsible and I am not delusional in my understanding of how fucked things are right now.....
I think there is a real and interesting phenomenon where people are giving contradictory survey responses depending on if they are asked qualitative questions about the economy vs quantitative questions about their own experiences. I think a number of major news outlets like NYT, NPR, and WaPo published articles on this.
I think these articles generated engagement and disagreement, and so lots of outlets started repackaging the story but without proper context or even particularly good presentation.
Because the articles generate disagreement, they are good for getting engagement and will keep getting posted and repackaged until something better comes along.
Full disclosure, I've commented many times on the subject from the perspective of this phenomenon of disagreement between our qualitative vs quantitative measures. I do this because I think it is worth discussion and investigation and most of the articles posted nor the comments really do it justice IMO.
However, to your point, even taking at face value that the economy is doing "well" or that real wages have increased, doesn't say anything about the people struggling. Like I said in a different comment on this thread, it can be true that the economy is improving, and that a large number of people need better services to address health care access and food security, at the very least.
Honestly, I hope these articles peter out, or at least up their game in presentation and headline construction, but that would yield less clicks.
Edit: to answer your question: the authors benefit from these articles because they get engagement.
There's a certain irony in traditional media companies saying the economy is fine, actually... as those media companies struggle and continue to layoff employees.
BuzzFeed is only worth $27M today... down 98% from it's all-time-high.
A few more "the economy is great, the vibes are just off" articles, then up only.
I mean it's not necessarily contradictory for the economy to be fine but media companies to be doing poorly. Newspapers aren't a very large share of the economy. Increasingly, people say they get their news from randoms on Tiktok, Instagram, or Telegram.
Where? Beater cars cost like $1,000 and even car dealerships are happy to give out usurious NINJA loans. Access to the cars isn’t an issue if you’re willing to be in debt up to your eyeballs forever.
The rest of the stuff you mentioned was basically the situation before the pandemic too. So the question is, relatively speaking, why are people more pessimistic now than before despite fortunes being better? Interest rates are still high, which is one explanatory factor, but underneath the high rates housing prices in most metros have actually come down.
The subjective doom and gloom stories really don’t line up with the economic reality. The administration has forgiven $5Bn in loan forgiveness aimed at the people worst impacted by them.
Again, this has been the case for at least 20 years, arguably 30 or 40. So what makes the vibes so much worse now than they were 4 or 6 years ago? That’s the question they’re asking.
Thanks for the thoughtful response, but I completely disagree.
First, access to cars isn't an issue if you're willing to be in debt up to your eyeballs forever is a contradictory statement. If you're going into forever debt to buy a depreciating asset, and one that's called "a beater" at that, then it's an issue. I also don't know where you're getting them for $1000. My rusted out piece of shit Mazda, a car that was 15 years old and had major issues which I advertised up front, sold for $5000 a year and a half ago.
Also, I'll just say at this point that I don't trust the data everyone keeps referencing. I was relatively poor growing up and I'm lower-middle class now. I was there in 2005 when my single mother bought a house working a mediocre job. That house had 3 bedrooms and a yard for my brothers and to utilize. I could not afford that same home today with my wife and me combining our incomes, which are both "real" careers in our fields.
The cost of daycare is through the roof. It's between $12,000 and $25,000 per year depending on where you live. Over 10% of our income is immediately being wiped out by daycare and that doesn't include all the other money babies cost, which is a lot. Thankfully my wife's job will reimburse us for some of that. But not everyone has that luxury. I don't know how they're doing it.
Student loans are better than they were, but they're still several hundred dollars per month extra that I just don't have.
Don't think I need to explain healthcare. That's been horrible for a long time now. You either need to be rich or really poor to not worry about healthcare. Being in the middle is where this hurts most. When I was poorer, I had free healthcare.
Housing prices are down because, as you said, interest rates are high. This doesn't make me able to afford a house right now. It makes me completely unable to afford one. I'm worried that when interest rates drop, people will come off the sidelines and we will just go back to higher prices and people waiving inspections while begging to get their offer accepted. Time will tell. God help you if you're renting right now.
I think Biden has done a great job in a shit situation but I'm pretty tired of hearing how awesome everyone is doing when most millennials and Zoomers I know are definitely not doing awesome at all. We are struggling. It's not the great depression but I'm not feeling hopeful about the next few years. In fact, I'm anxiously waiting for my car to die or for some other moderately large expense to knock me on my ass.
So two things there.
A.) the early 2000s famously had a bubble of cheap credit for real estate. Over the long term this turned out to be a bad thing, even if it opened up homeownership to a lot of people who otherwise wouldn’t have been on the market.
B.) This is really only the case in a high cost of living city. Where I grew up I could easily afford a 4 bedroom house with a big yard and fairly cheap and accessible childcare. It’s just an exurban sprawlsville town with little culture and not much in the way of career prospects. Where I live though, I can be in the top 20% of income earners and still feel like I can barely be above water in a 2 bedroom condo with no special amenities to speak of.
But housing costs like are almost entirely due to undersupply by municipal governments. They’re not a federal thing at all. I’m in a similar situation as you were I feel stuck in a career and financial rut, but I also realize I’m kind of an exception because everywhere I look around me I see peers doing very well on outward indicators, from the houses they’re living in to the cars they’re buying and the trips they’re taking. If anything I’d say my personal negativity comes more from envy than pessimism about the macroeconomy.
Respectfully, my friends can't afford houses or trips at all right now.
I live in a small town in the rust belt. Definitely not one of the high-cost-of-living areas you are referencing.
This isn't financial dysmorphia. This is financial Cassandra Syndrome. It's like the upper-class millennials have joined the boomers in telling us it's not so bad and I feel very frustrated by that on a good day - downright angry on other days.
Nobody is saying “it’s not that bad.” Headlines aren’t there to address any individual specifically and there’s no need to take it personally.
The observation is that the vibes don’t line up the data. So the question people are interested in answering is what’s causing the gap. Just repeating “the vibes are bad” isn’t an answer, it’s just a restatement of the question. Because the stuff you’re citing is things that should be theoretically reflected in the data by looking at things like median incomes with median home prices.
So if the data is missing something important, then the idea would be what should we be looking at instead?
I would agree that things are missing from the data, yes.
Apologies if my response was emotionally charged. I feel that every time I say the data doesn't reflect what people are actually experiencing, people have been responding with comments saying that the data doesn't support what I'm saying and therefore my stance is invalid. My whole point has been that the data is not reflective of reality for younger people.
Let's instead of looking at the averages, let's look at how the tenth percentile of annual household income is getting along. If we look at traditional metrics of wealth and (in)stability (savings, housing access, debt), we can see how folks are doing. It is very rare that, in the age of sub-5% unemployment, two able adults in the same household would both be unemployed, so we can assume that at least one will be employed at the 10% threshold. We can track how they are doing in key areas, and see how the situation changes.
I'm highly educated, and have a lot of friends who are as well. I belong to the top 20% of earners in my state, and it's frankly terrible how many people I know who are incredible thinkers and workers are unable to find stable employment anywhere that they can also can afford housing. I give the education and worker qualifier for the simple reason that a common myth is that underemployed workers are not hard working or are under achievers, not because people who do not have those qualifications do not are not "worthy" of these things. The problem is that the jobs are where the expensive housing is and there is no good way to get between the two areas without an expensive and depreciating personal transportation.
I only have anecdotal information, but the problem is systemic. My wife and I joke about being "the millennial 1%" because so few of our friends across the country (a young-30s predominantly well-educated group who were typically raised in middle class families) are able to enjoy housing stability. I literally am a professor in STEM at a major university, and that's what it took to get us a house.
The economy does not exist independent of people, and so many people in the economy are not doing well. Fetishization of the metrics saying the economy is going well is a mistake, because it does not reflect the reality for so many.
Oh, because we hoped it would get better over the last 20 years, and it has not. It's just a perpetual slide of shit that I see people exiting out of a 4 year degree in an even more dire situation than we did then.
It has though.
If people are comparing to an ideal counterfactual instead of their own direct experience that suggests there’s something different about the expectations and information environment they’re operating in.
No, it hasn't
Collectively, matching wealth to age. Boomers were more than twice as wealthy as Gen X at 35... 20% vs 8% national wealth. Millenials have 3%.
Savings as a percentage of income. All that pandemic aid (and inability to leave house) almost got us to the point where people were in the 1960s.
You’re comparing the 1960s to now. I’m comparing the 2010s to now. To me talking about living standards in the ‘60s might as well be talking about the Roman Empire. It doesn’t say anything about why someone today would be less content with their circumstances than they were 5 or 10 years ago.
And don’t ignore the fact that 15% of the US population is foreign born. And more than that are second generation immigrants. In the 60s my dad didn’t have electricity or running water in his village. The circumstances from back then are so different from now it’s not a useful basis for comparison. It just ends up being golden age thinking.
Not really comparing the 1960's to now.
Comparing that the last time anybody was saving more than 6% of their income was before 2000, and the momentary spike in covid matched quite coincidentally when the USA had some of the strongest union protection laws until the early 80s.
Here's a nice older article explaining how even in 2005, wages were still not recovered from 2001.
Inflation-adjusted wages are essentially a flat line. So when the most important things outpace inflation by a good margin...healthcare, housing, and education....people's lives get worse.
So that's why the grumbling is bad. The numbers go up, but things don't get better.
Inflation accounts for those in the calculation, so the growth in those outpacing inflation is being compensated for by prices staying level on everything else. People's financial lives wouldn't be "getting worse" there, mathematically they're staying the same.
There's an argument that prices are coming down on things people have flexibility on while they're going up on things where demand is inelastic, and that's a major stressor. But over the past few years it's actually been the other way. Inflation has hit hardest on the highly elastic things like groceries and consumables.
Here's a nice writeup from the whitehouse how that was more true in the 70's and 80's.
[snipping bit about the transition to the owner-equivalent rent]
[snip]
Overall, this means that while inflation increased about 644% since the 70's, housing prices have increased 1,608%. And while that doesn't impact people whom already own their home.. it certainly impacts anybody whom moves or is entering the market. The perpetual growth of the 'value' of homes that is not captured by inflation calculations negates how rising values of homes makes buying homes more affordable for people whom have already been building equity into already owning one. This further drives up the price of homes because existing homeowners can afford to buy at higher prices. And makes it exponentially harder for first-time buyers to buy. The housing market surge that happened in the wake of COVID relief speaks to that....people whom were able to save up a down payment quickly exited the rental market as quickly as they could. (Not getting into how the ridiculously low interest rates further exacerbated that).
I upgraded to a home that was 250% more expensive than my last one, for a lower monthly rate, because the equity in the first one (due to inflated home values) let me sidestep the down payment. It's almost impossible for a first-time home buyer to buy a home in my neighborhood before they're 35 if their household income is under $150k. And that situation is kinda broke....I don't live in some hyper-inflated town anymore...I live in a nice school district in a suburban area without a major city nearby.
None of this explains why the vibes stopped tracking the data over the past few years though. Because what you're talking about are long-term trends that unfolded over decades. People don't think in those terms for sentiment surveys like this. They're comparing how they were yesterday or a few years ago with how they feel now and none of that is a factor, that's just the water they're swimming in.
I'll throw this out there as a random guess: They're finally getting their acts together and doing better polling than they were 5/10/15 years ago.
IIRC even as recently as 2016 polls still favored the ever-declining group of landline users.
That, and as you get further in the hole, the light from the top grows ever dimmer. I guess there's a chance polling will improve when things become so dire people give up hope and just grieve and accept their fate.
This isn't political polling, this is a Qualtrics survey. The use standardized methodologies and methodological changes that can cause wild swings in the nature of responses are documented and raised as potential explanatory factors.
Sorry, could you cite the survey if you’ve found it? I spent a bit of time searching for it and only found news outlets retweeting Intuit’s think post. It’d be nice to understand how they avoided systemic sampling biases, as well as what their entire survey looked like.
One possible answer for the general malaise being expressed in these surveys is that we went through, and are still going through, a mass death event and very quickly into it people turned on each other and were left out to dry in a lot of ways by their government. Speaking personally, the combination of covid and the 2020 election and aftermath has deeply shaken my belief that the government can make things better. So if you ask people now how they're feeling about things, about the economy, about the future, it doesn't surprise me at least that the vibes aren't matching what one might expect from the data alone.
This is totally off-topic and I normally hate to be this guy, but three times in one comment was too much to ignore. So FYI:
This is improper use of whom. Whom is used as the object of a verb or to complete a prepositional phrase. In all three of these cases it's functioning as a relative pronoun and the subject of the verb, so it should be "people who" rather than "people whom."
Social media, from influences to just general message about how hard it is. Then you see people that seemingly have everything and their life together. Creates this whirlwind of despair.
Yeah I wonder if the pandemic habituated a lot of people to spending a lot more time on social media, leading to getting FOMO or needing to keep up with the Joneses.
The other possibility is that people are hitting age milestones where they expect to be further along and the dissatisfaction is hitting all at once as people have emerged from the pandemic and come out of the weird time-warping effect to realize 5 years have passed.
I think the US government showed its hand too much in 2020-21, let people know that there was another way they could be doing things, then immediately went back to business as usual and pissed a lot of people off. “Gosh I’m making more on unemployment than I was working at my job” is imo more of an indictment of wages than welfare.
That's a bit like assuming you can live off credit card debt indefinitely. Eventually you have to pay the piper. If we continued handing out money it's just as likely that inflation would be even worse than it got once things started to reopen.
I wish we were back to business as usual. It's not just that stuff is expensive, there are still supply constraints on a host of services and a lot of deferred maintenance and deferred housekeeping duties from city governments are starting to come due. But this is all part of the long tail of "digesting" the social and economic damage of the pandemic. Like we are just now beginning to get out of a mini-crime wave that resulted from schools being shut down and kids with bad home-lives being trapped in abusive situations.
TBF the piper is paid via taxes. The piper is supposed to collect more from those far more well to do, instead we have a shitty piper who's decided to give permanent breaks to the most well off among us, and the temporary breaks for the rest of us have long expired. Repeatedly. Honestly starting to think the piper is being bought off...
Oh and the typical household that received that aid spent it back into the economy, meanwhile businesses got shit tons more and used it to pump their coffers. And it's the latter that has historically had a far greater impact on inflation. Wealth accumulation is a primary factor in predicting inflation.
And I suspect that if given a choice, most people would rather be here today, rather than go back 20, 30, or 40 years ago.
It was a problem pre-pandemic but it's been turbo charged in the last 4 years. COL was on an unreasonable rise and it's only gotten worse. We added price setting software for land lord, private equity firms/hedge funds wetting their beaks, and insane increases in house prices across the country (I'm talking 50-100% in 2 years).
We've been feeling the squeeze for over a decade at this point and it feels like these issues are accelerating. Pessimism usually emerges from a lack of hope, and with the way things have been trending it's not surprising that folks are more pessimistic now.
Where? It seems like in most places price growth is leveling out. Even Manhattan, Seattle, the National Capitol region, and the Bay Area seem to be close to 0% or slightly negative. As someone who bought a house when interest rates were at their nadir, right before they got cranked way way up, this isn't looking great for me.
This is probably partly suppressed as well due to the really high interest rates reducing housing starts. If those come down in the next year you can probably start seeing the prices come down in the higher COL markets.
Can attest. Purchased home in 2016, Philadelphia suburbs for 215k...15k less than previous owner paid 6 years prior.
Home remained at more or less static value up till 2021... I refinanced in December of 2020 from FHA to traditional with roughly 10k of added value appraised. $225k
Listed it for $300k in May 2021. It was on the market for 6 hours before we got a cash offer for $305k, waiving any inpection other than termite, with a flexible move-out date for us to find a new house first. Judging from other homes in the neighborhood that also sold around then, we could have easily held out for $350k if we were willing to risk more logistics with my wife several months pregnant.
$70k in added valuation inside of 5 months. I knew what that house was actually worth, all the issues that need fixed. That house is still actually worth $200k unless they dropped about $100k of repairs and upgrades to it. The roof is due to be replaced inside of 5 years.
That house is now estimated at selling in roughly the $400k range, with a bad school district. It's insanity.
Yes, just since 2023, after what was truly crazy growth. And those high interest rates have now thrown up a barrier of entry for those not buying in cash. So even if the home price hasn't increased since the spike in 2021/2022, the real cost of a mortgage has and with that the price of rent has continued to increase.
Wouldn't the lowering of the high interest rates just spur more demand again? How would that drive down prices?
Yeah but they're saying this is partly also due to that being the first time housing stock actually started to improve due to reformed zoning laws.
You need credit to build new housing. And the bigger the construction project you need, the more high interest rates disincentivize your building. So it'll suppress expansion of large, dense, multi-family units most.
Ah, I think I misunderstood your comment. I'm also optimistic for the potential expansion of housing options, but it seems like more of a long term solution (which is great!) and I don't think it'll do much to change the immediate feeling of financial pressure for those feeling it now or even the next 5ish years.
The article I don't believe is trying to reference the median, or even the majority lived experience.... it's probably addressing people like me, I'm very financially conscious, very scarcity mindset, very job insecure, because I've lived through 3 recessions, a housing bubble, constant middle east wars. My brain will forever be in that mindset, my ambitions are to always seek more money.
But I'm not poor, is the thing, I have solid savings, I own my home, my wife and I earn a good amount.....I'm certainly not hurting, the past few years we've really grown into our careers and seen the bull market and housing increase our net worth....I'm not the only millennial like this, all my friends are now able to afford to hit those life milestones, we had our first kid last year same as a lot of my friends, sure it's later than the prior generation but that doesn't really mean anything to my day to day.
I get that lots of people are still struggling but it doesn't mean we can't look at those that aren't that have interesting disconnects in their reality and their perception. I actually think Millennials are about to be Boomers in the next decade or two, they are a much larger demo than zoomers or X, they are the most tech savvy, and will likely inherit a collosal amount of capital from boomer parents. It's not looking great for Zoomers, I agree, but Millennials are rapidly catching up to places they thought, or I certainly thought, we would never reach. If you asked me in 09 if I thought I'd ever be financially alright I'd have told you no shot. I'm 34 btw, so solidly in the cohort
I am genuinely glad to hear that for you. Keep it up!
I'm 30 and I started my "real adult life" just late enough to miss a lot of stuff that would have been nice, like buying a real house. We are locked into a townhouse with no space and HOA fees. It was meant to be a temporary thing so that we could avoid getting stuck in the rent trap while we got our careers going and saved for a house. Not building much equity and paying mortgage insurance, etc. Sucks but much better than a lot of my friends who were renting and literally missed their first home buying opportunity by mere months or a couple years. They're still stuck renting.
I'm also scarcity minded because I have never had much money. It just sucks because my savings account is absolutely pathetic right now and it keeps dropping by a few dollars each month. I just can't get it any higher.
One month we had medical expenses, another month I hit a deer and had to pay an insurance deductible, then the baby started daycare, etc.
Student loans payments kicking in again will completely swallow my raise next year so I don't see it being any better. I'm just feeling totally defeated and I'm realizing my wife and I can't leave this townhouse anytime soon. The worst part is that every appliance in our place is at the end of its life cycle. We already did the cheap "please just make it work for a while longer" fixes. And the townhouse is also just run down and shoddy. So we can't afford to make it nicer but we also can't afford to leave. Nevermind that we don't fit in it with the baby now.
So frustrating.
Oof yeah, I feel that "one disaster away" too often. With the baby and other expenses, I had to dip into savings a d yeah it definitely doesn't feel great. I just had to dip out our dishwasher and replace it this weekend since it's 8 years old and with daily running for bottles it crapped out. Hopefully if your careers start taking off as long as you're treading now..... eventually your savings rate will be decent, it's certainly survival instincts that cause millennials to save more. I think that difference in mindset is gonna kill some tourist spots, millennials don't see the value like boomers did.
It just feels weird to me reading articles like this. "the economy is doing better than we think" is all well and good for the economy, but it cleverly makes it a sum of its parts, and forgets about the people sucking the scum at the bottom.
I'm sure the people reading might relate to its message, but it seems too saccharine anyway; homeless people lining our soup kitchens. Foster homes full, traumatized children growing up to live in prisons.
You cannot work full time, minimum wage, and live alone, while meaningfully preparing for your future. You certainly can't if you are a single parent raising children.
But we will see authors burn calories to try and frame our systems as "we're doing alright!" I would like to see more active advocacy for the groups of people who literally cannot speak for themselves.
We are not doing alright until everyone is. Or rather, til everyone has the opportunity to be alright. And articles like this just make me feel like I'm supposed to get over my woes—without any action. As if saying the status quo is better than what my fears are signaling, so I can relax.
Disagree! Cognitive dissonance is where we can break the cycle, where we can wake up and progress to more equity and understanding.
Telling people the economy is fine when their lived experience is that they don't have enough to get by is such an odd approach. If someone isn't making enough to pay their bills and save at least a little, they really don't care how the economy is doing. It's nice that the government and news says everything is ok, but that doesn't change anyone's day to day experiences.
These articles are so obviously written by folks who have never struggled financially.
I agree. I do think it's important to make data informed decisions about the economy and economic policy, but aggregate statistics are only part of public policy. That average real wages increase is great for most people, but doesn't address the large number of people in absolute terms who live in poverty or are food insecure.
I think it is perfectly congruent to say that the economy is doing ok, and that we need better social safety nets for those in need. Medicare for all, child tax credits paid monthly, and food insecurity programs would address a huge amount of suffering.
This is an opinion piece on a summary of an unpublished survey that ran against 1006 Americans over the age of 18. Credit Karma's summary doesn't mention how they sampled, or what the definition of each "generation" was in terms of age range. First opinion: if they can't prove that their data isn't bunk, it's bunk.
The Credit Karma article claims that people are making bad decisions about their finances, but never describes what those decisions are. You need to present evidence to make a claim, so they need to cite some studies demonstrating how the decisions people made led to poor financial outcomes. Second opinion: this is just another article shaming people for their finances. Because coining terms is apparently hip, I'll call this "financial advice theatre": we're being told to point and laugh at all the dumb Gen Z and millennial children instead of anything actionable, because that drives engagement (and there's nothing you can do anyways).
I've seen this type of content popping up a lot recently, and I find these their timing interesting. I'm not sure if it's the election year, counter acting propaganda, or media copying each other but it seems suspicious. Especially so since the economy is partially built in sentiment.
The takeaway I get from the narrative is "a large part of the populat don't have faith in the market, but it doesn't matter because they're not really part of the market". With this reframe it's actually a story about people being carved out of the market completely. Much like the homeless, if you're in the market you become an externality, and the market doesn't price those in (look at the environment).
As a GenZ, I guess I am "obsessed" with getting rich, but it's not so I can buy a yacht or a private jet. Living in a city with plentiful economic opportunity means that I need to be rich to ever afford a condo. I've messed around with mortgage calculators and FHA loans where you only need to put 3.5% down doesn't help me afford the monthly payments or qualify for a large enough loan to purchase a 2 bedroom condo.
A 2 bedroom condo in the San Francisco Bay Area (not actually in San Francisco) costs around $800,000 without factoring in HOA fees. At 7% interest on a mortgage, a household making $200,000 a year can qualify for about $600,000 of loan. A household making $140,000 can qualify for about $400,000 of loan. My partner and I need to each be making 6 figures minimum and have aggressive savings rates to come up with $200,000 of savings to purchase a 2 bedroom condo.
I think many people who bought into the housing market 10-15 years ago don't understand because they purchased similar housing for half price with lower interest rates. If they choose to move today, they have to deal with higher rates, but they get to take the hundreds of thousands in equity they got over the past decade. If you are starting out with no assets, being "rich" is the bare minimum for not having to rent anymore.
Mirror, for those hit by the paywall:
https://archive.is/UbAd9
Money dysmorphia? Seriously? Did you mean dysphoria? Just stop Bloomberg, you're embarrassing yourself. You don't need to invent a new term to try and drive clicks. It's really not cool how you're trivializing mental health.
I agree that it's a shitty comparison to draw on Bloomberg's part, but dysmorphia is a real term and different than dysphoria. Dysmorphia would be the more applicable term here of the two.
Yes, dysmorphia is a medical term. It refers to a body part being abnormally shaped. It's rarely used in this context, except for describing births and large tumors. The way this word is most commonly used is in the fairly rare diagnosis of body dysmorphic disorder.
Dysphoria on the other hand is a state of dissatisfaction or anxiety.
Money isn't a body part and it's not abnormally shaped. Being upset about your finances, however, or where you think they should be, totally possible, one might even say reasonable.
I said it's not cool that they're trivializing mental health because BDD is a serious disorder and dysphoria is a serious symptom (most commonly seen as gender dysphoria). "Money dysmorphia" is not only incorrect but it makes light of real mental health concerns.
Why would it be dysphoria rather than dysmorphia?
The word "dysmorphia" is typically associated with body dysmorphia, the preoccupation with one's body image. The root "-morph" also suggests that the word has something to do with the shape of something. The word "dysphoria" means "abnormal depression or discontent", so it seems like it fits the definition of what they were going for better.
In either case, it reads as totally out of touch, IMO.
Hey, I changed my mind twice this week. I'm so bipolar!
Where are my car keys? I'm so ADHD!
That guy is a little kooky, I guess he's schizophrenic!
Yeah, I hate that too.
Big Money propaganda trying to get us to keep buying their devaluing currency.
The article is super cynical but the real propaganda is Biden causing hyperinflation. We had the biggest crisis since WW2 and… things got 15% more expensive. Inflation is coming back down towards 2% and rate cuts will follow. The narrative that we’re somehow living in a “hell hole” is politically weaponized. The problem isn’t “the economy”, it’s a lack universal healthcare and public housing.
I think this is not true? I mean other notable candidates are the Korean war, Vietnam, Yom Kippur war, Iran/Iraq war, 9/11, etc.
About "Biden causing hyperinflation" – I would argue this is categorically false. The inflation has mostly been caused by Russia invading Ukraine which is not Biden's fault (except in the view of Russian imperialists) and given the price shock the US has done a pretty good job at managing it (e.g. correctly selling the strategic petroleum reserve while prices were at their peak, etc).
It's also worth looking at inflation data in its historical context: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/FP.CPI.TOTL.ZG?locations=US.
If you measure by deathcount of americans, COVID was several hundred times larger than 9/11, and over 10x larger than korean and vietnam wars combined. (all other wars since then have had basically negligible american casualties). The vietnam war cost ~$1 trillion adjusted for inflation, COVID was almost $5 trillion. Of course making comparisons between civil and military crises is hard, especially when the US was a (relatively) smaller country in the past, but by most measures I would argue covid is at the very least comparable to those.
or just embrace either hyperinflation or hyper-interest rates
hyperinflate the debt, decimate the economy for a year or two, and cause a sort of "reset" that gets rid of all the leverage in the system, cleans out toxic balance sheets, etc.
or rocket up the interest rates, with capital control on reserves. rather than foreign/domestic surplus being parking in sovereign reserves, while the rates get played with, just open up a potential 300 trillion dollar private sector and let rates be high, let wages be high, nearly everything except assets.
Yea, because that worked so great in the past.
A lot of healthy parts of the economy (and potentially tens of millions of private livelihoods) would be taken down with all the "toxic" parts. Nothing about that solution is "clean". It would take decades to rebuild from there. Even if we would magically arrive at a more stable economy afterwards, I haven't seen an argument for why it would be worth the cost.
The reality is: We did pretty fine, considering. If it wasn't for all the toxic (to borrow that word) political discourse, we'd conclude that we went through a once-in-a-century global pandemic with dignity. Turns out the modern internet is pretty good at remote work (Zoom, online shopping,...), we developed a novel vaccine in a matter of months and the economy survived the shock of half the world having to stay at home and rebounded within a year or two. That's pretty good. But somehow right-wing assholes looked for ways to ruin everything out of spite. Vaccines are government conspiracies to kill us all, the virus doesn't really exist so fuck all security measures, governments paying for people to not lose their livelihoods is somehow communist nonsense and now, to fit the narrative, we just have to have hyperinflation and a broken economy because we largely didn't listen to their insane ramblings. But we don't. Things are looking up. Oh, Putin is rolling in and starts a war in Europe that sends energy prices rising. But even that turned out to be something we managed to adapt. And now they're fucking cheering for Putin!
It used to be that complaining about everything was just a natural thing we do, maybe a healthy thing to find areas to improve upon. But it's been so politicized online, through propaganda accounts and the bubbles they created, it's just absurd. I'm a pretty pessimistic person myself. But I'm actively forcing myself to be more optimistic because it closer aligns with reality and a lot of of the current pessimism seems to be propaganda.
It's more mechanical than it its political. It's simply the question of who will buy treasuries at this dollar level at this rate level.