What People Are Getting Wrong This Week: “Vibecession”
This week, the publishers of the Oxford English Dictionary named “rizz” the word of 2023, in part because of its “potential as a term of enduring cultural significance or insight into social history.” But they got it wrong. The real word that gives the cultural picture of 2023 is “vibecession.”
Vibecession, coined by Kayla Scanlon , has come to mean something like “widespread pessimism about the economy, independent of the economy itself.” We are currently in the middle of a huge vibrational recession.
According to a recent Pew Research Center poll, 81% of Americans believe the gap between rich and poor will widen between now and 2050, even though it is (finally) narrowing . Overall U.S. consumer confidence is now lower than it was during the middle of the Covid lockdown, and 71% of Americans say the country’s economic conditions are “poor” or “very bad,” with 38% of respondents saying “very bad.” “
In the real world, unemployment hovers around 3.5%, compared to 14.7% during the lockdown. The median U.S. household income rose from a pandemic low of $65,100 a year to $74,600. This figure also does not reflect the fact that “the rich are getting richer.” It’s coming from the bottom: In 2022 , incomes for people in the bottom half of the U.S. income distribution increased by 4.5%, while the average for all Americans was 1.2%. The inflation rate has also been steadily declining, currently standing at 3.24%, down from 3.70% last month and 7.75% last year. GDP increased 2% in 2022 and 5% the year before. Despite the constant chants on social media, all major economic indicators suggest that things are going pretty well.
America yearns for the good old days – 1973.
One thing that stood out to me in researching vibrations was that 58% of Americans say life is worse for “people like them” today than it was 50 years ago in 1973 , a year that was much worse for many more people. than in 2023 in almost any way that can be measured.
For the sake of realism and optimism, here are the exact numbers for the shitty year of 1973:
In 1973, more than half the world’s population lived in autocracies, compared with about 13% today. Today, almost 60% of people live in democracies, up from 25% in the early 1970s. About half the world’s population lived in extreme poverty in 1973 , up from about 8% in 2023. statistics.
In terms of the domestic economy, unemployment was 4.9% in 1973, down from the current 3.5%. The economy grew 5.6% in 1973, up from 9.2% in 2022. Inflation was 8.7% in 1973, down from the current rate of 3.24%. The federal interest rate was 8.74% in 1973, compared to 5.25% today. In 1973, women earned about 56.6 cents on a man’s dollar , compared with 83.7 cents today.
In 1973, 55,984 Americans died in car crashes , compared to 42,795 in 2022, and there are roughly three times as many cars on the road. There were more crimes of all types in 1973 . In 1973, people lived an average of 71 years , compared to 79 in 2023. In 1973 , a 20-inch TV cost about $500 and could probably receive three blurry channels. Adjusted for inflation, that’s about $3,300. In 1973, the Chrysler LeBaron cost $7,541 and could last about 100,000 miles. That’s $52,255.56 in today’s money to buy a car you can drive twice as long.
Every year is a bad year
I could go on, but you get the point. Not that 1973 was a particularly terrible year – things really started to go downhill in 1974, and they continued to get worse until the early 80s, when interest rates were almost 20% and unemployment was around 10%. I’m sure at the time people were looking back longingly at the “good old days” of 1936.
The lack of historical context underlies vibecession and illustrates its dangers. Tangible progress is achieved by trying to push the real world towards the ideal world we imagine could exist, but misremembering the past and convincing ourselves that we have allowed utopia to slip through our fingers leads to the opposite result. This leads to pessimism, inaction and defeat. People feed off this defeatist attitude too: politicians scaring people into voting for them, corporations profiting from selling comfort to an unsettled population, social media companies monetizing anxiety, and more. But buying a Doomer is not only depressing, it’s an embarrassment to the people who dedicated their lives to making 2023 a little less shitty than 1973. I mean, who wants to pay $52,000 for a Chrysler LeBaron?