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

> 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

>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

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...

> 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.