The top 1% in Teton County earns 142.2x more than the bottom 99%, compared to the US’s overall differential of 26.3x. The average annual income of that top 1%? Hold onto your Stetson: $22,508,018. (In the Economic Policy Institute’s accounting, New York, New York comes in at #2, with a modest-by-comparison one-percenter income of $8,983,154.) These numbers are from 2015, preceding the pandemic-fueled billionaire infestation, so it’s likely more disparate now. Jackson is an “onshore offshore tax haven,” according to a jauntily scored Bloomberg video, referencing Wyoming’s 0% state income tax, 0% corporate income tax, 4% sales tax rate, and 0.55% effective property tax rate, one of the lowest in the country. (Wyoming ranks first in the Tax Foundation’s euphemistically named “2026 State Tax Competitiveness Index.”) 

Tax breaks aside, the attraction is obvious. Sometimes you go places where it’s hard to imagine how anyone ever got brave or deluded enough to attempt paving the first road or building the first home there, given the landscape. But Jackson, hemmed in on all sides by what I can only describe as patented Purple Mountain Majesty, makes it clear why you’d try. There’s a rugged romance to this town that it still embraces: A sign on Highway 22 welcoming visitors (and workers who cannot afford to live within town limits) from Idaho over the Teton Pass announces its mythos as “THE LAST OF THE OLD WEST.” (This perilous commute was disrupted for three weeks last June when the infrastructure failed and the road literally slid off the side of the mountain.) A fictionalized version of Jackson even appears in HBO’s Emmy Award-winning series The Last of Us, portrayed as singular in its ability to survive a zombie apocalypse as a relatively thriving, walled-off settlement, a testament to the American fantasy of self-sufficiency against even the ugliest of odds.  

Post-apocalypse American Western Utopia, per HBO.

Flying into the valley “can be brutal,” a friend warned me, because of the quick descent over the Tetons. Already a slightly nervous flyer, I stalked the r/ATC subreddit before my trip. Normally, it’s a digital watering hole where air traffic controllers congregate to discuss niche industry drama with specialized terminology I don’t recognize. But since the government shutdown began last month, the subreddit has been overrun with posts about working without pay and questions from other voyeuristic nervous flyers asking if the stress of working unpaid six-day weeks or picking up second jobs is going to make the public less safe. The response was—horrifyingly—mixed.

Bewildered Europeans occasionally comment to express pity (“In Germany,” one wrote, “it is illegal for the government to make people work without pay.”). When well-meaning outsiders urge them to refuse to work, a reliably beleaguered flood of comments reminds OP that, unlike being forced to work without pay, striking is illegal for federal workers. Once inside the terminal at JAC, I noticed a conspicuous absence of other commercial planes taking off down its single runway—only Cessnas and Gulfstreams and other tiny jets with presumably private owners.

The strange thing about the wealth disparity in Jackson, with its population just shy of 11,000 people sharing less than three square miles, is how unusually proximate it feels. I’ve never met so many regular people with close, personal connections to billionaires. I spent time with a ski instructor who works for the resort, paid somewhere in the neighborhood of $19 per hour. (I struck up a conversation by asking her about “dropping Corbet’s,” referring to a notoriously harrowing run called Corbet’s Couloir which begins with a near-90-degree vertical dropoff that Colorado transplants like me learn to discuss with reverence in the company of people who don’t do things like, for example, read r/ATC before flying.) She was in her early forties, with wild, curly blond hair that called to mind 2007 Taylor Swift, and it became quickly apparent that she was a favorite of the Jackson vacation-home class. She ticked through a few locations she’d traveled to with clients—Egypt, Alaska, the Maldives—sometimes for ski instruction, other times, I gathered, as a comped tag-along on their six-figure vacations, simply because she’s a great hang. (Can confirm.)

After the conference ended the second night, a group of us got dinner together at a restaurant that paired things like elk hash with $17 cocktails. After a story about how she had grown accustomed to tracking one client’s jet on FlightAware whenever the family was running late for their lesson, she told me she was about to lose her health insurance. “I’m on an ACA plan,” she said, by way of explanation. With the planned upcoming expiration of Affordable Care Act enhanced subsidies, an average premium hike of 114% will price some portion of the 24 million Americans enrolled in ACA plans out of healthcare.

For some, premiums will rise a lot more. That morning, I made an unlikely connection with the event photographer. He looked like the type of man I expected to see on the Denver season of Love Is Blind: shoulder-length brown hair, a flannel shirt, a flat-brimmed hat bearing the logo of a local brewery. He beelined for the book signing table in the theater lobby after my presentation ended, where I had decamped to decompress from an unusually tense question-and-answer session. “When I heard your voice, I realized I know you,” he said, pulling out his phone to show me texts with his sister about my podcast, Diabolical Lies. 

Relieved to be in the presence of someone who voluntarily listens to my voice for entertainment, we settled into an easy rapport. “It’s important for someone to come into this town and say the things you just said,” he told me, “but it also takes courage, because some of the people in that room do not want to hear it.” (Being told my talk was courageous had the same effect on the pit in my stomach as being commended as “brave” for wearing a bathing suit; which is to say, I was unaware my words would be controversial.) He told me he’s self-employed, and volunteered that his ACA premium is about to go from $150 per month to more than $780. I got the impression he wasn’t sure what he was going to do yet. 

The ACA subsidies, which make insurance more affordable for 92% of enrollees, mostly act like a funnel for draining public funding into the private profits of the insurance companies. Still, the practical effect of removing them without offering an alternate public option means people lose their health insurance, or spend a mortgage-sized amount to retain coverage. My presentation covered issues like this one, how the privatization of public goods and services leads to market-distorting wealth that makes life more expensive for everyone else; issues that most people in Teton County probably didn’t need to learn about via Google Slides because they live them at the end of every month when the rent comes due. 

But not everyone in the audience found it resonant. One woman, a fast-talking New Yorker who sought me out afterward, said she found all my material about the dream of universal basic services and union density insulting; she insisted the answer wasn’t “more government,” but more financial literacy. “Financial literacy is the answer,” she told me, “not all this socialism.” I told her I put all the financial literacy “in there,” punctuating the words by tapping on my book with a stiff forefinger. She waved her hand over the stack of signed copies, as if exiling a bad smell. “People don’t learn from reading,” she insisted (news to me), “they learn by doing.” Fair enough; no further word on what she’d like them to do.

While in Jackson, I had the distinct feeling of accidentally being at the center of something, like an ant who had marched across the frontier (via SkyWest doing business as United Airlines) and mistakenly wandered under a magnifying glass where all of America’s glory and failure had been concentrated into a single, unforgiving beam. For all the talk of its economic uniqueness, Jackson seemed to me less an anomalous expression of American capitalism than an exceptionally pure one. In the Jackson of The Last of Us, the town is “an oasis of communal living,” where residents “share the responsibilities of cooking, cleaning and maintaining the town” in “relative safety and comfort.” “The Jackson community has figured out what they need to survive their world’s fungal-themed zombie apocalypse,” Taylar Dawn Stagner writes for High Country News of the fictionalized rendition: “each other.” In real life, where the disease is different, things are a little more atomized, and solutions a little less pat. (Even the HBO version doesn’t end so tidily: The zombies do, eventually, breach the town’s defenses.)

After the final panel closed Friday afternoon, a young woman with raven hair approached the foot of the stage. “Your book…” she began, “Is it out there in the lobby?” I nodded. She told me she worked at the local bank in their private wealth division. “Do you like your job?” I asked, tentatively. She seemed reserved in a way that bordered on melancholy. “I do, most days,” she began, “but what you were saying up there…” she searched the ceiling for words. “I see that every day in my job. Some of my clients are amazing people; very philanthropic. Others made billions in another state and don’t want to pay taxes there, so they come here instead, and my job is to help shield that wealth. I hate that part.” 

This sort of ambivalence was everywhere. Another woman, a former nanny for a person who resides cozily in the top 10 of every “richest people on earth” list, described a friendly yet intense working relationship, careful not to violate a non-disclosure agreement that I can only imagine was longer than the Jackson airport’s sole runway, but made clear her feelings were complicated. The core complication being: In Teton County, billionaires are not an abstraction, they’re your neighbors—people who, like the rest of us, are capable of wonderful and terrible things.   

One such terrible thing: cowboy cosplay.

The market has priced a one-bedroom apartment in Jackson, Wyoming at an average of $3,193 per month. To live in such a space without your rent absorbing more than 30% of your monthly gross income (let the record reflect I prefer using net income), you’d need to earn $127,716 per year. At dinner after the conference, I asked one of the organizers what she felt the town’s biggest challenge was. “I mean, it’s the inequality,” she answered. A former city councilwoman sitting to my right, ever thoughtful and practical, interjected. “To be more specific,” she added, “it’s that the people who work in this town cannot afford to live here. Their wages are just not high enough.” 

Silently, I wished the woman who had felt insulted by my presentation could’ve heard this exchange, and wondered how, exactly, she’d counsel those who had been run out of town to “financial literacy” their way into a $3,200 apartment and $780 catastrophic health insurance on $20 per hour. “To be clear, these aren’t all low-wage service employees who staff T-shirt shops or clean toilets in our county’s many, often vacant luxury mansions or pricey hotel rooms,” Brigid Mander reported about Jackson for Slate in 2024. “It includes teachers and nurses, sheriffs’ deputies and doctors, air traffic controllers, wildlife biologists, mountain guides, and other seemingly integral parts of a functioning community.” As is true in the rest of the United States, an increasing number of people who work in this economy cannot afford to live in it.

In the valley, every layer—all the beauty, myth, and material impossibility—felt stretched taut, as if pulled toward the event horizon of the American economy, threatening to collapse under an infinite blue sky. When we turned onto the road leading to the airport the following morning, the snow-capped Tetons loomed so imposingly in the distance that I was surprised to feel a cold stinging at the corners of my eyes, awe and grief in equal measure.

The post The Last of the Old West appeared first on Money with Katie.

Is it any wonder this person scored a CELINE campaign?

While every cool progressive young woman today uses her Ruth Bader Ginsberg bobblehead as a bookend for the Didion shelf of her bookcase, Didion launched her career at the conservative magazine National Review. (The publication was founded by none other than William F. Buckley, a man considered the architect of the modern conservative movement.) Her own conservatism was, as Sam Adler-Bell put it, “very invested in complexity and rejecting the liberal belief in easy answers; the idea that human nature can be reduced to solvable social problems.” It was former President Ronald Reagan who eventually turned her against the party, though you get the sense it was less that she disagreed with his politics and more that she found the whole Reagan family to be unbearably tacky. “Had Goldwater remained the same age and continued running,” she wrote in 2001, “I would have voted for him in every election thereafter.”

Considering her upbringing among “conservative California Republicans,” this checks out. But when you live by the pen, you change by the pen. She eventually turned her signature, unsparing method—“no lying, no self-soothing delusions, no aspiring toward innocence in the face of evidence of culpability”—on herself. This emerges most stridently in a book she published when she was 68 called Where I Was From, which is ostensibly about the history of California but ends up functioning as a record of personal disillusionment with the state’s blinkered origin story and, to a certain reader, American exceptionalism more broadly.

In it, she systematically juxtaposes her own ancestors’ self-styled bootstrappy California landfall—traveling with the infamous Donner-Reed Party, but escaping their cannibalistic fate by, poetically, refusing to take a shortcut—with the realities of early land distribution. Describing how California was originally parceled out, she observes that land was “largely acquired through imaginative interpretation of the small print in federal legislation.” She unceremoniously lists the various loopholes which allowed for “subsidized monopolization” among a few wealthy landowners and railroad companies. (One such provision deemed any land relegated as “swamp” to be essentially handed out for free by the hundreds of thousands of acres, which led to a curious reclassification of vast tracts of the state.)

A reinvention of this history, she writes, tends to carefully trim off the unsightly fat of federal government largesse in the amassing (or destruction) of private fortunes. “Stressing as it did an extreme if ungrounded individualism, this was not an ambiance that tended toward a view of life as defined or limited or controlled, or even in any way affected, by the social and economic structures of the larger world,” she writes of early California myth-making. The implication is unavoidable: Where she once identified with an imagined, exceptional group of rugged frontierspeople determined to do whatever it took, she now sees plot holes that demand a rewrite.

Speaking about the policies that created Southern California’s broad consumer middle class in the late twentieth century, she manages to sneak in more than a little class analysis, most memorably in the chapters about the disquieting economic ripple effects of hundreds of thousands of aerospace industry layoffs in Los Angeles county in the 1980s and 1990s. “What does it cost to create and maintain an artificial ownership class?” she asks of the communities whose work had been furnished by federal defense contracts. “Who pays? Who benefits?” Then, a devastating addition: “What happens when that class stops being useful?”

In 2025, that insistent “larger world” with all its “social and economic structures” seems to be closing in on our “extreme if ungrounded individualism” at record pace, as the dissonance Didion observed in 1990s LA continues to compound under a new antagonist: artificial intelligence. As a result, we’re relying more heavily than ever on the same flawed principles to explain what will happen if the corporations that once sustained a middle class no longer have any use for it. In other words, AI appears to be stretching the narrative limits of our most treasured story beyond the point of coherence.

The US economy in its present state presents a dynamic contradiction. There’s never been a greater “divergence between equity returns and job openings,” a conflict that Derek Thompson resolved by splitting the baby into separate realities: “a booming AI economy and a lackluster everything-else economy.” To put a finer point on it: JP Morgan estimated that AI-related stocks have driven 75% of all S&P 500 growth since 2022, which might be why Ruchir Sharma wrote for the Financial Times that, at this point, the story of American optimism is indistinguishable from three Nvidia chips in a trenchcoat. A portfolio manager told the Wall Street Journal that “‘[i]nvesting in US markets is almost becoming a one-way concentrated bet on the development and proliferation of AI,’” a statement prompting me to perform a nervous asset allocation check which revealed the metastasized US exposure in my portfolio. (It should be noted that, for all the talk of US stock market impenetrability this year, international stocks have outperformed the US by the widest margin since 2009.) The closer your proximity to this “booming AI economy,” the better you’ve done. Still, watching your wealth grow from artificial intelligence at the same moment your job security is threatened by it is a little like using the right hand to repair what the left is actively destroying.

Booming or not, the fundamentals of this gold rush leave something to be desired. OpenAI is, according to the magic of the market, “worth” $500 billion, despite its mere $12 billion in revenue. Nvidia, a company that makes chips, is somehow worth more than the entire pharmaceutical industry combined. A recent Bloomberg visualization of these companies’ financial interdependencies, which would appear to show a rat king of incestuous funding, offers little in the way of clarity about the true source of the demand or value:

The dominant story now is that the US economy is a complex puzzle that needs to be unlocked, and the alchemizing power of artificial intelligence will either forge a skeleton key that slides effortlessly into our most inscrutable problems, or it will destroy us all, or it will continue to be a useful if functionally limited chat partner for lonely young men and people weaning themselves off WebMD with large language model-powered symptom radar. Only time will tell, or so the story goes.

A clearer picture emerges when we confront the uncomfortable reality that these disparate conditions could, under our current configuration, coexist indefinitely. For bulls, the logic goes something like this: “The main reason AI is regarded as a magic fix for so many different threats is that it is expected to deliver a significant boost to productivity growth, especially in the US. … Higher output per worker would lower the burden of debt by boosting GDP. It would reduce demand for labor, immigrant or domestic. And it would ease inflation risks, including the threat from tariffs, by enabling companies to raise wages without raising prices.” The magical thinking of this “best-case scenario” is revealing, because it relies on a tacit acceptance of the rusting, decades-old infrastructure of Reaganomics. This blind faith in “productivity gains” as the cure-all, no other shifts required, represents how profoundly narrow our understanding of national flourishing has become. AI exuberance, then, belies a faith in the soothing myth that we can outrun a core rot exactly as quickly as we can make GDP go up. No matter how obvious it becomes that this hasn’t been the case for at least 30 years, Didion’s ethos rings true here: Soothing myths can be hard to part with, particularly if the majority of your resources depend on you (and everyone else) continuing to believe them.

When spelled out so plainly, it becomes clear who, exactly, the “economy” in this accounting chiefly exists to serve: a set of people who, like Southern Pacific in California 150 years ago, have effectively expropriated and monopolized the resources of the US through a neat understanding of tax law and pay-to-play politicking. Didion’s observations about Southern California’s economic downswing feel eerily prescient:

This “new economy” was to be built on “international trade,” an entirely theoretical replacement for the gold-standard money tree, the federal government, that had created these communities. Many seminars on “global logistics” were held. Many warehouses were built. The first stage of [construction] was near completion before people started wondering what exactly these warehouses were to bring them; started wondering, for example, whether eight-dollars-an-hour forklift operators, hired in the interests of a “flexible” work force only on those days when the warehouse was receiving or dispatching freight, could ever become the “good citizens” of whom Mark Taper had spoken in 1969, the “enthusiastic owners of property,” the “owners of a piece of their country—a stake in the land.”

Here, she’s providing an answer to the question she posed earlier: What happens when an artificially created ownership class stops being useful? Put another way: What happens when a robot can do your job nearly as well as you can?

Technologically, the world-changing potential of artificial intelligence—while “entirely theoretical” right now—may be something genuinely novel. But economically, the more I read about the grandest flavor of conjecture, the more familiar its implications feel. No matter how valuable it becomes, it will leave our foundation, plagued with persistent and neglected cracks, untouched. A true repair would require a more wholesale rejection of the American delusions we take most for granted, like the sanctity of meritocracy’s equalizing powers, wealth concentration as the most reliable indicator of brilliance (that will eventually, it goes without saying, trickle down), and perhaps most of all, the myth of total self-sufficiency that Didion interrogated so soberly in Where I Was From.

The good news is that our current model of publicly traded (and publicly owned) companies is, in some respects, actually quite elegant. You’d be hard-pressed to find a better mechanism for diversifying and distributing the spoils and risks of a complex, profoundly interrelated economic system. Chopping up ownership of every corporation into tiny, tradable shares that can be bundled together and distributed via a product like an index fund is (Wall Street Journal subscribers, cover your ears) borderline socialist in its mechanics. We’re all familiar with why and how this ends up falling short in our current iteration, but it can be summed up in two words, both of which apply to AI valuations: concentration and manipulation.

Roughly 87% of those shares belong to 10% of people, per a Ritholtz analysis from February, which is partially why consumer spending still looks so strong (the top 10% are spending almost as much as the bottom 90% combined), and short-term thinking is the name of the game in an era of stock buybacks and equity-based executive compensation packages. But an infrastructure already exists for something far more prosperous; something that distributes the value of this economy more evenly to the people who are laboring every day to produce it. The gamble on world-changing tech just makes Didion’s project of abandoning our “self-soothing delusions” feel all the more urgent—because if what the bulls say is true, our leverage as human workers to determine our fate will never again be greater than it is right now.

The post Joan Didion Saw the AI Bubble Coming appeared first on Money with Katie.

This quieting effect was its main appeal: the stripping away of street noise and the electromagnetic hum of a home office and all the neuroses that I’ve developed and stowed in my 1,200 square feet of Denver, where I have felt more than ever this year like I’m looping the same day, week, month, over and over again, each revolution faster than the last. I hoped this getaway would stop the spinning, like ejecting a hand from bed after one too many drinks to grope around for the ground and steady yourself. In this case, the hand was the whole self. When the usual suspects (sleep, walks, baths) stopped having the desired effect on my mood for longer than a couple of hours, two days off the grid was the hard reset that felt up to the task of restoring me for the final work sprint of the year. (This was before I realized that sleeping at an elevation of 11,000 feet implied mild hypoxia for the duration of our stay, but that’s showbiz, baby.)

Nobody enjoyed this more than Sam Cat.

That the Wi-Fi stopped working the first night felt like a cosmic joke. You said you wanted to disconnect, I chided myself, panic rising in my throat as I uselessly refreshed a Chrome tab that stubbornly bore the same “No internet” message below a pixelated dinosaur. But wasn’t that the entire point? To avoid, as Jia Tolentino characterized it earlier this year, the “device that makes me feel like I am strapped flat to the board of an unreal present: the past has vanished, the future is inconceivable, and my eyes are clamped open to view the endlessly resupplied now?”

Burnout’s spin cycle in an age when one could theoretically be sustained by a nonstop parade of front-door deliveries of (truly) any conceivable desire is—how do I put this?—humiliating. I imagine some ancestor freshly arrived at Ellis Island, knee-deep in a slurry of animal remains inside a rancid meatpacking plant for 18 hours each day, being confronted with a discomfiting vision: It’s their distant progeny (me!) pacing around a climate-controlled apartment in sweatpants, mumbling about something called a podcast and bemoaning an endless barrage of electronic mail and voter registration and parking tickets and doctors who don’t know why you sporadically wake in the middle of the night to vomit, but it sounds like chronic stress. Would they get back on the boat, assessing that it wasn’t worth it after all to guarantee the future of such a weak-willed dilettante? 

Regardless of the cause, becoming a little unmoored has by now taken a recognizable shape. I become hyperfixated on some virtually useless commodity that symbolizes The Treat That Will Change Everything. Last week, an ASMR YouTube video was recommended to me which pledged 1 hour and 15 minutes of “Cozy Fall Pampering” with Trader Joe’s pumpkin-scented ephemera. I immediately began rationalizing why autumnal-themed foodstuffs were—obviously—my mental health’s missing link. How had I not seen it sooner? The answer was right in front of me! (Or, more accurately, across town at Trader Joe’s.) Eventually, I settled on a Thoreauvian compromise: the cabin. 

On the second night (after the internet was restored), we watched the 2024 erotic thriller Babygirl, a genre of film I generally refer to as a “sick f***” movie. (Used in a sentence: “That’s a movie for sick f***s!”) As far as kink plots go, it was actually fairly vanilla—an exploration of the popular fantasy that powerful, rich women secretly wish to be powerless and subjugated. The movie was ostensibly about consent, desire, and shame, but all I could focus on was what Nicole Kidman’s character, CEO Romy Mathis, was wearing. (Sexist!) For as long as I can remember, I’ve been reluctantly drawn to characters like hers, mistaking cautionary tales about caricatured strivers (and their color-coordinated schedules) for tutorials. You can put a woman in the woods, but you can’t make her stop fetishizing business formalwear.

The proto-Boss Babe, Ashley Olsen’s Jane Ryan. The moment she pulled back the double doors to reveal her closet in New York Minute (2004) was one of many Olsen-twin-facilitated formative memories. That daybook? Her note cards? Transcendent. 

Pinning hopes for success on hypercompetent navigation of a modern economy is typical of the so-called professional-managerial class, a term coined by Barbara and John Ehrenreich in 1977 (or, in political theory, the “petite bourgeoisie,” a phrase which for some reason always makes me think of dainty finger sandwiches). It’s “the fantasy that financial anxiety and stress are temporary states of being that can be overcome through hard work, competition and education,” as Catherine Liu writes. 

If Barbara were still alive, she might observe that the economic extremes plaguing the 2020s are merely the continuation of a process that began many years ago, when deindustrialization broadsided America’s working class. The rising sea levels of neoliberal policymaking have finally begun to meaningfully dampen the prospects of the professional-managerial class, who (maybe subconsciously) believed themselves to be more or less exempted from its worst offenses. Of course, she would probably tell us, that was never true. Because they, too, had to sell their labor, they were always “subject to the same pressures as other workers: deskilling, the weakening of their collective economic power, the degradation of the meaning of their work.” There is an implied lesson in this analysis that would suggest a change of course: The respites of self-help, hustle, and merit once assumed to reliably produce autonomy and fulfillment were a sleight of hand all along, which served only to “reproduc[e]… capitalist culture and class relations” and undermine any real chance at transformative solidarity. 

Naturally, most financial media prefers to avoid class analysis, instead framing this ennui in terms of generation or gender. This provides narrative cover for dismissing structural strain by assigning it to the unique psychology of young people (or men, or women), rather than a legitimate force that exists outside TikTok. 

Gen Z is, allegedly, rife with “financial nihilism” about the future. “Zoomers grew up with smartphones, the internet, and social media during difficult times like the 2008 economic crisis and Great Recession, and the subsequent Occupy Wall Street protest movement,” Fast Company offered last week in one unconvincing explanation. In this telling, it was not these crises themselves, but the crust of digital connectivity specific to Gen Z that shaped their preferences and disenchantments. “They’re disillusioned with traditional ways of doing things, which extends to how they invest and conduct their own finances,” the article explained. Back in January, Bloomberg warned that a “feminine” form of financial nihilism (read: find rich man) was ascendant. Over the summer, CNBC sympathized with “young speculators” so eager to “break out of the American caste system” that they had “embraced financial nihilism.”

The story has been exercised to the point of exhaustion by now. When there’s little hope that the traditional path will pan out as promised (student loans, unaffordable homes, wage stagnation, etc.), the metaphoric lottery ticket looks like a reasonable alternative. The scant proof of said nihilism is a stated interest in riskier investment behavior, like options trading or cryptocurrency or sports betting. (All products, it should be noted, with multibillion-dollar markets and marketing behind them.) Young women have given up on money and careers of their own in favor of mating up, the story goes; young men have given up altogether and turned to the slot machines of memecoins and DraftKings. The resultant impression is one of generational hopelessness and fatalism, a group so up to their eyeballs in trauma and trigger warnings that they’ve stopped trying en masse. But is it true?

An NBC poll conducted in August with Americans aged 18–29 found that young women and men had identical “top three” priorities in response to a question about personal definitions of success: Number one for both was “having a job or career you find fulfilling,” number two was “having enough money to do the things you want to do,” and in third place, “achieving financial independence,” ranking all three above things like spiritual fulfillment, community involvement, and family formation. Tellingly, this trend held true for presumably conservative young women, those who voted for Trump. These are not the priorities of people who have given up on their hopes of upward mobility, but those who are instead singularly focused on it.

Once back in Denver and on the hunt for something I couldn’t buy in the woods (overpriced caffeine), I walked past a pilates studio with a sandwich board propped up at its entrance that commanded passersby to GET OBSESSED. The ad featured a striking woman (SNL’s Ego Nwodim, it turns out), all glowy sinew and smolder, perched cherry-like atop a pilates reformer. Implausibly, she was wearing a sleek white blazer and matching stilettos. I paused in front of the sign, sustaining eye contact, waiting to feel something like cynicism or annoyance with the dated Sexy Corporate Empowerment trope. It felt like a relic of (pre-election) 2016, when peak modern womanhood was mostly tantamount to group exercise and Revolve suits.

Shipwrecked on the sidewalk, it was not cynicism I felt, but a confusing, wistful longing. It wasn’t that I missed the pre-pandemic years, per se—when I would take an hour-long fitness class at six in the morning, five days a week, before spending 10 hours in heels and hard pants—so much as I missed when such things sounded not only like reasonable ways to spend one’s time, but fun. Back then, ambition still felt clean and moral; its challenges seemed to be accruing to something meaningful.

My mind immediately flashed again to Kidman’s character in Babygirl, all low chignons and high-neck blouses (“Another serve,” my husband joked approvingly when she appeared on screen in ‘fit after impeccable ‘fit), and how competent and controlled she seemed before her proclivities—and all that lactose—derailed her to the point of taking tousled weekday couch naps next to open jars of peanut butter on the floor, the universal distress signal for Not Thriving. (When she appeared again behind her desk at the end of the film reassembled in dignified workwear, I was embarrassed to feel palpable relief.)

The presence of these women in my weekend—the fictional Romy Mathis, the real Ego Nwodin—seemed significant, somehow, like an inadvertent girlboss revivalism. They appeared to inhabit a different world entirely, one in which constant self-discipline and hypercompetence was not only still possible, but glamorous and effective. 

Such aspirational displays must be understood not as drivers of a culture that’s been subsumed and defined by its economic system, but as responses to it. Nostalgia is a potent force both individually and nationally; some imagined, simpler past with cheaper homes and Chainsmokers songs and fewer breaking news push notifications. Normally, the era most effectively wielded in American politics to prescribe cultural shifts is the 1950s. But what does it mean to privately indulge in nostalgia for the 2010s, a time that felt comparatively hopeful? What to make of the fact that, regardless of the lofty class analysis, I still feel better when I’m trying? 

For the professional-managerial aspirants, the 2010s were all about startups, self-help, and striving—a path that, by the following decade, was widely understood and mocked as an individualist dead end; the Ehrenreichs’ 1977 prediction seemingly coming true. But for all the talk of nihilism and hopelessness, the pilates class I could see through the windows was full.

The post Babygirl, Girlbosses, and Economic Nostalgia appeared first on Money with Katie.

“You know how people who come into money suddenly look better?” I texted my friend the other day as I breached the threshold of the grocery store’s automatic doors. “How does that happen? How do I hire someone to give me a glow-up?” The question had occurred to me on the silent car ride to the store after I caught an unflattering glimpse of myself in the rear-view mirror. I considered it further as I plucked a bunch of green onions from a wall of vegetables and plunged a damp handful into a produce bag. Her response blooped into our open chat, face up in the cart, almost immediately. “What do you mean?” Then another: “Do you have a certain celebrity in mind?”

I scanned my mental Rolodex for an emblematic case study as I pushed my way down the cereal aisle, then pulled over next to the granola. “I guess Taylor Frankie Paul?” I responded. The triple name in question, a troll-y momfluencer who became popular on TikTok for the sort of provocative yet vanilla dance videos that launched the entertainment careers of many a white woman since 2020, perfectly embodied the subtle metamorphosis in question. 

Paul was swept into mainstream fame last year thanks to the bewildering popularity of the Hulu reality series The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. (I have, of course, seen every episode.) Her physical transformation since then has not been dramatic—to be a TikTok It Girl, your starting point must be conventionally attractive—but it is noticeable, especially if you’re attuned to the way wealth slowly, visibly announces itself. Paul is a fan-favorite “character” in the Mormon Wives universe because she’s the only cast member whose personality doesn’t seem buried beneath layers of posturing and self-conscious image curation. (The series opens with police body-cam footage of an intoxicated Paul being arrested for fighting with her boyfriend.) She’s a flawed person, and she knows it, which makes for excellent television. It was just announced that she’ll be ABC’s next Bachelorette, the first time the leading lady has been sourced from outside the franchise.

The glow-up pattern typically goes something like this: Normal traits like dull skin, a bad fake tan, blocky eyebrows, and often long, harshly highlighted hair—what I can only describe as the suburban mall aesthetic of my adolescence, like Victoria’s Secret PINK sweatpants tucked into worn, chocolate brown Uggs—are refined into a glossy, glowy, and windswept look that telegraphs access to a vast and accommodating glam squad. Paul appeared earlier this week on Alex Cooper’s Call Her Daddy to discuss her casting as the Bachelorette; Cooper herself might be an even more illustrative case of “Regular Midwest Suburban Hot Turned Upper-Class Hot” after she clinched a multiyear, $60 million podcasting deal with Spotify in 2021. 

Most rich women in the public eye tend to adhere to this visual code: luscious, tastefully colored hair; a frozen forehead; eyes that, through cosmetic intervention or actual rest, always appear as though they’ve freshly awoken from a nap in a cryo chamber. (In last week’s newsletter, I included a subway ad for the editing app Facetune that instructed, menacingly, “Look like you had 8 hours of sleep.”) When taken to extremes, the look in question can appear surrealist—embalmed, even—but there’s a sweet spot before the fillers start to migrate that suggests life is as frictionless as one’s glassy skin. Despite my commitment to proselytizing the Gospel of the Hot Girl Hamster Wheel (that beauty labor is not only time- and money-intensive, but also a waste of both for most normal people), it was notable when these two women, almost exactly my age, gradually Animorphed on my screen as they became wealthier.

The Kardashians are towering totems on Glow-Up Easter Island, from which the “You’re not ugly, you’re just poor” meme originated. Even rich men reliably undergo a similar physical transformation, as many have noted about Jeff Bezos (Mr. Clean cosplay), Mark Zuckerberg (“hit with the Dominican ray”), and Elon Musk (hair plugs). 

By the time I found myself wheeling down the dairy aisle, I was pretty sure there was an underground, invitation-only industry of LooksMaxxing professionals activated via Bat-Signal once one accumulates enough money and prominence to score their recognition. My friend had a different theory. “I think these people slowly accumulate teams,” she hypothesized, “but it probably starts with a stylist, who then recommends a colorist, who might offer an aesthetician referral, and so on.” This sounded more complicated and slipshod than my Centralized Cabal theory, but the slow burn is probably more realistic. 

Still, the mechanics of this now-predictable transformation continue to interest me: How does this begin, technically speaking? Is the newly flush-with-cash person assigned a Glow-Up Director by the Deep State to execute tactics from a fine-tuned, well-coiffed playbook? Are they consciously seeking out this particular aesthetic, or is the process less intentional? Could you walk into a salon in West Hollywood and ask for the Recently Viral Special? And maybe most importantly, what does it mean that wealth tends to physically manifest in such a uniform way; that “1%” is a distinct and differentiating aesthetic category as much as it is an income bracket?

That rich people look different than the rest of us is mostly accepted wisdom at this point. (One Reddit thread I found theorized the simple fact of never worrying about rent would make somebody look less haggard.) Even those who are wealthy outside the public eye tend to dress and carry themselves differently, a fascination inflamed by HBO’s Succession, which created a cottage industry of fashion freelancers producing an endless barrage of “old” vs. “new” money style write-ups in 2023. The popularity of brands like Loro Piana and The Row, synonymous with an understated expression of asset accumulation, crescendoed. 

As I shopped for the rest of my dinner, I continued to meditate on the shiny hair and glowing skin that wealth has unlocked for my contemporaries. Beauty has long been associated with goodness—and, as I wrote in Rich Girl Nation, capital. A straightforward example comes from the Tinder-simple moralizing in Disney movies: The evil witches are ugly; the pure princesses are beautiful. Despite my constant “class consciousness” rallying, the focus of my curiosity was not an academic inquiry into how such a transformation served to visually separate the rich from the hoi polloi or soften our perceptions of them, but where I could score some glow-up juice for myself. (I am but a simple, shallow observer who’s closer to her southern sorority girl roots than I like to let on most days.)

The finer points of the behavior, aesthetics, and proclivities of the rich have fascinated American writers for as long as the stratospheric class has existed. F. Scott Fitzgerald obsessed over the visual particulars of the wealthy in exquisite, literary detail at the height of their frivolity and excess during the 1920s. His scenes unfolded in the aftermath of the Great War (later rendered “the first” by its catastrophic sequel a couple decades later), a time which set the wheels of our favored American pastimes—economic dominance, consumerism, inequality—more decidedly into motion. Thanks to Prohibition, swaths of libertines were becoming wealthy, and quickly. Like the modern TikTok star-cum-celebrity, there was a grain of truth to the American dream of striking it rich.

Fitzgerald himself was, at least for a time, close to his subject. By 1925, when he published The Great Gatsby (the book celebrated its centennial in April), he reportedly earned an average of $24,000 per year, an income which catapulted him into the top 1 percent. (While the consumer price index was brand new then, having been developed in response to post-war inflation, one estimate said this would be equivalent to about $500,000 today—and with a far lower tax burden.) Back then, such an income could purchase a soccer team of servants. Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda had a “butler, chauffeur, yard man, cook, parlor maid and chamber maid,” plus “a laundress.” (The original glam squad?) He was infamously bad at managing money—at the time of his death in 1940, his estate was only worth around $35,000, or less than $1 million in today’s dollars.

Gatsby, for all its superficial glitz and glamor, also captured the era’s underlying moral rot, and carried with it an ominous warning of impending doom. Of Fitzgerald’s mindset while writing Gatsby, one history buff observed that he seemed to “have already foreseen the lasting consequences of America’s heady romance with capitalism and materialism.” His warning went unheeded. Just four years after the book was published, the Great Depression began. 

It’s hard not to feel as though we’re approaching a precipice of similar historic magnitude. The parallels are eerie and numerous, beginning with the 2020 global pandemic which mirrored the deadly 1918 global influenza, moving swiftly into the “Roaring Twenties”-style crypto bubble of the early 2020s. The racist moral panic du jour in the 1920s surrounded the influx of Italian immigrants, who were considered non-white and believed to have an ethnic predisposition to Doing Crimes. (Catholics were also viewed with suspicion and disdain, which means I would’ve been in double jeopardy.) In 1928, a year before the crash, the top 1% of households received 23.9% of all pretax income; the bottom 90% received 50.7%. As of 2022, we were approaching similarly barbaric levels of inequality: The top 1% received 20.7%; the bottom 90%, 53.2%. The polarization of the early twentieth century is typically characterized as “urban” vs. “rural”; today, that fight goes by a different name: “left” vs. “right.” Then, as now, the true distinction was capital vs. everyone else.

My politics are primarily concerned with economic justice, built on the foundation that people’s behavior and beliefs are inherently malleable and shaped to a large degree by their material circumstances—not unlike the bleached, mall-going Every Girl transformed by new media money into a millionaire with honeyed hair and tasteful cosmetic work, or the low-income worker turned virulent bigot in the face of decades of offshoring and wage stagnation. It’s easier to dismiss fanatical claims about the devious immigrants and trans people stealing your jobs and houses when you already have both jobs and houses. (This theory’s most obvious logical gaps are wealthy Baby Boomer conservatives, who own the majority of our country’s wealth and houses, and low-income progressives, who own virtually none of it.) The relationship between one’s circumstances and political beliefs is far from perfectly linear or rational, but one thing is for sure: The ultra-rich, unlike the rest of us, have outstanding class solidarity, which regularly transcends the left-right political spectrum altogether. 

The 1920s-esque inequality we face now is anathema to social cohesion. It is a fundamentally unstable molecule posing a constant risk of nuclear meltdown, because humans are less homo economicus than homo socialis. Our interpretation of our socioeconomic standing is comparative and relative, not absolute. That’s why data purporting to show the median American is better off in real terms than they were 30 years ago is less supportive evidence of economic contentment than one might assume. What counts to homo socialis is how much further away the richest have floated on the upthrust of everyone else’s work. 

There are academic explanations for why severe inequality is toxic to the body economic—inefficient concentration of power over labor, the law of diminishing marginal returns to consumption, increasingly speculative investment behavior, breakdown of basic public services—but that omits what is perhaps the most damaging element, which is the poison that oxidizes in one’s gut when watching another individual spend $50 million on a Venetian wedding while workers in his warehouses file lawsuits over human rights abuses. That, it goes without saying, should be viscerally offensive to the basic morality of any person whose operating system has not been irredeemably corrupted by a steady stream of Grant Cardone videos. What would Fitzgerald have to say about how reality TV, billionaires, and President Reality TV Billionaire have accelerated this social breakdown? 

Historically, nations in a position this precarious swing right, and swing hard. Italians and Germans embraced fascism in the 1920s and 1930s after the war left them in various states of economic instability, social fragmentation, and wealth inequality, their disillusioned citizens grasping at nationalism for answers. But the US, protected by its geographic isolation and a lack of humiliating post-war reparations, avoided this fate, responding to its own crisis by shifting leftward. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal invested heavily in prosocial programs like Social Security, reformed the financial sector, and established labor rights with the Wagner Act. 

This isn’t because Americans were immune from flirting with fascism, but because American institutions responded differently. They (accurately) assigned blame for the country’s economic troubles to banks, monopolies, and wealth concentration, where charismatic leaders in Italy and Germany blamed Jews, Communists, and other minorities. In each case, solutions were devised according to these narratives about who bore responsibility. Where others crumbled under the toxic weight of hypernationalism, state repression, and militarization, the US embraced a racially stratified spate of social programs and public works. (It’s important not to overstate things: FDR’s democratic populism was still designed to rescue and preserve the basic structure of capitalism, making it, one could argue, an inherently conservative project.) Still, the last time a proto-class consciousness meaningfully took hold in the US, the country navigated away from a profound crisis that could’ve otherwise taken a much more violent and destructive turn. 

Fitzgerald published his cautionary tale on the eve of a national collapse. We are, again, at the edge. Inequality’s radioactive sludge has seeped into every part of our culture, from Hulu’s Daisy Buchanans to the acid bath of our politics. Our choice now isn’t between inequality and justice; it’s between justice and collapse. We can’t afford to choose wrong.

The post A Political Economy Theory of the Glow-Up appeared first on Money with Katie.

This state of affairs has created the rare bipartisan consensus that the US is tangled up in an unprecedentedly knotty housing crisis. It’s a situation that everyone from the libertarian Cato Institute to center-left pundits present as a classic supply-demand mismatch. Depending on your calculation method of choice, the US is allegedly short by anywhere from 1.5 million to 5.5 million housing units.

In housing parlance, a “shortage” can refer to either units themselves—for example, there are 10 families in this neighborhood and only seven houses—or it can refer to the inability of existing inventory to meet demand affordably. Maybe there are 10 families and 12 houses, but six of those houses have cold plunges and heated driveways and therefore cost more than most of those families can afford. Right now, the popular understanding of our national housing predicament applies the former interpretation. The data suggests the latter. 

A 2024 University of Kansas study found that between 2000 and 2020, housing production outpaced household growth by 3.3 million units. When I called Kirk McClure, one of the paper’s coauthors who’s been studying housing since the 1970s, he told me he had been skeptical of the prevailing narrative that there were too few homes, but “was convinced [he] must be wrong.” Originally, he and his research partner, Alex Schwartz, set out to map the shortage so they could study its causes. But a shortage wasn’t what they found. Of the 907 metropolitan and “micropolitan” areas they studied, only 23 demonstrated a lack of sufficient units. (McClure described rolling out these findings, which ran uncomfortably counter to the leading understanding of the problem, as “an uphill slog.”)

The real crux of the problem, McClure and Schwartz wrote, is “the mismatch between the distribution of incomes and the distribution of housing prices.” A tidbit in the Harvard Joint Center for Housing report seems to validate their view: In 2024, development of multifamily housing hit a four-decade high of 608,000 new units—but “much of the construction was at the upper end of the market.” 

Sufficient inventory or not, something clearly isn’t working. And because every market features an array of unique variables, it’s difficult to isolate cause and effect when comparing outcomes. The relatively lawless Houston, Texas, for instance, famously has no formal zoning laws, but it also boasts an expanse of more than 600 square miles with which to house its 2.4 million residents—more than 26 times as much land as Manhattan’s paltry 23 square miles for 1.6 million people. Because Manhattan houses 20x more people per square mile, contrasting the two cities’ housing results as a function of, say, their approaches to zoning is basically useless. Local labor markets, climate, and land itself are all stars in a constellation of factors that influences prices in any given zip code.

But one thing is certain: The crisis is national. In 1990, the median home cost less than 3x the median income in more than 70% of the largest metro areas. Today, there’s virtually nowhere that’s true.

There are a few leading theories for how we got here: First, there’s the narrative of chronic under-building that followed the financial mushroom cloud the American banking sector detonated over the world economy in 2008 (exacerbated by, apparently, a glut of unnecessary local ordinances and environmental regulations). Then, there’s the private equity firms and investment banks or, their shorthand, Blackstone. Finally, you’ve got the large millennial generation coming of age and trying to buy homes simultaneously. All of these stories are compelling, and all are, at least, half-true—but regardless of the explanation du jour, they all tend to aim the laser pointer at the same broad solution: compel the market to provide more houses. I’m a proponent of more building, but a narrow focus on constrained supply alone mistakes a symptom for the disease itself, leaving the underlying power dynamics and incentive structures unexamined. 

For one thing, McClure finds the fashionable perspective that zoning reform will increase supply dubious. He said it tends to move housing development around, rather than spawn more of it. “We will simply cause those rentals that would have been built in a largely multifamily area…to be dispersed more broadly across the markets, and some will find their ways into areas formerly zoned for single-family housing.” The housing industry is, he said, “a pretty well-oiled machine,” making development decisions based on vacancy rates. In other words, zoning has less influence on how much housing is built, and more on where housing is built. 

“There are benefits to be gained from [zoning reform],” he said, “but we’re not going to see a price effect, because we’re not going to build any more units.” While I’m hesitant to draw sweeping conclusions from Prince’s hometown, Minneapolis experimented with eliminating single-family zoning in 2019 and the results were modest—a net gain of 255 housing units in the following 2.5 years for a population of around 430,000 people. A 2023 Urban Institute study of 1,136 cities found that loosening restrictions was associated with a 0.8% increase in housing supply within three to nine years, and predominantly “for the units at the higher end of the rent price distribution.” (“We find no statistically significant evidence that additional lower-cost units became available or became less expensive in the years following reforms,” the authors wrote.) It’s easy to miss what the zoning debate takes for granted: that more inventory of any kind is the straightforward solution, and all that’s left to do is thumb-wrestle about the best way to make the market provide it. 

Housing occupies a unique lane in our economy. It’s the only commodity that is both necessary to sustain life and, simultaneously, a speculative asset expected to make its owner rich. In the US, it also happens to be unusually illustrative of the way our cultural norms impact our ability to assess solutions clearly. The existing emphasis on increasing supply conceals a critical paradox. Jerusalem Demsas summarized it perfectly:

At the core of American housing policy is a secret hiding in plain sight: Homeownership works for some because it cannot work for all. If we want to make housing affordable for everyone, then it needs to be cheap and widely available. And if we want that housing to act as a wealth-building vehicle, home values have to increase significantly over time. How do we ensure that housing is both appreciating in value for homeowners but cheap enough for all would-be homeowners to buy in? We can’t.

As long as policymakers, buoyed by a homeownership-obsessed electorate who vote accordingly, are unwilling to confront this fundamental tension, we’ll be limited to affordability solutions that must teeter along an impossible tightrope. 

The supply-side critique—which chiefly targets development obstructionists like municipal governments staffed by climate-obsessed liberal scolds and “NIMBYs,” or existing homeowners who don’t want their property values to decline—argues that removing such obstacles will unleash a wave of building, thereby solving our affordability crisis. But setting aside any evidence to the contrary and assuming that the evaporation of city codes and rich ex-hippies’ grievances would have the intended effect, play that scenario out: The moment it begins working too well—when enough homes are built to achieve the purported goal of a meaningful slide in prices—you’re faced with the opposite crisis, a swath of middle-class homeowners whose primary source of wealth is losing value every year. (This will be especially relevant for those who almost certainly overpaid after 2021 and would be treading upstream for years if they ended up underwater on their mortgages.)

Rich San Franciscans with “IN THIS HOUSE WE BELIEVE” yard signs are the typical NIMBY avatar—rarely a sympathetic group for either political party. But this is hardly representative of the average American homeowner. Homeowners as a class are significantly wealthier than renters (as the National Association of Realtors loves to remind us), but it’s unfair to depict the group as a monolith that’s perennially squatted in the empty lot next door, elbows splayed from a defensive crouch, boxing out construction for a few extra points of appreciation. Nearly a quarter of all homeowners are cost-burdened like the renters, spending more than 30% of their income on their mortgage, taxes, and insurance. Because of the very incentives Demsas describes, US culture and policymaking alike have, for decades, marshaled generations of people—most of whom are not Bay Area-based B2B software company founders—onto a one-way street where each mortgage payment supposedly represented another paver on the yellow brick road to guaranteed long-term stability in an unstable system. When home equity is excluded, the median net worth in the US is more than halved.

It’s a Catch-22: If you produce only a moderate amount, prices don’t soften enough to make housing meaningfully more affordable for prospective buyers, and those who already own capital are more likely to see (and act on) an investment opportunity. If you somehow manage to convince private-market developers to create “extreme supply”—enough to dwarf demand and substantially impact affordability—you risk trapping existing owners in mortgages that are now larger than the values of their homes in a country where most working people’s largest asset is—you guessed it—their home.

Ignoring the conflicts of interest that decades of US policymaking have created makes pushing for more supply (let alone the right type of supply) an eternally Sisyphean task; a boulder we’re doomed to shoulder up the mountainside forever while quibbling over sidewalk ordinances and praying we can strike the exact right balance to avoid tipping either group into peril. 

So if there isn’t a true “shortage,” why are houses so expensiveright now? Since just 2019, home values have jumped by 60%. To put this into terms your average Zillow aficionado can immediately appreciate, a home that cost $200,000 six years ago would now list for $320,000. The sharpest increase—a 38% jump from a median sale price of $317,100 in Q2 2020 to $437,700 just two years later—maps closely with the pandemic-era quantitative easing. At the risk of violating the Yoda-like rule of armchair analysis that “causation does not correlation equal,” during the same period, the M2 money supply surged by about 38% as well, from around $16 trillion to $22 trillion. 

The relationship between monetary policy and asset prices is more complex than this coincidence might suggest, but to ignore its role outright in favor of overweighting alternate explanations—like the explosion of post-pandemic millennial household formation—seems like sidestepping the elephant in the formal living room. After all, the rate of household formation has been slowing for decades—growth in the period between 2010–2020 was the lowest ever recorded. 

Even a bunch of late bloomers synchronously exiting their parents’ basements stage left carries less plausible explanatory power than the reality that a flood of new money pooled in assets and pushed the prices of everything from stocks to two-bedroom condos to high-water marks. This will always be the unavoidable, if unfortunate, consequence of treating housing as an investment, stranding us to frantically search for other levers—like indirect, trickle-down manipulation of supply—to offset the fundamental truth of our incompatible goals. Lofty stock price growth that’s disconnected from any real increase in value is a problem, too, but with one key difference: We don’t host our dinner parties inside index funds. When stocks are overpriced and every dollar buys fewer shares, we can simply buy less until values rightsize—but you don’t stop needing somewhere to live just because rents rose by 20%. 

Because of the inherent tension in America’s housing incentive structure,maintaining this precarious balance will continue to require ongoing careful intervention. You may remember Vice President Harris’s campaign proposal of a new $40 billion tax credit for developers who build homes for first-time homebuyers. This subsidy, borrowing the logic of a public-private partnership, was intended to “facilitate” the construction of a stunning 3 million houses; the implication being, of course, that developers are currently insufficiently incentivized to build the type of housing we need. 

But developers, landlords, and real estate investors are already disproportionate beneficiaries of the US tax code—from the ability to deduct depreciation to the famed 1031 exchange, the perks of profiting from housing are plentiful. Even renter-focused benefits like housing vouchers end up accruing to owners: The $46 billion in emergency rental assistance funds of 2021 had the practical effect of a capital subsidy, with tenants acting as a mere pass-through entity for checks which first visited landlords on the journey to their final destination, the banks the landlords were paying. Hopefully it goes without saying: Preventing people from being evicted is necessary in any society that claims with a straight face to have a conscience. The issue is not that tenants were supported, but that in our current paradigm, “tenant support” essentially amounts to welfare for capital, which has the self-defeating net effect of making housing even more attractive to people who want to make money from it instead of live in it. 

Government intervention is an indispensable fixture of an arrangement in which something every human needs must also double as a speculative piggy bank. The visible hand which intermittently juices or softens demand uses four of its five fingers in service of underwriting the “line go up” philosophy of American home values, so it’s tempting to look at this state of affairs and deduce that government intervention writ large is the problem. The better question is not about “how much” government we want, but which goal and whose interests do we want that government to serve, and how directly?

Historically, housing in the US has been the primary way regular people could build equity as a byproduct of living their lives. Rather than designing a system in which shelter was treated as a public good and the path to building equity was instead linked to, say, productive labor—in which work would directly generate ownership in the economy over time—we tied equity for the masses to the ownership of unproductive land and the deteriorating structures we build on it. 

At this point, the reality that the median home costs something like “five times median income” is as much a commentary on income as it is on homes. Or, as McClure told me: “We have too many people whose incomes do not permit them to enter the market, even though the units are there.” Understanding the dynamics that are creating the outcomes we don’t want is necessary for resolving them, because right now, “The belief that we have a shortage is causing people to change policies, and not for the better.” Looking for solutions to affordable housing without addressing or even acknowledging underlying trends like class dynamics, income disparity, and the conflicting simultaneous goals of US housing policy means we will never cure this disease, only continue to poorly manage it.

The post America’s Housing Paradox, Hiding in Plain Sight appeared first on Money with Katie.

I love being lied to by beautiful, rich women on the internet. Not just any influencer will do—my preferred shared hallucination is the business influencer, over whose sprawling imperial colonies the digital sun never sets. Recently, I’ve taken to watching a woman who I’m pretty sure is a scammer; one of those “coaches coaching coaches” types who sells a course about sales in a digital ouroboros of grift that fascinates me. (I once heard the tendency to become intrigued by things you find distasteful described as “oppositional curiosity.” It’s always nice to receive a new diagnosis.) 

She often delivers her sales sermons while cocooned in her car’s crimson leather interior, taut forehead gleaming in the Miami midmorning sun, tanned boobs hoisted chin-level by the scubasuit-like material of an athleisure corset. She almost always appears to be coming from or going to the gym, but while adorned with about $20,000 worth of jewelry. In every video, she proffers pearls of wisdom about “closing” or “objections.” I sit entranced, typically on the foot of my unmade bed or slumped over midafternoon at my desk, mouth agape, as I patiently receive her instructions for business-oriented manipulation. She is, I learned from one video, freshly 24. 

The post Selling Sales appeared first on Money with Katie.

For a few hours on the Fourth of July, I did the most patriotic thing I could imagine: joining local Safeway workers on the picket line as they continued a sweaty, weeks-long strike to protest unfair labor practices. The company had been using illegal bargaining tactics (“surveilling, threatening”) during contract negotiations, and the union—UFCW Local 7, which represents more than 23,000 food and agriculture workers in Colorado and Wyoming—was determined to force better behavior.

The first picket lines germinated at a handful of Colorado stores on June 15, mushrooming to new locations with each passing day. By July, workers at more than 45 stores were on strike, some picketing all night. The company had to import expensive contract labor (“scabs”) from other states to keep shelves stocked. 

When I pulled up to the first store, situated across the street from a Porsche dealership and dental implant center, the parking lot looked unusually barren. As I got closer, I noticed the front windows had been boarded. I approached a cluster of people standing next to the sliding doors with lettered signs hanging around their necks. “They just came and shut this one down,” a young gas station attendant named Christopher told me, “but we’re holding the line.” Beside him stood a longtime cashier named Velma. Together, they told me what was at stake: The company was considering halving the pensions for the 30- and 40-year store veterans, removing a guarantee that part-time workers would get to work for at least 20 hours per week, and, worst of all, cutting healthcare. Their frustration was palpable. So was their loyalty. “My mom’s got 46 years at her store,” Christopher noted proudly.

The temporary closure of the first store represented a union win, sending a message in the only language corporations understand: loss of revenue. I moved on to the next location, a much livelier, active strike with dozens of picketers packed densely across the store’s sun-bleached expanse. Some customers who walked past sheepishly averted their eyes (“Sorry, guys, there’s a sale on soda”); others read the signs (“PLEASE DO NOT PATRONIZE SAFEWAY”) and ceremoniously announced, to whoops and cheers, their decision to shop elsewhere in solidarity. A much smaller percentage, bewilderingly, antagonized with expletives and middle fingers—one patron, presumably intoxicated from holiday festivities, stumbled toward his car and then wheeled around and began shouting incoherently. I only picked up a few words from across the parking lot: something about work ethic, handouts, and “striving.”

After about an hour, I met Anthony, a middle-aged man with a wide grin who started working at Safeway before the pandemic introduced us to the concept of “an essential worker.” When I asked him the same question I had posed to Christopher and Velma, he reiterated their concerns and shared his own—how quickly food prices had been rising for his customers, who he felt responsible for protecting. “In just the last few years, the prices have jumped like crazy,” he said, adding quickly, as if to make it clear employee greed wasn’t to blame, “and we haven’t seen a dollar of that.” 

A receipt tracker compared 2022 Safeway receipts to 2019 receipts for the same items and found the company’s prices rose a stunning 76%, outpacing overall food inflation nearly sixfold. Founded in 1915 and commandeered by the private equity firm Cerberus since 2006, Safeway’s recent history is checkered with failed mergers, delayed IPOs, and—as anyone who’s shopped there can attest—staggeringly high prices. (They boast 27% gross margins, compared to Kroger’s 22% and Costco’s 13%.)

After decades of mergers and acquisitions, the US grocery industry—which employs around 2.6 million Americans—is an oligopoly. Safeway, one of 22 chains owned by parent company Albertsons, is a portrait-in-miniature of this trend. In coverage of the proposed 2022 Kroger-Albertsons merger, antitrust journalist Matt Stoller wrote, “There are already 30% fewer grocery stores than a few decades ago and most major metropolitan areas…are heavily concentrated among just a handful of grocery chains. That means large chains not only secure better prices for goods than their smaller counterparts, but can also increase prices faster than costs, contributing to inflation.” At the end of last year, the FTC blocked the Kroger-Albertsons merger in a rare antitrust coup, taking the position that the two grocery behemoths needed to “continue to compete for workers through higher wages, better benefits, and improved working conditions.”

A mutating syndicate of private equity firms still owns large swaths of the now-publicly traded Safeway, with Cerberus at the head (fittingly, “Cerberus” in Greek mythology is the three-headed dog that guards the gates of hell). Over their uncharacteristically long tenure, they executed the standard-issue PE playbook: selling the company’s real estate for an infusion of cash just to lease it all back, assessing onerous management fees, and, of course, saddling the stores with the billions in debt necessary to grease the wheels of High Finance. As is customary, the firm used Safeway’s assets as collateral to borrow the money they needed to buy it, after which they could use the grocer’s operating cash flow to pay the interest on the debt. Between 2013 and 2018 alone, Cerberus reportedly charged $350 million in (debt-financed) fees. As The Onion so eloquently put it:

The post When We Fight, We Win appeared first on Money with Katie.

The surgeon general’s pop-up shop, Robert Iger’s face

Discount Etsy agitprop, Bugles’ take on race

Female Colonel Sanders, easy answers, civil war

The whole world at your fingertips, the ocean at your door

The live-action Lion King, the Pepsi Halftime Show

Twenty-thousand years of this, seven more* to go

Carpool Karaoke, Steve Aoki, Logan Paul

A gift shop at the gun range, a mass shooting at the mall

—That Funny Feeling (2021)

A meme that somehow only ever becomes more true.

There are lies, damn lies, and US officials making Powerpoint presentations to the United Nations Security Council.

The post That Funny Feeling appeared first on Money with Katie.

Every once in a while, a series of mundane events accumulates to produce a moment of out-of-body, blistering clarity. “Clarity” is not a mental state I’ve experienced much recently, but on my last day in California, it arrived unannounced while I idled in a Safeway parking lot.

Earlier that morning, I had been speaking with the moving team’s foreman in our cardboard-filled kitchen. “How much do you think they’re asking for this house?” he wondered aloud, referring to my out-of-state landlord’s decision to sell. I told him it was a low seven-figure sum that still seemed a little high to me, but what did I know? 

“I went through a nasty divorce 11 years ago,” he volunteered, “and let my wife keep the house.” I nodded silently, unsure where this was headed. “Then I bought a six-bedroom foreclosure from the bank for $187,000. I put $100,000 down. My monthly payment is only $2,300.”

Despite having spent enough time dicking around with mortgage calculators to realize immediately this math was nonsensical (a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage in 2014 averaged about 4%, which would put payments on an $87,000 loan at around $600), I decided against pursuing a new line of questioning. 2014 saw the lowest foreclosure rates since 2006, I learned later, after the Great Financial Crisis had finally finished flushing around 10 million people out of their homes. Without prompting, he added, “I did the eviction myself,” with a note of what sounded like pride.

A few hours later, the Berkshire Hathaway real estate agent arrived in a silver Maserati for a move-out walkthrough. After I finished showing him where the carpet had worn thin and which drawers in the kitchen frequently jammed, we stood in the driveway talking about a prospective buyer eager to tour the house later that day. 

The financial mood in the US ever since the phrase “mortgage-backed security” was uttered.

The post Scenes From an Empire in Denial appeared first on Money with Katie.

There are a few notable examples of overlap between traditional personal finance advice and economic justice movements. Take, for example, last Friday’s “Economic Blackout,” organized by a group called The People’s Union. The Blackout challenged Americans to avoid shopping at megacorporations like Target or Amazon for a single day (Friday, February 28), an idea which Newsweek dubbed “a potent message” about “consumer power” and “corporate accountability.” This sort of message—stop shopping—is right at home in personal finance canon, particularly among the FI/RE faction of the industry. This isn’t frugality pitched as boring, lame self-restriction—it’s frugality as revolution. The boycott was covered by national publications including NPR, Fast Company, USA Today, AP News, Forbes, and Time, all of which awkwardly danced around a central question: Does a 24-hour spending boycott…matter? 

The founder of The People’s Union, John Schwarz, expressed his beliefs during an Instagram Live Thursday night that seemed to send mixed political signals: He mentioned an interest in “eliminating federal income taxes” (a Trumpian fixation), “capping profits for corporations” (appeals to both the populist right and the Bernie left), and “promoting equality for all” in response to Target rolling back DEI policies (scans as liberal). This lack of coherence isn’t necessarily a bad thing: Part of what a good class analysis should emphasize is that a working Republican and working Democrat have far more in common with one another than the billionaires who lead their respective parties.

Did the one-day boycott teach Target a lesson? The short answer is probably “no,” but the long answer is more complicated and worthwhile. An effort like this could’ve cultivated a sense of solidarity, or demonstrated the scope of opposition to the hegemony of corporate interests. (The group’s website outlined a flurry of more targeted boycotts to come, indicating this one-day abstention was merely a warning shot.) But within two days, the movement’s focus was fraying, as Schwarz’s checkered past and GoFundMe page came under scrutiny. Our willingness to curb consumption or engage in political action is fragile enough—scandals don’t help. 

A History of Domestic Work and Worker Organizing.

That’ll show they/them.

Business Insider.

The post What Will Make Economic Boycotts Work Again? appeared first on Money with Katie.