Vibenomics and the end of the venture capital lifestyle subsidy

Paul has already had some fun with the latest example of a conservative pundit rage-tweeting about the cost of various bougie luxuries. The failure to cherry-pick a sympathetic example of inflation is indeed deeply hilarious, but it reminded me of another point. It’s seemed to me for a while that upper-middle-class vibenomics seems largely about people being upset about losing the huge VC subsidy for delivery and livery service and having to pay something like market prices for them. You can see this tendency even in some more measured and thoughtful pieces about why people are much more negative about the economy then they were under much worse economic circumstances:

People are struggling with mortgage interest rates, housing shortages and pricey grocery bills. They’re also consuming to make their lives work: on expensive, hard-to-manage child care, health care and convenience spending — things like restaurants, travel, delivery services and on-demand help — which are necessary for balancing work and life demands. Even when those services are affordable, they are full of friction. That is a nice way of saying the consumer experience sucks. It is hard to schedule things, hard to get customer service, hard to judge the quality of what you are buying and hard to get amends when an experience goes bad. There is a reason industry analysts have reported that customer brand loyalty is low and customer rage is high.

Some of these complaints are valid, but not really responsive to the question of why consumer sentiment has become so radically disconnected from the strength of the economy — it’s not like child care was cheap or easy to find 5 or 10 years ago. But clearly a lot of professionals are simply taking the availability of delivery and car services for granted, while not actually wanting to pay what having an on-call army of servants costs. The complaints about customer service are also a reminder that a tight labor market is great for the working class, but upper-middle class professionals don’t necessarily get as much benefit, but might have to deal with the mild inconvenience of stores being short-staffed, restaurants charging more as the cost of labor goes up, etc. And the message the public is getting about the economy is mediated largely through upper-middle class professionals.

Anyway, while there’s nothing you can really do about conservatives whining about how Uncle Joe Brandon is the only reason a steak and lobster dinner is more expensive than Burger King, people making a good living on the broad left should be celebrating low unemployment even if it means paying a few extra bucks so that people providing valuable services can get paid. And it should do without saying that the political incentives of effectively telling presidents that they should take Larry Summers’s advice and throw millions of people out of work rather than risk inflation are very distinctly reactionary.