Cole Maritz

Very good op-ed: "How Can America Be So Miserable When It’s So Rich?" @DavidAFrench gives 2 reasons: (1) scarce goods like land in desirable neighborhoods and NFL game tickets and (2) positional goods - there is always someone who sits in the front of the plane and someone who gets on last. As wealth rises, demand for scarce and positional goods increases, and businesses focus more heavily on serving that demand. Seating on Southwest Airlines was originally based on when you arrived. Then they created one premium tier. Now every seat has a distinct price. This evolution went from no positioning to near perfect positioning. Most people can afford many everyday comforts, like a large TV or meal delivery, so competition for scarce and status-linked goods intensifies. That dynamic can leave people outside the top wealth tier feeling worse off, even as their material standard of living improves. "No one is the clear villain in this story, and that’s one thing that makes the problem difficult to solve. We can’t target and defeat a specific set of bad actors who are immiserating America. Everyone is acting in rational self-interest." The growing discontent, almost impossible to reverse, drives the move towards populism as voters demand solutions to problems that can't be solved.

While social media is polarising, evidence suggests AI may nudge people towards the centre. This holds true of all studied models. Grok is more right-leaning than other models, but also has depolarising effects. By @jburnmurdoch.