Why are people so unhappy?

This is the key political question of the age.

Here’s an excerpt of an essay from the guy who ran Biden’s digital campaign in 2020 and 2024, and then Harris’s after Biden dropped out. The essay is in reaction to the 2024 DNC autopsy of the campaign, which per his description doesn’t really exist as any sort of coherent document. It’s more just a bunch of interviews that the DNC did with various people on the topic of what went wrong:

We traditionally think of “swings” as right-left or left-right—the kind of person who, say, votes for Romney one cycle and Obama the next. In reality, today’s swing voter is choosing between “change” and “burn it all down.” People just didn’t trust our ability to make a difference in their lives.

Which brings us to the elephant in the room: President Biden never should have run for re-election in the first place. Biden’s a good man; I think he woke up every day trying to do what was best and I think he genuinely believed he was the only one who could defeat Donald Trump. When he decided to run again—irrespective of the wisdom of that decision—my view was that the best thing to do was to throw everything we had at getting him re-elected. It was the only option to stop Trump. You may have even seen an email in my name making the case for Biden being the only person who could win.

Look, I am a political professional: I believed—and still believe—that once you’re on the team, you’re on the damn team. Even after the pivotal June 27, 2024 Biden-Trump debate, the campaign owed it to downballot candidates and grassroots donors to keep up our energy. Grassroots donors were keeping the lights on, and if Biden was staying in (which I believed he was going to), they needed to see the campaign rally like they were. Our only option was to fight to the death. Turns out, well, that’s what we did.

We all knew Biden’s age was his worst negative. At 81, he was the oldest sitting president. But his age was more than just a number, it mattered tactically. It was harder for him to communicate clearly, which eroded trust in his leadership. But the worst damage was to the perception that Biden could connect with people’s lives and could be trusted to deliver. Even at the beginning, focus groups showed clearly that the problem wasn’t that Biden was perceived to be senile—it was that he was perceived to be too old to understand what voters were going through. The perceptions around his age took away Biden’s reputational superpower: empathy, the thing that kept him in the Senate for thirty-six years, got him on the ticket in 2008, and made him president in 2020.

And unfortunately, the problem of Biden’s age also pre-loaded the “she’s not in it for you” perception that would dog Vice President Harris.

I saw the vice president rise to the occasion in all the obvious ways—and in ways people didn’t get to see. But in a country fervently pissed off at the status quo and with Biden’s numbers being what they were, anyone from the Biden administration would have lost.

Could Harris have rehabilitated the brand by distancing herself more from Biden? Perhaps there were ways she could have, but I doubt it would have changed the outcome. It was a quandary: If she had said ‘Joe Biden was wrong about [X] and I disagreed vehemently,’ the obvious journalistic followup would be: ‘Okay, so what did you do about it?’ Once we missed an early window on that distancing, anything late-breaking would have seemed political and phony.

It’s clear in retrospect that what Democrats needed for our damaged brand in 2024 was a primary in which a real, well-funded candidate running an economically populist campaign could have teed off against the Biden administration. Even that wouldn’t have been a sure bet. But “a primary” and “a one-week shotgun primary 107 days out from the election” are not the same. Once we were in it, we were always playing around the edges.

I have no interest in re-litigating The Thing, but I assume everyone can agree that probably the biggest problem Biden was always going to have was that he was the incumbent, in an absolutely horrible environment for incumbent political leaders all around the world. And the biggest reason Joe Biden Old was such a huge issue was precisely that it was a metaphor for the very widespread perception that the status quo is bad, and Biden’s whole 50-year political career was the ultimate symbol of the political status quo. The perception that the status quo is bad is even more powerful today, and or much better reasons than in 2024 of course. Still, beyond the particularities of the Trump disaster, we are stuck in a kind of general culture vibe that Things Suck Now.

My question is, why do people feel this way?

The standard answer tends to focus on issues of what’s called “affordability” but let’s critique that a little.

Twenty years ago, median household income in the US was $71,850, while in 2024 it was $83,730, and it’s probably a little higher than that right now (these are inflation-adjusted numbers). If you’re wondering the percentage difference is pretty similar at each quintile as well, so it’s not just the median.

The response to this kind of statistic tends to be, but certain critical goods are way more expensive than they used to be, specifically housing, higher education, and health care.

Housing: The median sales price of a house in the US (note the linked chart isn’t CPI adjusted) is slightly lower today than it was twenty years ago, inflation-adjusted. ($403K v. $407K). Yes 2006 was near the peak of a long run-up, but on the other hand twenty years is a long time for the real price of houses to remain essentially flat.

Higher education: This is the stunner. The average effective tuition paid by undergraduates to attend four-year public colleges and universities is drastically lower now than it was twenty years ago.

2006-2007: $4,030

2025-26: $2,300

Note: Effective tuition means sticker price minus institutional discounts and internal and external grants.

In fact public undergraduate tuition is cheaper now in real terms than it has been at any time in the past 60 years, as improbable as that statistic seems.

And that is merely inflation adjusted, without adjusting for changes in family income. When you do that, public undergraduate education in the US is radically less expensive than it’s been at almost any time since the boomers started going to college in the mid-1960s. (I’ll be publishing a piece soon with all the relevant data).

Health care: This one is harder to suss out, but the ACA didn’t exist 20 years ago, so it seems improbable that things have gotten measurably worse on this front, although it’s fair to say it was a horrible economic and social mess then and remains one today. (Health care as a percentage of GDP was 15.7% twenty years ago; it’s 18% today).

Looking beyond the affordability frame, the vast majority of objective measures of social well being are better now than in the past, often drastically so. The violent crime rate in the USA is literally half of what it was in 1990. Divorce rates and teenage pregnancy rates are way down. Life expectancy at birth is at an all-time high. Despite all the MAHA nonsense, most rates of chronic disease are much lower than they were a generation ago, and those that are higher, such as dementia rates, are a product of public health success: people are living long enough to die of diseases of extreme old age much more now than in the past.

Now all this comes with plenty of caveats, naturally. To mention some:

Median housing prices don’t capture the truly extreme prices in many of the most desirable markets, nor do they reflect current mortgage interest rates, which are a good deal higher than what people had gotten used to for a sustained period, when they were at historical lows.

Life expectancy in the US is a lot lower than it is in what I’ll charitably characterize as “other” developed countries. 35 years ago France and the US had the same life expectancy: France’s is now five years higher, and this is a typical trajectory.

Violent crime rates in the US are still much, much higher than they are in the rest of the developed world, despite the fact that they’re so much better than they were a generation ago.

Median household income figures don’t reflect both increasing wealth inequality, and especially increasing precarity, or at least the powerful perception of the latter. The “vibe” that you could lose everything tomorrow and there’s no social safety net to catch because socialism makes the baby Jesus cry is not just a vibe: for many people, it’s a lived reality.

ETA: A big category I should have mentioned is that child care in the US is a total financial and social disaster. This is a massive and completely legitimate source of financial stress and unhappiness.

Exacerbating this is what I call “inflation distortion:” people really really hate high prices simply because they’re high. The simplest way to put this is that, for example, a restaurant meal that cost $20 when your income was one quarter of what it is today somehow felt less expensive than that meal today, even if it costs $70, and is therefore objectively cheaper. We see this effect constantly everywhere. This is in part because people ascribe high prices to the malevolence of the universe or that one trans volleyball player, while they ascribe their rising incomes to personal merit and virtue.

Relatedly, the hedonic treadmill and invidious comparison are also very real, and have reached levels that would probably have astounded even as cynical an observer as Thorstein Veblen, who invented the idea of conspicious consumption.

In regard to the latter, the internet in general and social media in particular are the obvious villains, and for all the wonders of the cyberworld, which are easy to underestimate now that we’ve gotten so used to them, the psychologically devastating effects of so much of that world are undeniable.

There’s much more to say about this, but for now I want to flag what seems like an incredibly important general phenomenon: The gap between objective measures of well-being and subjective measures of peoples’ perceptions of whether they personally and the world as a whole are better off than in the Good Old Days ™ is constantly growing. And the Trump presidency is merely the most spectacular example of the dire consequences of this trend.