Rachel Dec in LA Review of Books: IN 2022, AS THE labor market thrived, a noticeable gap emerged between traditional economic indicators (which seemed good) and the lived experiences of Americans (which seemed not). Kyla Scanlon, a young and wildly popular economics commentator (with over 175,000 subscribers on TikTok) coined the term “vibecession” to define the phenomenon. Her newsletter on the topic blew up, and “vibecession” commentary has since permeated nearly all parts of the media ecosystem, with repeated usage in Bloomberg and The New York Times.
As of 2024, it seems we’re still in a vibecession. Despite positive news regarding the labor market, consumer confidence remains relatively low, even as inflation is slowing. As David Kelly, chief global strategist at J. P. Morgan Asset Management, recently wrote, “even if the economy is humming along because of the income and spending of the most affluent households, most families could still feel that they were languishing.” In this complex, unpredictable, and unequal postpandemic economy, do economic indicators still hold meaning for everyday Americans?
This is a question Kyla Scanlon seeks to answer in her debut book, In This Economy? How Money & Markets Really Work (2024). She sets out to explain most of the economic and financial systems of the United States, with a particular focus on the impact of the pandemic—and she accomplishes that task well. Among a wide range of topics, she manages to squeeze in explanations of classical economics, degrowth, the labor market, the housing market, the stock market, the bond market, cryptocurrencies, fiscal policy, monetary policy, and her signature “vibe economy” paradigm (which views popular feelings as “vibes” that shape consumer sentiment, which then influences economic outcomes).
Much like her explanatory TikToks, each section aims to highlight the “human” side of an issue—a welcome departure from mid-2000s economics texts like Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner’s Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (2005), which, due to their focus on empirical data and quantification, frequently overlook more humanistic explanatory models.
Yet even Scanlon peppers her explanations with an astonishing number of statistics and charts. The prose is breezy (“This is how we feel. This is vibes”), and her cheerful, bright voice brims with exclamation points (“There were so many things going on!”), creating a reading experience that is more late-night Twitter thread than Econ 101 homework. This approach breaks down the coldness and abstraction of economic analysis, an effect enhanced by Scanlon’s numerous references to mass media and literature. She quotes authors such as James Baldwin, Mary Gaitskill, and Toni Morrison, though citing Morrison’s musings on fascism seems rather strained in a section discussing the benefits of recessions. These gestures at humanizing her analysis are welcome, but they sometimes come at the cost of logical clarity. To bring a bit of levity to tough topics, Scanlon includes her own hand-drawn comics, which sometimes serve as unwieldy metaphorical illustration. One depicts how the Federal Reserve navigates markets via a sketch of a mountain, with rent and supply chain recovery shown as “disinflationary storm clouds,” and the labor market as a mountain goat (“something that the Fed needs to work with but is sort of in the way”), while falling snow is the stock and bond markets that could “lead to an avalanche and bury us all.”
The book aims to depict the field of economics both exhaustively and pointedly—and it partially succeeds…
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