Keeping Up with the TikTok Joneses

Noah Smith has a pretty good essay this week on a question he and I both wonder about: why do Americans feel that the economy is bad when all the numbers say it is great? Perhaps, he suggests, it has to do with social media, which constantly shows us people who appear to be wealthier, happier, and having more fun than we are. 

Well, maybe. In a sense this comparative approach has to be true, because we take our idea of what life should be like from those we see. Given the vast range of human lives, how else could we do it? People have been comparing their wealth to those of others for as long as we have had possessions; anthropologists find that this is a big issue in tribes who own next to nothing by our standards. 

There is tons of sociology showing that comparative  wealth looms large in our self-understanding; one of my favorite examples was a study that found moving to a bigger house did not make people happier unless their new house was larger than those of their neighbors. Smith cites a study that concluded

controlling for an individual's own income, higher earnings of neighbors are associated with lower levels of self-reported happines.

My problem with all thes areguments is that I don't see what about this is new. One of the broad changes that has taken place in western society is that wealthy people have in many ways withdrawn from center stage. Now many of the rich live in gated communities where you and I will never set foot, but they used to build their houses on the busyest street in town, where everybody had to see them. They used to go around in gilded carriages. Or think about Hollywood in the 1930s, offering Depression-era America a constant diet of fabulous millionaires in their fabulous mansions.

In 1850, tens of thousands of people lived as servants in the houses of the rich, sleeping in bunk beds in dingy little rooms just yards away from the silken beds of their employers. Many years ago I read a novel about a black American woman who worked as a maid for a rich white family, dividing her time between their lovely clean house, with three lovely clean daughters, and the rough house where she lived with her working class husband and three rough, dirty sons. It made a huge impression on me but I just searched for it and couldn't find it; if anybody recognizes it, let me know.

Being poorer than others is in no way new. So the argument that this explains our current misery depends on finding some way that the comparison now hurts more. Here is how Smith tries to derive this result from social media:

First, all of those classic reference points tended to be people who were roughly similar to us in income — maybe a little higher, maybe a little lower, but usually not hugely different, and certainly not Becca Bloom types. Housing markets, job markets, and all kinds of other forces tend to sort us into relatively homogeneous social classes. The rich and the poor were always fairly removed from the middle class, both geographically and socially. 

But perhaps even more importantly — and this was a point that David Marx especially emphasized — we were able to explain the differences we saw. In 1995, if you knew a rich guy who owned a car dealership, you knew how he made his money. If you envied his big house and his nice car, you could tell yourself that he had those things because of hard work, natural ability, willingness to accept risk, and maybe luck. The “luck” part would rankle, but it was only one factor among many. And you knew that if you, too, opened a successful car dealership, you could have all of those same things.

But now consider looking at an upper-class social media influencer like the ones I cited above. It’s not immediately obvious what they do for work, or how they could afford all those nice things. Some of them have jobs or run businesses, but you don’t know what those are. Some might have inherited their wealth. Some of them make money only by showing off their lifestyles on social media!

Not only can you not explain the wealth you’re seeing on social media, but you probably don’t even think about explaining it. It’s just floating there, delocalized, in front of you — something that other people have that you don’t. Perhaps you make it your reference point by default, unconsciously and automatically, as if you’re looking at your sister’s house or your neighbor’s car.

I find this unconvincing. First, as I said, I do not believe that any human in a society we would call civilized is not aware that others are richer. Second, I am also skeptical of the argument that  the wealth of people on social media is mysterious. We have the internet! We can look people up and find out! Some years ago I saw a bit of a reality series called Crisley Knows Best, and after just a few minutes of watching them I offered the opinion that they had to be fraudsters. Which turned out to be true. (Donald Trump pardoned them.) So I am not impressed by the notion that mysterious wealth is throwing off our social radar.

So I don't know. Maybe it is social media; maybe it is a decline in belief in other things, like religion or a better future. Maybe people with fewer children just have more time to worry about it.

But I continue to think that all the awfulness of our politics is downstream from a widespread sense that life is terrible, and I keep wondering why that might be.