Why Affordability and the Vibecession Are Real Economic Problems Mike Konczal Subscribe Sign in Why Affordability and the Vibecession Are Real Economic Problems There are many ways inflation makes people worse off even when real incomes recover, especially for essentials. Mike Konczal Feb 09, 2026 59 13 12 Share Affordability is a major concern among voters in practice. But is it a major concern in theory? This Substack sets up the economic fights for the year, subscribe to get ahead of them. Subscribe You’ve probably seen some version of Graphic 1 below, which shows real median household income from Census. After falling during the post-pandemic inflation surge, real incomes recovered. By 2024–2025, they had ended up higher than in 2019. This result holds across multiple ways of looking at this data, including hourly wage data. Yet consumer sentiment is stuck near historic lows, about as pessimistic as during the financial crisis and the depths of the Great Recession. These two facts coexist. And the politics of “affordability” has rushed into the gap between them, as politicians and advocates try to speak to people’s persistent anxiety about prices and living costs. But there has also been a subtle, yet real, pushback against this focus. That pushback usually starts from the observation that today’s affordability debate is inseparable from the 2021–2024 inflation episode. From there, two critiques follow. The first is a money-illusion story: people fail to recognize that their incomes rose alongside prices, so their distress reflects confusion rather than material harm. This argument often emphasizes that incomes at the bottom of the distribution rose faster than those at the top, producing a durable wage compression. And yet polling consistently finds that lower-income households report more dissatisfaction with inflation, not less. The second critique follows naturally. If what people really want is their old price level back, that is simply not something policymakers can deliver. Broad-based price declines tend to occur only in deep recessions, and even then only modestly. So it is said to be dangerous politics and bad economics to make affordability central. Doing so risks promising something impossible, or worse, flirting with economic collapse as a policy goal. Matthew Yglesias has made a version of this argument , affordability is “just high nominal wages” and “basically just anger at inflation,” as have others. This conversation echoes what you often hear about the so-called “vibecession.” The term was originally coined by the writer Kyla Scanlon in 2022 in a nuanced way, to describe self-reinforcing pessimism. Today, it’s more often weaponized to imply that consumer sentiment is untethered from material reality, a reflection of the circulating bad vibes. One could correctly say that these affordability problems existed in 2019 and are independent of the inflation wave. But we should take the bait. Over the past five years I’ve been hau

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