America has two economies, and they’re diverging fast
Wow, this really blew my mind. The divergence is striking. Even without words, the article really explains the contemporary social situation in the US. It makes me wonder if remote-work, high COL in tech hubs, higher-ed cost exhaustion, tech burn-out, and the next recession will reconfigure things. Like the article states, the amount of unbalance here can't be sustainable though "the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" kind of idea should be kept front and center in this discussion. I am worried a massive wealth transfer coordinated by the government (e.g., single payer healthcare, UBI, basic housing guarantee, free college, etc.) will entrench this divergence. I wish we had let the last recession ('08) actual happen instead of cheap money for a decade allowing us to kick the can down the road. Intervention in the capital markets a la the past decade probably amplified this  phenomenon by pulling money from productive, structural capacity increases instead of to loss-leading Unicorns that wouldn't work in an economic system that accurately priced risk (i.e., higher interest rates). A company like Uber, though amazing to me and I use all the time, could only exist with cheap money for a decade. The idea of building a company by losing money for 10 years in order to build your client base is impossible if rates are high. That capital would have looked for more "real" investments that probably would have valued what these areas that lost GDP over the past decade could have provided.