Kyla Scanlon > Quotes

“Just as the value of money is a collective belief, the behavior of every market is determined by the collective decisions of millions of investors based on their perceptions of reality. Markets reflect the foibles (and triumphs!) of human behavior and decision-making.”
― Kyla Scanlon, In This Economy?: How Money & Markets Really Work

“Anthony Lee Zhang, a professor at the University of Chicago, once tweeted, “As resources get cheaper, we find progressively dumber uses of them.” Things like artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, 3D printing, virtual reality, and potential innovations like quantum computing will of course change how we interact with the world. But we have gotten very good at taking raw materials out of the earth and making things out of them. However, the cost of repairing things (labor) has skyrocketed, hence the “I’ll buy cheap things because they’re cheap rather than repairing those I already have” mindset.”
― Kyla Scanlon, In This Economy?: How Money & Markets Really Work

“Fascism talks ideology, but it is really just marketing—marketing for power. It is recognizable by its need to purge, by the strategies it uses to purge, and by its terror of truly democratic agendas. It is recognizable by its determination to convert all public services to private entrepreneurship, all nonprofit organizations to profit-making ones—so that the narrow but protective chasm between governance and business disappears. It changes citizens into taxpayers—so individuals become angry at even the notion of the public good. It changes neighbors into consumers—so the measure of our value as humans is not our humanity or our compassion or our generosity but what we own. It changes parenting into panicking—so that we vote against the interests of our own children; against their health care, their education, their safety from weapons. And in effecting these changes it produces the perfect capitalist, one who is willing to kill a human being for a product (a pair of sneakers, a jacket, a car) or kill generations for control of products (oil, drugs, fruit, gold).”
― Kyla Scanlon, In This Economy?: How Money & Markets Really Work

“We are increasingly forgetting about our commonalities. Many people have explored the disintegration of communities that has come with suburbanization and social media-ization, but it’s becoming increasingly stark. The complexity scientist Peter Turchin explored this in his 2013 piece “The Strange Disappearance of Cooperation in America,” and so many parts of it still ring true: “What we have then, is a ‘strange disappearance’ of cooperation at all levels within the American society: from the neighborhood bowling leagues to the national-level economic and political institutes.” We are breaking away from one another. This is not a novel phenomenon—as the piece outlines, the same thing happened in ancient and medieval empires. However, polarization is bad; it leads to less progress and eventual stagnation.”
― Kyla Scanlon, In This Economy?: How Money & Markets Really Work

“Find out what makes you kinder, what opens you up and brings out the most loving, generous, and unafraid version of you—and go after those things as if nothing else matters. Because, actually, nothing else does.”
― Kyla Scanlon, In This Economy?: How Money & Markets Really Work

“The less you eat, drink and read books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save—the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor dust will devour—your capital. The less you are, the more you have; the less you express your own life, the greater is your alienated life—the greater is the store of your estranged being.”
― Kyla Scanlon, In This Economy?: How Money & Markets Really Work

“If a bottle of aged grape piss can sell for thousands of dollars, what other trillion dollar industries and worldviews are constructed on a foundation of mass preference falsification and status driven self-deception?”
― Kyla Scanlon, In This Economy?: How Money & Markets Really Work

“The way that we think about the economy is going to have to evolve. It probably can’t be based on Big Growth forever. As economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas wrote in 2022, “As trend GDP growth slows due to aging demographics and slower productivity gains, there may be more frequent periods of negative GDP growth without an increase in unemployment, making the distinction between increasing slack and declining activity more relevant than in the past.” (Author’s emphasis.)”
― Kyla Scanlon, In This Economy?: How Money & Markets Really Work

“Human minds are not elusive, ghostly inner things. They are seething, swirling oceans of prediction, continuously orchestrated by brain, body, and world. We should be careful what kinds of material, digital, and social worlds we build, because in building those worlds we are building our own minds too.”
― Kyla Scanlon, In This Economy?: How Money & Markets Really Work

“Workers who hold stock in a company have a stake in what they make and are more likely to feel invested in the company’s success. They aren’t working to make billions of dollars for five dudes in suits in a boardroom somewhere; rather, they are working to make money for themselves. This enables them to build wealth over time and creates a much more inclusive and equitable economy.”
― Kyla Scanlon, In This Economy?: How Money & Markets Really Work

“George Saunders wrote in Congratulations, by the Way: Some Thoughts on Kindness, “Find out what makes you kinder, what opens you up and brings out the most loving, generous, and unafraid version of you—and go after those things as if nothing else matters. Because, actually, nothing else does.”
― Kyla Scanlon, In This Economy?: How Money & Markets Really Work

“The writer and director Paul Auster touched on the complex nature of understanding others, underscoring the necessity of communication in his book The Invention of Solitude: Impossible, I realize, to enter another’s solitude. If it is true that we can ever come to know another human being, even to a small degree, it is only to the extent that he is willing to make himself known. A man will say: I am cold. Or else he will say nothing, and we will see him shivering. Either way, we will know that he is cold. But what of the man who says nothing and does not shiver? Where all is intractable, here all is hermetic and evasive, one can do no more than observe. But whether one can make sense of what he observes is another matter entirely. I do not want to presume anything.”
― Kyla Scanlon, In This Economy?: How Money & Markets Really Work

“Mankind must acquire two things which are at present increasingly disappearing: loving kindness and scientific impartiality. —Bertrand Russell”
― Kyla Scanlon, In This Economy?: How Money & Markets Really Work

“The Fed was established and signed into law by President Woodrow Wilson in 1913. (His wife, Edith Wilson, who was also the first woman to hold a driver’s license in Washington, D.C., probably played an outsized role. When Woodrow collapsed from a stroke in 1919, Edith Wilson took the helm of the ship, making decisions on behalf of the president and serving as his filter and access control point. She reviewed documents, worked with advisers, and went to meetings, acting as a pseudopresident in the day-to-day operations of the country. So it might seem as though it was just another group of dudes deciding the fate of the future, but perhaps the story is more complicated than that.)”
― Kyla Scanlon, In This Economy?: How Money & Markets Really Work

“Money is a tool, but it’s also a symbol. It’s sort of like the luxury wine sector, which is a trillion-dollar-a-year industry even though many people can’t taste the difference between low- and high-quality, cheap and expensive, red and white wines. As Samuel Hammond, a senior economist at the Foundation for American Innovation, tweeted, “Wine seems to just be a well-studied microcosm of how human beliefs and desires work more generally. Namely, that they’re socially mediated, easily falsified, unconsciously influenced by cues of status and distinction, and relatively impervious to rational self-reflection.”
― Kyla Scanlon, In This Economy?: How Money & Markets Really Work

“I know the last few years of economic news have been… disorienting. Reality feels almost like a dream state. That’s because the algorithms controlling our news feeds reward alarmism over objectivity, and the Fed—and all other central banks, for that matter—purposefully speaks in vague, wordy language—known as Fedspeak, defined by the economist Alan Blinder as “a turgid dialect of English”—in an attempt to stop the markets from overreacting, and with the unfortunate side effect of confusing everyone.”
― Kyla Scanlon, In This Economy?: How Money & Markets Really Work

“Barbara Alice Mann of the University of Toledo wrote, “Westerners are fond of the saying ‘Life isn’t fair.’ Then, they end in snide triumph: ‘So get used to it!’ What a cruel, sadistic notion to revel in!”
― Kyla Scanlon, In This Economy?: How Money & Markets Really Work

“What the heck, right? Expectations manifest reality! And before you ask, “Isn’t this book about economics, not astrology?,” let’s just say that economics and astrology have more in common than not.”
― Kyla Scanlon, In This Economy?: How Money & Markets Really Work

“Like yes, your toaster is theoretically worth $10 billion until it’s time to sell it—and then it isn’t.”
― Kyla Scanlon, In This Economy?: How Money & Markets Really Work

“What got less coverage was that, adjusted for inflation, egg prices were actually lower in 2022 than they had been in 2015. Prices peaked in December 2022, with a dozen eggs selling for around $5 on average. Egg supply and prices were already recovering in early 2023. Producer prices, the prices farmers charge grocery stores, began to fall. The retail price, the price consumers pay in the grocery store, fell sharply (by $1 in one week in early January!) and continued to fall into 2023. The moral of the story is: We need more egg-laying chickens. The eggflation story is emblematic of what could happen to the rest of the economy. We are dependent on fragile systems that can break when stressed.”
― Kyla Scanlon, In This Economy?: How Money & Markets Really Work

“One could draw a line from Chesterton’s thoughts on dandelions to the way we tend to treat certain aspects of blue-collar work—whether through lower wages, longer working hours, or simply a societal nose sniff at the jobs that most need to be done. He continued: These are all methods of undervaluing the thing by comparison; for it is not familiarity but comparison that breeds contempt. And all such captious comparisons are ultimately based on the strange and staggering heresy that a human being has a right to dandelions; that in some extraordinary fashion we can demand the very pick of all the dandelions in the garden of Paradise; that we owe no thanks for them at all and need feel no wonder at them at all; and above all no wonder at being thought worthy to receive them.”
― Kyla Scanlon, In This Economy?: How Money & Markets Really Work

“I came across Kyla years ago, when she made short videos about the economy that were as funny as they were informative. It was instantly apparent that she had not only mastered the technical details of how the economic machine works; she could also explain it in a way that had so much empathy for the human side of this field. Her work exploded in 2022 when she coined the term “vibecession” to describe a situation in which the economy was technically okay but people still felt glum about it, and their vibes could become a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s a perfect example of understanding the gap between the chalkboard and the real world. Let me tell you: Roughly 0 percent of economic PhDs understand that gap, and exactly 0 percent can explain it like Kyla can.”
― Kyla Scanlon, In This Economy?: How Money & Markets Really Work

“Money—personal finance, investing, and economics—is typically taught as a math-based field, where you take the data and plug it into a formula and out pops an answer. Not just an answer, but the answer. Iron laws, like in physics. The problem when thinking like this is that in theory people should do what the economic laws tell them to do, but in reality they are impatient, misinformed, bad at math, hungry, irritable, short-sighted, guided by incentives, and a slew of other unavoidable characteristics that create a mile-wide gap between theory and reality. And that’s why I’m so excited about the book you’re holding.”
― Kyla Scanlon, In This Economy?: How Money & Markets Really Work

“When expectations, theory, and reality diverge, that’s when the vibes get really weird. Economic theory is the perfect example of this. There is a gap between what textbooks say is going to happen and what companies actually end up doing. Economics is known as the dismal science, but it really should be known as the dismal art. Most stock valuation models are an educated guess about the future; most economic theory is measurable, but on the basis of loose facts. As the English author Hilary Mantel wrote in a 2017 Guardian piece on facts, history, and truth, “Evidence is always partial. Facts are not truth, though they are part of it—information is not knowledge. And history is not the past—it is the method we have evolved of organising our ignorance of the past. It’s the record of what’s left on the record.”
― Kyla Scanlon, In This Economy?: How Money & Markets Really Work

“take experience and evidence and shape our expectations, which warps our perception and acts as a forcing function for interpretation—and that is how you feel (in the most simplistic sense possible). That feeds back into discourse and discussion, which also influences vibes and thus feelings. How you feel compounds into how everyone feels, and that is consumer sentiment. Of course, consumer sentiment is everything because consumer spending is such an important component of GDP growth.”
― Kyla Scanlon, In This Economy?: How Money & Markets Really Work

“There’s a short memoir called The Crane Wife by C. J. Hauser. Hauser had recently broken off an engagement and headed to Texas to study whooping cranes for a novel. This is what she says: Here is what I learned once I began studying whooping cranes: only a small part of studying them has anything to do with the birds. Instead we counted berries. Counted crabs. Measured water salinity. Stood in the mud. Measured the speed of the wind. It turns out, if you want to save a species, you don’t spend your time staring at the bird you want to save. You look at the things it relies on to live instead. You ask if there is enough to eat and drink. You ask if there is a safe place to sleep. Is there enough here to survive? (Author’s emphasis.)”
― Kyla Scanlon, In This Economy?: How Money & Markets Really Work

“There are a lot of examples of central banks losing their independence, as political interference begins to influence monetary policy. “In Turkey, central bank independence is now an endangered species,” political scientists writing in Foreign Policy warned in 2022. As of the time of writing of this book, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has fired three bank governors who disagreed with his economic agenda, packing the bench with loyalists who enable his meddling. Despite surging inflation peaking at 85.5 percent in October 2022, Erdoğan pushed to lower interest rates dramatically, a puzzling move that defied economic orthodoxy. Naturally, this has raised concerns about the central bank’s ability to maintain price stability independently and do its job well.”
― Kyla Scanlon, In This Economy?: How Money & Markets Really Work

“At the most basic level, economics is the study of change: how to handle change and how to predict change.”
― Kyla Scanlon, In This Economy?: How Money & Markets Really Work

“We want to own things. We want to build things. Crypto provides tools to do that, but it might have lost its soul in the euphoria. Either way, owning the online (how do people who use the internet benefit from the upside of the internet, versus Big Tech capturing all the value?) will be a theme as we become increasingly embedded in the digital world, and crypto is an early iteration of a solution for what that could look like.”
― Kyla Scanlon, In This Economy?: How Money & Markets Really Work

“There should be no doubt by now that markets, economists, and pretty much everyone for the past generation has underrated the power/utility/capacity of fiscal policy, and overrated the power/utility/capacity of monetary policy.”
― Kyla Scanlon, In This Economy?: How Money & Markets Really Work