Kyla Scanlon 是一位经济学家，她以清晰易懂的经济解释而闻名，并因创造了“vibecession”一词而广受欢迎。她的新书《在这个经济中？金钱和市场如何运作》探讨了现代经济中的复杂性，并为 Gen Z 提供了一种新的视角，帮助他们理解经济理论。Scanlon 将“vibes”定义为“我们对经济的集体感受”，并认为情绪在经济中扮演着重要角色，这种观点超越了传统的消费者情绪理论，并考虑了数字时代算法的影响。

👨‍🏫 Kyla Scanlon 是一位经济学家，她以清晰易懂的经济解释而闻名，并因创造了“vibecession”一词而广受欢迎。她的新书《在这个经济中？金钱和市场如何运作》探讨了现代经济中的复杂性，并为 Gen Z 提供了一种新的视角，帮助他们理解经济理论。Scanlon 的著作旨在帮助非专业人士理解驱动当今经济复杂性的基本力量。她从最基本的概念入手，例如货币是如何运作的以及供求关系，并由此延伸到各种时事和理论，例如马克思主义、泰勒·斯威夫特门票如何体现企业的权力以及价格波动有时不仅仅是供求关系的结果、金本位制不再是一个好主意以及加密货币交易所 FTX 的崩溃。

📈 Scanlon 对“vibes”进行了深入研究，她将“vibes”定义为“我们对经济的集体感受”。这种情绪在经济中发挥作用的想法并不新鲜。经济学领域的一些读者可能会将“vibes”视为与消费者情绪或凯恩斯关于动物精神的概念相近的术语。然而，Scanlon 的概念比这些理论更深入。我认为，经济“vibes”可以被定义为数字时代中的集体感受。此前，几乎所有关于消费者情绪的经济理论都是在互联网出现之前形成的。直到现在，还没有人将这些框架更新到算法时代。当我和 Scanlon 谈论她如何将自己的理论与凯恩斯的理论进行比较时，她告诉我：“凯恩斯关注的是推动经济决策的基本心理力量，而‘vibecession’则是数据和情绪之间的脱节。”由于 Instagram 和 TikTok 等主要价值主张是情感操控的娱乐服务的出现，提供了大量数据，因此“vibes”感觉（哈哈！）对我来说是一个更大的概念。

💡 Scanlon 的著作提供了对当代经济的独特见解，它将经济理论与社会情绪和数字时代联系起来。她对“vibes”的分析揭示了在理解经济复杂性时，考虑人们的情绪和集体感受的重要性。她的著作为我们提供了一个新的视角，帮助我们理解经济如何运作以及我们如何应对不断变化的经济环境。

📊 Scanlon 的著作也强调了理解经济理论的重要性，尤其是对于年轻一代来说。在当今世界，经济问题与我们的日常生活息息相关，理解经济理论可以帮助我们更好地理解自身所处的环境，做出更明智的决策。

🚀 Scanlon 的著作为我们提供了新的视角，帮助我们理解经济如何运作，以及我们如何应对不断变化的经济环境。她对“vibes”的分析也提醒我们，在理解经济复杂性时，考虑人们的情绪和集体感受的重要性。

by Evan Armstrong in Napkin Math

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Kyla Scanlon is good at the internet. She is the rare economics commentator who has become popular not for having sensationalist takes, but for producing smart and accessible explainers that people under the age of 60 like. The 27-year-old Kentucky native, who coined the term “vibecession” in June 2022, has amassed 172,000 followers on X. She just published her first book, In This Economy?: How Money and Markets Really Work.

Scanlon isn’t just a popular economics commentator—she’s a helpful stand-in for anyone trying to understand how Gen Z views economic theory in the context of today’s markets. In case you have forgotten, things have been, like, kinda weird over the last decade. But this is economics revisited for a generation that was in elementary school during the 2008 financial crisis, and for whom the pandemic economy, and the resultant inflation, has commanded much of their adult experience. The America portrayed in most economics textbooks, one where if you work hard, you can afford a house and make a comfortable living, is largely gone. Instead, it is a stranger, more complicated place.

In This Economy is an attempt to help the layperson understand the underlying forces driving all this weirdness. It’s the kind of book you may give to a high schooler asking questions about the economy for the first time—not quite a textbook, not quite a theory proposal. Scanlon starts with the most fundamental concepts, such as how money works and supply and demand. From there she springboards into newsy items and theories as diverse as Marxism, how “Taylor Swift tickets show the influence of corporations and how sometimes price fluctuations are not just about supply and demand,” why the gold standard is no longer a good idea, and the collapse of the crypto exchange FTX. 

Where Scanlon is most inventive is in her serious study of “vibes,” which she defines as “our collective feelings about the economy.” The idea that emotions play a role in the economy isn’t new. My more economics-oriented readers could consider vibes as a term loosely adjacent to consumer sentiment or Keynes’s notion of the animal spirit.

Her concept has more depth than those theories. I would characterize economic vibes as collective feelings in the digital age. Almost all previous versions of economic theory around consumer sentiment have been formed in a pre-internet world. Until now, no one had updated those frameworks for the age of algorithms. When I emailed Scanlon about how she would compare her theory to Keynes's, she told me, “Keynes is around fundamentally psychological forces that drive economic decisions, whereas vibecession is a disconnect between data and sentiment.” Now that services like Instagram and TikTok—whose primary value proposition is entertaining emotional manipulation—provide such an abundance of data, vibes feel (ha!) like a bigger idea to me.

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