2025-11-30 21:17:00
2025年1月8日，塞内加尔圣路易斯的一个男孩正在往水桶里装水。这座沿海首都城市正因气候变化面临洪水风险。感恩节通常是人们开始感恩的时刻，多年来，数百亿人对此感到庆幸：他们生活在一个极端贫困现象显著减少的时代。从1990年到今天，以美国购买力计算，每天生活费不足3美元的极端贫困人口数量从23亿人减少到约8亿人，尽管全球人口几乎翻了一番。换句话说，过去35年中，平均每天有11.5万人摆脱了极端贫困。即使经历了金融危机、技术革命、战争和气候变化，甚至疫情，这种根本性的进步依然持续。这被视为人类历史上最伟大的成就之一。然而，现在这种趋势可能即将终结。这是Our World in Data网站创始人Max Roser最近一篇文章中的严峻结论。Roser预计未来五年，极端贫困人口将减少约4000万，但他指出，从2030年起，极端贫困人口数量预计会增加。如果这一预测成立，这将标志着人类在对抗极端贫困方面取得的重大成就的终结。但这并非因为过去几十年推动减贫的工具突然失效，而是恰恰因为这些工具的成功。
增长的失败
过去几十年令人惊叹的全球进步主要依赖于经济增长。在1990年代和2000年代，中国、印度、印度尼西亚、孟加拉国等快速发展的国家，数百万人摆脱了极端贫困，因为这些国家的经济以惊人的速度增长。由于当时大多数世界上最贫困的人口都生活在这些国家，他们得以在收入、基础设施、教育和医疗等方面实现爆炸式增长。然而，如今极端贫困人口主要集中在撒哈拉以南非洲以及脆弱和冲突频发的国家，这些地方几十年来经济增长缓慢、不稳定或停滞。这意味着，剩下的极端贫困区域正位于我们通常推动进步的引擎几乎无法运转的地方。马达加斯加就是Roser举出的例子：该国的人均GDP至今仍与1950年代相当，而人口却增长了700%。当经济不增长而人口却迅速增加时，形势变得严峻。更多孩子出生在极端贫困中，总人口中处于贫困状态的人数保持不变甚至上升。未来，世界人口增长主要集中在极端贫困国家，这将使问题更加复杂。再加上冲突，情况将更加难以解决。据世界银行估计，到2030年，全球极端贫困人口中将有近60%生活在受冲突影响的国家。一场内战可能摧毁一个十年的经济发展成果。气候冲击同样如此。当干旱、洪水或农作物歉收袭击一个本就生活在贫困边缘的地区时，数百万贫困人口可能在一夜之间重新陷入贫困。
拯救未来
Roser承认他的预测并非预言。如果改变增长模式——例如通过改善治理、减少冲突、增加投资、使用廉价清洁能源，甚至大幅扩大移民机会——这些预测也会随之改变。极端贫困的未来取决于那些最贫困人口居住的国家是否最终能够开始增长。维持这一进步将更加困难，但我们不应将“困难”误解为“无望”。过去35年的成就看似奇迹，但它们是特定选择、投资和改革的结果，帮助数十亿人改善了生活。现在面临的挑战是将这种成功扩展到那些被遗忘的地区。如果我们能做到这一点，对抗极端贫困的进展时代就不必终结。如果我们做不到，那么这次感恩节可能就是我们最后一次能够自信地称全球贫困数字为“祝福”的时刻。本文最初发表于《未来完美》（Future Perfect）通讯，点击此处订阅！
Thanksgiving is traditionally a good time to start counting your blessings. And for years, hundreds of millions of people have had this to be thankful for: they live in a time that has made historic progress against the scourge of extreme poverty.
Between 1990 and today, the number of people living in extreme poverty — meaning on the equivalent of $3 or less per day in US purchasing power — fell from 2.3 billion to around 800 million, even as the global population nearly doubled. To put it another way, each day over the past 35 years, an average of 115,000 people escaped from extreme poverty. Through financial recessions and technological revolutions, through wars and climate change, even through pandemics, this fundamental progress continued. It was the ultimate good news story.
And now it may be ending.
That’s the dire conclusion of a recent post by Max Roser, founder of the website Our World in Data. While Roser projects that the number of people in extreme poverty will decline by about 40 million over the next five years, he writes that “after 2030, the number of extremely poor people is expected to increase.”
If that projection holds, it would mark the end of one of humanity’s greatest accomplishments. And it wouldn’t be because the tools that worked for decades mysteriously stopped working. It would, in a way, be precisely because of the success of those tools.
The last few decades of astonishing global progress were propelled above all by growth.
In the 1990s and 2000s, hundreds of millions of people in China, India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, and other rapidly developing countries rose above the extreme poverty line because their economies were growing at extraordinary speed. And because most of the planet’s poorest people lived in these countries at that time, they were able to experience explosive gains in income, infrastructure, education, and health.
Today, however, the majority of people living in extreme poverty are concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa and in fragile and conflict-affected states — places where economic growth has been weak, volatile, or nonexistent for decades. This means the remaining pockets of extreme poverty are concentrated in places where our usual engines of progress barely turn over at all.
Madagascar — where my Vox colleague Benji Jones just returned from — is Roser’s example of a country stuck in this trap: GDP per capita today is roughly what it was in the 1950s, even as its population has grown by 700 percent.
When an economy doesn’t grow but its population does, the math is brutal. More children are born into extreme poverty, and the total number of people living in deprivation stays flat or rises. And the problem will become more challenging in the future, as much of the world’s population growth is projected to be in countries mired in extreme poverty.
Layer on conflict and the situation becomes even more intractable. By 2030, the World Bank estimates that nearly 60 percent of the world’s extreme poor will live in conflict-affected economies. A civil war can wipe out a decade of economic progress. Climate shocks can do the same. When drought, flooding, or crop failure hits a region where people already live one bad break away from destitution, millions can fall back below the poverty line overnight.
Roser acknowledges that his projections are not prophecy. Change the growth pattern — through better governance, fewer conflicts, more investment, cheap clean energy, or even dramatically expanded migration opportunities — and the projections change with them. The future of extreme poverty depends on whether the countries where the poorest people live can finally begin to grow.
Keeping this progress going will be harder, but we shouldn’t mistake “harder” for “hopeless.” The gains of the last 35 years might feel like a miracle, but they were the result of specific choices, investments, and reforms that helped billions of people build better lives.
The challenge now is to extend that success to the places that were left behind. If we can do that, the age of progress against extreme poverty doesn’t have to end. If we can’t, then this past Thanksgiving might be one of the last moments when we can look at the global numbers and confidently call them a blessing.
A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!
2025-11-30 20:00:00
特朗普总统在H-1B签证问题上一直处于微妙的平衡之中。H-1B签证是高技能外国专业人士申请来美国工作的签证，通常用于医生、软件开发人员、工程师、大学教授等专业领域。今年早些时候，特朗普提议对每份H-1B签证收取1万美元的费用，旨在限制合法移民劳工进入美国。然而，在最近一次与福克斯新闻主持人劳拉·英格拉姆的采访中，他为该计划辩护，称H-1B签证对于引进人才是必要的。英格拉姆回应称：“我们这里有很多有才华的人。”特朗普则反驳道：“你们没有，你们没有。”他的言论引发了其支持者群体MAGA的不满。MAGA影响者萨瓦娜·埃尔南德斯在社交媒体上表示：“特朗普需要走出他的泡泡，回到地面，倾听那些选他上台的美国人民的声音。他的H-1B言论显示了他与支持者脱节。”这场关于高技能工作签证的争论反映了这个一贯反移民的白宫内部存在根本性的矛盾。特朗普虽然以“美国优先”为竞选纲领当选，但他的言论表明，美国经济的现实可能更为复杂。一些科技行业人士则认为，这场关于H-1B签证的争论忽略了更大的问题。今天，Explained的主持人阿斯特·赫尔顿采访了科技公司CEO维韦克·瓦德瓦，以获取更深入的见解。瓦德瓦在美国经营一家医疗诊断公司，他认为签证体系存在缺陷，但若让全球高技能人才难以进入美国，美国自身将受到伤害。他说：“我作为移民来到美国，是一名高技能工作者。我的父亲是外交官，所以我最初是通过外交签证进入美国的。1980年我来到美国时，花了18个月才拿到绿卡。五年后我成为美国公民，成为美国成功故事的一部分。”后来，他成为学者，研究美国的竞争力，发现移民是其中的核心因素。他说：“从1995年到2005年，硅谷四分之一的初创公司由移民创立。十年后，这一趋势扩展到全国，四分之一的初创公司由移民创立。”以下是他们对话的节选，已进行删减和润色。更多内容请收听完整的播客。你认为H-1B计划为何对创业如此重要？因为这是高技能移民进入美国的方式。他们要么作为学生，要么作为为美国公司工作的员工来到这里，这是他们进入美国的途径。你最近写过关于H-1B签证的体验，你提到该系统容易被滥用。你看到系统被这样利用时有什么感受？每个政府项目都可能被腐败和滥用。H-1B签证持有者会被送到“身体工厂”（即外包公司）或寻找廉价劳动力的公司。当H-1B工人来到美国并爱上这个国家时，他们却无法留下来。如果他们成为经理，那将是一个不同的职位，所以人们继续做他们最初申请H-1B签证时的工作，这让他们陷入困境，而且收入低于市场水平。因此，H-1B签证的反对者指出，该系统确实被滥用，并影响了美国的薪资水平。特朗普在这一问题上的立场有些矛盾。他的很多部门都反对这些签证，但他在其他场合又表示这些签证在某种程度上是有效的。现在他宣布对每份H-1B签证申请收取1万美元的费用。作为一位依赖H-1B签证的创业者，这对你会有什么影响？初创公司靠的是微薄的资金。你没有那么多钱。像谷歌、微软和甲骨文这样的大公司有充足的资金，所以1万美元对他们来说不算什么。但对那些真正需要顶尖人才来实现世界性创新的公司来说，这1万美元的费用是难以承受的。你是否认为，真正受到这一费用影响的是那些依赖H-1B签证的公司，而不是那些大公司？是的，这基本上会关闭整个系统。大约两年前，我打算在美国创立一家医疗诊断公司，可以检测疾病。我计划在合适的时机将公司带入美国。但为了实现这个目标，我需要电气工程师、机械工程师、等离子体物理专家、热力学专家和实验室技术人员，这些技能在美国很难找到。我需要精通数学且了解生物学的顶尖人才，而这类人才在美国非常稀少，而且如果有的话，往往不在硅谷。因此，我最初打算在美国筹集资金并建立公司。但后来我意识到，我找不到这些人才，我尝试过，但没有成功。于是，我开始在LinkedIn上寻找全球范围内的专家，发现印度有很多这样的专家，因为印度的大学仍然教授这些学科。因此，我决定雇佣他们，并通过H-1B签证将他们带入美国。但申请过程就像抽签一样，机会渺茫。而且，一旦他们爱上美国，就无法留下。这是一场输不起的斗争。我了解了这个体系后，决定放弃。我将公司迁到了印度。因此，美国在这场竞争中失去了优势。你提到自己对美国的忠诚和感激，那么当你要在印度建立公司时，是否有一种感觉，仿佛在背叛美国？你是否欠美国什么，必须在美国建立公司？绝对不。我欠美国一切。没有美国，我不会走到今天这一步。我无法实现这些创新，也没有这些机会。这是我的国家，我把自己视为百分之百的美国人，对美国的忠诚是毋庸置疑的。这就是为什么我不得不在印度建立技术，尽管我也热爱印度。我原本希望在美国建立技术，但考虑到H-1B签证带来的种种麻烦和耻辱，以及申请延迟和1万美元的费用，我无法在美国实现这一目标。即使我从硅谷筹集了2000万美元，我仍然是一家初创公司，无法承担每名员工1万美元的费用。你认为解决这个问题的最好办法是什么？目前，H-1B签证已经政治化多年，关于其应有规模的讨论一直反复无常。白宫本身也不断发出矛盾的信息。你认为国家应该做些什么来改善这种情况？首先，要解放那些被困在移民困境中的人。大约有一百万人在美国合法工作，为美国公司效力，纳税。他们应该能够立即获得绿卡。这样，就有五十万人购买房屋，这将比特朗普的关税更能促进美国经济。其次，取消这些愚蠢的费用，比如1万美元的签证费。你是否认为，我们所讨论的某些问题也与美国文化有关？比如，我们因为教育体系的问题，认为美国工人无法胜任当前出现的新岗位？我写过关于这个问题的书，涉及少数族裔和女性的排斥。美国存在很多问题。而且，美国人不再像以前那样学习硬科学和数学。如果我们不把工程师和科学家带入美国，其他国家就会这么做。像印度这样的国家将建立与硅谷相媲美的创新体系。这让我心痛。我们必须拯救美国，使其免于自我毁灭。
President Donald Trump has been walking a fine line when it comes to H-1B visas — the visa that high-skill foreign professionals apply for to work in the US. These visas often go to physicians, software developers, engineers, university professors, and other specialty professions.
Earlier this year Trump proposed a $100,000 fee for H-1B visas, a move that aimed to restrict the flow of legal immigrant workers into the US. But in a recent interview with Fox News host Laura Ingraham, the president defended the program and said H-1B visas were necessary “to bring in talent.”
“We have plenty of talented people here,” Ingraham replied.
“No you don’t, no you don’t,” Trump said.
His comments have sparked outrage among his MAGA base.
“Trump needs to get out of his bubble and back on the ground listening to the American people who elected him to work for us,” Savanah Hernandez, a MAGA influencer and contributor to conservative youth group Turning Point USA said online. “His H-1B comment shows how out of touch with the base he has become.”
The debate over high-skill work visas inside this very anti-immigration White House gets at a fundamental tension. Trump may have been elected on an “America First” platform, but as his comments to Ingraham suggest, the reality of the American economy may turn out to be more complicated.
And some in the tech industry say that this debate over the H-1B visas is missing the larger point. Today, Explained’s Astead Herndon spoke with tech CEO Vivek Wadhwa to get an inside perspective. Wadhwa runs a medical diagnostics company here in the US. He thinks the visa system is broken — but that by making it harder for the world’s highly skilled workers to come here, America will only harm itself.
“I came here as an immigrant. I came here as a skilled worker. My father was a diplomat, so I came on a diplomatic visa. And when I came here in 1980, it took 18 months for me to get a green card,” Wadhwa tells Herndon. “Five years later, I was a US citizen. I became part of the American success story.”
When he became an academic, he studied US competitiveness — and found immigration at the heart of the story. “From 1995 to 2005, a quarter of all the startups in Silicon Valley were founded by immigrants. A decade later, the trend had become national — that a quarter of all the startups all across America were founded by immigrants,” Wadhwa says.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
Why do you think the H-1B program has been so vital when it comes to entrepreneurship?
Because this is the way skilled immigrants come to the United States. They come here either as students or they come here as workers who are working for American companies. And that’s the path to entering the United States.
You’ve recently been writing about your experience with H-1Bs and you write that it has been ripe for abuse. What’s been your experience seeing the system tested in those ways?
Every government program is susceptible to corruption and misuse. [H-1B visa holders] go to body shops, they go to companies looking for cheap labor. And when the H-1B workers do come here and decide that they love America, they want to now become Americans, [but] they’re stuck in the same job.
What happens is there’s a nasty trick over here. If you’re a computer programmer, when you’ve filed your H-1B visa and you become a manager three or four years later — which is what’s normal in the tech industry — it’s a different job.
So therefore people continue doing the same job they did when they started the H-1B process, which means that they’re stuck in limbo and they’re also making below-market salaries. So the opponents of H-1B visas are correct in the fact that the system is abused and that it does impact US salaries.
Trump has sent out some mixed signals when it comes to this. A lot of parts of his administration have talked against the visas, while he has said in other instances that he finds them to be somewhat effective. Now they’ve announced a $100,000 fee on every H-1B visa application. As someone who has leaned on it as an entrepreneur, what would that mean for you?
A startup works on fumes. You don’t have that kind of money. The Googles and the Microsofts and the Oracles, they’ve got big money, so $100,000 is nothing to them. But to the companies that really need the deep talent to be able to do world-changing innovations, we’re on tight budgets. $100,000 is unaffordable.
If I hear you correctly, you’re saying the people who are most affected by this proposed fee are the ones in your sphere, maybe not those big companies.
Yes, it basically shuts off the system.
About two years ago, I was looking to start my medical diagnostics company that’s going to now be able to detect diseases. I’ll bring it to the United States when the time is right. But the skills I needed for that were electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, experts in plasma physics, thermodynamics, lab technicians — a lot of skills that you can’t readily find in the United States. I needed top-notch mathematicians who understood biology, all right? There are very few of those in the United States. And if they exist, they’re outside Silicon Valley.
So at first, I was looking to raise money over here, build my company over here. And then I realized, I simply can’t find — I looked, it’s not that I didn’t try, I looked for talent.
So I started looking on LinkedIn for experts across the globe. And there were quite a few of them in India because they still have universities that teach these things. So I was looking to hire them and then I said, ”My God, H-1Bs, I need to bring them on H-1B visas.” And I looked at the numbers, the chances of being able to, it’s literally a lottery.
Yeah.
And then all the hassles, the fact that you’re bringing people in, if they fall in love with America, they can’t stay. It was a losing battle. I knew enough about the system that I said, “Forget it.” I decided to move my company to India. So the United States lost over here.
You know, you mentioned about being a proud American, about what this country has given you. Is there any kind of — I don’t know — a feeling that when it comes time to build this company here, that you’re going back to India? Is there anything you owe the United States to build the company here?
Absolutely. I owe the United States everything. I wouldn’t be where I am. I wouldn’t be able to do these innovations. I wouldn’t have had the opportunities if it wasn’t for America. This is my country. I consider myself 100 percent American and my loyalty is to America.
This is why it pains me that I had to build my technology in India, even though I love India also. I wanted to build my technology here. And I could have raised the money I needed to build the technology here, but not dealing with all the nightmares and the stigma around H-1B visas and then the delays, the $100,000 [fee]. Because at the end of the day, even if I raise $20 million from Silicon Valley, I’m still a startup. I can’t afford $100,000 fees on every employee I hire.
A question I have for you is, what do you think the solution is? I mean, we’re coming at a point now where H-1Bs have been kind of politicized for several years. There’s been so much back and forth about what the right level should be. You get back and forth messages from the White House itself. What would be the biggest thing that the country could do to make your life easier?
Well, number one, free the people who are trapped in immigration limbo. There are about 1 million people who are here legally — they’re working for American companies, paying taxes. They can get a green card immediately, all right? You’d have half a million people buying houses, okay? That would boost the American economy more than his tariffs can, more than anything else can. And then get rid of the stupidity, $100,000 fees and so on.
Is some of what we’re subtly talking about here a kind of American cultural thing too, that we think that because of our education system, the American worker is just not fit for the emergence of jobs that we have right now?
I’ve written books about this, about the exclusion of minorities, the exclusion of women. I mean, there are a lot of issues here, okay? And the fact that Americans aren’t studying the hard sciences anymore. They aren’t studying mathematics anymore. So if we don’t bring the skills, engineers and scientists to the United States, other countries will. Or countries like India will have innovation systems that rival Silicon Valley. And that breaks my heart. We have to save America from itself.
2025-11-29 21:30:00
全球凶杀率正在下降，但究竟是为什么呢？| SimpleImages/Getty Images
一个好消息的来源——我本人和显然也受到风险投资家青睐——是所谓的“叙事违反”（narrative violation）。所谓“叙事违反”，指的是人们普遍认为某件事是这样，但实际证据却显示并非如此。而很少有叙事比“暴力犯罪总是上升”这一信念更常被违反。2023年，IPSO对30个国家的人进行了一项调查，结果显示70%的受访者认为世界变得更加暴力和危险。在美国，自上世纪90年代初以来，多数人几乎每年都告诉民调机构，暴力犯罪在上升。其他调查也表明，许多人坚持认为50年前的生活比现在更安全、更好。
然而，事实却与这种叙事相反：当你实际查看凶杀数据时，会发现世界整体上正在变得更加安全，无论是与遥远的过去相比，还是与本世纪初相比。今年早些时候，我曾写过，上世纪90年代实际上是美国暴力程度极高的十年，而今年美国的暴力犯罪率可能接近历史最低水平，尽管许多美国人——包括总统——仍坚持认为情况并非如此。
最近，世界银行更新了数据，从全球视角来看，这一趋势更加明显。2000年至2023年间，全球凶杀率从每10万人约6.9起降至2023年的约5.2起，这意味着任何随机个体被谋杀的可能性下降了四分之一。尽管全球人口在这段时间内有所增长，但凶杀总数仍有所上升。如果凶杀率没有下降，而是保持不变，那么在这段时间内，将有约150万人额外丧生。这相当于整个费城的人口都因世界变得更加和平而得以存活。
过去并非总是如此。由于好莱坞的影响，我们对古代的暴力有某种想象，但实际情况可能更糟糕。研究者如史蒂芬·平克（Steven Pinker）的工作帮助我们拼凑出中世纪和早期现代时期的暴力图景——在很多地方，暴力程度非常高。最近，犯罪学家曼努埃尔·艾森纳（Manuel Eisner）利用验尸官记录，绘制了14世纪英国伦敦、约克和牛津镇的每起已知杀人事件。艾森纳发现，伦敦和约克的凶杀率在每10万人20至25起之间，而牛津——欧洲最古老的大学所在地——的凶杀率则高达每10万人100起（原因可能是中世纪的牛津学生喜欢喝醉并互相决斗致死）。如今，牛津的大学生最多可能只用到一把小刀，而2023年结束前，该市仅有两起凶杀案。至于伦敦，2025年前九个月的凶杀率低于每10万人1起，这是自2003年开始记录以来最低的水平。这些世纪的变化，可以用一个词来概括：文明。更强大的国家垄断了武力，法院取代了血亲复仇，宗教和哲学运动使残忍变得不正常，而城市商业的兴起使得稳定的合作比无序的掠夺更有价值。暴力不再被视为日常可接受的工具，社会规范也逐渐跟上。
当然，批评者对平克及其同事的乐观观点提出了质疑，尤其是关于战争和殖民暴力方面。但不可否认的是，西方的普通凶杀案比以往少得多。
这种下降并非仅限于西方。多年来，巴西每年记录的凶杀案超过5万起，全国凶杀率在每10万人20多起。然而，巴西公共安全论坛最新报告指出，2024年的凶杀案降至约4.4万起，这是自2012年以来的最低水平，比之前的高峰下降了约25%。报告作者认为，这一下降得益于多种因素，包括联邦政府对安全的重新投入、对平民持枪的更严格限制、帮派之间的停战协议，甚至还有人口老龄化。
但这并不意味着工作已经完成。当今的暴力负担高度集中。2021年，美洲和非洲的凶杀率分别为每百万人口约150起和127起，远高于欧洲或东亚。在这些地区，只有少数国家和城市承担了大部分的凶杀案。例如，海地的太子港或墨西哥的科利马，这些城市某些区域的凶杀率已达到每10万人数百起。全球平均水平的改善并不意味着所有地区都变得安全，某些社区仍然危险。
全球凶杀率下降的研究并不完美，没有单一的“万能钥匙”，但一些模式反复出现。国家基本能力的提升有助于减少凶杀，例如运作良好的法院、较少腐败的警察和可预测的法律体系，使得谋杀更难得逞。有针对性、数据驱动的警务，专注于小范围的热点区域和少数导致严重暴力的人群，似乎比无差别镇压更有效。武器政策、经济和社会状况也起着重要作用。例如，美国的研究发现，家庭和经济困境的指标与凶杀、自杀和毒品死亡率之间存在强相关。当这些压力减轻时，暴力也随之减少。
最后，还有一个因素是所有人都无法控制的，但可能是最重要的：老龄化。年龄是暴力犯罪最有力的预测因素之一，凶杀案几乎全部由（针对）年轻男性所实施。一项2019年的研究发现，自1960年代以来，世界大部分地区15至29岁人口的比例都在下降，而这种老龄化现象解释了近期凶杀率下降的很大一部分。当社会老龄化时，犯罪率往往会下降。全球人口结构的变化——更少的儿童，更长的寿命——似乎正在悄然使人类社会更加和平。
如果你像我一样喜欢通过“叙事违反”来看世界，那么这个趋势值得牢牢把握。有些人认为我们正滑向混乱，但数据表明，尽管缓慢且不均衡，我们正在让彼此互相伤害变得更加困难。发现“叙事违反”很有趣，但构建准确的叙事则更加重要。本文最初发表于《好消息》（Good News）通讯，欢迎订阅！
One source of good news — favored both by me and, apparently, venture capitalists — is what’s known as a “narrative violation.” A narrative violation occurs when everyone thinks one thing, but the actual evidence suggests the opposite.
And few narratives are more persistently violated than one common belief: “Violent crime is always going up.”
A 2023 survey from IPSOS of people in 30 countries found that 70 percent of respondents thought the world was becoming more violent and dangerous. Here in the US, majorities have told pollsters almost every year since the early 1990s that violent crime is going up. And other surveys indicate that many people around the world insist that life was better and often safer 50 years ago than it is today.
So, that’s the narrative. Here’s the violation: When you actually look at data on murder, it shows that the world has largely been getting safer, both as compared to the more distant past and in this century. I wrote earlier this year about how the 1990s were actually an extraordinarily violent decade in the US and how violent crime in the US this year may be headed towards record lows, even as many Americans — including the President — insist it isn’t.
Now, recently updated data from the World Bank looks at the picture from a global perspective and finds something astonishing. Between 2000 and 2023, the international homicide rate fell from roughly 6.9 deaths per 100,000 people to around 5.2 per 100,000 people in 2023. That translates into around a one-quarter decline in the chances that any random person will be murdered.
Because the global population has increased since 2000, the total number of murders has gone up over these years. But, had the global homicide rate not experienced this decline and instead stayed steady, some 1.5 million additional people would have been murdered over these years. That’s equivalent to the population of Philadelphia still breathing because the world has gotten less violent.
We all have a vision of violent antiquity thanks to Hollywood, but how bad was it really? Thanks to the work of researchers like Steven Pinker, we’ve managed to piece together a picture of violence in the medieval and early modern eras — and wow, in a lot of places, it was very high.
A recent project by the criminologist Manuel Eisner used coroner records to map every known killing in the 14th-century English towns of London, York, and Oxford. Eisner found that the homicide rates in London and York clocked in at between 20 and 25 per 100,000 people, while in Oxford, home to the most venerable university in Europe, it was around 100 per 100,000 people. (Why? Apparently medieval Oxford students really liked to get drunk and fight each other to the death.)
Today, the most lethal thing an Oxford undergraduate might wield is a cutting remark; there were all of two homicides total in the city for the year ending in September 2023. For its part, London’s homicide rate was less than 1 per 100,000 through the first nine months of 2025 — the fewest murders since monthly records began in 2003.
What changed over those centuries is, in a word, civilization. More powerful states maintained a monopoly on force, courts replaced blood feuds, religious and philosophical movements de-normalized cruelty, and the rise of urban commerce made stable cooperation more valuable than lawless predation. Violence stopped being an acceptable everyday tool, and norms slowly caught up. Critics have quarreled with Pinker and his colleagues on just how far that optimism should stretch, especially for war and colonial violence, but it’s indisputable that ordinary homicide in the West is far less common than it once was.
It’s not just the West. For years, Brazil recorded more than 50,000 killings annually, with national murder rates in the high 20s per 100,000 people. Yet, a new report from the Brazilian Forum on Public Security finds that homicides fell to about 44,000 in 2024, the lowest level since 2012 and down roughly 25 percent from that earlier peak. The authors credit a mix of factors, including a renewed federal security push, tighter rules on civilian gun ownership, truces between rival gangs, and even demographic aging.
None of this means the work is finished. The burden of violence today is highly concentrated. In 2021, the Americas and Africa had homicide rates of roughly 150 and 127 per million people, respectively — many times higher than Europe or East Asia. Within those regions, a relatively small group of countries and cities bear an outsize share of the killings. Think of Port-au-Prince in Haiti or Colima in Mexico, where recent homicide rates in some parts of these cities have reached well into the triple digits per 100,000 people. The global average can improve even while particular neighborhoods remain terrifyingly dangerous.
The research behind the global murder decline is messy, and there is no single magic lever, but several patterns recur. Improvements in basic state capacity help; functioning courts, less corrupt police, and a predictable legal system make it harder to get away with murder. Targeted, data-driven policing that focuses on small hotspots and the tiny fraction of people responsible for most serious violence appears more effective than indiscriminate crackdowns. Policy choices around weapons matter, as do economic and social conditions. Studies of US counties, for instance, find strong links between measures of household and economic distress and death rates from homicide, suicide, and drugs. When those stresses ease, violence tends to do the same.
One last factor is out of everyone’s control, but it might be the most important: aging. The single most robust predictor of violent offending is age, and homicide is overwhelmingly committed by (and against) young men. One 2019 study found that, since the 1960s, most regions of the world have seen a decline in the share of their population aged 15-29, and that this aging accounts for a significant share of the recent decline in the homicide rate. When societies age, crime falls, all else equal. The global demographic transition — fewer kids, longer lives — seems to be quietly pacifying humanity.
If you, like me, enjoy seeing the world through narrative violations, this is a big one to hold on to. Some people would have you believe we are sliding toward chaos. The numbers say that, very slowly and unevenly, we have been making it harder to kill each other. Spotting a narrative violation is fun; building accurate narratives is even better.
A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!
2025-11-29 20:30:00
NVIDIA股价走势图。| Jonathan Raa/NurPhoto 通过 Getty 图片提供
随着几乎所有东西的价格上涨，而美国工人的工资几乎停滞，像唐纳德·特朗普这样的政界人士试图让我们安心，称经济“表现很好”，股市繁荣。本月早些时候在佛罗里达州的一次活动中，特朗普说：“历史新高，历史新高，历史新高。”
要点总结
As the price of almost everything has increased, and American workers’ wages have all but stalled, politicians like President Donald Trump have tried to ease our minds by telling us that the economy is “doing great” and that the stock market is booming. “Record high, record high, record high,” Trump said at an event earlier this month in Florida.
Still, despite what has been a good year for the stock market, it’s hard to find a day in which a podcaster, influencer, or economist isn’t warning that the AI boom that’s powering the economy could be a bubble — one that is about to burst.
The company that’s driving Wall Street’s positive movement is Nvidia, the most valuable company on the planet. And that’s because the recent rash of data centers popping up across the country are filled with Nvidia’s graphic processing units, or chips.
So why did the health of this single company become an outsized force in the economy? And why does its health scare so many people? Today, Explained co-host Noel King asked economic commentator, educator, and author of In This Economy? Kyla Scanlon.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
Recently, the markets have been a rollercoaster. And when you ask why, the answer broadly is because of Nvidia. Why is the world holding its breath for Nvidia? What’s the worry here?
Well, Nvidia is kind of emblematic of the entire AI buildout. So every single tech firm from Microsoft to Meta to Amazon have based all of their future plans around Nvidia. (If you hear anything about “circular financing,” that’s what that means.)
Nvidia is just so wrapped into the broader market — is such a big part of AI — that if they sneeze, everybody else catches a cold. And so markets are a little bit nervous, because the entire AI story, [and] therefore the entire stock market, [and] therefore the entire economy depends on Nvidia maintaining pretty impossible growth metrics.
It really feels like this shouldn’t happen — that there shouldn’t be one company that’s big enough, important enough to make world markets like quiver.
What exactly happened here?
Nvidia just became so big so quickly, and the US economy decided to design itself around AI. You know, 40% of GDP growth is coming from AI buildout. And so Nvidia, because of that concentration, because of the bet that the US economy is making on AI — they have become somewhat of a macro variable.
You can kind of think of their earnings reports like you would a jobs report that we get from the BLS or an inflation report that we get. Earnings day for Nvidia is a test of the AI narrative, and is therefore a test of the US economy. And that just is because we’ve spent so much money on data centers [capital expenditure] — so much money on these chips and these companies just building out continuously. So that’s what happened.
Are there any other companies that hold this sort of sway? Does Walmart or Chevron have that kind of power?
No. Nvidia is such a big part of the S&P 500; it’s almost 8% of the entire index. It’s contributed, I think, a fifth of the index’s total gain this year.
Walmart is not that big of a percentage of the S&P 500, and it has not driven that much growth, that much earnings power, that much investment. Nvidia is really special in that way. …
The S&P 500 has always been pretty top heavy. There’s always been companies that are more important than other companies. But without Nvidia, the story of 2024, 2025, would look like economic stagnation.
You know the old saying, right: The stock market is not the economy. Is Nvidia just playing this enormous role in the markets, or does it represent an outsized portion of other parts of the economy? If Nvidia stumbles, do a million Americans lose their jobs?
I don’t think it would be something that extreme. The stock market is definitely not the economy, but they are increasingly intertwined because the AI narrative is so important. If Nvidia implodes, it wouldn’t be that, like, people who are doctors and bus drivers and construction workers would suddenly be without work.
It would just be that the stock market would collapse, and the economic growth narrative would collapse. And you could see secondary effects. Like maybe the construction firm decides to start laying off people because Nvidia leads to some sort of recession if they do end up imploding. But it would not be a direct correlation, no.
Everybody’s been asking, “Are we in an AI bubble?” And lately I’ve seen people suggesting that Nvidia will be one of the big signs telling us if it’s going to pop.
What do we know about the threat of an AI bubble and where Nvidia plays in?
If I had a nickel for every time somebody talked about the AI bubble, you know, I’d be able to invest in Nvidia. But I think that the way that you can think about it is: Nvidia is the entire AI thesis.
If all of a sudden, Nvidia stumbles — and there’s increasing worries that they’re going to, because their growth path is pretty impressive, and pretty unsustainable because it is so impressive — companies might pull back on spending tens of billions of dollars on data centers. Cloud providers would delay expansion, and startups built around “AI is the future” would face funding problems. The stock market would lose double-digit percentages. The regional construction booms tied to data centers would slow. Places like in Iowa where they’ve helped to revive local economies to a certain extent — everything from steel plants to electrical workers, to construction workers, land developers — would feel the shock.
And then of course if the stock market goes down, ultimately the broad economy does suffer, because then the Federal Reserve would have to come in with some sort of emergency funding plan. President Trump might have to come up with a fiscal policy plan to prevent the bottom from going out and having a massive blow-up.
The worry is if Nvidia does go [down], the entire AI supply chain becomes wobbly. And because the economy and stock market are so tied up into that, it could really lead to some other repercussions.
I wonder, at the end of the day, what you think a company like Nvidia means for the American economy. It is a beast. It takes up a huge share of the market.
What kind of position are we in here that we have a company that is this influential?
Well, Greg Ip from the Wall Street Journal wrote a great piece calling Nvidia the joyless tech revolution. And I think that is a really good way to think about it. The AI trade, if it works, [then] the benefits are going to be accrued to a select few people, right? So companies like Nvidia — people will invest in Nvidia a little bit. Companies like Open AI, companies like Anthropic — they’re going to really benefit if all of this ends up working out.
But the losses from AI are socialized. So if all of a sudden the data centers don’t work, if the AI trade totally blows up, you’re gonna have people’s retirement accounts really suffer, because the S&P 500 is what most people invest in for their retirement account, and Nvidia is a lot of the S&P 500 as we discussed. And then if the data centers don’t work out, you’re going to have a lot of local communities that have pinned hope on these things and have dreamed that they’ll work and add jobs. And so that’s kind of the issue with AI and Nvidia taking up such a big part of the economy.
That’s why Greg is calling it the joyless tech revolution — because a lot of people don’t like this. I think that’s a really important thing to consider. I believe the statistic was 6 out of 10 Americans, essentially, don’t want all of this. They don’t like what the AI companies are promising, especially when the CEOs come on and say that they’re going to take people’s jobs.
Then there’s also a chart from the [Financial Times] that I think encapsulates this broad conversation that we keep having really well, too, where it’s like: AI could either be the end of scarcity, meaning it solves everything; the end of humanity, meaning it kills everybody; or it could add 0.2 percentage points to GDP. And it’s just like how the internet was to a certain extent.
It seems like there’s the potential here that this problem of inequality that we’ve been dealing with now for about a generation could really be exacerbated.
The frustrating thing about the AI conversation is that everybody’s talking about it, but there’s no policy solution yet. We don’t have any idea of how we’re going to re-skill people. We don’t know if we need some form of UBI, universal basic income, to help people out during a time of transition.
We have so many lessons that we could learn from things like what happened to the Rust Belt, when manufacturing went overseas, and how that devastated local communities. We could see something like that happening with AI over time.
2025-11-29 01:00:00
在明尼苏达州奥瓦顿的一家大型工厂农场里，Jennie-O公司饲养火鸡，该公司是美国第二大火鸡生产商，今年还为白宫的火鸡赦免仪式提供火鸡。11月2日晚上，几名动物权益活动人士进入了一间未上锁的谷仓，发现里面火鸡的生存条件极其恶劣。这间谷仓是Jennie-O工厂农场的一部分，而该农场的条件被揭露存在大量动物福利问题。
据活动人士Kecia Doolittle称，他们发现许多火鸡患有严重疾病，甚至有死掉和腐烂的火鸡，还有因互相啄食而受伤的火鸡。此外，一些火鸡因身体过于沉重而无法行走。Doolittle还提到，一些火鸡被束缚，无法获得食物和水。她指出，这些条件违反了明尼苏达州的动物虐待法，该州是少数不将农业活动排除在动物虐待法规之外的州之一。
Jennie-O的母公司Hormel Foods在回应中表示，他们高度重视动物福利，并定期进行设施审核，确保符合国家火鸡协会和美国兽医医学协会的标准。然而，兽医Sherstin Rosenberg认为，Gabriel和Gilbert的状况表明Jennie-O的设施存在严重的动物福利问题。
在火鸡产业中，由于选择性繁殖，火鸡体型变得越来越大，生长速度也加快了。这种做法导致火鸡身体结构不协调，容易出现健康问题。为了防止火鸡互相啄食，农场通常会割掉它们的喙、脚趾和鼻部的肉瘤，而不会给予任何麻醉。此外，火鸡在运输和屠宰过程中并未受到联邦法律的保护。
白宫的火鸡赦免仪式每年都会举行，作为对火鸡产业的宣传。今年，Jennie-O的总裁Steve Lykken负责挑选被赦免的火鸡，它们被送往明尼苏达大学，以确保它们能继续生活。而Doolittle救下的两只火鸡Gabriel和Gilbert则将被送往动物庇护所，过上自由的生活。
尽管火鸡产业的现状令人担忧，但它们仍然是感恩节的象征。这种矛盾的象征意义在白宫的赦免仪式上尤为明显。
Editor’s note: This story was originally published on November 22, 2023, and reflects events that took place that year. We’re republishing it in its original form for this year’s Thanksgiving week.
Late into the night on November 2, a few animal rights activists opened an unlocked barn door and stepped foot into a sea of turkeys living in gruesome conditions. It was one of several barns at a sprawling factory farming operation in Owatonna, Minnesota, that raises turkeys for Jennie-O, the country’s second-largest turkey producer and this year’s supplier to the annual White House turkey pardon ceremony.
“We documented a lot of really horrific health issues,” activist Kecia Doolittle, one of the investigators, told Vox. “It was about as bad as you can imagine.”
They found numerous turkeys who were dead and rotting, Doolittle said, and many who had trouble walking. There were also live birds pecking at dead birds, and dozens of birds with visible wounds — each a sign of cannibalism, a persistent problem in turkey farming.
Doolittle also alleges there were a number of turkeys who were immobilized and unable to access food and water. In a letter to Steele County’s attorney and local law enforcement, Bonnie Klapper — a former assistant US attorney advising Doolittle — said the conditions are a violation of Minnesota’s animal cruelty law, which stipulates that “No person shall deprive any animal over which the person has charge or control of necessary food, water, or shelter.” (Minnesota is one of the few states that don’t exempt agricultural practices from their animal cruelty statute.)
“It smelled terrible,” Doolittle said. The air made her throat burn, likely due to high ammonia levels from the turkeys’ waste, which gives the birds eye and respiratory issues.
The activists found a sign on the property that read, “Jennie-O Turkey Store cares about turkeys — you should, too!”
“Jennie-O Turkey Store takes the welfare of the animals under our care seriously and has robust animal care standards throughout our supply chain,” a spokesperson from Hormel Foods, Jennie-O’s parent company, told Vox via email. “We conduct routine audits at our facilities to ensure that our standards are being met with animal-handling practices and policies set forth by the National Turkey Federation and the American Veterinary Medical Association.”
Doolittle rescued two of the birds — whom she later named Gabriel and Gilbert — and took them to veterinarians in Wisconsin, who urged her to euthanize Gilbert. “They both had really severe infections, they both had parasites,” Doolittle said, but Gilbert was in especially bad shape, with a wound under his wing, an infection on his face, and pecking wounds on part of his genitalia.
But Doolittle wanted to give him a chance to recover. Both birds were treated and given a combination of antibiotic, pain relief, and antiparasitic drugs; Gabriel is on the mend, while Gilbert’s condition remains touch and go.
Sherstin Rosenberg, a veterinarian in California and executive director of a sanctuary for rescued poultry birds, wrote in a veterinary opinion that Gabriel and Gilbert’s condition “suggests serious animal welfare problems” in Jennie-O’s facility.
The findings, while disturbing, are common across the turkey industry. Numerous animal welfare groups have found similar conditions at operations run by Jennie-O’s competitors — even the ones that brand themselves as more humane. That’s because turkey farming is incredibly uniform, with companies using generally the same practices and the same breed — the Broad Breasted White turkey — that’s been bred without regard for their suffering.
Like everything else in the US — cars, homes, cruise ships — the turkey has become supersized.
The poultry industry has made turkeys so big primarily through selective breeding. The Broad Breasted White turkey, which accounts for 99 out of every 100 grocery store turkeys, has been bred to emphasize — you guessed it — the breast, one of the more valuable parts of the bird. These birds grow twice as fast and become nearly twice as big as they did in the 1960s. Being so top-heavy, combined with other health issues caused by rapid growth and the unsanitary factory farming environment, can make it difficult for them to walk.
Another problem arises from their giant breasts: The males get so big that they can’t mount the hens, so they must be bred artificially.
Author Jim Mason detailed this practice in his book The Ethics of What We Eat, co-authored with philosopher Peter Singer. Mason took a job with the turkey giant Butterball to research the book, where, he wrote, he had to hold male turkeys while another worker stimulated them to extract their semen into a syringe using a vacuum pump. Once the syringe was full, it was taken to the henhouse, where Mason would pin hens chest-down while another worker inserted the contents of the syringe into the hen using an air compressor.
Workers at the farm had to do this to one hen every 12 seconds for 10 hours a day. It was “the hardest, fastest, dirtiest, most disgusting, worst-paid work” he had ever done, Mason wrote.
In stressful, crowded environments, turkeys can be aggressive and peck one another, and even commit cannibalism. Instead of giving turkeys more space and better conditions, producers mutilate them to minimize the damage. They cut off a quarter to a third of their beaks, part of their toes, and their snoods — those fleshy protuberances that hang over their beaks — all without pain relief.
Turkeys are excluded from federal laws meant to reduce animal suffering during transport to the slaughterhouse and during slaughter itself, so you can imagine — or see for yourself — how terribly they’re treated in their final hours. According to the nonprofit Animal Welfare Institute, the Jennie-O slaughter plant near the farm Doolittle investigated was cited nine times in 2018 by the US Department of Agriculture for turkeys who’d been mutilated by malfunctioning equipment.
Strangely, despite the horrific reality of turkey farming, we still use the animal as a symbol of giving thanks. Nowhere does the song and dance of celebrating turkeys while we torture them feel more disconcerting than at the White House’s annual turkey pardon.
Every Thanksgiving, the US president “pardons” a turkey or two in what is essentially a PR stunt for the turkey industry, as the birds are selected by the chair of the National Turkey Federation, an industry trade association. This year, that was Steve Lykken, president of Jennie-O.
The two turkeys selected for this year’s pardon — named Liberty and Bell — could have ended up among the 46 million or so birds on Thanksgiving tables this year. Instead, they were transported from Minnesota, the country’s top turkey-producing state, to Washington, DC, in a stretch black Cadillac Escalade. “They’re on their way in a pretty lavish coach,” Lykken told Minnesota Public Radio.
The annual story makes for feel-good if hammy coverage by the nation’s largest news organizations, but it papers over the darkness of American factory farming — including not just the animal cruelty but also the dangerous working conditions at slaughterhouses, environmental pollution, and unfair treatment of turkey contract farmers.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment about the Jennie-O investigation video.
This year, industry is especially looking forward to the pardon amid the devastating bird flu. The disease, which has been resurging this fall, has resulted in the killing of 11.5 million potentially infected turkeys since early 2022. Increasingly, producers are killing the birds in the most brutal fashion imaginable, deploying a method called “ventilation shutdown plus” that uses industrial heaters to kill them via heatstroke over the course of hours.
“To have something that’s fun, that can draw positive attention to our industry, is very welcomed” in light of the outbreak, Ashley Kohls, executive director of the Minnesota Turkey Growers Association, told Minnesota Public Radio about this year’s pardon.
This week, Liberty and Bell will be moved to the University of Minnesota to live out the rest of their lives. If the turkeys knew what went on there, they might not want to go: The university helped build the state’s turkey industry and still conducts research on turkeys to ensure the industry’s success. The university’s interim president formerly served as the president of Jennie-O and the CEO of Hormel, its parent company.
Meanwhile, Doolittle’s pardoned turkeys, Gabriel and Gilbert, assuming both survive, will spend the rest of their lives at an animal sanctuary, showing humans what these birds can be like when allowed to live on their own terms. “They’re just the most curious, loving, intelligent guys,” Doolittle said.
A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!
2025-11-28 20:30:00
在经济不确定的时期，Z世代正在通过购买价格实惠的“身份象征”商品来获取社交媒体的关注度并脱颖而出。例如，星巴克最近推出了一款以熊为造型的限量版杯子“Bearista”，原价30美元，最初在韩国销售，但很快在美国的星巴克门店售罄。然而，在抢购过程中，一些顾客甚至与店员发生争执，甚至互相推搡。这些抢购行为在社交媒体上引发热议，甚至登上TikTok热搜。星巴克对此表示歉意，但并未确认是否会重新补货。目前，这款杯子在eBay上以高价出售。
与此同时，成功购得“Bearista”杯的顾客纷纷在社交媒体上分享自己的“胜利”。这些杯子只是今年引发热潮的众多“看似随机但难以获得”的商品之一，例如Labubus、Owala水瓶和Trader Joe’s迷你帆布包等。虽然低价小商品引发抢购的现象并不新鲜（如Cabbage Patch Kids和Beanie Babies），但如今这些商品已成为一种新的身份象征，成为年轻人展示个性和独特性的创新方式。
传统上，身份象征被认为是昂贵的奢侈品，但如今在经济压力日益增长的背景下，年轻人开始寻找其他方式来体现自己的社会地位。即使是一些价格不高的商品，只要能获得，就能成为一种“炫耀”。即使是富裕人群，也开始接受这些低调但有“圈内”意味的象征。这些商品的稀缺性使得购买行为本身成为一种社交体验，甚至在社交媒体上形成了一种独特的“寻宝”文化。例如，有人会拍摄自己在超市或大型卖场中寻找限量版Stanley保温杯或迪拜巧克力的过程，甚至有人会去翻垃圾桶寻找商品。这些行为虽然可能引发冲突或盗窃，但却为产品带来了更多关注。
此外，这些商品的流行也反映了Z世代对“可负担的奢华”（affordable luxuries）的追求，这被一些人视为经济衰退的征兆。这种现象类似于2001年经济危机期间的“口红效应”（lipstick effect），即消费者在经济困难时更倾向于购买价格低廉但能带来愉悦感的商品。然而，哥伦比亚大学商学院副教授Silvia Bellezza认为，Z世代对这些小商品的痴迷并不完全是因为经济压力，而可能更多是出于对“品味”或“文化资本”的追求。她指出，传统的高端象征（如豪车和名牌服装）在大规模生产后变得过于普遍，因此消费者，包括富裕人群，开始寻找更独特的方式来彰显自己的身份。
“将高端与低端结合是一种聪明的方式，可以让你比那些只追求传统高端商品的人更具个性，还能掌控自己的时尚风格。”Bellezza表示。这种趋势也解释了为什么名人和亿万富翁们也开始佩戴Labubus或使用帆布包。此外，消费者希望拥有只有特定群体才能理解或识别的商品，这种行为被称为“水平信号”（horizontal signaling）。例如，Trader Joe’s的帆布包不仅是一个实用的购物袋，更是一种潮流符号。
由于社交媒体在Z世代购物行为中扮演着重要角色，拥有这些“身份象征”更多是为了获得社交影响力，而非实际的财富展示。尽管抢购这些商品可能带来诸多不便，但对于一个经济前景不明朗的群体来说，这种行为似乎合情合理。在这样的背景下，抢购行为不仅是一种消费方式，更是一种社交资本的积累。
A cuddly animal wearing a beanie should not incite violence. And yet, this is what occurred in some Starbucks shops earlier this month after the coffee chain released a limited line of teddy bear-shaped tumblers as a part of their holiday merchandise.
The “Bearista” cup, which was originally sold in South Korea and retails for $30, is reportedly sold out across Starbucks locations in the United States — but not before customers hassled baristas and tussled with each other in line to get their hands on one. Stories of frustrated Starbucks fans standing in long lines at the crack of dawn and accusing employees of hogging the cups made headlines and went viral on TikTok. Starbucks apologized to customers for the frenzy but stopped short of confirming whether they would restock the cups.
For now, these glass critters are being sold on eBay, sometimes for exorbitant prices. Meanwhile, shoppers who managed to procure the Bearista cup in store are posting their wins.
The Bearista cup is just the latest entry on a list of seemingly random but extremely hard-to-get merchandise that’s gone viral this year, from Labubus to Owala water bottles to Trader Joe’s micro tote bags. That certain low-cost novelty items can attract huge lines isn’t exactly new. (Cabbage Patch Kids and Beanie Babies are canonical examples.) What’s new is the extent to which these relatively cheap trinkets have become status symbols and an innovative way to distinguish oneself.
Status symbols are traditionally thought of as expensive luxury items that indicate one’s class. But in a time when affordability is driving the political conversation, young consumers are finding alternative ways to convey their social stature. It isn’t a flex anymore to splurge on a designer bag or an expensive car. Status can be earned by getting your hands on something rare, even if it only costs 30 bucks. Even wealthy people are embracing these less glitzy but in-the-know signifiers.
In the case of all these conspicuous or wearable commodities, the goal is to invest and partake in the online attention economy.
While some of the hottest items of the year have necessitated elaborate hunts or long wait times, this isn’t always intentional on the brand’s part. Many companies use artificial scarcity as a marketing tactic, partaking in seasonal or limited product drops to boost sales, while others may not anticipate the initial demand of new products and run out of supply, according to Tara Sinclair, head of the economics department at George Washington University. In any case, these shortages lend themselves to social media content that sparks intrigue and turns the purchasing of these products into full-blown experiences.
On TikTok and YouTube, the search to find a special-edition Stanley cup or a Dubai chocolate bar has become its own subgenre. Users post trips to their local grocers or big box stores where they scour the aisles, either successfully or unsuccessfully, for the latest trendy purchase. Others have filmed themselves going dumpster diving behind stores. In some cases, recorded confrontations between especially committed customers, and even theft of these items, have helped these products generate buzz. Much of the conversation around Stanley cups and Labubus, for example, was about the outsized emotional reactions people seem to have to them, adding a mysterious value to these products.
Given that these products are not financially out of reach for working and middle-class consumers, the thrill of attaining these items seems largely wrapped up in beating your competition, whether through time, dedication, or pure luck.
That said, these items still signal a level of financial privilege. (A $30 mug is more expensive than the paper cup that you usually get with your coffee at Starbucks.) And the amount of time and energy spent scavenging these items “is a way of signaling being part of a club,” says Sinclair.
“When we think about products of scarcity, there’s typically two ways that we pay for them, money or our time,” she says. “Spending time scouring a store is not so different from spending your money on it because you could, otherwise, potentially be working and earning money during that time.”
Even so, it’s notable that our idea of status symbols is expanding to include a variety of low-end and easily collectible things. For a generation riddled with economic anxiety and navigating a slimming job market, it feels appropriate that cost-friendly items are suddenly carrying a lot more esteem.
This fits into a larger trend of Gen Z spending on so-called “affordable luxuries,” that some have theorized as a recession indicator. To many, the current craze around these low-cost products seems like a re-treading of the “lipstick effect,” a term that dates back to the 2001 recession. At the time, Estée Lauder chair Leonard Lauder noted that the company had experienced a rise in lipstick sales, inspiring a theory that says consumers are less likely to spend on expensive, luxury goods in the midst of an economic crisis, instead opting for cheap indulgences. After all, luxury spending is slowing down and could continue this trajectory for a while.
But Silvia Bellezza, associate professor of business at Columbia University, isn’t totally convinced that Gen Z’s obsession with trinkets and tumblers is primarily a response to harsh economic times, given that people are always falling for these novelty items. These alternative status symbols could also be driven by an interest in acquiring taste or “cultural capital.”
Bellezza has found that “traditional markers of superiority,” like cars and designer clothes, become too mainstream and diluted when they are mass-produced. This leads to consumers, including affluent people, finding more clever and original ways to distinguish themselves.
“Mixing and matching high and low is a very clever way to stand out and show that you’re even superior to engaging in all the traditional high-status products, and you can dictate your own fashion,” says Bellezza.
This would probably explain why celebrities and billionaires alike are incorporating Lababus and canvas totes into their high fashion wear. Plus, she says consumers want to be seen with items that can only be perceived and understood by a certain subset of people, a behavior referred to as “horizontal signaling.” A Trader Joe’s tote, for example, is mostly understood as a trendy fashion item and not just a utility bag to a specific group of young, very online urbanites.
Given that social media is such an integral part of Gen Z’s shopping experiences, it’s only natural that owning status symbols is more about achieving social clout than signaling actual currency. Waiting in line, fighting crowds, and tracking down these affordable items may be extremely inconvenient, but it’s suitable for a cohort with an uncertain financial future. In the meantime, why not rack up views?