HBO Max’s Gossip Girl reboot is an expensive, tired retread.
It’s hard to imagine that anyone was craving more Gossip Girl.
The original version of the show, a glossy and cold-hearted soap about the glamorous foibles of wealthy Manhattanite teens, was a sensation when it first premiered on the CW in 2007. It was the coolest new show on TV, and watching it felt like grabbing a boozy brunch with your perfectly coiffed friend who flies into town once a month to recuperate in between threesomes in Paris and coke binges in Berlin: Oh, so that’s how the other half lives.
But by the time it ended in 2012, six seasons and countless love triangles later, Gossip Girl had grown stale and exhausting. It began repeating its stories over and over again; with each iteration, they seemed to get a little colder. The show’s ratings fell off a cliff. In its final season, it regularly pulled under a million viewers per episode, down from a peak of 3.38 million in 2008.
Nevertheless, on July 8, Gossip Girl will be back on HBO Max under the auspices of Josh Safran, a writer-producer on the original show. Watching it feels like that same glamorous old friend has called you up for brunch again, ready to repeat the same handful of stories they’ve already told you a thousand times, and oh, would you mind footing the bill, too? Times aren’t what they used to be.
The new Gossip Girl is, loosely speaking, an in-universe continuation of the old, taking place at the same viciously rich Upper East Side high school with a new set of students, nine years after the original show ended. Our new queen bee is Julien (Jordan Alexander), an Insta-famous influencer who mouths platitudes about how she doesn’t believe in hierarchies while maintaining a white-knuckled grip on the school’s social scene. Her chief rival in that effort is her estranged half-sister, middle-class Zoya (Whitney Peak), who transfers into the school and immediately captures everyone’s attention with her punk rock refusal to bow to the whims of high school authority.
This dynamic is — as you will note if you watched the original Gossip Girl, and which the show self-consciously lampshades — very Serena and Blair redux. It’s one of many ways the new Gossip Girl feels less like a continuation than like a remix: The exact same set of characteristics that animated the original cast have been scattered merrily through a new and photogenic cast of newcomers, who are, in keeping with the times, less white and less straight than the originals.
Which means very little about Gossip Girl feels new. It’s just the same old show with a face-lift and a bigger, streaming-friendly budget.
Cross Dan’s judgy social conscience with Nate’s prince of the Upper East Side status and you get Obie (Eli Brown), the wealthy anti-gentrification activist torn between Julien and Zoya. Julien combines Blair’s killer social instincts with Serena’s effortless fashion sense, while Blair’s ice princess primness goes to Julien’s best friend Audrey (Emily Alyn Lind). You could practically draw a graph.
Frankly, the original Gossip Girl did not really have enough personality traits to sustain its first cast, let alone a new one. (Disclosure: I come to this new show as a viewer who found the original to run a maddening spectrum of nearly brilliant to unwatchably awful, but I also watched almost every episode, with the exception of the final season.) The new show is reiterating the same set of tired tropes as the first, so even four episodes in, it has acquired an exhausting sameness. You feel you’ve already seen all of it before.
The biggest difference between the new Gossip Girl and the old is also perhaps the show’s most wackadoodle plotline. Now as then, our cast of teens is tormented by an anonymous and omniscient blogger, the titular Gossip Girl, who is tasked with revealing everyone’s scandalous secrets at the most inconvenient possible time, and with providing a thematic voiceover at the end of each episode to explain how all of the show’s subplots are secretly about the same thing. (She’s still voiced by Kristen Bell, who I hope to god is being paid well for the word salad she keeps purring in her most scandalized voice.)
While original Gossip Girl never planned to reveal the Girl’s identity, however, the new Gossip Girl has made her central to the show, in an absolutely bonkers way.
The new students of Constance Billiard School, we learn, are terrorizing their underpaid teachers with bitchy quips about their Zara wardrobes and threats to get them fired for giving out bad grades.
But it wasn’t always like this, one teacher explains. Back in 2009, all the students were well-behaved model pupils who respected authority because they were all being terrorized into submission by Gossip Girl. And doesn’t that story just give the new teachers an idea!
Before long, the teachers are happily filming their underage students changing in front of windows, digging up smut on all the cool kids, and publishing the results on Instagram for all the world to see. In exchange, they get to revel in a more respectful, more thoughtful school environment.
None of it makes any sense from top to bottom, but Gossip Girl has always been at its most fun when it stopped clinging to such old-fashioned constraints as “coherent plotting” or “character motivations that make sense.” Gossip Girls United Against the Bullying of Teachers comes from the same well of nonsense that birthed such plotlines as Serena Kills a Guy and Blair Becomes Princess of Monaco, and as such it breathes some welcome life into the new series. It’s also a window into what the new variation on the show does pretty well.
The chief architect of the new Gossip Girl plan is English teacher Kate Keller, played by the writer, editor, and proto-influencer Tavi Gevinson. Gevinson is not a natural actress, but her very presence functions as a campy, smirking wink to the audience: Unlike the old CW Gossip Girl, the new HBO Gossip Girl will understand the social currency of the internet. Or at least, the wealthy New York media personality corners of the internet.
When Gossip Girl can unite its camp ridiculousness with its meticulous understanding of what Manhattan clout looks like in the age of Instagram, it starts to soar. Like when Princess Nokia backs out of a private performance at one of Julien’s parties because Julien’s been canceled for a fat-shaming tweet she wrote at 13, but then has to agree to perform after all when Julien rebrands the party as a fundraiser for lupus research in honor of her dead mother. Or when the gang goes to see the new Jeremy O. Harris play at the Public, and then Harris asks 14-year-old Zoya — who, chicly, has her doubts about Hamilton’s racial politics — to come party with him in the VIP area because he’s so interested in her thoughts on how Broadway needs to evolve. All those moments are the kind of silly, soapy fun at which this show knows how to excel.
Yet while Gossip Girl has savviness galore when it comes to the complexities of clout-chasing, when it comes to making its characters feel like real and interesting people, it has no idea what it’s doing. Which wouldn’t be so bad if Gossip Girl didn’t have aspirations to make you care about its characters and to develop some sort of heart.
It wants you to root for Zoya and Julien to become friends as well as sisters, even as it revels in the sudsiness of their on-again-off-again rivalry. It wants you to care about lothario Max (Thomas Doherty) and his fraught relationship with his two dads, even as it shows him seducing his classics teacher in the school showers. It even demonstrates a touchingly naive belief that its audience will take Julien’s decision to drop filters and makeup for a day as a sign of her revolutionary honesty, and not as a classic iteration of an influencer with good bone structure flexing on her audience with a #nomakeup #nofilter selfie.
The new Gossip Girl careens back and forth between giving its audience frothy, minutely observed rich-people hijinks, and serving up shopworn and sentimental clichés about teen soap archetypes with the apparent belief that viewers will embrace them with a ready hand.
That’s a problem the original Gossip Girl ran into over and over again, too. Except in that case, the show had a secret weapon: Leighton Meester. Meester was cast as Blair, original Gossip Girl’s ice queen, but she developed into the beating heart of the show, memorably described by another character as a “95-pound, doe-eyed, bon-mot-tossing, designer-label-whoring package of girly evil.”
The exhaustive Gossip Girl recappers at Daily Intel used to joke that Blair had access to another, better writers’ room than the rest of the characters did, but what they meant was that Meester was capable of making even bad jokes sound clever. She could make you cry or make you cringe in delicious sympathy with whichever of Blair’s minions she was cutting down to size for buying her shoes at a discount, and it’s thanks to Meester’s efforts that the show ever worked as well as it managed to.
So really, did anyone ever want more Gossip Girl? Or did they just want more of Leighton Meester saying bitchy things in a variety of fetching headbands?
That’s not something the new Gossip Girl can provide. And without Meester or her equivalent talent on its side, it simply doesn’t have the skill to pull off what it’s trying to pull off. Which makes it feel, in the end, like the worst thing a reboot possibly could be: unnecessary and unexciting.
You don’t have to keep meeting your exhausting, toxic frenemy for brunch to hear the same handful of stories another thousand times, even if they’ve promised to sprinkle in a few new bon mots. It’s time to unfriend and unfollow.
Public attitudes around marijuana have shifted. Policy at all levels is taking time to catch up.
What would have happened if Sha’Carri Richardson were suspended from the Olympics for marijuana use in the 1980s?
In the era of Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” mantra, as the country barreled further into its war on drugs, much of the public likely would have backed the move to block the sprinter from competing after a failed drug test. Politicians on the right and left, many of whom worked together to enact punitive anti-drug laws, would have said the suspension sends the right message to the public about the dangers of drug use — while news shows hosting these politicians’ messages cut to “This Is Your Brain on Drugs” commercials showing an egg frying on a pan.
The story is very different today. Prominent figures on the left and right, ranging from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Donald Trump Jr., condemned the decision. For Americans now living in states where marijuana is legal (including Oregon, where Richardson used it), the question is obvious: Why should this drug get anyone banned any more than other legal recreational substances, such as alcohol or tobacco? Even President Joe Biden, who as a senator helped write anti-drug laws in the ’80s and has taken a more conservative stance on marijuana legalization, suggested — while also acknowledging that “the rules are the rules” — that the rules should change.
Yet Richardson remains suspended, making her the latest victim of the global war on drugs.
There’s no good evidence that marijuana enhances a sprinter’s ability to compete — pot, after all, is not exactly known for making people faster or more energetic. As a founder of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) told the Washington Post, marijuana’s inclusion as a banned substance was rooted in the fact that it was, and still is, illegal in much of the world.
“We were a little diffident about saying, ‘Even though these things are prohibited by criminal law, we don’t care,’” Dick Pound, also a member of the International Olympic Committee, said. “That just looked bad. But I think as thought has been given to these things over the years, they’re really not performance-enhancing.”
In fact, the US over the years has pledged financial support to the Olympics to help wipe out drug use, both performance-enhancing and recreational, from the competition. The White House drug czar under former President Bill Clinton, Barry McCaffrey, was explicit: “We raise Olympic athletes up on international pedestals for all the world’s children to look up to as role models — it is vital that the message they send is drug-free. The goal of this whole effort must be to prevent Olympic medals and the Olympic movement from being tarnished by drugs.”
To put it another way: The war on drugs — which was fostered by US foreign policy and also led to international treaties that still ban recreational marijuana use — pushed the influential WADA to prohibit recreational marijuana use among athletes, a ban it continues to enforce.
The problem for the Olympics is that attitudes around marijuana have shifted dramatically over the past few years. Eighteen states and Washington, DC, have legalized marijuana for recreational use. Canada and Uruguay have also legalized cannabis, even as it puts them in conflict with international law; other countries are considering similar moves, with several dozen already legalizing marijuana for medical uses. In many nations, including in the US, public opinion is strongly behind these changes.
The Olympics have now been put in a position of effectively condemning something that much of the competition’s viewership no longer rejects and, in fact, would like to see their governments relax the rules around. Richardson is not just a victim of the war on drugs: She’s a victim of an approach that no longer matches much of the public’s views of drugs.
Americans’ views toward marijuana have softened
It really can’t be understated how quickly views around marijuana have changed in such a short time.
One decade ago, marijuana wasn’t legal anywhere in the world — not even in the Netherlands, which takes a soft approach to marijuana but technically still prohibits it. But then Colorado and Washington state legalized marijuana, opening the floodgates to a broader movement. Since then, 16 other states have followed suit, as well as the nations of Canada, Uruguay, and, perhaps soon, Mexico.
In the US, public attitudes have often been ahead of the change. In 2000, just 31 percent of the country backed legalization while 64 percent opposed it, according to Gallup. By 2020, the numbers flipped: In the most recent Gallup poll on the topic, 68 percent of respondents supported legalization and 32 percent were against it.
It is, after all, voter-approved initiatives in Colorado and Washington that enabled the first two US states to legalize.
This support extends to Republicans, who typically take more conservative views on drugs. Gallup found that a slim majority of Republicans supported marijuana legalization in 2017, 2018, and 2019; a majority were opposed to it in 2020, but the difference was within the margin of error, and a sizable minority of 48 percent still backed it. Pew also found a majority of Republicans — 55 percent — backed legalization in 2019.
And of the four Republican-dominated states where marijuana use has come up to a vote, it’s won in three: Alaska, Montana, and South Dakota, losing only in North Dakota. Marijuana legalization is 3-1 in solid red states.
Marijuana remains illegal at the federal level. But even that stands to change in the near future as public opinion moves ahead rapidly, and more prominent Democrats like Chuck Schumer and Bernie Sanders introduce legislation to end federal prohibition.
Why the shift? There are many likely explanations: The failure of war on drugs to stop widespread drug addiction (see: the opioid epidemic) and backlash to racially uneven, punitive policies have left Americans wanting a new approach. The public now tends to view marijuana use as not so bad, or at least not as harmful as using alcohol or tobacco. The internet likely sped up many of these conversations, as well as experiments around legalization that began with medical marijuana and have now spread to recreational use.
Some sports leagues reflect this change, with the NFL and MLB relaxing punishments for athletes who test positive for the drug. But while the Olympics and the WADA have raised the banned threshold for marijuana to genuinely high levels, it still suspends athletes who surpass that limit, and marijuana was the ninth-most flagged drug in 2019.
It’s in this context that many Americans and their leaders have viewed the suspension of one of their athletes over marijuana as absurd.
The reaction, however, hints at a potential sign of hope: While Richardson is the latest victim of the war on marijuana, she may soon be among its last. Because with the pace of change happening around the world regarding cannabis, it seems likely that suspensions like hers could soon become a historical footnote — a reflection of an era gone by when the world tried an overly punitive approach to a relatively harmless drug.
A sociologist on why people buy too many things.
What’s at the root of modern American consumerism? It might not just be competition among the brands trying to sell us things, but also competition among ourselves.
An easy story to tell is that marketers and advertisers have perfected tactics to convince us to purchase things, some we need, some we don’t. And it’s an important part of the country’s capitalistic, growth-centered economy: The more people spend, the logic goes, the better it is for everybody. (Never mind that they’re sometimes spending money they don’t have, or the implications of all this production and trash for the planet.) People, naturally, want things.
But American consumerism is also built on societal factors that are often overlooked. We have a social impetus to “keep up with the Joneses,” whoever our own version of the Joneses is. And in an increasingly unequal society, the Joneses at the very top are doing a lot of the consuming, while the people at the bottom struggle to keep up or, ultimately, are left fighting for scraps.
I recently spoke with Juliet Schor, a sociologist at Boston College, about the history of modern American consumerism — what it’s rooted in, how it’s evolved, and how different groups of people have experienced it. Schor, who is the author of books on consumerism, wealth, and spending, has a bit of a unique view on the matter. She tends to focus on the roles of work, inequality, and social pressures in determining what people buy and when. In her view, marketers have less to do with what we want than, say, our neighbors, coworkers, or the people we follow on social media.
Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below.
When I think of the beginning of what I perceive as modern American consumerism, I tend to go back to the 1950s and post-World War II, people moving to the suburbs in the cookie-cutter homes. But is that the right place to start?
Scholars differ on how to date consumerism. I would say we need to go back a bit earlier to the 1920s, which is when you get the development of mass production, which is what makes mass consumption possible. This perspective differentiates the 20th century from the earlier period, in which you have shopping and you have consumer fads. But what changes beginning in the 1920s is that the production technologies make it possible to produce things cheaply enough that eventually you can get a majority of the population consuming them.
In addition to the things that are happening in factories, the automobile is the leading industry where you move from stationary production to a moving assembly line and big declines in costs. You also have the beginnings of the modern advertising industry and the beginnings of consumer credit.
Then it stalls out, of course, because of the Depression and the war. What happens in the 1950s is the model gets picked up again, this time with major participation by the federal government to spur housing, road building, the auto industry, education, and income. We get into durable goods and household appliances. As we know, that’s really confined to white people post-war.
I imagine it’s changed across the decades, but why do we buy things, often more than we need?
Scholars have different answers to this question. Economists just assume that goods and services provide well-being, and people want to maximize their well-being. Psychologists root it in universal dimensions of human nature, which some of them tie back to evolutionary dynamics. I don’t think either of those are particularly convincing.
The key impetus for contemporary consumer society has been the growth of inequality, the existence of unequal social structures, and the role that consumption came to play in establishing people’s position in that unequal hierarchy. For many people, it’s about consuming to their social position, and trying to keep up with their social position.
It’s not necessarily experienced by people in that way — it’s experienced more as identity or natural desire. But I think our social and cultural context naturalizes that desire for us.
If you think about the particular things people want, it mostly has to do with being the kind of person that they think they are because there’s a consumption style connected with that. The role of what are called reference groups — the people we compare ourselves to, the people we identify with — is really key in that. It’s why, for example, I’ve found that people who have reference groups that are wealthier than they are tend to save less and spend more, and people who keep more modest reference groups, even as they gain in income and wealth, tend to save more.
Increases in inequality trigger what I’ve called “competitive consumption,” [the idea that we spend because we’re comparing ourselves with our peers and what they’re spending]. It can be hard to keep up, particularly if standards are escalating rapidly, as we’ve seen.
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Mark Boster/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images
I want to dig into this idea of competitive consumption. How are we competing with each other to consume?
We have a society which is structured so that social esteem or value is connected to what we can consume. And so the inability to consume affects the kind of social value that we have. Money displayed in terms of consumer goods just becomes a measure of worth, and that’s really important to people.
How do we pick our “reference groups” if it’s not necessarily by wealth?
We don’t know too much about it. The argument that I made in [my book] The Overspent American was that in the postwar period, we had residentially-based reference groups. So it was really your neighborhood. People moved to the suburbs, and they interacted with people in the suburbs. Those were reference groups of people of similar economic standing because housing is the biggest thing that people buy, and houses tend to cost the same amount roughly within a neighborhood. Family and friends and social networks have always been really important.
Then the next big thing that happens is that you get more and more married women going into the workforce. That really changes reference groups, because they go from a flat social structure in the suburbs to a hierarchy in the workplace, particularly if you’re talking about better-remunerated work and white-collar work. People interact with people above and below them in the hierarchy. So people were exposed to the lifestyles of the people above them in the informal socialization that goes on in the workplace.
Then there is the impact of media, and increasingly now, social media. It’s the friends that you don’t actually know, the Friends on TV.
The reference groups change under different socioeconomic dynamics, but it mostly has to do with who you’re in contact with — what you’re seeing in front of you, so your neighbors, your coworkers, what you’re seeing on TV, in movies, on social media.
I think the key point here that differentiates this approach from that of many people who think about consumption is that it is not saying that it’s primarily driven by advertising. It’s not a process of creating desire where it didn’t exist. Critics of advertising say it’s just making people want stuff they don’t need and doesn’t have value to them. And you have to think, “Okay, why do they keep doing that? Why do they keep falling for the advertisements?” Many of the things that people desperately want are not particularly advertised. My approach is rooted in really deep social logic.
It can be very rational and compelling for people to do something that in the end doesn’t necessarily make them all that better off but that failing to do requires really a major effort and going against the social grain in a very big way.
People aren’t buying a house because they saw a commercial for it.
Exactly. It’s because their sibling got one and their best friend got one. Everybody they know is getting a house, and then they think, “Okay, am I just going to be a renter?”
How has the role of women evolved in consumerism? Women are often driving what to buy, right?
Men still dominate in certain kinds of purchases, and particularly the big ones. Women were responsible for everyday purchasing: food and apparel and things like that. There’s that old binary that “men produce, women consume,” which comes out of the differences in roles we have in our economy to a certain extent.
It’s fascinating, though, because I did some work trying to estimate models of differences between men and women and various kinds of consumption, and I never found any gender differences. But if you are looking at data from marketers, you see a disproportionate amount of spending done by women.
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Small Business Administration/PhotoQuest/Getty Images
What about Black Americans? You alluded to this earlier, but they were at least left out of the ’50s version of consumerism.
The literature on Black Americans’ consumption is not large. If you look at it as a whole, you get a couple of things.
The biggest takeaway is that Black consumers are not that different from white consumers. Now, they do spend on different things, but it’s not like there are two types of consumers, whites and Blacks, and they have different orientations and dynamics. You have differences that are occasioned by some of the dynamics of structural racism — for example, the lower rates of Black homeownership. You’ve got some particular things that you see in part due to the high urban population. Urban dwellers spend more on shoes because they walk a lot more.
You have dynamics among Black consumers that are driven in part by racism. So, for example, sartorial choices in which middle-class and upper-middle-class Black people will have to spend more on their wardrobes in order to avoid being stigmatized in retail settings, the so-called “shopping while Black phenomenon.” Cassi Pittman Claytor, a sociologist at Case Reserve Western University, wrote a wonderful dissertation [now a book] on middle-class and upper-class Black people in New York City, and one chapter is on the shopping while Black question. Some of the consumption choices are driven by the attempts to manage racism and stigma in the workplace and outside of it.
Another important phenomenon around the racial discourse in consumption goes back to the period of enslavement of Black Americans in which consumption was a prohibited activity. You see the linkages from the period of enslavement where you’ve got white moralistic discourses against consumption [by] African Americans. A lot of this is in the context of poverty and poor Black people, and the illegitimacy of their consumption choices. And that’s still present today. It’s a really pernicious line of discourse back to enslavement and the ways in which whites attempted to control consumption [by] enslaved people.
What about anti-consumerism? How has that evolved, the people who try to reject consumerism?
There’s a long history of consumer rejectors. You have it in the 19th century as well, and often these were religious groups or sects of people who went into intentional communities, like the Shakers.
To me what’s interesting about anti-consumerist movements of the current period is that there’s a certain kind of mainstreaming going on of them. They’re growing. My work is focused on the connections between work choices and consumer choices. So with downshifters, these are people who made decisions to work less and consume less, and it was often the decisions around work that were driving them. Many of them were not people who wanted to consume less in and of itself, but they wanted to take control of their time. And they were willing to make that trade-off.
You do have this minimalist movement now where the stuff is first, though it has a whole story around not getting tied to a burnout job. It’s connected with financial independence and this big “FIRE” movement — financial independence, retire early — and that’s really mainstream. It has much less of a countercultural aspect of it.
You’ve got people coming from the ecological side of things, like buy-nothing groups, and some of these are really big now. They have an ethic of anti-consumerism.
What we’re not sure about is how much participating in one of these actually reduces people’s consumption of new items. But people who participate in buy-nothing groups, most of them don’t buy nothing.
Has the conversation around consumerism and the environment picked up? Should we be talking about consumerism more in the context of saving the planet?
I think we should, and there are two parts to it. One is consuming differently, and the other is not consuming as much. So, volume and composition. To meet climate targets, we need to do both.
There are also issues of inequality of consumption. Look at the inequalities of income and wealth, which have led to these really gross disparities — the excess consumption of people at the top and the deprivation of huge numbers of people both domestically and abroad. It’s not just the bottom, it’s a big swath of the population that doesn’t have enough. So the distribution of consumption is really key, and a lot of the discourse around climate ignored that for a long time. The Green New Deal really put it at the center — it doesn’t lead with a critique of consumerism by any means, but it’s about meeting people’s needs and equity. It has a lot of implications about how we live.
The climate situation does compel us to look differently. In Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth, a book I wrote which is now 10 years old, one of the things I looked at was the volume of consumption of consumer goods over the decade before the crash [ahead of the Great Recession]. There was a massive speedup in what I call the cycle of acquisition and discard, just the volume of things people were buying. The fast fashion model that we saw in apparel happened in all sorts of other items, too.
The crash led to a hangover in which you haven’t seen that acceleration again, but it was just a period that showed how dysfunctional the consumer system has become.
Did the Great Recession change how we’re behaving and what we’re buying?
It really slowed down that cycle of acquisition and discard. From 1991 to 2007, the number of pieces of apparel people were buying, on average, went from 34 pieces of new apparel a year to 67. That number hasn’t really budged in the last 10 years.
We haven’t had a massive discontinuity in how the consumption system is operating, but people had less money. And that’s part of the rejecter dynamic — when it’s more difficult for people to participate in that system, either because of its growing cost or their own incomes stagnating, they are likelier to reject it.
It will be interesting to see whether there are any wider impacts of Covid and the fact that people lived with not much more than basic necessities for a while. My own view is that the work patterns are really key in driving consumption. The standard economic view is that it’s the consumer decisions and desires that drive work patterns, and I don’t think that’s the way it works. I think that work patterns actually end up driving consumption.
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Mario Tama/Getty Images
People make decisions about work, and the hours of work and the incomes associated with them are fixed with the decision. In general, if I decide to take my job as a professor, it has a salary that goes with it, and then that’s what drives my consumption decisions because it drives my income.
If I can’t work this hard anymore, I’m going to go part-time and my income gets cut in half, then I have to adjust my consumption. And that’s not to say it doesn’t go in the other direction — if I want to buy a house, I am going to work some more. But this is my analysis of how the work and spending sides fit together, which is that the work side is a little more dominant.
So we are entering a moment where lots of people have been sitting at home for a year and a half, and as you said, there’s a lot of pent-up demand. Plenty of people I know are ready to spend. Is it odd that we’re responding to the end of a crisis by spending money?
We’re just talking about the people who have it. One of the things about the pandemic is that it made the inequalities in income and spending power more visible to many Americans.
You had so many people who just were struggling through the pandemic to meet basic needs. If you think of that as a working-class phenomenon, you also had this middle-class phenomenon of people whose salaries continued. They were stuck in their houses, so the money was coming into their bank accounts every month and they didn’t have much to spend it on at all. There are people with considerable disposable income right now. We’re going to see a burst of spending now, and we’ll see how long it lasts.