A Post-Truth Economy Built for the 1%
My conversation with Faris Yakob of Genius Steals about the YOLO economy, diverging demographic destinies, and why there is no "average" American for you to appeal to, in politics or marketing
Despite my interest in politics, polling and political strategy, my work as a market researcher and brand & marketing strategist means I work in a world that is, for better or worse, now decidedly downstream of politics.
The companies I work with rely on a certain amount stability. I don’t necessarily mean economic stability — sophisticated executives and marketers have heard of business cycles — but a more generalized stability. They rely on the rules being more or less the same tomorrow as they were yesterday. They rely on prices being either stable, or rising or falling predictably, for clear reasons. They rely on having fair notice that regulations or tax rates are changing. They rely on consumer behavior likewise being basically stable over time: that people will care about fashion, health, transportation, housing, technology, trends, safety, etc. more or less the same amount year after year, even if the specifics preferences or interactions change over time.
This sort of stability — of markets and governments — allows businesses to plan. And they need to plan. Warehouses and factories can take months to years to build; vendor relationships take time to establish and can be difficult to unwind. The markets may move based on daily rumors, but corporations give guidance to their investors quarterly. They try to model out their businesses a minimum of 1-5 years out.
This tells them how to spend their money — or if you like, how to invest it. Those investments can mean innovation and it can mean jobs. Cutting investments means delaying product launches, facility construction, contracts with suppliers, and hiring. It can mean cancelling all of that. And it can mean serious cutbacks in spending on anything that is deemed inessential.
So I talked to my friend Faris Yakob, co-founder of Genius Steals, about the illusion of averages, an increasingly bifurcated economy that creates a truly distorted distribution curve, the effects of geopolitics and tariffs on business and consumer health, and the way cultural isolation and economic precarity are driving us into more than one kind of polarization.
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About Faris
Faris is the co-founder of Genius Steals, a nomadic creative consultancy that works with brands, agencies and events. He and his partner Rosie speak at conferences and corporate events all over the world and have been living nomadically in between engagements for the last 7 years.
Previously he held senior agency roles at Naked Communications, McCann and MDC Partners, in London, Sydney and NYC. He is the author of Paid Attention: Innovative Advertising, writes a monthly column on effective brand communication, and bylines include Fast Company, Financial Times, The Guardian, Economic Times of India Brand Equity, and Campaign.
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Mentioned articles, posts, and more:
Here are some links to articles and other materials we referenced in the conversation, which I think help drive home some of these ideas.
On why we’re obsessed with the average but we should love the median more: “How the Average Triumphed Over the Median” by Dan Kopf, 4/5/2016 on Priceonomics
“In many cases, perhaps even more often than is the case for the average, the median is the better number to use if you are trying to understand the center of a distribution. This is because the average is significantly more affected by extreme measurements.
“Many analysts believe that the unthinking use of the average damages our understanding of quantitative information. This is because when people look at averages, they think it is “the norm”. But in reality, it might be highly impacted by just one huge outlier.
Imagine an analyst who wanted to know the representative value for the cost of real estate on a block with five houses. Four of the houses are worth $100,000 and one is worth $900,000. Given these numbers, the average would be $200,000 and the median $100,000. In this case, and many others, the median gives you a better sense of what is “typical”.
“Recognizing the huge impact a small number of extreme values – or a skewed distribution – can have on the average, the U.S. Census primarily uses the median to present changes in family incomes. This methodology deemphasizes the growth in income of people in the top 1%.”
On how social isolation distorts our behavior: “Evolving human ecology” by Faris Yakob, 3/13/2025, WARC.com
“How does being at home alone change how we consume advertising and products? How much are people willing to pay to suit their desire for solitude, as delivery costs creep up as the inevitable consequence of post-ZIRP economics? Can they keep paying for a “private taxi for their burrito” to quote the meme?
“The logistical and practical implications are interesting but I keep thinking back to Keynes. How do thoughts and feelings and even occupations change when people act alone and choose to be so. How do brands provide solutions or comfort or go about trying to understand these consumers?”
On mass v. luxury, and why luxury wins: “Diverging demographic destinies: Cars and the middle class” by Faris Yakob 12/10/2024, WARC.com
“According to Pew, the American middle class has shrunk significantly in the last few decades. The top 20% of earners now take more than 50% of aggregate income because theirs has grown faster. 88% of Americans have less than $2000 in their checking account and 50% have less than $500 in savings. The average cost of a new car in 1984 was $6000 and the average household income was $27k. Today average household income is $80k [Fed] but averages conceal the widened gap between maxima and minima: the median income per person is around $35k [Census]. The average price of a new car is almost $50k, which is surprising enough that CNN wrote an article about it. They explain that “much of the reason Americans are paying nearly $50k for a car is that automakers decided to go all-in on expensive cars. The more they charge for a car, the more money they make off it.””
On buying even when you shouldn’t: “The Yolo Economy, or what happened to the recession we were promised?” by Faris Yakob 10/5/2023, WARC.com
“Why save when inflation destroys the value? Why invest when memestocks cleaned out retail investors, NFTs are worthless and bankers rig the game? Why save for a house you can never afford, no matter how many avocado-toast-lattes you resist? How can you afford to have kids when they, and especially childcare, cost so much and younger generations are less well off than their parents and will face the real impact of climate change during their lives? Why stick at a job you hate in a ‘gig economy’? Why wait until retirement to travel if you are unlikely to ever retire and the climate crises may make many destinations unappetizing in a decade or two anyway?
“This is the YOLO economy, where people that can are focusing on the moment because planning for a future requires near-infinite discounting due to perceived maximal uncertainty. Pent-up demand is part of it but it’s also pulling demand from the future.”
On how dependent the US economy is on the rich, and that Moody’s report Faris mentions: “The U.S. Economy Depends More Than Ever on Rich People” [GIFT LINK] by Rachel Louise Ensign 2/23/2025 at WSJ.com [PAYWALL LINK]
“Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, estimated that spending by the top 10% alone accounted for almost one-third of gross domestic product.
“Between September 2023 and September 2024, the high earners increased their spending by 12%. Spending by working-class and middle-class households, meanwhile, dropped over the same period.
“The finances of the well-to-do have never been better, their spending never stronger and the economy never more dependent on that group,” said Zandi, who oversaw the analysis, which was based on data from the Federal Reserve. The analysis runs through the third quarter of 2024 because that is the most recent data available.
Taken together, well-off people have increased their spending far beyond inflation, while everyone else hasn’t. The bottom 80% of earners spent 25% more than they did four years earlier, barely outpacing price increases of 21% over that period. The top 10% spent 58% more.”
On the deep and wide gulf that exists between those with generational wealth, and the rest of us: “What the Comfort Class Doesn’t Get” by Xochitl Gonzales 4/6/2025 at The Atlantic
“America is not just suffering from a wealth gap; America has the equivalent of a class apartheid. Our systems—of education, credentialing, hiring, housing, and electing officials—are dominated and managed by members of a “comfort class.” These are people who were born into lives of financial stability. They graduate from college with little to no debt, which enables them to advance in influential but relatively low-wage fields—academia, media, government, or policy work. Many of them rarely interact or engage in a meaningful way with people living in different socioeconomic strata than their own. And their disconnect from the lives of the majority has expanded to such a chasm that their perspective—and authority—may no longer be relevant.
“Take, for instance, those lawmakers desperately workshopping messages to working-class folks: More than half of congressional representatives are millionaires. In academia, universities are steered by college presidents—many of whom are paid millions of dollars a year—and governed by boards of trustees made up largely of multimillionaires, corporate CEOs, and multimillionaire corporate CEOs. (I know because I serve on one of these boards.) Once, a working-class college dropout like Jimmy Breslin could stumble into a newsroom and go on to win the Pulitzer Prize; today, there’s a vanishingly small chance he’d make it past security. A 2018 survey of elite newsrooms found that 65 percent of summer interns had attended top-tier colleges.”
On the biggest consumer packaged goods conglomerates growing at 1% per year for the last decade and a half: “Madison Avenue Media Madness” by Michael Farmer 3/11/2025, C-Suite Blues (perhaps one day I will try to unpack what Marketing Mix Modeling is, and whether it’s really the solution Farmer is suggesting, but that day is not today).
“Consider the following: for the fifty years from 1960 to 2010, the combined FMCG sales of P&G, Unilever, Nestle and Colgate-Palmolive grew at about an 8% compounded annual growth rate per year.
“The numbers associated with this long-term growth rate are staggering. P&G alone grew from about $1 billion (1960) to $79 billion in 2010. Throughout this period, P&G was the industry’s advocate for the power of advertising, becoming the largest advertiser in the US, with a focus on traditional advertising — digital / social advertising had hardly begun until 2010.
”Since 2010, with the advent of digital / social advertising, and massive increases in digital / social spend, P&G, Unilever, Nestle and Colgate-Palmolive have grown, collectively, at less than 1% per year, about half the growth rate of the US economy (2.1% per year).“They are not the only major advertisers who have grown below GDP rates. At least 20 of the 50 largest advertisers in the US have grown below 2% per year for the past 15 years.”
On how it’s not just going to get more expensive, it’s going to get more scarce:
🚨 UPDATE 🚨: Last episode was with
and I referenced Echelon’s 5-party experiment. But the version of the report I was writing from was 2023! Alas, there was a 2024 report, and things wound up looking… less good… for my left-ish coalition. The updated deck, showing that the public seemed to have moved left on a lot of political issues and ideas, but right on their political identities, which is FASCINATING is here: https://echeloninsights.com/wp-content/uploads/June-2024-Omnibus-Multi-Party-and-Quadrants-2.pdf
Books you should read
Based on this conversation (these and others mentioned on the show are found at the Cross Tabs Bookshop List):
The Road to Somewhere by David Goodhart
Paid Attention by Faris Yakob
Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door - Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy by Christopher Mims
Back next week!