15 Things from the week | 23 Aug 25
News from the past couple of weeks, and a few other things.
1. The troubling decline in conscientiousness (FT)
Of all personality types, conscientious people tend to fare best on a number of key measures. They live the longest, have the most career success and are less likely to go through divorce. They even manage to hold down a job during recessions. Intuitively, this makes sense. Life isn’t just about knowing what you should do, or having the resources to do it, it’s about following through. Being motivated and persistent is a huge help.
All this makes it disconcerting that levels of conscientiousness in the population appear to be in decline. Extending a pioneering 2022 US study which identified early signs of a drop during the pandemic, I found a sustained erosion of conscientiousness, with the fall especially pronounced among young adults.
Digging deeper into the data, which comes from the Understanding America Study, we can see that people in their twenties and thirties in particular report feeling increasingly easily distracted and careless, less tenacious and less likely to make and deliver on commitments.
While a full explanation of these shifts requires thorough investigation, and there will be many factors at work, smartphones and streaming services seem likely culprits. The advent of ubiquitous and hyper-engaging digital media has led to an explosion in distraction, as well as making it easier than ever to either not make plans in the first place or to abandon them. The sheer convenience of the online world makes real-life commitments feel messy and effortful. And the rise of time spent online and the attendant decline in face-to-face interactions enable behaviours such as “ghosting”.
Collapsing conscientiousness is not the only personality shift visible in the data. Neuroticism — a function of the much-discussed increase in anxiety — has risen almost as much. Young adults also report feeling less amiable and outgoing. There’s a particularly steep drop shown in the latter during the pandemic, when young people bore the brunt of restrictions on contact in order to protect others from harm. In fact, long the most extroverted group in society, young adults are now the most introverted.
But while the trends are undoubtedly troubling, we shouldn’t be fatalistic. Unlike parental background and genetic make-up, there is a wealth of evidence that personality is malleable — what has been eroded can be rebuilt. Conscientiousness will separate those who just survive from those who thrive in the 21st century. We can each decide which half of that divide we fall on — but ironically that will take some dedication.
NOTE: I don’t count myself a Luddite, but I do think technology has played a large role in these negative trends. A healthy dose of humanities studies in combination with STEM degrees may help our future technology leaders restore balance to our own humanity.
I’m reminded of this 1953 quote from German philosopher Martin Heidegger:
“When the farthest corner of the globe has been conquered technologically and can be exploited economically; when any incident you like, in any place you like, at any time you like, becomes accessible as fast as you like; when you can simultaneously "experience" an assassination attempt against a king in France and a symphony concert in Tokyo; when time is nothing but speed, instantaneity, and simultaneity, and time as history has vanished from all Being of all peoples; when a boxer counts as the great man of a people; when the tallies of millions at mass meetings are a triumph; then, yes then, there still looms like a specter over all this uproar the question: what for? — where to? — and what then?”
2. Scientific Journals Can’t Keep Up With Flood of Fake Papers (WSJ)
A growing tide of fake papers is flooding the scientific record and proliferating faster than current checks can rid them from the system, scientists warn.
The source of the trouble is “paper mills,” businesses or individuals that charge fees to publish fake studies in legitimate journals under the names of desperate scientists whose careers depend on their publishing record.
The rate of fake papers generated by these operators roughly doubled every 1.5 years between 2016 and 2020, according to a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Real Estate & Housing
3. Nobody’s Buying Homes, Nobody’s Switching Jobs—and America’s Mobility Is Stalling (WSJ)
In the 1950s and ’60s, some 20% of Americans would typically move each year.
The share of people moving has steadily slowed since then, in part because the U.S. population has aged, and older people tend to move less. More Americans also live in households with two earners, which makes uprooting more challenging.
By 2019, the year before the Covid pandemic, 9.8% of Americans moved.
During Covid, there was a well-publicized increase in people decamping farther away from work and deeper into the suburbs. That surge was brief. In 2023, only 7.8% of Americans moved, the lowest rate logged since U.S. Census records began in 1948. That figure held relatively steady in 2024, the most recent data available.
The biggest drop: a roughly 47% decline among people moving within the same county over the past three decades, according to census data.
4. Number of Americans Selling Their Home Hits Major Milestone (Newsweek)
The imbalance between sellers and buyers in the U.S. housing market has now passed the 500,000 mark, according to the latest data from Redfin, as unsold inventory continues piling up across the country.
Back in May, the real-estate brokerage warned that the number of Americans selling their homes was nearing half a million, the highest on records dating back to 2013. Now that record has been shattered.
In June, there were a total of 1.922 million sellers on the market, up 12.8 percent from a year earlier, facing 1.413 million buyers, down 8.9 percent from a year earlier, according to Redfin. The difference between them is around 509,000.
5. US homeowners are more locked in than they’ve been for 40 years (Sherwood)
American homeowners just aren’t ready to sell their properties — not this year, and certainly not at these rates.
A new Bankrate survey found that only 3% of homeowners said they’d be comfortable selling their homes in 2025 at mortgage rates of 6% or higher, a level we’ve been stuck at for almost three years.
Part of the reason, of course, is because people remember the record-low mortgage rates they used to look at during the 2010-21 era, making today’s rates seem high.
But when you zoom out even further, the ~7% we’ve been hovering at really isn’t all that extreme: mortgage rates soared into double digits in the 1980s amid the Fed's aggressive fight against inflation.
6. Americans Are Getting Priced Out of Homeownership at Record Rates (Bloomberg)
It’s no surprise that home purchasing costs have soared, with mortgage rates hovering near two-decade highs and property prices breaking records. What’s shocking is how quickly prices have ballooned out of reach. The annual income needed to afford monthly payments on a median-priced home in the US was $126,670 in 2024—a 60% jump from $79,330 in 2021, according to the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies. Meanwhile the US median household income was $80,610 in 2023, the most recent year for which data is available, up just 1.3% from three years earlier. “There’s no rush to be a homeowner given that differential,” says Laurie Goodman, founder of the Housing Finance Policy Center at the Urban Institute.
For decades part of the logic for buying a house was that, after the down payment, mortgage payments were generally cheaper than renting. Ultrapricey cities such as New York and San Francisco were the exception. Well, no more: As of June, renting was on average $908 a month cheaper than buying a starter home, and the cost of owning was higher in 49 of the 50 largest US metro areas, according to Realtor.com. Pittsburgh is the last major city where owning is cheaper than renting. In 2021, when mortgage rates were at rock bottom, buying was still as cheap or cheaper than renting in 21 markets, including Atlanta, Cleveland, Philadelphia and Tampa, Florida.
7. San Francisco Has Embraced a New Tool to Clear Homeless Camps (WSJ)
Last year, the U.S. Supreme Court granted cities more power to penalize people for sleeping outside, handing city leaders a new tool with which to clear homeless people from the streets.
Since then, San Francisco has been among the most aggressive in wielding it.
Between July 2024 and July 2025, the city arrested or cited more than 1,080 people on illegal-lodging charges, over 10 times the number of illegal-lodging arrests during the same period a year earlier. In April 2025, illegal-lodging citations and arrests hit 130, the most in a single month since the Supreme Court’s ruling.
Business
8. The entire stock market is being carried by these four AI stocks (Market Watch)
Nvidia Corp., Meta Platforms Inc., Microsoft Corp.and Broadcom Inc. have contributed a combined six percentage points to the S&P 500’s total year-to-date appreciation of 10%, according to a note from DataTrek Research. That means 60% of the index’s gains are from these AI megacaps, highlighting just how narrow the stock market has become. Nvidia alone accounts for 26% of the S&P 500’s year-to-date advance.
The AI hype has lifted the S&P 500 to a pricey valuation. The index trades at a price-to-earnings ratio of 22 times, and DataTrek calculates the S&P 500’s “AI premium” provides a 2.7-point, or 14.2%, boost to the index’s valuation. That means the S&P 500 would trade at just 19.4 times earnings without the AI premium.
9. American Companies Are Buying Their Own Stocks at a Record Pace (WSJ)
American companies are repurchasing their shares at a record pace, boosting their balance sheets and fueling the U.S. stock rally.
U.S. companies have announced $983.6 billion worth of stock buybacks so far this year, the best start to a year on record, according to Birinyi Associates data going back to 1982. They are projected to purchase more than $1.1 trillion worth overall in 2025, which would mark an all-time high.
The biggest repurchasers include tech giants Apple and Google parent Alphabet. Big banks such as JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley also are leading the charge.
Strong earnings growth and tax cuts have helped fill corporate coffers, while powering stocks out of their tariff-driven April rout and lifting the S&P 500 and Nasdaq composite to fresh records. At the same time, the confusion around trade has stalled many businesses’ investment plans, making buybacks a more appealing use of incoming cash.
10. The Era of Big Raises for Low-Paid Workers Is Over (WSJ)
Something remarkable happened in the years immediately preceding and, especially, following the pandemic: Wages for poor workers began rising much faster than they did for the rich.
That era may have now come to at least a temporary halt. And with worries about the health of the job market heightened following the disappointing July jobs report, it may have ended altogether.
Wage growth for low-income workers looks to have significantly deteriorated in recent months, while wage growth for their higher-income counterparts has held up much better. It is a shift that could matter not just for low-paid workers, but the overall economy.
11. AI Is Forcing the Return of the In-Person Job Interview (WSJ)
Artificial intelligence has taken over so much of the job search that employers are resorting to a retro move: the in-person job interview.
Virtual interviews have become the new normal in hiring in recent years, driven by the rise of remote work and companies’ desire to speed up hiring. Trouble is, more candidates are using AI tools to cheat by feeding them answers off screen, especially in technical interviews, recruiters say. In rarer cases, AI-enabled scammers are impersonating job seekers with the aim of stealing data or money once they are hired.
Health
12. U.S. Drinking Rate at New Low as Alcohol Concerns Surge (Gallup)
The percentage of U.S. adults who say they consume alcohol has fallen to 54%, the lowest by one percentage point in Gallup’s nearly 90-year trend. This coincides with a growing belief among Americans that moderate alcohol consumption is bad for one’s health, now the majority view for the first time.
Gallup has tracked Americans’ drinking behavior since 1939 and their views of the health implications of moderate drinking since 2001. The latest results are from Gallup’s annual Consumption Habits survey, conducted July 7-21.
Life
13. America’s fertility crash reaches a new low (Economist)
In 1960 America’s total fertility rate, or the average number of children a woman could be expected to have, was 3.6. By 2022 it had fallen to 1.7. Recent data released by the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), an official body, show a further drop since then, to just under 1.6—the lowest rate on record. Women in every state are having fewer children.
Troublingly for such policymakers, the recent fall in birth rates is concentrated in rural parts of the country and places where people tend to have less education. Although Utah has plenty of worshippers, they are having fewer children. Pro-natalist types often argue in favour of supplying homes with space for big families; now, even in places with abundant space, birth rates are dropping. This mainly reflects changing behaviour among young women, who are having fewer unplanned births. Whereas in 2005 most women in Utah had their first child before the age of 25, today fewer than one in four do.
Policymakers looking to prompt more births have few tools at their disposal. America’s fertility rate dropped firmly below 2.1—the level required to keep the population stable without immigration—almost two decades ago. In the years since, few convincing explanations for the trend have emerged. The CDC’s recent data have therefore alarmed researchers and the White House. Both worry that the lower birth rates fall, the lower the chance they will ever recover. In their search for a fix for America’s falling birth rate, they may have to start looking in new places.
14. From $24,000 to $147,000: How Much Daycare Costs Across America (WSJ)
The median cost of sending one child to daycare for five years is about $44,000 across the U.S., according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of Labor Department data. In 26 counties, the median cost for five years of daycare is more than $100,000.
NOTE: Article has interactive map:
For Fun
15. How the Savannah Bananas Are Reinventing Baseball, One Crazy Sellout at a Time (WSJ)
What does the Man in the Yellow Suit know?
I went looking for the answer on a recent afternoon at Camden Yards. In a few hours, this major-league ballpark would be packed—all 45,000 or so of its seats filled for a sold-out baseball spectacle.
No, not the hometown Orioles, currently marinating in last place.
The Savannah Bananas.
In recent years, the Bananas have become an inescapable phenomenon, a traveling revue that mixes the charm of old vaudeville, the creativity of the Harlem Globetrotters and the fan loyalty of the Grateful Dead.
Playing an unserious version of a game that takes itself seriously, the Bananas have their Scrooges and eye rolling skeptics, naturally.
And yet the butts-in-seat data is undeniable.
The Bananas don’t spend a nickel on traditional advertising—“Zero,” club owner Jesse Cole told me—and yet this spring, the Bananas played to 81,000 people at Clemson University.
The Bananas also sold out Fenway Park and the home fields of the Phillies, Cardinals, Reds and Royals, among others. They have a sold out weekend coming at Yankee Stadium, in jaded, too-cool-for-school New York City. The club’s wait list currently has 3.6 million names, and they don’t have plans to hit the brakes.
“I want a billion fans,” Cole said.
It’s bonkers. At a time when Major League Baseball is unleashing its own stunts for relevancy—witness its effort to draw 85,000 this weekend at rainy Bristol Motor Speedway—the Bananas have already made people go crazy for a fading pastime.
The 41-year-old Cole is the Barnum in charge. He’s not hard to find: He’s the Man in the Yellow Suit.