Ending the Anger Economy
When my daughter was a newborn baby, all that mattered was her physical survival.
When she became a toddler, the “survival” part still mattered, but her ability to play became important as well.
And now that she’s 4 years old, the “survival” and “play” parts still matter, but her social awareness and capacity to sustain friendships are crucial as well.
Whenever I go to school events, I notice all the hilarious and awkward exchanges between the kids that make each event so memorable. Friends will giddily gather around one another and literally stumble over in excitement. Acquaintances will give each other a shy “hello” and then proceed to scream in joy when they realize they’re wearing a similar color shirt.
And then, of course, there are moments where kids get into heated exchanges and end up crying over something you could only pretend to understand.
The most interesting part of these latter moments is not the behavior of the children, but the behavior of the parents. When two kids get into a conflict, their parents will rush over to see what happened, and then encourage their children to make peace or to apologize for whatever occurred. There’s a cordial rush to the land of compassion that leads to a quick and satisfying resolution.
I find it fascinating that as parents, we are quick to suggest the virtues of patience and understanding to resolve conflicts between children. But when it comes to conflicts that we have with other adults, we often resort to the vices of grudges and spite. There’s a deep asymmetry between the standards we hold our children to, and the standards we hold ourselves to.
Maybe it’s because it’s easier to give advice than it is to take your own. Or that when you’re a parent, you have to act as a moral exemplar knowing that you have a being that is observing you all the time.
But I think the actual reason is more troubling in nature. Ultimately, it has to do with the fact that in the modern world, the incentives are such that being in conflict with one another is socially rewarded. It’s something that doesn’t take away from your status, but rather adds to it.
And the force that’s driving this is what I call the Anger Economy.
Whenever you see a disparaging remark getting 30,000 likes, that’s the Anger Economy. Whenever you see a video insulting someone with an ad inserted in the middle, that’s the Anger Economy. Anytime you see spite or distaste being praised and amplified, that’s when you know that wrath has enraptured our values.
We like to wonder how things got this way, and we’ll often explain it through the lens of psychology and sociology. We tend to point to what social media has done to our brains, how political partisanship has polarized everything, the loneliness epidemic, and so much more.
But I think a stronger frame to view this problem through is that of economics, and more specifically, the economics of anger.
This is because human behavior is governed by the puppet string of incentives. People will adapt their behavior (and even their morals) according to what is socially rewarded, which is why good people can end up doing terrible things. If a certain type of conduct is incentivized within a population, then the laws of economics will ensure that this behavior is heralded within that group.
To illustrate this, let’s view anger through the only graph we remember from economics class:
Thankfully, this is all we’ll need to understand the Anger Economy, so you can rest assured that Econ 101 will be enough.
As a quick refresher, these two lines represent the supply and demand of a given good (which is referred to as a “widget”), where there’s an equilibrium price and quantity that has been set by the market. All widgets are governed by the law of supply and demand, but I’ve found that this doesn’t just apply to goods and services.
It applies to the economics of anger as well.
To illustrate this, let’s substitute the axes of price and quantity with labels that treat anger as a commodity instead:
The first thing to note is that anger is always a response to an event. You won’t feel it unless something provokes it, which means that if you’re a monk in a cave somewhere, there won’t be much that could trigger that response. That sounds awfully nice, but the tradeoff is that there’s not much of anything else going on either, which is why you and I would rather live in an angry world than renounce it entirely.
The reality, of course, is that events happen everyday that piss us off to no end. The pernicious combination of politics and social media ensures that a steady stream of events increase our cortisol levels at scale, and this is one of the primary culprits of the Anger Economy. In fact, this is the very example I’ll use to illustrate how it all works.
Let’s say that the current administration issues a policy that you find disgraceful. This event finds its way to you via the news or social media, and in that moment, you feel angry.
The thing is that millions of people are also feeling that anger around the same time, and when this happens, people rush to find solidarity in that anger. This is an important point. When we feel angry about something, inherent in that feeling is the belief that an injustice has been committed, and wherever there is injustice, there is the desire for a community to bond over it. To fight against it.
In other words, there is a huge increase in demand for angry content to help rally around this emotion. This is reflected in your own behavior whenever you hear about an upsetting event. You don’t just say “oh, that happened” and then proceed to go about your day; instead, you go on social media to find other people that are also angry so you can engage with an opinion that you may also share.
Multiply this by however many millions of people are doing the same thing, and the demand curve shifts to reveal a new equilibrium.
Now here’s where it gets especially troublesome.
When people see angry posts go viral (which is exemplified by the higher “engagement with anger” equilibrium point), they also want to create content that can help them do the same. Both the algorithm and public opinion incentivizes people to post angry content, so the supply of anger also increases to match that increase in demand.
This leads to a situation where the quantity of angry content explodes, resulting in a new equilibrium:
This explains why a few hours after any triggering event, any social media timeline will be completely inundated with anger from all directions. The incentives are such so that people are encouraged to add to this storm instead of stepping away from it, and we see that reflected in public opinion right away.
The balance to this is that after some time, the engagement with that content decreases because the market becomes saturated. People can only handle enough “hot takes” on a subject for a given period of time before they tire of it, and eventually the event itself becomes part of an old news cycle.
When this happens, the demand curve returns to its baseline state, bringing the equilibrium point to a lower (and calmer) level.
But when the Anger Economy is in full force, there isn’t enough time for the demand curve to move down like this again.
When political instability is high, news cycles become shorter as the events that provoke rage increase in frequency. One day, it’s the economy. The next, it’s a human rights violation. The next, it’s the threat of global war. The events that kickstart yet another cycle of anger are endless, which means that the demand for angry content never has the chance to settle down.
Instead, it grows yet again.
If this results in a continuous pattern where supply and demand keep edging upward, we reach an untenable place where the Anger Economy has a hold on everything. Anger becomes something we encourage because it’s a commodity we value and incentivize. It no longer becomes the vice we want our children to avoid; it becomes a virtue that we seek to enshrine.
I’ve since realized that the most effective way to push back against this pattern isn’t to treat anger as a moral problem. It’s to treat it as an economics problem. And the way to actualize this is to neutralize your demand for angry content as much as possible.
This is because the Anger Economy is completely dependent upon demand increasing once an event happens. It lives in the moment where you put on the news knowing that it’ll just leave you more anxious and frustrated. It manifests in the subsequent moment where you then rush to social media to post something snide or to amplify a seething opinion.
But what if, in these moments, you ask yourself these 2 questions:
(1) Is there anything I can do about this event right now to make a change?
or…
(2) Am I just going to get angry about it and go online?
The first question is about real action that can make a difference. Perhaps you can find a protest to join or you can sign a petition to be sent to a government official. Regardless of how effective the end result may be, what matters is that there’s something concrete you can do that is a form of action to fight a particular injustice.
But chances are, you’re going to fall in the camp of the second question. You’re going to go online to find an angry opinion you agree with and simply click a digital heart to express your rage. Or you’re going to add a snide comment that gets lost in an algorithmic storm. These behaviors not only detract from your mood, but they also strip you of agency. In the end, they’re empty actions that only serve to push up demand for the Anger Economy by leaving you enraged without a healthy release.
To be clear, it’s okay to be angry at something you find reprehensible. That’s how we fight against injustice, tyranny, and all the other vices of the sort. But the real question is if you can convert that anger to concrete action through the lens of Question 1. And if your answer that is “no,” then I encourage you to also say “no” to Question 2 and refuse to contribute to the Anger Economy.
In my case, whenever I hear news about turmoil or upheaval, I’ll discuss it amongst my close circle of friends and family to decompress and see if there’s anything concrete I can do about it. For example, with the recent LA fires, my wife and I donated a bunch of goods to a nearby community center and she chose a number of GoFundMe accounts to donate to. Instead of being angry at local government officials and posting my discontent about them, I wanted to direct my attention to what I can act upon to make a small yet substantive difference.
But if I come across enraging news that I can’t do much about, I choose to opt out of the Anger Economy. Instead of going on social media and spending hours ingesting random people’s hot takes, I’ll focus on what I have agency over: my creative work, my family, and my community. This is my way of refusing to push the demand curve up by keeping my attention anchored to what’s most productive for it.
The way to end the Anger Economy is to first end your personal involvement in it. It’s to stop treating it as a commodity that flares up and subsides based on the forces of supply and demand. It’s to ask yourself if you’re going to take real action to fight injustice, or if you’re going to do it by clicking hearts and reposting snide comments behind a glimmering screen.
Ultimately, it’s to understand that the values we teach to our children are the ones we should espouse as well. And given that we don’t want them to be spiteful to those they don’t know, perhaps we need to reflect on whether we operate according to that same principle ourselves.
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Related Posts
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