Kyla Scanlon knows it’s easier for most people to talk about their bowel movements than to talk about money. Unlike bathroom habits, which don’t necessarily reflect one’s success or failure in life, money is personal. Money is intimately tied to our sense of self-worth; the ups and downs in our bank account often reflect our most important life choices, and expose our bad habits and vulnerabilities. Taking a hard look at your finances is often easy to avoid when there is so much information online, and so little guidance about how to do with all of that advice. Even for someone who is deeply committed to improving their personal finances, “the opportunity cost is high” when considering new information, Scanlon says.
So Scanlon, the 27-year-old educator and economics commentator, meets people where they are: their social media feeds. Scanlon’s piercing, crystal-blue eyes pop up in Instagram Reels and TikToks all around the world. Her most popular TikTok, with over 700K views to-date, unpacks hedge-funder Michael Burry’s 2021 tweet in which he speculates that the US economy is headed towards hyperinflation. She typically shares economic commentary on daily news––like her recent analysis of the economics of flood insurance, posted days before Hurricane Milton’s landfall in Florida, or her updates on a latest fed day.
Like a weather woman who knows exactly where to point on greenscreen, Scanlon seamlessly embodies the ‘talking head’ native to TikTok. Scanlon knows that most of her viewers don’t have any background in finance (how many of us know what “PMI stage V recovery” means?), but refuses to treat them with condescension, instead talking to them like friends with whom she is sharing hot gossip. She grounds the iconoclastic Burry in pop-culture reference––to the 2015 biographical film The Big Short on Burry himself––and speedruns her way through a rapid history of hyperinflation––defined as inflation at a rapid rate of over 50% per month, all while shuffling through scary screenshots of news headlines about rising debt and inequality. She adds a disclaimer that “this is not my opinion, just a breakdown of Burry’s tweet,” hedging herself from standard accusations of fear mongering.
And Scanlon’s approach works: through a combination of personal integrity and social media-savvy, Scanlon has succeeded in making honest financial commentary cool. Scanlon has around 200K followers on each of TikTok, Instagram, and X (formerly Twitter). She has contributed to publications like Bloomberg Opinion, the Financial Times, and the New York Times Opinion, discussing economic policy and the state of economic “vibes.” Well-respected public economist Tyler Cowen describes Scanlon as “a force of nature.” Sporting just a bachelor’s degree, she even teaches in classrooms at top institutes like MIT and UC Berkeley.
For someone who talks a lot about money, Scanlon tells me that making money is not her top priority. She says it in her signature matter-of-fact manner, maintaining her characteristically-intense eye contact, and I am forced to believe her.
Scanlon explains that her interest in money began in childhood. Growing up through the Great Recession, surrounded by widespread poverty in her hometown in Kentucky, she began to wonder how to help people and decided that “money seemed to be the way.” Since then, Scanlon has been endlessly curious about the economy.
Scanlon tells me that “’You can’t fix the system until you understand it.” It’s cliché, but a willingness to understand the economy does seem scarce these days. Fortune magazine dubs Scanlon ‘Gen Z’s favorite economist.’ But, really, how many well-known Gen Z economists are there to begin with?
Scanlon’s generation is known for loving Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the first woman endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America to win Congressional office. As a nominally pro-capitalist influencer, Scanlon might seem to be a surprising folk hero for Generation Z. But Scanlon never invalidates her generation’s negative feelings about capitalism. Instead she offers concrete theories for why her peers feel alienated from the contemporary economy, and offers advice on how that her peers can participate in—not just feel like “victims of”—the “system.”
In Scanlon’s view, her generation’s loudest voices have a point about capitalism’s present failings. Global temperatures are, in fact, rising and housing is getting more expensive––pricing many Americans out of the “American Dream” that their parents seemingly achieved so effortlessly. But Scanlon does not imagine a world where capitalism stops, and where climate change slows down and housing prices fall as a result. To believe that such a world is possible is to believe that “incentives are perfectly aligned such that it’s okay if our economy stopped growing and [that] jobs somehow remain intact.” Instead, Scanlon’s approach is to accept the capitalist reality, and teach her generation how to use the existing economic systems for good.
“I think things can be greater than they have been. And I believe that improvement will come through [economic] abundance.”
Scanlon’s economic journey started in high school. Scanlon began trading options after she observed her father, an athlete who ran the GE headquarters gym, attend investment webinars on evenings and weekends. Scanlon asked him what he was doing. Rather than just telling his daughter directly, Scanlon’s father insisted that Scanlon learn for herself. He opened her a parent-approved trading account.
Scanlon was hooked. She started to treat trading as her full-time job for the summer. Scanlon recalls spending hours everyday researching companies and formulating theses on the stock market.
“I would think ‘I believe this company will do well. How can I design a position to benefit from that? How do I analyze the implied volatility and the Delta to figure out the best way to trade?’”
Later, when Scanlon attended Western Kentucky University on scholarship, she was prepared to major in engineering. But in her first semester, she wound up in an introductory economics class: up until then, she had no idea that you could even major in fields like economics or finance. A switch in majors followed quickly.
The more Scanlon studied economics, the more she began to appreciate the complexity of the economy. And the more she began to understand the complexity of the economy, the more she realized just how little everyone else understood. “We live in a system we don’t understand. Sewage, water supply, and electricity make no sense. The economy makes no sense,” she says.
In order to find more like-minded friends, Scanlon turned to Twitter. “I didn’t have any friends at college who were into options trading or the federal reserve. I had my professors, but I couldn’t hang out with them. So I found these people online who were incredibly kind with their time and their thoughts.”
As a result of her unconventional background, Scanlon had an unusual awareness of the average American’s lack of baseline economic understanding. As a twenty-something girl online, she quickly discovered social media’s capacity to share knowledge across traditional social barriers. This uncanny combination would form the perfect storm for her future as Gen Z’s premier economic educator.
In the summer of 2021, Scanlon began making videos about stocks like AMC and GME (Gamestop)––favorites among the then-rising r/WallStreetBets community. In a 2021 video, Scanlon offered an unusual take on the growing phenomenon of social investing: she argued that r/WallStreetBets phenomenon was not caused by people looking to make money, but people looking for community at a time when connection was scarce (it was the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, after all). With her characteristic no-nonsense attitude, though, Scanlon didn’t judge the Redditor; instead, she treated them as human beings with their own story to tell. Even today, as Scanlon proudly proclaims that she is herself a part of FinTwit (financial twitter).
Scanlon’s most notable achievement is coining the term “vibecession”: a neologism designed to explain why, despite being one of the richest generations in human history on paper, Gen Z increasingly feels “left behind” by the capitalist system. As Scalon puts it, Gen Z has struggled with many elements of their economic trajectory not working as advertised. In addition to missing out on valuable networking and skill-building opportunities on campus due the pandemic, many Gen Zs never got to experience the dignity and independence that can come from work––since they started internships and first jobs from their childhood bedrooms. Home ownership seems like a delusional fantasy in a world where even a college graduate making a six-figure salary might struggle to make rent for a studio apartment in a major city. And publications like Business Insider regularly run headlines like “It’s a tough time to be a tech graduate — AI and layoffs have made it a competitive job market”––making many Gen Zs doubt that their skills will be valued on open labor market.
All these factors contribute to Gen Z becoming some of the best-suited participants in a “vibecession,” which Scanlon defines as a period where the economy is doing well on paper, but where the general public feels like they are living in a recession. In an interview with CNN, Scanlon hypothesizes that rising home prices are a key component of the vibecession, sharing taht “the bottom 50% of Americans, all their wealth is tied up in housing.” Given the current housing market, generational wealth transfer is nearly impossible for most Americans. And so even though the stock market may be up, the vibes remain down. Why? Because not enough Americans even participate in––let alone benefit from—public markets.
Unlike her older, usually more conservative counterparts, Scanlon does not blame her generation for feeling the bad vibes. Instead, she blames a lack of economic education and a lack of structural affordability.
I ask Scanlon if she considers herself part of Gen Z, to which she says yes. Graduating right into a pandemic aligns her with that generation; it’s “the unifying factor” as she puts it.
Instead of just complaining about the economy, however, or advocating for older adults to educate her generation better, Scanlon tries to be the economic educator she wants to see in the world. She is sympathetic to her peers and uses the same language, mediums, and memes that one might use to comment on a contemporary pop-culture beef to explain the mysteries of the economy. You can almost hear her Gen Z viewers crying out “One of us! One of us!” in the comments section of her posts.
In May 2024, Scanlon released her first book, titled In This Economy?, an updated take on the classic Econ 101 textbook, in which she takes readers through everything from economic basics like supply and demand to the nuances of the stock market and fiscal policy. But Scanlon opens the book with her signature conjecture: vibes are the economy. “Consumer sentiment—more holistically, our vibes—not only affects how much we borrow, spend, save, and earn but also moves the needle on food prices, gas prices, shelter costs, wages, and more,” she writes.
Scanlon tries to keep her personal opinions out of her economic education by design––she wants her content to appeal to everyone, regardless of their political background. But while much of her generation is ready to blame capitalism for all of their ills, Scanlon notably is not. In the last section of the last chapter of In This Economy, titled “The Abundance Mindset,” Scanlon diverges from education and explicitly advocates for a future she’d like to see:a future where policies are aligned with financial mechanisms (like green bonds and carbon pricing), where AI is aligned with human-interests, and where innovation and risk-taking are celebrated—so long as those risks are taken in order to improve the welfare of people.
“I am not a degrowther. I think things can be greater than they have been and [that improvement] will come through abundance. Improvement will come through investing in healthcare, communities, and homes. It will come through thinking about immigration through a different lens. There is a world where we can have much more than we do now, but that world can only come through spending money and growth.”
Scanlon admits that her political opinions have slowly been becoming more and more public. She pins the increasing transparency of her views on how economic policies are increasingly tied to politics. This interview was conducted before the presidential election; she expressed concern about what the results could mean for housing policy, but also for womens’ rights.
Scanlon sees many reasons for optimism about America’s ability to confront economic strain, and points to the resilience of the economy through the pandemic. “I think a lot of people will yell at me for this but we saw an incredible thing during COVID, which was fiscal policy and monetary policy. It’s great that we can manipulate interest rates and we saw the power of what fiscal policy can do to fight a recession.” Scanlon cites stimulus checks, pausing student loans, and rent forbearance as examples of successful policy that helped ease the burden of the pandemic for average Americans. She goes so far to say “COVID was a perfect natural experiment for economic policy. It obviously was beset with great tragedy. But we learned a lot about what does and does not work.”
Scanlon’s broad optimism is coupled with a sense of realism about what tends to be the frothiest, and most hopeful, area of the economy: technology investing. Scanlon professes to see “beyond startups” in terms of how capitalism can make the future a better place than the present. According to Scanlon, Silicon Valley has done a lot of good for the world, but technology startups do not have sufficient tools to solve collective-action problems in areas like housing, healthcare, or providing public services like libraries. Venture capitalists need to see the potential to get an enormous multiple on their investments, becasue they take so much risk by investing in unproven products. But many industries that are necessary for human flourishing are structurally incapable of providing that multiple: she cites Adam Neumann’s housing project and Austin Allred’s BloomTech as examples of the venture capital model failing to scale outside of software.
Scanlon’s vision of a capitalist future is one where the physical world becomes a much better place to live, and where markets are relegated to their rightful place of improving people’s lives. Scanlon’s favorite symbol for real-world economic optimism? Cranes. “They’re economic indicators, symbolizing new housing, developments, and growth.”
