Speaker

Kyla Scanlon

Kyla Scanlon

Economics writer and content creator known for explaining monetary policy, markets, and the labour market to a mass audience across TikTok, YouTube, Substack, and X; author of In This Economy? How Money & Markets Really Work (2024). She grew up in western Kentucky, self-taught options trading at 16, and graduated valedictorian from Western Kentucky University before working at Capital Group in Los Angeles and beginning to make videos during the pandemic — reasoning that talking to a camera was her best available route to connection while living alone.

Scanlon describes herself as introverted, and frames video-making as suited to that temperament precisely because it is a solitary act performed in a room alone. She has posted more than 500 TikToks and 150–200 YouTube videos, hosts a podcast called Let’s Appreciate, and publishes a Substack newsletter. Her audience skews young (20 to 35), and she says the recurring feedback she gets is gratitude for simplifying economics and for taking seriously the financial anxieties of people who feel excluded from mainstream economic commentary aimed at an older cohort. She is also publicly known, outside this episode, for coining the term ‘vibecession’ in 2022 to describe a gap between negative public sentiment about the economy and more benign underlying economic data. [?]

Core positions

  • Economics education should meet audiences on the platforms they already use, in language stripped of unnecessary jargon. Scanlon produces across TikTok, Substack, YouTube, and a podcast deliberately, rather than picking one medium, because different audiences consume media differently; she frames her ambition as building something like a modern Free to Choose.
  • Conspiratorial economic thinking on social media is driven by a demand for a scapegoat, not by a shortage of information. She reads TikTok economics content as trending toward blaming discrete villains (companies, institutions) for structural problems like inflation, because a named culprit offers emotional relief that a diffuse explanation does not.
  • Persistent economic negativity has generational roots and gets channelled into passive sharing rather than action. She connects her own cohort’s tilt toward nihilism to being born into the dot-com bust and coming of age through the financial crisis, 9/11, and the pandemic, and observes that discontent increasingly surfaces as sharing a story online rather than organised protest.
  • Housing and equity markets increasingly channel young people toward speculation rather than participation. She points to a Federal Reserve chart showing the bottom half of Americans hold nearly all their wealth in housing versus the top decile in equities, and cites the theory that being priced out of homeownership pushes younger investors toward crypto and meme stocks instead.

In the wiki