The Great American Fun Shortage

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1:37ben welcome to the studio thank you have you been having a fun summer so far having an amazing summer an amazing summer what have you been up to well last weekend i was at the beach with my family and then the weekends before that we had amazing pride weekend in new york and then before that i was on a boat on a dance party on a boat in The Hudson River when the Knicks won the NBA championship. Electric. That was the best feeling. A lot of communal stuff happening in the city. Absolutely. I've honestly been having a really fun summer, too. I've been traveling a little bit, but mostly enjoying being in New York, going to the beach.

2:11Now I'm watching a lot of soccer at bars in my neighborhood. I've been having a lot of fun. But Ben, you've been reporting on this depressing reality that nationwide, fun is actually on the decline. Some of this fun we're having is very hard won. Yeah, I've been thinking about this a lot over the last few months and thinking about this summer as a summer of scarcity in some ways. Fun is harder to find. It's more expensive. It's less available. It's a depressing sense that either you can't afford to do the things you want to do or it's just like you have to think like way in advance and do a lot of planning.

2:49And the roads are full. The parking lots are full. The concert's sold out. Like there's a lot of angst about it, I think, out there. And that sucks at a personal level, but that can't be good at a societal level either. Right, Ben? So when you look at happiness in America, like the United States is like the place on the globe where their happiness has gone down the most. The World Happiness Report is this comprehensive look every year. And it really looked this year at like why people in the United States are getting less happy. Why are they less satisfied with their lives? And it can't be the Internet because other countries are at least as online as we are.

3:33But like there's something else going on with America. And I'm positing I believe that it is something to do with our availability of fun and shared experiences. This is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder. Today on the show, in the U.S., there's a mismatch between fund supply and fund demand. I talked to Ben Steverman, who covers economic and social trends for Bloomberg, about what's driving the fund shortage in America and what can be done about it.

4:05I'm wondering if we could just start with a definition here. What is fun? this is a little bit my own definition but i think this is based on real happiness research that i've talked to scholars about the fun that really makes a difference in our lives is shared fun if you just look scrolling through tiktok like okay that's like amusing but it's not fun my definition of fun is shared experiences that get you out in the world with other people whether that's going on vacation with your family, going out to nightlife or a concert with your friends, even like small talk with a stranger in your community like that is also fun.

4:48And what did you find in your reporting that showed that those kinds of fun, those collective shared fun experiences are getting harder to come by? Well, when you ask people and the Bureau of Labor Statistics actually does an annual study of how Americans spend their time. We are spending a lot less time communicating face to face over the last 20 years. And we're spending a lot more time interfacing with screens and computers. We're spending a lot more time at home rather than getting out. And in the world, we're seeing fewer arts and entertainment programs. We're seeing less sports. The walls are kind of closing in on us and we feel like we can't get out.

5:29And I'm trying to figure out Like, what is the barrier that's preventing people from going out and having more fun? One of the factors that you identified is that the number of venues for having fun has been declining. What's behind this scarcity? One thing that's happening here is that the U.S. population has gone up and the places to have fun have not. In some cases, they've gone down. Like it is so hard to open a new nightclub or bar in America because of a lot of local regulations, because of rising costs, the sort of geographic constraints in a lot of popular destinations. So we basically haven't kept up with population.

6:11We haven't kept up with demand. And it just makes it harder to like get tea time at a golf course or the waiting list at your local country club is even longer because everybody wants to join. Sort of everywhere you turn, there's just less available for you. Does any of this have to do with the long tail of COVID where a lot of spaces for IRL gathering closed down or is something else going on here? I think that's absolutely the case. When you think about like local nightlife and local live music venues, that was like a really challenging time. The other thing that happened, I think, is that recession during COVID meant that we kind of stopped building new stuff in that period of time.

6:51And now demand is roared back and those places aren't available. An important point that you write about is that not everyone is experiencing this fund shortage in the same way, right? How does income inequality exacerbate the ways that people are having a harder time accessing fun? If you look at what's happened with the stock market, we've gone up so much. What happens is some people can afford to bid up the prices of that vacation rental. Other people, we're stuck making a salary. We're still saving for retirement. We can't afford it. And like a huge segment of the middle class and even the upper middle class can feel locked out of these experiences that they used to do.

7:36How new is that dynamic, though? I think that the wealth creation over the last decade in the United States is really significant, like is really record breaking, especially at that higher end. And so that enables people to spend more. The other thing is that it coincides with this lack of supply. And those things are coming together.

8:02And the fun industry is contributing to this dynamic too, right? How are businesses and institutions designed to serve up fun responding to the shortage? Well, one way you would think to respond to this is that you create more supply. You create new destinations, new beachfront resorts. And there's a little bit of that, but a lot of what's happening is that if you are the major concert venue, if you are running a major tour of an artist, like you're the only game in town, you can charge more and more and more. even if like the actual ticket, the sort of the base ticket hasn't gone up that much.

8:42You create these experiences, whether at a concert or at a theme park or in an airplane or in a hotel, where if you want to have like the experience you used to have a decade ago, you need to pay more and more and more. And you mentioned this idea that it's not so easy to just like open up a new concert venue, open a new sleepaway camp, that that is expensive. Say more about that. Why aren't there new opportunities for entrepreneurial fund makers to get into the business right now? The cost of construction really soared. Tariffs haven't helped. You look at summer camps for kids. One of the main reasons is building a new dining hall with a brand new industrial kitchen.

9:22And buying all the food for all those mouths. And buying all the food for all those mouths. That's the expensive thing. You can put up a cabin and put some bunks in there. It's really about the infrastructure. It's also about finding those special properties, like a lot of those special properties where you might put a summer camp or even a hotel or vacation resort, like it's already bought up by somebody else. So the supply side of fun looks pretty bleak. After the break, we'll talk more about the demand side, why Americans still want to have fun and how to address the shortage. That's next.

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11:39So Ben, unlike a shortage of gas or food or housing, a shortage of fun sounds like manageable for a society. Maybe fun is a nice to have, not a need to have. But fun is actually really important. Why is it so important that people have fun? I think it's why we're alive. It's sort of the point of life in some ways. It's important to our mood. It's important to how we feel about each other and our politics. And it makes people incredibly unhappy if they feel like the only thing they're doing is working and staring at a screen. And in fact, like studies have looked at like how do people feel about like digital tools and using digital tools and like what is it?

12:23And it often makes people even more bored. Like you think you're having fun and like actually the opposite is happening. And it's not just boredom, although the boredom is really important. It's also the fact that you're not connected with your neighbor or your family or your friends. The consequences of that are profound. People who are socially isolated are much more likely to die younger. And the other thing is our politics. There's been really interesting studies coming out of Europe. looking at what happens when a local gathering spot closes down. In the UK, they've looked at pubs. In France, they looked at bar tabacs, which are like local sort of betting.

13:05You can kind of place a bet, buy a newspaper, buy some tobacco, have a drink, coffee, whatever. Thousands of these have closed down. And both of those phenomenon in a small town predict voting for nationalist parties in those countries. So I think that there is a reason to think that a shortage of kind of community fun activities is shifting politics to the right and also making people feel like they're left behind, especially in small towns and places where fun is less accessible. And I mean, we were talking a lot about the fact that fun is harder to access. It's also getting more expensive. But still, there's this demand in America for fun, despite the rising cost of living, despite inflation, despite high interest rates.

13:53Americans, at least, are spending on travel. Why is that? When we write about this sometimes, and I think I've been guilty of this in the past, there's a sense of like, oh, Americans are addicted to their phones. And they like they they're we're antisocial now. Nobody wants to get out and do anything. And I actually think the opposite. When you look at the evidence out there, people are desperate to get out. When we had gas prices spike earlier this year because of the war with Iran, it barely dented travel demand. You look at number of people passing through airports. You look at travel spending generally.

14:30You look at national park visitors. We're at or very near record levels. People are kind of desperate to get off a screen. It's just that sometimes you have no alternative because you can't afford to do anything else. Ben, are there efforts being made at a government level, at a policy level, to address this challenge? What can be done? One idea out there is making it easier to create new places for people to gather and have fun. New York State, for example, has very strict liquor laws, like most of the country does. It's very hard to open a new venue. A lot of those rules, though, have been relaxed in the last few years.

15:10Same thing is happening in Massachusetts, in Boston. They've made it much easier to open new bars by just creating a bunch of new liquor licenses. I think there's sort of a recognition, at least on the nightlife side of things, that those regulations were a little excessive. I think maybe there's a recognition among elected officials that you need to create excitement in places and you need to give people a reason to feel connected to their community. And that's one of the things that nightlife can do. There's other ways to sort of create fun for local communities like free events in parks. There's some groups in New York where people get together and they sing together and they all study the music.

15:55They connect on the internet beforehand, but then they get together in some spot and they all sing the same piece of music. I think things like that are really cool because it's completely free except for the time of the person who has to organize those things. And that's a lot of work, but it can be really satisfying to kind of create that kind of fun collectively. Maybe someone listening will create their own free fun in their community. Let's hope so. Ben, thank you so much. You're welcome. This is fun.

16:31This is The Big Take from Bloomberg News. I'm Sarah Holder. The show is hosted by me, David Gura, and Juan Ha. The show is made by Aaron Edwards, David Fox, Jeff Grocott, Patty Hirsch, Rachel Lewis-Kriskie, Emma Munger, Lauren Newcomb, Naomi Ng, Julia Press, Tracy Samuelson, Naomi Shaven, Alex Ugiura, Julia Weaver, Yong Yong, and Taka Yasuzawa. Our executive producer is Nicole Beamster-Boer. To get more from The Big Take and unlimited access to all of Bloomberg.com, subscribe today at Bloomberg.com slash podcast offer. Thanks for listening. We'll be back on Monday.

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