The deadweight loss of entertainment: a simple model for why nobody shows up to your party anymore
moultano · x · 2026-10-01
- Engineer Ryan Moulton builds an economics model of solo home entertainment's social cost: alone-time has never been richer (infinite video, games, chat), yet people report more loneliness and less public life.
- The core mechanism is an equilibrium trap: going out is only fun if others are out too; as the couch gets more entertaining, fewer people go out, making going out worse for everyone.
- Modeling a distribution of extroversion, welfare first declines as couch-fun rises until nearly everyone abandons the outside world (the "gooner singularity"), then gradually recovers.
- Conclusion: solo home entertainment carries large deadweight loss, so showing up to things is pro-social even when you're ambivalent—answering a poster's lament about chronic no-shows at his parties.
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