Social Mood Indicators Keep Shifting Positive
Baseball rising, but stock market still out of sync
Everybody has been talking lately about how major league baseball, long considered in terminal decline, is suddenly more exciting than the NBA.
Cactus League: Spring training 2026 attendance up for fifth-straight year despite record heat
Officials say 1,753,849 people attended 237 spring training games in 2026, up 3.4% from the previous year.
Opening Day of spring training was the largest since 2018, when nearly 40,000 people attended four games in the Valley.
Baseball is a positive mood sport. It’s also the National Pastime in the United States. An upswing in social mood combined with rising nationalism should bring baseball back to first place as the most popular sport over time.
Here’s another interesting data correlation: inflation-adjusted SPX versus homeruns and strikeouts per game.
Mood won’t turn on a dime though, and there are many crosscurrents in the signals. The biggest anomaly is the stock market itself. Using social mood indicators in the culture, everything from political polarization to transgenderism, from football and MMA popularity over baseball to ugliness as a trend in music, modeling, movies, art, to drab color schemes, all point to deeply negative mood.
The stock market has risen and risen throughout this period because government policy was aimed at propping up prices above all else. The stock market has become an inverted indicator, now reflective of the immiseration of the middle and lower classes who are being crushed to keep asset prices from crashing to their sustainable level.
Even leaving that aside, mood is fluid. The whole of society is impacted by social mood, but it appears slowly as different facets of society shift, as well as trends being impacted by planning. In hindsight, we can see the neon action heroes of the 1980s vs the drab androgynous 1970s. At the time, movies such as Star Wars, First Blood and Rocky were early in the mood shift, while the horror genre was still doing well in the early 1980s with the Jason and Freddy.
Today, there is great anger and disillusion over the Iran war. An increasing number of voters are seeking revolutionary results. Trump was poised to defuse some of this growing dissatisfaction, with even many of his critics happy about his former anti-war position. Politics may be a lagging indicator as increasingly pessimistic voters finally land on a revolutionary figure who will overturn the established order.
We have testable theories for social mood though, among them:
baseball rises in popularity;
models become more attractive;
color schemes become brighter;
marriage and fertility rates increase;
horror declines in popularity;
defined sex roles return and are exaggerated, a reaction to the extreme of transgenderism;
eventually, political polarization crashes with a new “Era of Good Feelings;”
science replaces superstition, Christianity overtakes conspiracy theories in a search for truth and this could include govt opening archives and moving some conspiracy theories into the truth column.
The rub is a final low in the stock market may be coming as one of the lagging indicators because the market it set up to benefit from crushed wages, low interest rates and high asset prices, but an upturn in mood would likely involve surging wages and interest rates than undo current valuations.