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Jeff Dorman's avatar

Thanks for sharing this important post with us free subscribers. This is one message that needs to spread/reported far and wide. Mainstream media is often as complicit as social media. The 4th Estate needs to move away from eyeball count as a motivator and get back to straight reporting.

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Eric Fish, DVM, PhD's avatar

You raise good point about the impact of negative misleading media information. I do think there is a simpler answer driving most of the negative sentiment: People are just pissed about higher prices.

They may *call* that inflation, but they don't really understand how inflation is calculated, or that it is a rate of change. They saw prices spike pretty dramatically over a year or so, and it hasn't gone down yet. Very few understand that widespread falling prices would actually be DE-flation which really CAN lead to a doom spiral and truly hellish economic times.

Maybe they are making more money, and the economic surveys suggest people are actually doing better now than they were in 2019, but it doesn't FEEL that way to a lot of folks. When you get an extra few hundred bucks in your paycheck but EVERYTHING in your world EVERY DAY is a lot more money than you remember a year or two ago, it just hits you different. People are social and emotional creatures, sometimes highly irrational, not the drily logical "Homo economicus" taught in Econ 101

I would wager that >75% of the public have no idea what the Fed is or what they are actually doing. They may repeat lines about "interest rates" they heard in soundbites but how many REALLY understand the wonky and counterintuitive stuff they do? Very few.

If my hypothesis is right, the main thing that will improve this is simply: Time. People need time to adjust to the higher baseline prices and for that to seem like a normal part of life.

I'm not arguing for fatalism, we absolutely SHOULD try to counter media misinformation. Just saying that I personally don't think that is causing the majority of the problem, and want to make sure we aren't so glib as to ignore any actual suffering or bad vibes.

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