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.
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.
Sorry to be a broken record, but the piece is about the mystery of why sentiment is so much worse now than in the past when, e.g., inflation was worse (and not paired with real wage growth). There was surely sticker shock in the late '70s, but people reported less-negative sentiment back then. A puzzle that individual indicators can't solve.
I would suggest that, even in the 1970s, most Americans would have felt that the overall economic system and the government regulating it were fundamentally fair in the sense that hard work and persistence would reward most people and the basic interests of most Americans were a real concern of government. This has all eroded in the past four decades or so after relentless attacks on regulation in the public interest and the apparent impunity by which the wealthiest can wreck the economy almost at will and remain unpunished. Both parties bear responsibility for embracing neoliberalism and lifting the lid on corporations, but it should clear who today persists in continuing to want to cut taxes and destroy oversight (GOP) and who doesn't (Biden).
Yes this exactly (I basically posted the same thing three minutes later)! People expect prices to fall after they go up quickly (like gas), and then don’t understand / get mad when that doesn’t happen for everything else.
I negotiate union contracts for a living and am seeing higher wins than ever and yet people aren't happy about them because prices are higher. I even show that they'll make out more AFTER the high prices and for many it's becoming an instance of disbelief because they don't feel the numbers are true
One other issue is the prices we deal with on a daily basis: gas, food, utilities, have all spiked the most and mostly stayed higher than previous lows. Gas is lower than a year ago and there hasn't been any corresponding correction in public sentiment around it because it's being compared to $2 gas.
I don't necessarily disagree with this, but this feels like it should be verifiable/falsifiable -- we've had periods of higher inflation before, did public sentiment about the economy sour for year(s) afterwards?
Inflation was high, interest rates were high, unemployment was high, we were on the brink of a recession, and yet Reagan was popular. Even a year later when all of this was even more obvious, public sentiment about Reagan was shockingly high. https://www.pewresearch.org/2010/12/14/reagans-recession
It seems to me that inflation is an obviously concrete thing to point at to justify their position, but isn't really the root cause of it.
True, but context matters. All of those economic parameters were WORSE under Carter, whose popularity suffered greatly as a result and voters tossed him out of office. Without having been alive at the time I would think that optimism at that time was hope that a change in leadership (and a charismatic leader like Reagan) would improve things
Yeah, how are we ignoring this altogether in this discussion? Gen Z (and to a lesser extent, half of Millenials) has grown up in an era of rock-bottom inflation. Until recently, it’s all they knew. That is what they perceived to be the norm.
Relative to that norm, inflation is being perceived as abnormal and catastrophic in a way that I don’t think is entirely unsurprising. Of course they’re reacting to inflation more than people did in the ‘80s!
THIS - if you are looking back to the 1970s for the last time people experienced this you are really saying most people haven't experienced this. I'm 51 and political/economic junkie so i know 70s were bad but I was 8 when Carter lost. I don't remember my parents complaining about inflation. the Iran hostages kinda sticks. Reagan was also full of happy talk and the great optimist - alongside a media environment that wasn't doom & gloom. It was easier to move public sentiment. Of course people under 40 think inflation was crazy. They've never seen it this high. and haven't experienced or thought about inflation cooling means not going up more not prices coming back down.
Not to mention in the 70s 4 times as many workers were in unions and many of them had cost of living increases tied to inflation and nonunion workers got larger raises too as it rippled. Nearly no worker gets COLA even with union contracts. UAW just won it back from Big 3. so even back in the 70s the hit from high prices could have been less scarring.
I hadn't considered nihilism bleed-over from climate pessimism, but that opinion profile is definitely consistent with the explanation being effective propaganda.
I suspect there's also some serious dissatisfaction that not even the Dems (pre-Biden, at least) have been willing do anything more than ineffective neoliberal BS to address worsening (pre-Biden, at least) income inequality. Maybe it's getting old for some people, but I'm glad Biden keeps beating the grow-the-economy-from-the-middle-out-and-bottom-up drum
I agree about your point on the impact of emphasis on climate change on the outlook of young people. Nevertheless, it is a real threat and we all need to face up to it not sweep it under the rug like the Republicans. (And people my age need to accept a good deal of blame due to ignorance about the situation for too long, if not for overt denial.
I suspect if you change the question from "How do you rate the economy?" to "How do you feel about the future?" these poll answers make more sense.
Politics is as much about the future as it is about today. People thrive on hope. FDR knew this well and gave that to people even when their material condition still remained pretty severe. He got elected four times, even in one of the grimmest periods of the 20th century.
I know it's a bit stupid, but.....
Clinton's use of this song at the end of the savings and loan crisis and the recession it caused was a beautiful piece of positive "propaganda" as Brian defines it. It certainly seems to have been
a much more effective a political message than any relentless dry presentation of facts would have been. It doesn't hurt that it is also a pretty good song. (That Clinton failed to deliver on much of it does not detract from its initial effectiveness. I don't need reminders.)
I think FDR's massive political success is, unfortunately, more easy to attribute to the depth of awfulness of the Great Depression than to inspiring rhetoric of hope. Most Americans ultimately don't want to do *anything* about climate change; they're not waiting for the candidate who says it's time for drastic measures that might alter their day-to-day lives. I could be wrong.
Of course, rhetoric alone would not have worked. I think "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself "and the fireside chats were quite effective because they were accompanied by rapid action getting people some relief and work to do after Hoover appeared to not care enough. The idea that someone in the White House cared for ordinary people and what they were enduring through no fault of their own was not something that could be taken for granted before FDR. Some of the relief programs were massively popular such as the CCC that employed three of my uncles and the WPA that not only put people to work but enabled people like my mother to acquire some secretarial skills after she dropped out of high school. (Although til the day she died, my mother hated peanut butter, as it reminded her of the worst of the Depression and the food packages they used to get.)
My daughter is 22 and thinks the economy is doing terrible. Trust me that she is in a perfectly fine place economically. So are many of her friends in grad school. I do think a HUGE stressor of this was the Supreme Court nixing the student loan plan. Publicly what they know is that this is dead and they'll have their debt for the rest of their lives. Debt, and the fear of it, runs through a lot of people's views on the economy.
As an aside, my wife worries about our debt. Ours is fairly standard: a few student loans, a small mortgage, and a car that will be paid down in 2 years. We are perfectly fine. We are making more money than we ever have in our lives. And yet she is stressed out. This is why I handle the joint finances, so she doesn't worry. She knows the economic numbers but the debt and the "what ifs" stress her out.
As you hint at, she's likely not actually reflecting on the economy. She reflecting on her fears about her personal economic future, among other negative effects.
I think you are onto something. Another media-related circumstance that may also figure in: There has been a huge drop-off in news consumption since 2020. So maybe when asked about the economy at large, those who have checked out of news people rummage around in their memories and pull up fossilized news factoids.
I think it’s pretty straightforward- people on the right have a political incentive to mislead/dissemble on the economy so they can regain/expand political power. And it seems that a lot of people on the left have a social incentive to mislead/dissemble about the economy because of this weird progressive norm that you aren’t supposed to celebrate any achievements because that means you think things are good enough and you won’t continue to work to fix all the remaining bad things in the world. So voila - pressure from both sides to make things sound bad.
Couldn’t it just be as simple as a fixation on nominal prices? When things at the grocery store are 20% more expensive than they were three years ago, that’s very salient. It doesn’t matter that someone has more money now too. For one thing, they probably don’t have 20% more (real wages only started outpacing inflation recently) and for another, they feel like they should be “getting ahead” and spending that extra money on wants, not needs.
I think this is particularly relevant for young people, who (rightfully) have an expectation of making more money annually as they develop their career, get promotions, etc. So the fact that they have more money to cover higher costs doesn’t register as a sign that the economy is good - they’re “supposed” to make more money at 27 than at 24. But the difference is historically they got more money while the cost of stuff remained roughly the same, and now they have more money but the cost of stuff has gone way up. I fully understand how that feeling can result in someone concluding that the economy is bad, without necessitating them having fallen into a propaganda trap.
As you know, I give praise when it's earned, and criticism or scorn when those are earned too.
It was good to read this early this morning. Thanks for taking the shillelagh to some of our colleagues in media. As my folks used to say, "If it hurts when you do that, don't do that." IF our colleagues would like to stop getting whupped on this topic, they can change their framing & direction at any time.
I’m not a pollster so I may be way off base, but the NYT/Siena poll looks like it was set up to have a majority of respondents wind up on the negative side.
Of the 4 options 3 are positive or at least not negative.
“Excellent”, “Good”, “Only Fair” and “Poor”.
What is the difference between “Only Fair” and “Fair”?
And why is the fair option on the negative side?
Poor is an antonym of excellent so I can see how those are the options at the extremes. But fair is not the opposite of good.
Very good, good, bad and very bad would have been better choices. I suspect that at least some of the people who answered “only fair” would not have chosen bad over good if those were the two options. I understand why you don’t have a middle-ground 5th option. A lot of people will just default to the neutral middle option. Force the people in the middle to pick a side, but the choices have to be distinct, good or bad. “Only Fair” sounds like the middle ground people will default to when they are not really sure.
Also, what does it mean that 89% of those ages 18 to 29 responded “Only Fair” or "Poor "? Is that 80% “Poor” and 9% “only Fair”? Or is it more like 45% to 44%? We can’t answer based on this graphic.
But that 89% to 11% looks really bad. Shocking. It’s newsworthy, which I suspect is what the pollsters were after.
I get most of my news from the Dunning-Krueger Times and the Onion. One reason I trust them more than other major media is that neither one has ever had to run a correction after bungling a big story about politics or the economy.
Discontent is the gap between reality and EXPECTATIONS. For generations, Americans have expected to rent for a while, save, and then buy a home. In the past few years, most young renters have become aware that this expectation will never be met. They are becoming permanent renters, their monthly income drained the next month. Homeownership (whether a condo or house) is a central part of the American Dream. When dreams are burned, discontent rises like smoke.
It's not just a "financial" thing. In the US, being a renter means an unstable & precarious home. You don't know what the rent will be next year. You often need to move--which changes your relationship with your employment. If you have kids, you may not be able to keep them in the same childcare (or any) or school. You might have to drive far to visit family and friends. This precariousness and the expereince of this loss of control is not something that stats suss out. And we barely have the language to articulate it.
As a union leader for 4 decades, now retired, I witnessed in real time how Democrats lost the white working class. If Democrats don't address the precariousness of ever increasing rents (and the impossibility of owning for most), we can expect that the young progressive generation will become further demoralized & apolitical. They won't become Trumpets. They'll simply stop voting, seeing it as irrelevant to the challenges they face.
Inflation's a re-election killer. Before Biden, the three highest inflation rates of the last 50 years happened under Carter (13.5 percent), Ford (11 percent), and H.W. Bush (5.40 percent)
"“everyone knows Sinbad starred in a movie called Shazaam” (he didn’t, there is no such movie)"
How technical of you. ;)
"And to answer that question—is the economy good or bad?—one must enter the realm of social information."
Introduce the digital divide to the debate. Elder Millenials and Gen X don't have nice things to say about how the economy works. I'd wager that private (or at least obscured) communication of our philosophies and struggles with the economy, and our struggle to unbrainwash ourselves from being groomed 90s kids who lived through:
The End Of History being published/neoconservatism in general
The Spice Girls making softcore porn
Y2K hype with the successful averting of issues by diligent computer programmers being treated like dog-bites-man news
Dotcom crash
The Stations of The Cross, starring Britney Spears
9/11 and that we're still best friends with Saudi Arabia
'Terrorist sympathizers'
'The Axis of Evil'/'weapons of mass destruction'/'Mission Accomplished'/Friedman Units (h/t Atrios)
the socially engineered Great Recession (leading to the underground success of Occupy Wall Street)
AIM and its many companion softwares (no walled gardens - Trillian did exactly what you wanted it to do) dying out in favor of social media and enshittification (Goodbye, Tom) before it had a label
Larry Summers, may he have a potato shoved up his tailpipe, further undermining our belief in hopey changey politics as our surplus labor was sucked out of us by sparkly vampires
Feeling like we own vinyls for ever having bought music MP3, much less CDs
EMAILS
and then the second once-in-a-century recession of our lifetimes, when we finally started having the leverage to work from home and resign from shitty jobs effectively
before or shortly after Millenials (big apocalyptic term, much epic) stopped being marketed to as youth.
It seem accurate to say that Millenials don't have the nihilism. Maybe that's because we try not to exist, publicly speaking. Just keeping it Buddhist or at least video game and anime adjacent, passing Zen on to the kids today who aren't privy to the tired pathetic jokes about what ungrateful, ridiculous dolts we were that were mainstreamed our entire lives (participation trophies! support our troops! learn to code! avocado toast!)
Or maybe it's just because we're mentally ill, passionately so. :)
I believe it comes down to INFLATION, the more I think about it. According to the Fed, the inflation rate for 2022 was 8.0% The 2022 rate of inflation was the highest since 1981 (42 years). In that time, we experienced one year of negative inflation (2009 down 0.4%)
So those price increases from 2022 are now embedded in the economy, likely forever. Think about it... no one under the age of 60 has ever experienced 8.0% inflation before as an adult. So we are all feeling it LIKE NEVER BEFORE.
Where I think there is a huge opportunity for Democrats in explaining why!! Corporate monopoly pricing power and economic control, supply chain disruption, and the war in Ukraine. What is Biden doing about it?
- Strengthening anti-trust
- Strengthening infrastructure and bringing manufacturing back
- Energy sufficiency through both fossil fuel and clean energy
- Strengthening unions and employee negotiating power
- Providing greater support for families
The Republicans have no plan to address inflation. They have no economic agenda outside of strengthening corporate control of our economy. The vaunted Trump economy was just a continuation of the Obama economy with benefits siphoned to the top.
Democrats are pro capitalism, pro business, pro worker BUT anti corporatocracy.
Discontent is the gap between reality and EXPECTATIONS. For generations, Americans have expected to rent for a while, save, and then buy a home. In the past few years, most young renters have become aware that this expectation will never be met. They are becoming permanent renters, their monthly income drained the next month. Homeownership (whether a condo or house) is a central part of the American Dream. When dreams are burned, discontent rises like smoke.
It's not just a "financial" thing. In the US, being a renter means an unstable & precarious home. You don't know what the rent will be next year. You often need to move--which changes your relationship with your employment. If you have kids, you may not be able to keep them in the same childcare (or any) or school. You might have to drive far to visit family and friends. This precariousness and the expereince of this loss of control is not something that stats suss out. And we barely have the language to articulate it.
As a union leader for 4 decades, now retired, I witnessed in real time how Democrats lost the white working class. If Democrats don't address the precariousness of ever increasing rents (and the impossibility of owning for most), we can expect that the young progressive generation will become further demoralized & apolitical. They won't become Trumpets. They'll simply stop voting, seeing it as irrelevant to the challenges they face.
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.
Thanks Jeff! I hope you'll share it!
Oh, I have!
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.
Sorry to be a broken record, but the piece is about the mystery of why sentiment is so much worse now than in the past when, e.g., inflation was worse (and not paired with real wage growth). There was surely sticker shock in the late '70s, but people reported less-negative sentiment back then. A puzzle that individual indicators can't solve.
I would suggest that, even in the 1970s, most Americans would have felt that the overall economic system and the government regulating it were fundamentally fair in the sense that hard work and persistence would reward most people and the basic interests of most Americans were a real concern of government. This has all eroded in the past four decades or so after relentless attacks on regulation in the public interest and the apparent impunity by which the wealthiest can wreck the economy almost at will and remain unpunished. Both parties bear responsibility for embracing neoliberalism and lifting the lid on corporations, but it should clear who today persists in continuing to want to cut taxes and destroy oversight (GOP) and who doesn't (Biden).
look at the huge gaps in younger people - none of them were alive when this happened before in the 70s.
Yes this exactly (I basically posted the same thing three minutes later)! People expect prices to fall after they go up quickly (like gas), and then don’t understand / get mad when that doesn’t happen for everything else.
I negotiate union contracts for a living and am seeing higher wins than ever and yet people aren't happy about them because prices are higher. I even show that they'll make out more AFTER the high prices and for many it's becoming an instance of disbelief because they don't feel the numbers are true
One other issue is the prices we deal with on a daily basis: gas, food, utilities, have all spiked the most and mostly stayed higher than previous lows. Gas is lower than a year ago and there hasn't been any corresponding correction in public sentiment around it because it's being compared to $2 gas.
I don't necessarily disagree with this, but this feels like it should be verifiable/falsifiable -- we've had periods of higher inflation before, did public sentiment about the economy sour for year(s) afterwards?
We had >10% inflation in 1980/1981, for example, and yet here's a NYT headline in April 1981 that's "RISE IN U.S. OPTIMISM ON ECONOMY BOLSTERS REAGAN SUPPORT, POLL HINTS". https://www.nytimes.com/1981/04/30/us/rise-in-us-optimism-on-economy-bolsters-reagan-support-poll-hints.html
Inflation was high, interest rates were high, unemployment was high, we were on the brink of a recession, and yet Reagan was popular. Even a year later when all of this was even more obvious, public sentiment about Reagan was shockingly high. https://www.pewresearch.org/2010/12/14/reagans-recession
It seems to me that inflation is an obviously concrete thing to point at to justify their position, but isn't really the root cause of it.
True, but context matters. All of those economic parameters were WORSE under Carter, whose popularity suffered greatly as a result and voters tossed him out of office. Without having been alive at the time I would think that optimism at that time was hope that a change in leadership (and a charismatic leader like Reagan) would improve things
Yeah, how are we ignoring this altogether in this discussion? Gen Z (and to a lesser extent, half of Millenials) has grown up in an era of rock-bottom inflation. Until recently, it’s all they knew. That is what they perceived to be the norm.
Relative to that norm, inflation is being perceived as abnormal and catastrophic in a way that I don’t think is entirely unsurprising. Of course they’re reacting to inflation more than people did in the ‘80s!
THIS - if you are looking back to the 1970s for the last time people experienced this you are really saying most people haven't experienced this. I'm 51 and political/economic junkie so i know 70s were bad but I was 8 when Carter lost. I don't remember my parents complaining about inflation. the Iran hostages kinda sticks. Reagan was also full of happy talk and the great optimist - alongside a media environment that wasn't doom & gloom. It was easier to move public sentiment. Of course people under 40 think inflation was crazy. They've never seen it this high. and haven't experienced or thought about inflation cooling means not going up more not prices coming back down.
Not to mention in the 70s 4 times as many workers were in unions and many of them had cost of living increases tied to inflation and nonunion workers got larger raises too as it rippled. Nearly no worker gets COLA even with union contracts. UAW just won it back from Big 3. so even back in the 70s the hit from high prices could have been less scarring.
To me, the most interesting data point is how many people both think that the larger economy is bad but that their personal finances are good:
https://www.axios.com/2023/08/18/americans-economy-bad-personal-finances-good
I hadn't considered nihilism bleed-over from climate pessimism, but that opinion profile is definitely consistent with the explanation being effective propaganda.
Yes, I think this is a big tipoff that it's an information environment problem, not a material conditions problem. Thrivers say the economy sucks!
I suspect there's also some serious dissatisfaction that not even the Dems (pre-Biden, at least) have been willing do anything more than ineffective neoliberal BS to address worsening (pre-Biden, at least) income inequality. Maybe it's getting old for some people, but I'm glad Biden keeps beating the grow-the-economy-from-the-middle-out-and-bottom-up drum
I agree about your point on the impact of emphasis on climate change on the outlook of young people. Nevertheless, it is a real threat and we all need to face up to it not sweep it under the rug like the Republicans. (And people my age need to accept a good deal of blame due to ignorance about the situation for too long, if not for overt denial.
I suspect if you change the question from "How do you rate the economy?" to "How do you feel about the future?" these poll answers make more sense.
Politics is as much about the future as it is about today. People thrive on hope. FDR knew this well and gave that to people even when their material condition still remained pretty severe. He got elected four times, even in one of the grimmest periods of the 20th century.
I know it's a bit stupid, but.....
Clinton's use of this song at the end of the savings and loan crisis and the recession it caused was a beautiful piece of positive "propaganda" as Brian defines it. It certainly seems to have been
a much more effective a political message than any relentless dry presentation of facts would have been. It doesn't hurt that it is also a pretty good song. (That Clinton failed to deliver on much of it does not detract from its initial effectiveness. I don't need reminders.)
Don't stop thinking about tomorrow
Don't stop, it'll soon be here
It'll be here better than before
Yesterday's gone, yesterday's gone.
I think FDR's massive political success is, unfortunately, more easy to attribute to the depth of awfulness of the Great Depression than to inspiring rhetoric of hope. Most Americans ultimately don't want to do *anything* about climate change; they're not waiting for the candidate who says it's time for drastic measures that might alter their day-to-day lives. I could be wrong.
Of course, rhetoric alone would not have worked. I think "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself "and the fireside chats were quite effective because they were accompanied by rapid action getting people some relief and work to do after Hoover appeared to not care enough. The idea that someone in the White House cared for ordinary people and what they were enduring through no fault of their own was not something that could be taken for granted before FDR. Some of the relief programs were massively popular such as the CCC that employed three of my uncles and the WPA that not only put people to work but enabled people like my mother to acquire some secretarial skills after she dropped out of high school. (Although til the day she died, my mother hated peanut butter, as it reminded her of the worst of the Depression and the food packages they used to get.)
My daughter is 22 and thinks the economy is doing terrible. Trust me that she is in a perfectly fine place economically. So are many of her friends in grad school. I do think a HUGE stressor of this was the Supreme Court nixing the student loan plan. Publicly what they know is that this is dead and they'll have their debt for the rest of their lives. Debt, and the fear of it, runs through a lot of people's views on the economy.
As an aside, my wife worries about our debt. Ours is fairly standard: a few student loans, a small mortgage, and a car that will be paid down in 2 years. We are perfectly fine. We are making more money than we ever have in our lives. And yet she is stressed out. This is why I handle the joint finances, so she doesn't worry. She knows the economic numbers but the debt and the "what ifs" stress her out.
As you hint at, she's likely not actually reflecting on the economy. She reflecting on her fears about her personal economic future, among other negative effects.
She should look at how much the Biden/Harris Administration has already forgiven - $127B ( https://www.cnbc.com/2023/10/29/biden-administration-has-forgiven-127-billion-in-student-debt.html ) - and know that they're not stopping, as they just forgave another 800K student's debt THIS WEEK:
https://themessenger.com/politics/biden-sends-800000-student-loan-borrowers-emails-forgiving-their-debt
I think you are onto something. Another media-related circumstance that may also figure in: There has been a huge drop-off in news consumption since 2020. So maybe when asked about the economy at large, those who have checked out of news people rummage around in their memories and pull up fossilized news factoids.
I think it’s pretty straightforward- people on the right have a political incentive to mislead/dissemble on the economy so they can regain/expand political power. And it seems that a lot of people on the left have a social incentive to mislead/dissemble about the economy because of this weird progressive norm that you aren’t supposed to celebrate any achievements because that means you think things are good enough and you won’t continue to work to fix all the remaining bad things in the world. So voila - pressure from both sides to make things sound bad.
DING DING DING!!!
Couldn’t it just be as simple as a fixation on nominal prices? When things at the grocery store are 20% more expensive than they were three years ago, that’s very salient. It doesn’t matter that someone has more money now too. For one thing, they probably don’t have 20% more (real wages only started outpacing inflation recently) and for another, they feel like they should be “getting ahead” and spending that extra money on wants, not needs.
I think this is particularly relevant for young people, who (rightfully) have an expectation of making more money annually as they develop their career, get promotions, etc. So the fact that they have more money to cover higher costs doesn’t register as a sign that the economy is good - they’re “supposed” to make more money at 27 than at 24. But the difference is historically they got more money while the cost of stuff remained roughly the same, and now they have more money but the cost of stuff has gone way up. I fully understand how that feeling can result in someone concluding that the economy is bad, without necessitating them having fallen into a propaganda trap.
Spot on with today's column, Brian.
Even shared a brief thread on it on the old bird site: https://x.com/_silversmith/status/1730599664225747408?s=20
Again, 100% Brian. Well done.
Thanks Shawn!
As you know, I give praise when it's earned, and criticism or scorn when those are earned too.
It was good to read this early this morning. Thanks for taking the shillelagh to some of our colleagues in media. As my folks used to say, "If it hurts when you do that, don't do that." IF our colleagues would like to stop getting whupped on this topic, they can change their framing & direction at any time.
Keep up the good work!
I’m not a pollster so I may be way off base, but the NYT/Siena poll looks like it was set up to have a majority of respondents wind up on the negative side.
Of the 4 options 3 are positive or at least not negative.
“Excellent”, “Good”, “Only Fair” and “Poor”.
What is the difference between “Only Fair” and “Fair”?
And why is the fair option on the negative side?
Poor is an antonym of excellent so I can see how those are the options at the extremes. But fair is not the opposite of good.
Very good, good, bad and very bad would have been better choices. I suspect that at least some of the people who answered “only fair” would not have chosen bad over good if those were the two options. I understand why you don’t have a middle-ground 5th option. A lot of people will just default to the neutral middle option. Force the people in the middle to pick a side, but the choices have to be distinct, good or bad. “Only Fair” sounds like the middle ground people will default to when they are not really sure.
Also, what does it mean that 89% of those ages 18 to 29 responded “Only Fair” or "Poor "? Is that 80% “Poor” and 9% “only Fair”? Or is it more like 45% to 44%? We can’t answer based on this graphic.
But that 89% to 11% looks really bad. Shocking. It’s newsworthy, which I suspect is what the pollsters were after.
I had the same reaction, they split those responses as if they were good/bad in the charts, but "only fair" isn't really bad. It's neutral at worst!
I get most of my news from the Dunning-Krueger Times and the Onion. One reason I trust them more than other major media is that neither one has ever had to run a correction after bungling a big story about politics or the economy.
All true. This is also true:
Discontent is the gap between reality and EXPECTATIONS. For generations, Americans have expected to rent for a while, save, and then buy a home. In the past few years, most young renters have become aware that this expectation will never be met. They are becoming permanent renters, their monthly income drained the next month. Homeownership (whether a condo or house) is a central part of the American Dream. When dreams are burned, discontent rises like smoke.
It's not just a "financial" thing. In the US, being a renter means an unstable & precarious home. You don't know what the rent will be next year. You often need to move--which changes your relationship with your employment. If you have kids, you may not be able to keep them in the same childcare (or any) or school. You might have to drive far to visit family and friends. This precariousness and the expereince of this loss of control is not something that stats suss out. And we barely have the language to articulate it.
As a union leader for 4 decades, now retired, I witnessed in real time how Democrats lost the white working class. If Democrats don't address the precariousness of ever increasing rents (and the impossibility of owning for most), we can expect that the young progressive generation will become further demoralized & apolitical. They won't become Trumpets. They'll simply stop voting, seeing it as irrelevant to the challenges they face.
Inflation's a re-election killer. Before Biden, the three highest inflation rates of the last 50 years happened under Carter (13.5 percent), Ford (11 percent), and H.W. Bush (5.40 percent)
"“everyone knows Sinbad starred in a movie called Shazaam” (he didn’t, there is no such movie)"
How technical of you. ;)
"And to answer that question—is the economy good or bad?—one must enter the realm of social information."
Introduce the digital divide to the debate. Elder Millenials and Gen X don't have nice things to say about how the economy works. I'd wager that private (or at least obscured) communication of our philosophies and struggles with the economy, and our struggle to unbrainwash ourselves from being groomed 90s kids who lived through:
The End Of History being published/neoconservatism in general
The Spice Girls making softcore porn
Y2K hype with the successful averting of issues by diligent computer programmers being treated like dog-bites-man news
Dotcom crash
The Stations of The Cross, starring Britney Spears
9/11 and that we're still best friends with Saudi Arabia
'Terrorist sympathizers'
'The Axis of Evil'/'weapons of mass destruction'/'Mission Accomplished'/Friedman Units (h/t Atrios)
the socially engineered Great Recession (leading to the underground success of Occupy Wall Street)
AIM and its many companion softwares (no walled gardens - Trillian did exactly what you wanted it to do) dying out in favor of social media and enshittification (Goodbye, Tom) before it had a label
Larry Summers, may he have a potato shoved up his tailpipe, further undermining our belief in hopey changey politics as our surplus labor was sucked out of us by sparkly vampires
Feeling like we own vinyls for ever having bought music MP3, much less CDs
EMAILS
and then the second once-in-a-century recession of our lifetimes, when we finally started having the leverage to work from home and resign from shitty jobs effectively
before or shortly after Millenials (big apocalyptic term, much epic) stopped being marketed to as youth.
It seem accurate to say that Millenials don't have the nihilism. Maybe that's because we try not to exist, publicly speaking. Just keeping it Buddhist or at least video game and anime adjacent, passing Zen on to the kids today who aren't privy to the tired pathetic jokes about what ungrateful, ridiculous dolts we were that were mainstreamed our entire lives (participation trophies! support our troops! learn to code! avocado toast!)
Or maybe it's just because we're mentally ill, passionately so. :)
I believe it comes down to INFLATION, the more I think about it. According to the Fed, the inflation rate for 2022 was 8.0% The 2022 rate of inflation was the highest since 1981 (42 years). In that time, we experienced one year of negative inflation (2009 down 0.4%)
So those price increases from 2022 are now embedded in the economy, likely forever. Think about it... no one under the age of 60 has ever experienced 8.0% inflation before as an adult. So we are all feeling it LIKE NEVER BEFORE.
Where I think there is a huge opportunity for Democrats in explaining why!! Corporate monopoly pricing power and economic control, supply chain disruption, and the war in Ukraine. What is Biden doing about it?
- Strengthening anti-trust
- Strengthening infrastructure and bringing manufacturing back
- Energy sufficiency through both fossil fuel and clean energy
- Strengthening unions and employee negotiating power
- Providing greater support for families
The Republicans have no plan to address inflation. They have no economic agenda outside of strengthening corporate control of our economy. The vaunted Trump economy was just a continuation of the Obama economy with benefits siphoned to the top.
Democrats are pro capitalism, pro business, pro worker BUT anti corporatocracy.
All true. This is also true:
Discontent is the gap between reality and EXPECTATIONS. For generations, Americans have expected to rent for a while, save, and then buy a home. In the past few years, most young renters have become aware that this expectation will never be met. They are becoming permanent renters, their monthly income drained the next month. Homeownership (whether a condo or house) is a central part of the American Dream. When dreams are burned, discontent rises like smoke.
It's not just a "financial" thing. In the US, being a renter means an unstable & precarious home. You don't know what the rent will be next year. You often need to move--which changes your relationship with your employment. If you have kids, you may not be able to keep them in the same childcare (or any) or school. You might have to drive far to visit family and friends. This precariousness and the expereince of this loss of control is not something that stats suss out. And we barely have the language to articulate it.
As a union leader for 4 decades, now retired, I witnessed in real time how Democrats lost the white working class. If Democrats don't address the precariousness of ever increasing rents (and the impossibility of owning for most), we can expect that the young progressive generation will become further demoralized & apolitical. They won't become Trumpets. They'll simply stop voting, seeing it as irrelevant to the challenges they face.