Nearly three in five Americans wrongly believe the US is in an economic recession, and the majority blame the Biden administration, according to a Harris poll conducted exclusively for the Guardian. The survey found persistent pessimism about the economy as election day draws closer.
The poll highlighted many misconceptions people have about the economy, including:
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55% believe the economy is shrinking, and 56% think the US is experiencing a recession, though the broadest measure of the economy, gross domestic product (GDP), has been growing.
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49% believe the S&P 500 stock market index is down for the year, though the index went up about 24% in 2023 and is up more than 12% this year.
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49% believe that unemployment is at a 50-year high, though the unemployment rate has been under 4%, a near 50-year low.
I took some pretty high level statistical analysis courses back in the day, with a professor who is about as close to “rockstar” as someone can be in the field of statistical analysis.
One thing he always said was that it was easy to paint a picture exactly the way someone wants while being 100% honest and reporting real numbers.
What was hard, was picking thru all the numbers, identifying trends, and quantifying the effects and how likely a bunch of changes would play out to predict future outcomes.
Our economy runs on “numbers must go up”.
If a CEO of a publicly traded company says anything other than “Shits amazing!” The numbers go down.
Because stock prices are really just investors opinion, real life doesn’t have much effect on the economy.
So everyone cheats a little (or a lot) to make their numbers seem like everything is great. Do a meta analysis on those numbers, and it looks like everyone is doing great.
But it’s all just because no one wants to be the one to say it’s not.
Because in our economy, if people think things are bad, then that makes things bad. People sell stocks and hide money under mattresses (what the rich do with offshore accounts) and that Cascades I to not enough money to buy anything. And then not enough sales to employ people.
It’s a feedback loop that the only way to prevent is constantly telling people everything is fine.
The longer we let 0.01% of the population hoard insane wealth, the more we risk the death spiral
It’s getting to the point where they have so much, they’re the entire economy. If they decide to just bury all their gold, we’re fucked.
So we have to keep making these rich assholes think everything is great and numbers will always go up.
Or just tax their fucking wealth…
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I know basically nothing about economics, but from what it seems, I shouldn’t be wishing for record losses instead of record profits? They both seem to have a cascading effect that fucks us from what it seems (but them buying more yachts while we hurt definitely feels worse than all of us hurting).