Exclusive Harris poll for the Guardian shows 55% believe economy is shrinking, in troubling sign for president’s re-election bid

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:

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 49% believe that unemployment is at a 50-year high, though the unemployment rate has been under 4%, a near 50-year low.

  • @CharlesDarwinEnglish
    30•25 days ago

    IIRC, wages have been flat to down since the 1970s, so it’s likely this cuts across many generations, from the “greatest generation” on, and soon including generation alpha.

    • Cyborganism
      11•25 days ago

      It hasn’t been felt until the millennials, for sure. That’s when the rifts really started to widen. Around the early 2000’s

      • @CharlesDarwinEnglish
        14•25 days ago

        Eh, that’s not my experience. I saw what corporate downsizing and Ronnie Raygunism did to the boomers and some of their parents’ generation during the 80s. Many of us Gen Xers were very cynical about corporations as a result of early 90s recession (though some may have later forgot those lessons) and the growing corporate rule and the rise of things like Manpower and temp work - many of us chuckled when we saw the usual suspects rebranding this as the “gig economy” as if this was a good thing for workers.

        Of course, many of our generation got burned, and burned hard, by the boom/bust cycles like the dot-com bubble and the real-estate speculation that came after. But then, so did older and younger generations.

        When the poor and middle class suffers, it’s not like just one set of people that happened to be born between certain years and are lumped into one group (mostly for marketing purposes, by the way) are the only ones affected.

        As someone else points out here, though, for the first time in a long time, though, real wages have gone up in the very recent past. If that is a trend, it would be a reversal of literally decades of it not going up. I suspect it is not, being the cynic I am, and eyeing things like AI and the automation it is/will be enabling. I also think the uptick is partly a result of Covid and the powers that be seek to reverse any gains ASAP.