Heading into the November presidential election, one of the biggest issues on voters' minds is the economy. According to a new poll, 73% of Americans say strengthening it is their top concern.
So there’s a pretty concerted effort to make “the economy is actually getting better” stories sound untrue with some particular talking points - it’s actually really effective. Here are some of the big ones. You can see why they work.
Replying to “the economy is getting better” with “how DARE you say the economy is good and all the problems are fixed, clearly that’s not the case” as a way of reframing away from the conversation of whether things are getting better, or worse, and why that is. Basically interfering with the effort to understand the policies that help or hurt by simply asserting that everything’s bad, so nothing being talked about can possibly be a good thing.
Saying “well I’m not doing okay, how dare you say I’m not struggling” and getting all fucked up and angry about it, so that anyone that tells you that millions of low-income workers are making more now than they were a few years ago, like way more, and that’s a good thing, looks like an asshole
Bringing up that the CPI excludes some categories, and implying that if it did include them, it would show more inflation than what it does (including the pretty significant spike in 2022). This one is actually a really clever subterfuge, because of how complicated it gets to explain why it is wrong (whereas if you just say “CPI doesn’t include housing costs” or whatever, people can grasp that instantly and make the connection and assume that housing costs would change the value if they were included).
Saying “well who cares about the stock market, I just know I’m struggling” when no one said anything about the stock market or the rich-person economy metrics, and everyone’s talking about inflation-adjusted wages and nothing about the stock market
They’re all tricks. There are more but those are some of the main ones
And you see the same 4 or 5 of them, over and over again, if you start looking
You’ll see some of them in comments nearby to this one, I guarantee it
Edit: More
Insisting that when cumulative inflation is 20%, and 10th percentile wages have gone up 32%, wages aren’t keeping up with inflation, simply because you insist that they aren’t. If anyone tries to say numbers, just say they don’t count.
Focus on the 20% inflation, because it feels real. People can see it in grocery prices, it’s tangible. It rings true. The wage growth is mostly at the low end (truck drivers, housekeepers, manufacturing) where most Lemmy users can’t see it, and even when someone’s wage has gone up, it’s easy to decide it happened because of some other factor, whereas $7 for a carton of eggs is right there in your face and memorable. And universal.
What are these “tricks” for? Millions of us out here are struggling. “But you’re earning more money!”… Ok, a dollar more? While everything else has gone up including rent with a near 40% increase in the last few years in some places.
To just be so dismissive of those barely surviving sounds like you’re coming from a place of privilege.
Insisting that when cumulative inflation is 20%, and 10th percentile wages have gone up 32%, wages aren’t keeping up with inflation, simply because you insist that they aren’t. If anyone tries to say numbers, just say they don’t count.
Focus on the 20% inflation, because it feels real. People can see it in grocery prices, it’s tangible. It rings true. The wage growth is mostly at the low end (truck drivers, housekeepers, manufacturing) where most Lemmy users can’t see it, and even when someone’s wage has gone up, it’s easy to decide it happened because of some other factor, whereas $7 for a carton of eggs is right there in your face and memorable. And universal.
This is also a little bit of the getting angry or fucked up tactic, too. See? I look like an asshole now, with all my numbers.
Just making up a number of 40% inflation I haven’t seen before. I don’t think that’s common enough to warrant an entry of its own. Want to show me where you got 40% from?
Got it. So, back in November of 2021, someone wrote a story with a clickbaity headline about 40% rent increase in the future from back then, and now to you that’s reality you are citing to me. Great stuff.
Anyway, here’s the actual numbers. The median rent went from $1,102 to $1,340 in those 3 years - 21.5% cumulatively. That’s what happened. So someone who’s low income who’s making 32% more comes out ahead. Does that mean that can afford their rent, when it’s $1,700 because they’re in a metro area and they make $16/hr? Fuckin A, man, maybe not. I’m being an asshole to you in this conversation a little bit, just because I know that you’re deliberately twisting things to make Biden look as bad as possible (as confirmed by you which was what got you temp banned already). But I’m not trying to be unsympathetic to someone who’s actually struggling and being honest about how they’re struggling.
But maybe we should keep doing more of the stuff that gave them the 32% increase, and in a few years they’ll be able to afford the $1,700 or whatever it is by then. Right? Or not? What would your solution be, instead, if not that?
I think you’re out of touch on the dire situation Mozz. You can throw statistics and numbers around but for millions of the working class, they’ve never struggled as much as they are currently.
Eight of the top 10 metro areas are in the Sun Belt region. Rents in each of these metros have increased over 37% since 2019.
I don’t want to play the debunking game all night. I read your link, and here’s their rent increases:
Rent in the area went from $582 to $907, or a 55.8% increase.
Rent for 1-bedroom apartments increased 49.5% from $646 to $966 from 2019 to 2024.
And so on. It looks like they sorted every metro area in the US by percentage increase, which yields a whole bunch of individual metro areas with oddball markets where some super-cheap pandemic pricing ended and so the percent increase in places where it had been $582 for a 1 bedroom apartment during the pandemic, was pretty high. That doesn’t mean the price of housing in general went up by that same high percent.
Like I say, someone who’s actually struggling, I have sympathy for. You, I don’t, because you’re just out here lying with statistics to try to hurt the people you are claiming to have all this sympathy with.
It looks like they sorted every metro area in the US by percentage increase, which yields a whole bunch of individual metro areas with oddball markets
This is the entire reason why people critique nationalized metrics on economic trends: they intentionally disregard figures that fall outside the norm so that they can apply a fed policy for the entire country, favoring the overall economic performance instead of addressing the localized economic shortfalls. It’s like a doctor trying to diagnose constipation by reading someone’s vitals; none of the experience of the patient can be seen on the metrics they’re using until it’s literally killing them. “You say you haven’t shit for 8 days but your BP is 120/80 so you must be fine”.
Like, sometimes those metrics overlook really important possibilities, like unemployment not accounting for people who need multiple jobs, or total job market numbers not accounting for ghost positions and high turnover. CPI is used for setting fed interest rates, and it tosses out specific categories because the prices move too fast to gauge the effect of interest rates on those prices. They’re not trying to measure how well people are surviving, they’re measuring how economic output is adjusting to the supply of cash. That’s why they have CPI-U, it adds those categories back in so that they get a better picture of how people are experiencing the market. Notice, though, that even real wages doesn’t have any way of reflecting anything about where those wages come from; whether people are taking on extra jobs or if their work hours are increasing without extra pay, or if a transient spike in COL depleted your savings and you’re right on the edge of instability. Those numbers tell an extremely narrow story about the state of the economy, and if there are a bunch of people who are telling you ‘this number isn’t reflective of my experience’ then maybe you need to take a more granular approach to the data.
It’s exhausting watching this from the left, because depending on who is in office the chosen metrics for assessing the economy change. For 2016-2020 the metric was stock indexes and GDP, for 2020-present it seems to be CPI and unemployment. Neither party likes talking about high-interest credit, or job security, or retirement savings, or healthcare costs or realestate affordability, and that’s infuriating. There are a growing number of ways people fall through the cracks of economic instability and the averages are designed to throw those out as exceptions. You lose your job and fall into drug addiction? Sorry, that’s not the ‘average’ American. You get into a car accident and can’t pay your medical bills? Sorry about that but that’s not relevant to the bigger picture. All we can see is ‘you should feel good/bad about the economy for these abstracted reasons’, and then you get partisan fanboys yelling at you that you’re wrong if your experience doesn’t align with that national picture. It’s even more frustrating when the same people are are telling you things are great are simultaneously acknowledging that things should be a lot better.
‘You’re just trying to make people feel bad about the state of things’ - jesus can you just fuck off with that constant condescension? People feel shit about the economy because things are shit for a lot of people. More than a quarter of the country has less than $1000 in savings, maybe people are scared they’re a single accident away from homelessness and your national metrics simply don’t show that. My parents are talking about EOL plans and I’m realizing I don’t make enough to support them. How does CPI account for that? It fucking doesn’t.
“Things are relatively better through this narrow view of the world” - well why the fuck should I care if i’m not in that picture?
I wasn’t real explicit about it, but my point was more that the results he cited were coming from places where the “before” picture was rent of $600/mo during the pandemic, and so it’s not reasonable to say it went up by 57% after that, and so that’s the rate of housing inflation.
For 2016-2020 the metric was stock indexes and GDP, for 2020-present it seems to be CPI and unemployment
I’ll take wages at different percentiles, and average wages, as a pretty good metric. Your criticisms of the other metrics I’ll agree with. In particular, unemployment gets a ton of play for how shitty a metric it is overall if you really look at how it’s calculated.
Your implication that if they only were looking at the other metrics (in particular hours worked as an explanation for why rising wages may not mean anything)… I mean, it makes sense, but do you know that that’s actually happening? As opposed to, if it were happening then it’d paint a different picture?
There are a growing number of ways people fall through the cracks of economic instability and the averages are designed to throw those out as exceptions.
I partly agree and partly don’t. So, the fed actually does keep track of a survey that tries to get at this stuff -I think this is it. Like, okay forget the metrics, what’s the average financial reality look like for the average American. It’s actually pretty fascinating reading, both because it agrees with you in parts (shows places where the metrics aren’t showing the full picture), and because it’s a way of getting at that idea without abandoning the idea of being rigorous.
But also, you can’t set economic policy because “hey my brother’s out of work and he’s struggling, isn’t that important? Don’t tell me things are good.” You have to try to get at the broad scale of what’s going on. Like am I supposed to not care about a million truck drivers, and stop doing the stuff that got them another $6/hr? The point is let’s pick the right metrics and try to help the most people, not just say my brother’s doing bad so let’s not use metrics anymore.
So what are you saying we should do instead? If anything I’m saying sounds like “let’s not give them another $20/hr instead”, that is not at all what I am saying.
Idk ma, I feel like I’m just rehashing all my bullet points again. Me saying, wages went up and that’s good, is meaning to be yelling at and disagreeing with the people who say NO THEY WENT WAY DOWN AND THE GUY WHO MADE IT HAPPEN IS EVIL. It’s not at all meaning, they’re high enough or things are good for working people.
Being rigorous isn’t always meaning the metrics are wrong or you don’t care about the individual behind the aggregate. Saying you don’t want to be rigorous and focus on anecdotes instead, is usually a sign of something pretty dishonest though. That isn’t helping anyone who’s struggling, it is in service of something that is hurting them.
Replying to “the economy is getting better” with “how DARE you say the economy is good and all the problems are fixed, clearly that’s not the case” as a way of reframing away from the conversation of whether things are getting better, or worse, and why that is. Basically interfering with the effort to understand the policies that help or hurt by simply asserting that everything’s bad, so nothing being talked about can possibly be a good thing.
Let’s see if we can get through literally all of the bullet points if you want to keep the conversation going long enough; we have 3 so far I think
It’ll be an easy way to get your hours in at least
I don’t feel the economy is getting better but I blame inflation on trump not continuing obama slowly raising interest rates and so when covid hit we were already at zero. Covid actually saved trump from inflation on his watch as we reduce demand for about a year or so amount of resources which managed to shift it to just out of his term.
So there’s a pretty concerted effort to make “the economy is actually getting better” stories sound untrue with some particular talking points - it’s actually really effective. Here are some of the big ones. You can see why they work.
They’re all tricks. There are more but those are some of the main ones
And you see the same 4 or 5 of them, over and over again, if you start looking
You’ll see some of them in comments nearby to this one, I guarantee it
Edit: More
What are these “tricks” for? Millions of us out here are struggling. “But you’re earning more money!”… Ok, a dollar more? While everything else has gone up including rent with a near 40% increase in the last few years in some places.
To just be so dismissive of those barely surviving sounds like you’re coming from a place of privilege.
You’re right, I missed a couple
This is also a little bit of the getting angry or fucked up tactic, too. See? I look like an asshole now, with all my numbers.
Just making up a number of 40% inflation I haven’t seen before. I don’t think that’s common enough to warrant an entry of its own. Want to show me where you got 40% from?
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/01/rents-are-bouncing-back-what-to-do-if-you-expect-a-big-increase-.html
Got it. So, back in November of 2021, someone wrote a story with a clickbaity headline about 40% rent increase in the future from back then, and now to you that’s reality you are citing to me. Great stuff.
Anyway, here’s the actual numbers. The median rent went from $1,102 to $1,340 in those 3 years - 21.5% cumulatively. That’s what happened. So someone who’s low income who’s making 32% more comes out ahead. Does that mean that can afford their rent, when it’s $1,700 because they’re in a metro area and they make $16/hr? Fuckin A, man, maybe not. I’m being an asshole to you in this conversation a little bit, just because I know that you’re deliberately twisting things to make Biden look as bad as possible (as confirmed by you which was what got you temp banned already). But I’m not trying to be unsympathetic to someone who’s actually struggling and being honest about how they’re struggling.
But maybe we should keep doing more of the stuff that gave them the 32% increase, and in a few years they’ll be able to afford the $1,700 or whatever it is by then. Right? Or not? What would your solution be, instead, if not that?
I think you’re out of touch on the dire situation Mozz. You can throw statistics and numbers around but for millions of the working class, they’ve never struggled as much as they are currently.
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/06/12/metro-areas-with-the-biggest-one-bedroom-rent-increase-since-2019.html
I don’t want to play the debunking game all night. I read your link, and here’s their rent increases:
And so on. It looks like they sorted every metro area in the US by percentage increase, which yields a whole bunch of individual metro areas with oddball markets where some super-cheap pandemic pricing ended and so the percent increase in places where it had been $582 for a 1 bedroom apartment during the pandemic, was pretty high. That doesn’t mean the price of housing in general went up by that same high percent.
Like I say, someone who’s actually struggling, I have sympathy for. You, I don’t, because you’re just out here lying with statistics to try to hurt the people you are claiming to have all this sympathy with.
This is the entire reason why people critique nationalized metrics on economic trends: they intentionally disregard figures that fall outside the norm so that they can apply a fed policy for the entire country, favoring the overall economic performance instead of addressing the localized economic shortfalls. It’s like a doctor trying to diagnose constipation by reading someone’s vitals; none of the experience of the patient can be seen on the metrics they’re using until it’s literally killing them. “You say you haven’t shit for 8 days but your BP is 120/80 so you must be fine”.
Like, sometimes those metrics overlook really important possibilities, like unemployment not accounting for people who need multiple jobs, or total job market numbers not accounting for ghost positions and high turnover. CPI is used for setting fed interest rates, and it tosses out specific categories because the prices move too fast to gauge the effect of interest rates on those prices. They’re not trying to measure how well people are surviving, they’re measuring how economic output is adjusting to the supply of cash. That’s why they have CPI-U, it adds those categories back in so that they get a better picture of how people are experiencing the market. Notice, though, that even real wages doesn’t have any way of reflecting anything about where those wages come from; whether people are taking on extra jobs or if their work hours are increasing without extra pay, or if a transient spike in COL depleted your savings and you’re right on the edge of instability. Those numbers tell an extremely narrow story about the state of the economy, and if there are a bunch of people who are telling you ‘this number isn’t reflective of my experience’ then maybe you need to take a more granular approach to the data.
It’s exhausting watching this from the left, because depending on who is in office the chosen metrics for assessing the economy change. For 2016-2020 the metric was stock indexes and GDP, for 2020-present it seems to be CPI and unemployment. Neither party likes talking about high-interest credit, or job security, or retirement savings, or healthcare costs or realestate affordability, and that’s infuriating. There are a growing number of ways people fall through the cracks of economic instability and the averages are designed to throw those out as exceptions. You lose your job and fall into drug addiction? Sorry, that’s not the ‘average’ American. You get into a car accident and can’t pay your medical bills? Sorry about that but that’s not relevant to the bigger picture. All we can see is ‘you should feel good/bad about the economy for these abstracted reasons’, and then you get partisan fanboys yelling at you that you’re wrong if your experience doesn’t align with that national picture. It’s even more frustrating when the same people are are telling you things are great are simultaneously acknowledging that things should be a lot better.
‘You’re just trying to make people feel bad about the state of things’ - jesus can you just fuck off with that constant condescension? People feel shit about the economy because things are shit for a lot of people. More than a quarter of the country has less than $1000 in savings, maybe people are scared they’re a single accident away from homelessness and your national metrics simply don’t show that. My parents are talking about EOL plans and I’m realizing I don’t make enough to support them. How does CPI account for that? It fucking doesn’t.
“Things are relatively better through this narrow view of the world” - well why the fuck should I care if i’m not in that picture?
I wasn’t real explicit about it, but my point was more that the results he cited were coming from places where the “before” picture was rent of $600/mo during the pandemic, and so it’s not reasonable to say it went up by 57% after that, and so that’s the rate of housing inflation.
I’ll take wages at different percentiles, and average wages, as a pretty good metric. Your criticisms of the other metrics I’ll agree with. In particular, unemployment gets a ton of play for how shitty a metric it is overall if you really look at how it’s calculated.
Your implication that if they only were looking at the other metrics (in particular hours worked as an explanation for why rising wages may not mean anything)… I mean, it makes sense, but do you know that that’s actually happening? As opposed to, if it were happening then it’d paint a different picture?
I partly agree and partly don’t. So, the fed actually does keep track of a survey that tries to get at this stuff -I think this is it. Like, okay forget the metrics, what’s the average financial reality look like for the average American. It’s actually pretty fascinating reading, both because it agrees with you in parts (shows places where the metrics aren’t showing the full picture), and because it’s a way of getting at that idea without abandoning the idea of being rigorous.
But also, you can’t set economic policy because “hey my brother’s out of work and he’s struggling, isn’t that important? Don’t tell me things are good.” You have to try to get at the broad scale of what’s going on. Like am I supposed to not care about a million truck drivers, and stop doing the stuff that got them another $6/hr? The point is let’s pick the right metrics and try to help the most people, not just say my brother’s doing bad so let’s not use metrics anymore.
So what are you saying we should do instead? If anything I’m saying sounds like “let’s not give them another $20/hr instead”, that is not at all what I am saying.
Idk ma, I feel like I’m just rehashing all my bullet points again. Me saying, wages went up and that’s good, is meaning to be yelling at and disagreeing with the people who say NO THEY WENT WAY DOWN AND THE GUY WHO MADE IT HAPPEN IS EVIL. It’s not at all meaning, they’re high enough or things are good for working people.
Being rigorous isn’t always meaning the metrics are wrong or you don’t care about the individual behind the aggregate. Saying you don’t want to be rigorous and focus on anecdotes instead, is usually a sign of something pretty dishonest though. That isn’t helping anyone who’s struggling, it is in service of something that is hurting them.
Bruh. Everybody is struggling, wake up…
Let’s see if we can get through literally all of the bullet points if you want to keep the conversation going long enough; we have 3 so far I think
It’ll be an easy way to get your hours in at least
Let’s say the economy is doing better… It is still not better enough. People should be able to retire by 50.
I don’t feel the economy is getting better but I blame inflation on trump not continuing obama slowly raising interest rates and so when covid hit we were already at zero. Covid actually saved trump from inflation on his watch as we reduce demand for about a year or so amount of resources which managed to shift it to just out of his term.