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.
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.
The broader problem with adhering to those metrics as a gauge for economic output is that it assumes things across the board move up or down together within a reasonable margin, when you and I both know that certain groups fair way better than the average, a big portion of economic growth not even reflected in wages at all, and some are falling off the bottom of the graph entirely. Taking an average wage doesn’t tell you anything about the long-term stability of individuals. A greater and greater number of people are having to rent because they’re being priced out of home ownership, and even if that isn’t reflected in rent prices now it still means that asset-backed capital is being held by a smaller and smaller number of people. That doesn’t mean much to CPI but it means everything to upward mobility and generational wealth transfer.
I’m not even trying to paint a bleak picture in service of saying it’s all Biden’s fault, it’s been the default economic schema for decades. I’m saying its disingenuous to point to those metrics when you know they aren’t the ones that of the most concern to individuals who see no future for themselves and their families. It’s not all Biden’s fault, but he’s currently the one enacting those policies that have slowly degraded economic mobility for 80 years. “But you’re wages are marginally higher!” doesn’t mean much when the cost of home ownership has been outpacing median income since the 1970s..
Things being marginally better for the average American under Biden doesn’t mean anything when the average American has been almost completely left behind over the course of 50+ years.
It’s not all Biden’s fault, but he’s currently the one enacting those policies that have slowly degraded economic mobility for 80 years.
This is where it breaks down for me. All the rest of it, I pretty much agree with completely. But Biden’s been busting his ass to strengthen unions, bring domestic manufacturing back, and make corporations pay their fair share. He routed like a trillion dollars from corporations to working people, and it had a little tiny bump of an effect, and it may be a few drops in the bucket but it’s still a good thing. They’re making about 35% more (un inflation adjusted) than they were before. If we weren’t still digging out from Covid inflation it would have been an economic revolution, but even as it is, they’re comfortably clearing over the 20% inflation and getting a tiny bit more breathing room.
If you want to extrapolate from that statement to “but rent is a huge missing piece of that, with specific things he should be doing to address that, too” then sure. I’d 100% agree with you. But, on the other hand, if you want to extrapolate to “and so none of that union stuff happened and he’s still a piece of shit just like all the generations of politicians that created the gilded age nightmare we’ve been drowning in ever since 2008/1995/1980/whenever”, then I’ll disagree with you.
Maybe you aren’t saying that second thing, and I’m angling a certain amount of heat at you because there are other people who are, and it’s easy to become tribal about this type of disagreement. But, that’s how I feel about it.
strengthen unions, bring domestic manufacturing back, and make corporations pay their fair share.
That’s what I mean though, those things aren’t the problem. They fit within that neoliberal economic picture really well but it doesn’t address the declining state of middle class’ economic stability. We’ve been operating under the assumption that when our productive output is high, everyone benefits (which is why bringing manufacturing stateside is valuable), but over the last couple decades those jobs have had a steep decline in quality (it used to be that a manufacturing job could support a family of 5, but that’s just not the case anymore) due to automation and the relative productivity of capital against the productivity of an individual worker. We’d have to continue consuming well beyond a sustainable level in order to produce enough manufacturing jobs for everyone, and those jobs just aren’t as good as they used to be. Even union protections are ultimately just a finger in the dam, when fewer and fewer jobs are needed for higher and higher output. And none of that picture addresses home ownership and generational wealth transfer.
Things are as good as they can be without fundamentally challenging the neoliberal economic hegemony, but that’s exactly the problem with the picture. Those metrics suit that way of thinking but they simply don’t address the reasons why the American public is struggling.
I’m just so sick of seeing these accomplishments paraded around as if they address the problems normal people are actually facing. You’re going to be chanting “things are really great actually!” as we all get chased out of the country by a nationalist movement driven by economic disenfranchisement. We can’t keep doing this.
Right, I know. This is a fundamental disagreement in how we see “the right economy” and the right type of structure for a country.
Honestly, I don’t even really have a problem with what you’re saying here. I think the answer to the problem you’re describing is strong unions to be able to claw back the fruits of all those gains in productivity for the working class, pretty much by force, and then a democratic-enough government in place that it won’t squash or undo that whole effort on behalf of capital. That’s very different from anything we currently have.
I think that the US economy as it existed for white people between about 1940-1970 was a very clear example of how things can work well, and if we could deploy that, extended to all races instead of just the whites, and replacing oppression of the third world on a massive scale with technological improvements, I think that would be good.
One thing incredibly notable to me about that FDR economy that I like, is that it didn’t come from some political class coming down from above and saying “here you go we fixed it” – it only was able to happen because people banded together into unions and fought multiple generations’ worth of literal bloody battle to demand the type of economy they deserved, and then after the fact the politicians took credit for having “given” it all to them. But whatever.
I don’t really expect you to agree with me on that, but I don’t have the type of intense disagreement with you if you’re saying that Biden isn’t putting us on track for real communism which is what’s required. My real intense disagreements are reserved for other people who are pretending that Biden is doing a Clinton-style neoliberal betrayal of even my preferred within-the-capitalistic-model progress, and so even people who want that FDR economy should vote against him.
I could get on board with some militant union organizing and class solidarity. But that’s about as likely to be successful under our current government as a class revolution: police are armed to the gills and even a union-friendly administration isn’t going to tolerate the kind of union action that we’d need to make a noticeable dent in our economic organization. Even a pretty light rail strike was quickly intervened on (I’m aware of the concessions won with the administrations assistance after the fact, you don’t need to elaborate on it for me). The reason why that example isn’t a good sign is that the kind of damage a strike like that threatens is kind of fundamental to all potential strikes in the future… That a union strike like that with real leverage couldn’t even be tolerated for a moment is… well it’s not encouraging. Can you imagine something like an energy strike, or a roadworker strike in the form and style of the Pullman or Homestead Steel? An entire city’s industry shut down by armed union workers? God forbid a general strike…
Idk. And I also really doubt that a new-deal economy would work today… Capital just isn’t as reliant on labor as it used to be. It’s my ardent belief that we’re already way overproducing ‘goods’ (I like the marxist term ‘treats’ to describe most of what we produce now); how would unions help reverse that kind of overproduction and over-consumption? How do unions dissolve the kind of wealth that’s accumulated around old-money industry and redirect it? The free market has distorted the capital landscape so much that the kind of action we need isn’t achievable without an external pressure… Unions work well to redistribute resources between industry and labor but aren’t able to pump the breaks or redirect it elsewhere.
I think our economic options are just… really really bleak. And it’s happening as we’re entering into another cold-war style conflict with China… Yea. I’m of the opinion that things will get way, way worse before they get noticeably better.
You might be right. It used to be that without people to grow the food, anyone involved with capital would starve. Kind of sets a baseline underneath how small labor’s power is ever able to shrink to.
Now automation has gone, not quite, but almost far enough that it’s the exact opposite – capital can simply say “lol okey dokey then, good luck” and stop cutting labor in on any of the products of automated factory farming.
Brings it back to the question, though, of what is the solution then?
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.
The broader problem with adhering to those metrics as a gauge for economic output is that it assumes things across the board move up or down together within a reasonable margin, when you and I both know that certain groups fair way better than the average, a big portion of economic growth not even reflected in wages at all, and some are falling off the bottom of the graph entirely. Taking an average wage doesn’t tell you anything about the long-term stability of individuals. A greater and greater number of people are having to rent because they’re being priced out of home ownership, and even if that isn’t reflected in rent prices now it still means that asset-backed capital is being held by a smaller and smaller number of people. That doesn’t mean much to CPI but it means everything to upward mobility and generational wealth transfer.
I’m not even trying to paint a bleak picture in service of saying it’s all Biden’s fault, it’s been the default economic schema for decades. I’m saying its disingenuous to point to those metrics when you know they aren’t the ones that of the most concern to individuals who see no future for themselves and their families. It’s not all Biden’s fault, but he’s currently the one enacting those policies that have slowly degraded economic mobility for 80 years. “But you’re wages are marginally higher!” doesn’t mean much when the cost of home ownership has been outpacing median income since the 1970s..
Things being marginally better for the average American under Biden doesn’t mean anything when the average American has been almost completely left behind over the course of 50+ years.
This is where it breaks down for me. All the rest of it, I pretty much agree with completely. But Biden’s been busting his ass to strengthen unions, bring domestic manufacturing back, and make corporations pay their fair share. He routed like a trillion dollars from corporations to working people, and it had a little tiny bump of an effect, and it may be a few drops in the bucket but it’s still a good thing. They’re making about 35% more (un inflation adjusted) than they were before. If we weren’t still digging out from Covid inflation it would have been an economic revolution, but even as it is, they’re comfortably clearing over the 20% inflation and getting a tiny bit more breathing room.
If you want to extrapolate from that statement to “but rent is a huge missing piece of that, with specific things he should be doing to address that, too” then sure. I’d 100% agree with you. But, on the other hand, if you want to extrapolate to “and so none of that union stuff happened and he’s still a piece of shit just like all the generations of politicians that created the gilded age nightmare we’ve been drowning in ever since 2008/1995/1980/whenever”, then I’ll disagree with you.
Maybe you aren’t saying that second thing, and I’m angling a certain amount of heat at you because there are other people who are, and it’s easy to become tribal about this type of disagreement. But, that’s how I feel about it.
That’s what I mean though, those things aren’t the problem. They fit within that neoliberal economic picture really well but it doesn’t address the declining state of middle class’ economic stability. We’ve been operating under the assumption that when our productive output is high, everyone benefits (which is why bringing manufacturing stateside is valuable), but over the last couple decades those jobs have had a steep decline in quality (it used to be that a manufacturing job could support a family of 5, but that’s just not the case anymore) due to automation and the relative productivity of capital against the productivity of an individual worker. We’d have to continue consuming well beyond a sustainable level in order to produce enough manufacturing jobs for everyone, and those jobs just aren’t as good as they used to be. Even union protections are ultimately just a finger in the dam, when fewer and fewer jobs are needed for higher and higher output. And none of that picture addresses home ownership and generational wealth transfer.
Things are as good as they can be without fundamentally challenging the neoliberal economic hegemony, but that’s exactly the problem with the picture. Those metrics suit that way of thinking but they simply don’t address the reasons why the American public is struggling.
I’m just so sick of seeing these accomplishments paraded around as if they address the problems normal people are actually facing. You’re going to be chanting “things are really great actually!” as we all get chased out of the country by a nationalist movement driven by economic disenfranchisement. We can’t keep doing this.
Right, I know. This is a fundamental disagreement in how we see “the right economy” and the right type of structure for a country.
Honestly, I don’t even really have a problem with what you’re saying here. I think the answer to the problem you’re describing is strong unions to be able to claw back the fruits of all those gains in productivity for the working class, pretty much by force, and then a democratic-enough government in place that it won’t squash or undo that whole effort on behalf of capital. That’s very different from anything we currently have.
I think that the US economy as it existed for white people between about 1940-1970 was a very clear example of how things can work well, and if we could deploy that, extended to all races instead of just the whites, and replacing oppression of the third world on a massive scale with technological improvements, I think that would be good.
One thing incredibly notable to me about that FDR economy that I like, is that it didn’t come from some political class coming down from above and saying “here you go we fixed it” – it only was able to happen because people banded together into unions and fought multiple generations’ worth of literal bloody battle to demand the type of economy they deserved, and then after the fact the politicians took credit for having “given” it all to them. But whatever.
I don’t really expect you to agree with me on that, but I don’t have the type of intense disagreement with you if you’re saying that Biden isn’t putting us on track for real communism which is what’s required. My real intense disagreements are reserved for other people who are pretending that Biden is doing a Clinton-style neoliberal betrayal of even my preferred within-the-capitalistic-model progress, and so even people who want that FDR economy should vote against him.
I could get on board with some militant union organizing and class solidarity. But that’s about as likely to be successful under our current government as a class revolution: police are armed to the gills and even a union-friendly administration isn’t going to tolerate the kind of union action that we’d need to make a noticeable dent in our economic organization. Even a pretty light rail strike was quickly intervened on (I’m aware of the concessions won with the administrations assistance after the fact, you don’t need to elaborate on it for me). The reason why that example isn’t a good sign is that the kind of damage a strike like that threatens is kind of fundamental to all potential strikes in the future… That a union strike like that with real leverage couldn’t even be tolerated for a moment is… well it’s not encouraging. Can you imagine something like an energy strike, or a roadworker strike in the form and style of the Pullman or Homestead Steel? An entire city’s industry shut down by armed union workers? God forbid a general strike…
Idk. And I also really doubt that a new-deal economy would work today… Capital just isn’t as reliant on labor as it used to be. It’s my ardent belief that we’re already way overproducing ‘goods’ (I like the marxist term ‘treats’ to describe most of what we produce now); how would unions help reverse that kind of overproduction and over-consumption? How do unions dissolve the kind of wealth that’s accumulated around old-money industry and redirect it? The free market has distorted the capital landscape so much that the kind of action we need isn’t achievable without an external pressure… Unions work well to redistribute resources between industry and labor but aren’t able to pump the breaks or redirect it elsewhere.
I think our economic options are just… really really bleak. And it’s happening as we’re entering into another cold-war style conflict with China… Yea. I’m of the opinion that things will get way, way worse before they get noticeably better.
You might be right. It used to be that without people to grow the food, anyone involved with capital would starve. Kind of sets a baseline underneath how small labor’s power is ever able to shrink to.
Now automation has gone, not quite, but almost far enough that it’s the exact opposite – capital can simply say “lol okey dokey then, good luck” and stop cutting labor in on any of the products of automated factory farming.
Brings it back to the question, though, of what is the solution then?