President Joe Biden goes into next year’s election with a vexing challenge: Just as the U.S. economy is getting stronger, people are still feeling horrible about it.
Pollsters and economists say there has never been as wide a gap between the underlying health of the economy and public perception. The divergence could be a decisive factor in whether the Democrat secures a second term next year. Republicans are seizing on the dissatisfaction to skewer Biden, while the White House is finding less success as it tries to highlight economic progress.
“Things are getting better and people think things are going to get worse — and that’s the most dangerous piece of this," said Democratic pollster Celinda Lake, who has worked with Biden. Lake said voters no longer want to just see inflation rates fall — rather, they want an outright decline in prices, something that last happened on a large scale during the Great Depression.
“Honestly, I’m kind of mystified by it,” she said.
Good thing modern macroeconomics doesn’t depend on that. People only have to be semi-rational. I. e. they may not examine all possible options in a market, just a few, and pick the best one. The results are almost the same.
It’s wrong to say that “consumers are not rational”. That implies that their choices are potentially random. We know that they’re not, because people are complaining about not having enough money. Which is rational.
It’s only rational if you accept that what they want is actually money. They don’t want money, they want a safe place to live, good food to eat, health care when they feel sick, someone to teach their kids, free time to pursue the things they love, and security that these things will be available for the rest of their lives.
The only reason they want money is because that’s how you get those things in our economic system. People don’t want money for the sake of money, at least for the most part.
No part of economics assumes that people “want money”. If that were true, there would be a lot more printed paper money in circulation.
Utility curves use prices for goods to find the maximum value of “happiness” or “satisfaction”. Rationality, in Economics, mean that people’s actions conform to their utility curves based on current prices.
Basically, if you like apples (or whatever) you should pay more for them than other goods, comparatively. That’s rational because your actions follow your preferences. Nothing to do with “liking money”.
I just don’t think this happens that much necessarily though. Mostly because of necessities taking up such a huge percentage of peoples budgets.
I also find myself and see others kind of have a “I Like X more, but not enough to spend Y for it”. This doesn’t necessarily imply it’s a utility curve, I often find myself thinking it’s more of an anchoring psychology effect. I.e. you at age X get used to a Combo meal at the local fast food place costing $10. If it “frog boils” over say 20 years to $20, you’ll bitch about how “back in my day”… If it doubles in a year, like many things have - it just seems way more like overcharging and the utility curve is all out of whack.
I’ll tell you one thing, the service at fast food places has fallen so much where I live that if I can’t get their app to work to pre-order so I can waltz in and just grab it, I’ll go somewhere else. And the cost has gone up so much that I’ve been actively comparing to fast casual app based pick ups or hell, sit downs because the food is usually somewhat better and they’re often no longer massively more expensive or slower.
Ah, okay. It’s not “rational” it’s “Rational™” which is an economic term. Kind of like how Magnetic Attraction™ isn’t them wanting to fuck.