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.
The popular conception of economics feels quite a bit like a religion. There’s the god of The Invisible Hand™, there’s a priesthood of economists, there’s the creation myth of barter, there’s people’s vehement insistence that they’re capitalists.
David Graeber’s books “Debt: The First 5,000 Years” and “The Dawn of Everything” do a really good job of showing different economic and political systems, and that ours isn’t some ideal end goal but one of many possible choices.
Graeber isn’t an economist and doesn’t present his books as a part of economics in any way, though. In fact he criticizes how economists have essentially made up fairy tales to explain things rather than to look at history and understand how the modern world came about in a factual manner.
He lays out the history of various economic systems in a well researched, extremely detailed, and anthropological manner. Just because it doesn’t agree with your conception of reality doesn’t make it non-factual.
Oh don’t get me wrong, I agree with what I’ve read of him, particularly Debt: the first 5000 years. I don’t think he’s an economist. I also think that’s a credit to him on the whole.
Absolutely. But I think dismissing it as non-economic is short sighted. He begins by searching anthropology and history for the mythical time when goats got too difficult to carry to market and someone invented money, only to find that it’s a myth.
Honestly, the actual history presented is far more interesting than the myth of barter.
Given that I find the economists roughly on par with weather forecasters, I really think we have to treat it that way. Like Climate change has thrown a huge wrench in existing weather models causing the forecasts to be much worse - I think if the models ever worked(and that’s a big if), things have sufficiently changed to break them pretty badly now.
A lot of our systems, both physical and governmental, were developed for a world that no longer exists.