8 ms·

Analysis of 200M newspaper pages: Sentiment has collapsed over the past 50 years

51 points by atticora 3y ago

gumby 3y ago
https://archive.md/qgBYu https://archive.md/qgBYu
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
geekodour 3y ago
any idea about if the dataset is available online somewhere?
- kobiguru 3y ago
  same. Would love to look at the data set. Very unlikely they will share it because of copyright issues.
gumby 3y ago
This is more about economic news specifically (well, it is an NBER paper being reported in the FT after all) but is quite interesting. Things are getting better yet sentiment is falling. Does that mean things aren’t getting better or does it mean expectations are rising? Only the second of those two is brought up in this brief article.
- iammjm 3y ago
  I think it's in our nature that we are never satisfied with what we have and once we have fulfilled our latest desire we just directly move onto the next one. Being constantly bombarded with other people's carefully crafted illusions of perfect lives on social media probably makes this tendency even worse - we are even more acutely aware of what life could be (at least in theory) & what we are potentially missing. Plus, the negative & outrageous is what generates the clicks, so these kinds of signals get amplified and create a yet another illusion dressed as reality
  - jononomo 3y ago
    If it is in human nature to never be satisfied, then why were Americans more satisfied a few decades ago?
    - antisthenes 3y ago
      The GP post already explained it - rising expectations are one of the causes of falling satisfactions. If I expect $500 and get $600, I am satisfied, but if I am expecting $1000 and get $900, I am not, despite objectively being better off.
    - kube-system 3y ago
      Maybe the tone used by journalists in newspapers isn’t equally representative of the satisfaction of all Americans.
- mikeravkine 3y ago
  In terms of economics specifically, in what way have things "gotten better"? Purchasing power has collapsed, the poor sentiment here seems the correct sentiment to me.
  - galimaufry 3y ago
    > Purchasing power has collapsed But is this actually true, or just something that declining economic sentiment in the newspapers has led us to believe? People are consuming more food, more education, more square feet of house, more travel. My sense is that is surprisingly hard to find a quantitative signal that purchasing power has collapsed. Maybe it is just that positional goods (access to the best neighborhood in the best city) get harder to obtain as the population grows?
    - giantg2 3y ago
      I mean, real wages have stagnated or declined over the past 50 years. Sure, we're eating more food, but it's increasingly garbage. Yes, we have more education, but the quality has gone down and is really only a response to the barriers to entry that have increased for most professions. It does seem travel has increased and new houses are bigger, but these seemed to be aligned to a particular class of person. I doubt the middle class is doing much of that. Perhaps the increase in income in equality is reflected by a larger upper class skewing those metrics. https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/ https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/
      - eru 3y ago
        The labour share of GDP has held more or less constant over the last 70 years. It bounced between 60 - 65%. See eg https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LABSHPUSA156NRUG https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LABSHPUSA156NRUG If you want to argue that real wages have stagnated, you need to argue that real GDP has stagnated. > Yes, we have more education, but the quality has gone down and is really only a response to the barriers to entry that have increased for most professions. Yes, that is a problem. See 'The Case against Education' by Bryan Caplan. > I doubt the middle class is doing much of that. What's your definition of the middle class in this context? Have you checked any statistics? > Perhaps the increase in income in equality is reflected by a larger upper class skewing those metrics. The first few decades after the second world war were really rough. But fortunately, global equality has massively improved in the last few decades. Numerically, that's mostly due to China (but also India and recently Africa) first falling behind and then starting to catch up. There was probably never a time since at least the Industrial Revolution when global consumption was as equal as today, and the situation is set to keep improving.
- tqi 3y ago
  Their chart actually seems to show both economic and non-economic sentiment trending down at the same time.
- concordDance 3y ago
  > Things are getting better Doesn't that depend on what you look at? E.g. if you look at gdp then things are getting better but if you look at growth rate then things are getting worse?
  - eru 3y ago
    Absolute growth isn't too bad, ie how many more inflation adjusted dollars do you get to spend your after year. (If you look at growth as the ratio between years, instead of as a difference, then yes, growth has slowed down.)
- thunderbird120 3y ago
  News organizations are businesses and bad news sells. People are evolutionarily wired to pay more attention to bad news because bad news is theoretically useful for trying to avoid or mitigate threats. Problems is, once you have a limitless firehose of news from all over the world 24/7 what you end up with is essentially a limitless supply of bad news which inundates people constantly. This causes issues, since any mild gradual improvements to the world get drowned out. The amount of actual yearly improvement needed to give the impression that things are improving ends up being dramatically more than the small incremental improvements which are normally seen.
  - gumby 3y ago
    > News organizations are businesses and bad news sells. The paper discusses this and the ft article quotes it: > particularly if one adheres to the view that traditional media fulfills a watchdog/surveillance function. Although this argument could explain the average level of negativity in news reporting, it does not address its increasingly downward trend. … Fighting the media negativity bias, the local Russian newspaper City Reporter decided in 2014 to report only positive news for a day and lost two-thirds of its readers.
- giantg2 3y ago
  "Things are getting better yet sentiment is falling." Have they? By what measures? Real wages have stagnated or fallen. Workforce participation is at a low. We can't compete on costs with much of the world. Population is mostly stagnate. It's hard to see how a system built on consumerism is not in trouble when our products must be subsidized to compete on exports (ag), the population is mostly stagnate, and a large portion of the population is either not working or is making just enough to survive. Looks pretty bleak to me. I suppose it looks better if you wrap assets in multiple layers of derivatives.
  - yorwba 3y ago
    Since you don't specify which country you're talking about, I assume you're in the US. In which case labor force participation is at a high https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060
    - galleywest200 3y ago
      Labor force participation being high does not mean people are making enough money to be comfortable.
      - eru 3y ago
        The parent comment talked specifically about workforce participation being low.
    - MisterBastahrd 3y ago
      The average person is working. The average person has always been working. The cost of living has risen faster than wages, which have have stagnated except for those who are either in the C-suite or making their money primarily through capital. My father made half of what I make at the same age. But his mortgage was 1/8th of the size of mine for the same basic home.
    - giantg2 3y ago
      That's interesting. I wonder what the difference is, because the BLS shoes something very different. https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-labor-force-participation-rate.htm https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-lab...
- boplicity 3y ago
  It's not for sure, but there seems to be significant evidence that partisan bias is affecting economic sentiment more than the reality of jobs/prices/etc. > https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/09/opinion/economy-survey-republicans.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Mk0.R8Iu.UySU3SzcdsNY&smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/09/opinion/economy-survey-re...
- colinsane 3y ago
  > Things are getting better yet sentiment is falling. Does that mean things aren’t getting better or does it mean expectations are rising? i'm not sure the two can actually be decoupled. why do people work? as a means to fulfill their needs and desires. how do you measure if a person's needs and desires are being fulfilled? you can try to ground economic measurements in something like Maslow's hierarchy, but you can't escape that a person's sentiment is real. give a person shelter, but in such a way that they feel it could be taken away from them at any moment (e.g. "living paycheck-to-paycheck"), and you've only sort of fulfilled their base needs. give a person the exact same shelter but in such a way that they feel secure in it, and it's hard to argue that's not meaningfully better. so whatever macro measurements you're using, if your goal is for them to reflect anything real to the individual, they ought to have some correlation to sentiment. "household savings" and "job openings" often do proxy the difference between being secure v.s. insecure in your housing. but, speaking to the article, worries you'll see captured and reinforced by the news such as "the other half of the country wants to take away my healthcare" or "the other half of the country wants to obsolete my coal/oil/manufacturing job" proxy these same feelings of in/security, but are likely not captured by any formal measurement... except "sentiment". so if these sentiments aren't proxied by your "things are getting better" measurement, then yes, it would mean that things aren't getting as better as your measurement claims.
epups 3y ago
This seems to map pretty well to that famous graph showing the divergence between productivity and wage gains [1]. It also at least correlates with the start of a relative predominance of China and other third-world countries in economic growth, which kept wage growth lower in the West than it could have been - empowered, of course, by the policies of people like Reagan and Thatcher. [1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/11/productivity-workforce-america-united-states-wages-stagnate/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/11/productivity-workforc...
- tootie 3y ago
  It's also pretty similar to the constant belief that crime is rising regardless of whether it's actually falling: https://news.gallup.com/poll/404048/record-high-perceive-local-crime-increased.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/404048/record-high-perceive-loc...
- hash872 3y ago
  How did Reagan and Thatcher 'empower' other countries to rise up and compete with the US & Europe? If they passed the right combination of laws, we would've prevented billions of smart, hard-working people from daring to compete with the West? Do you think it's moral to impoverish billions of people to keep the West economically pre-eminent? (Should the US have kept Europe impoverished post-WW2 to prevent the competition?) I strongly disagree with the idea that the government is a magic God-like wizard, who can bend objective reality and achieve any economic or social outcome by twisting the right knobs here or there. Other countries rose economically to compete with the West and that's not something that the government can magically outlaw, any more than it can pass a law against the tide coming in tomorrow
  - eru 3y ago
    > I strongly disagree with the idea that the government is a magic God-like wizard, who can bend objective reality and achieve any economic or social outcome by twisting the right knobs here or there. Agreed. See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38838608 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38838608 on a similar topic recently. You might like my sibling comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38953586 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38953586
casualrandomcom 3y ago
Just read the title... can something that happens over a 50 years span be correctly described as a "collapse"? go figure
- atticora 3y ago
  Cosmologists discuss gravitational collapse that takes place over billions of years.
- jononomo 3y ago
  Yes. I would say that it took more than ten minutes for the Roman Empire to collapse, for example.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
tqi 3y ago
I can't access the NBER paper so I can't see the methodology - how did they choose which papers to include? I'm always wary of studies that tout the size of their data set. Did they dedupe wire stories? Control for which newspapers were included? I feel like more often than not, it turns out these effects are mostly due to mix shift / selection bias / other methodological artifacts.
- atticora 3y ago
  Here's a PDF of the paper: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w32026/w32026.pdf https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w32026/w320...
dahfizz 3y ago
In my opinion, this is a graph of the downfall of journalism rather than some larger indicator of the attitudes of Americans. Journalism now is primarily ragebait and self-gratifying garbage.
- novagameco 3y ago
  Hasn't journalism always been that way? Was there ever truly a "golden age" of journalism? What I remember from history class is that William Randolph Hearst published lies to sell more newspapers which resulted in the Spanish American war. Early British and American newspapers were just partisan pamphlets meant to rile up support for a particular politician. Whenever we hear about good journalism in the past, I think it's usually the exception rather than the rule. Perhaps there was a period around the 1970s where journalists were willing to go to war zones and risk prosecution to report on the Viet Nam war or the Watergate scandal, but I'm not sure if that's indicative of the entire body of work of the era.
  - MrBuddyCasino 3y ago
    And even the Watergate scandal was really a coup by the deep state, which was vehemently opposed to the changes Nixon had in mind [0]. Even if you don't buy the whole story, it should give you pause that the Watergate burglars were connected to the CIA. Or, put differently: "49 state landslide, 520 electoral votes, and a year later half the country genuinely believed he had to break into an office building to win" [1]. [0] https://theamericansun.com/2019/11/10/impeachment-unified-theory-of-watergate/ https://theamericansun.com/2019/11/10/impeachment-unified-th... [1] https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1710010371464122508 https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1710010371464122508
    - hedora 3y ago
      How does the coup theory explain the audio tapes of Nixon implicating himself? I'd explain his resignation differently: Back then, there was more of an expectation that politicians would obey the law, or at least get punished if caught.
giantg2 3y ago
Financial sentiment has collapsed over the last 50 years? No shit... Real wages have stagnated or declined. Barriers to entry for good careers have increases. Entire industries have been outsourced, mainly effecting lower skilled workers. Workforce participation is extremely low. Multiple financial crises. A system built on consumerism that is dependent on almost free money not to crumble. If the system doesn't look like a house of cards, then I don't know what does...
- eru 3y ago
  > Real wages have stagnated or declined. Wages as a proportion of GDP, ie the so called 'labour share' has been relatively steady. If you believe that real GDP has increased, then real wages have increased. > Workforce participation is extremely low. https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/labor-force-participation-rate https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/labor-force-parti... says it's about 62.5%.
  - bendbro 3y ago
    Total real wages have gone up, while median real wages have stagnated. Your 62.5% labor force participation rate only aligns with the past if you completely discount women's unpaid and unaccounted work in the home and elsewhere. The male labor force participation rate has declined from around 90% to around 68%. Thanks to our glorious new economy instead of basically everyone getting a house, spouse, and kid, now many will rent, work and die. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300001 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300001
    - eru 3y ago
      Huh? When women do stuff at home, you want to count that. Sure. But when men do stuff at home, you refuse to count that? > Total real wages have gone up, while median real wages have stagnated. An investigation of median wages can be interesting. The comment only talked about wages in general. > Thanks to our glorious new economy instead of basically everyone getting a house, spouse, and kid, now many will rent, work and die. The US doesn't build enough housing, yes. Though renting by itself isn't a problem, but that housing (whether rented or owned) has become less affordable. That's mostly because of various regulations (especially zoning) that limit how much developers can build. See eg https://www.amazon.com/Shut-Out-Shortage-Recession-University/dp/1538122146 https://www.amazon.com/Shut-Out-Shortage-Recession-Universit...
swimwiththebeat 3y ago
I can think of a few reasons for this besides the reason that life has genuinely become worse: 1. Profit-seeking news orgs: it's no secret that negative and controversial news sells significantly more. With all the destruction of locally run papers in favor of the national consolidation of news by a lot of private equity investors, there are increased expectations to make a profit and therefore increase the amount of negative-sentiment news over the recent years. 2. 24-7 news cycle: people are also much more aware of all the bad news around them with smartphones and social networks. Readers' sentiment will just bleed into the papers over time. Ignorance is bliss. 3. Sampling bias: which kind of papers did they measure sentiment for back then versus now? There could be a divergence in the sources they use and different sources could have different sentiment tendencies. (I don't have access to the actual paper) 4. Rising expectations: humans are many orders of magnitude more powerful than our ancestors. We live like gods compared to them. Yet there are so many people who still aren't happy. Why? It's because our expectations also rise endlessly. Things may be better than before, but maybe it's not better relative to our expectations. Point is, this isn't necessarily indicative of life becoming worse. There could be other plausible explanations.
- al_hag 3y ago
  I agree, life does not need to have become worse for the narratives reflected in this analysis to have become wise to the complexities of global society.
- andrewmutz 3y ago
  > Point is, this isn't necessarily indicative of life becoming worse It probably isn't indicative of life becoming worse. These articles are about economics, and the nice thing about macroeconomics is that its reasonably well measured. We can just look at the numbers to see in aggregate what the conditions are like. To choose just the most dramatic example from the graph: sentiment was generally been more negative from 1975-2020 than it was during the great depression in the 1930s. Things aren't perfect, but no one would claim that economic conditions in the US have been worse than the great depression for the last 50 years. I suspect that this trend holds outside of economics as well, but of course I have no data to back this up. Specifically, I suspect news-based sentiment of the world conditions have been declining while conditions in the world have not been declining.
vcg3rd 3y ago
Did it take into account the feedback loop of journalism and sentiment? Recent example: the TV show that finally compelled action in the British Post Office scandal by increasing awareness and altering sentiment?
lamontcg 3y ago
The start seems to about align with 1980 and falling interest rates and increasing corporate profits and rising income inequality.
- red-iron-pine 3y ago
  a lil earlier than that -- "wtf happened in 1971?" https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

51 points by atticora 3y ago

gumby 3y ago

https://archive.md/qgBYu https://archive.md/qgBYu

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

geekodour 3y ago

any idea about if the dataset is available online somewhere?

kobiguru 3y ago
same. Would love to look at the data set. Very unlikely they will share it because of copyright issues.

gumby 3y ago

This is more about economic news specifically (well, it is an NBER paper being reported in the FT after all) but is quite interesting. Things are getting better yet sentiment is falling. Does that mean things aren’t getting better or does it mean expectations are rising? Only the second of those two is brought up in this brief article.

iammjm 3y ago
I think it's in our nature that we are never satisfied with what we have and once we have fulfilled our latest desire we just directly move onto the next one. Being constantly bombarded with other people's carefully crafted illusions of perfect lives on social media probably makes this tendency even worse - we are even more acutely aware of what life could be (at least in theory) & what we are potentially missing. Plus, the negative & outrageous is what generates the clicks, so these kinds of signals get amplified and create a yet another illusion dressed as reality
- jononomo 3y ago
  If it is in human nature to never be satisfied, then why were Americans more satisfied a few decades ago?
  - antisthenes 3y ago
    The GP post already explained it - rising expectations are one of the causes of falling satisfactions. If I expect $500 and get $600, I am satisfied, but if I am expecting $1000 and get $900, I am not, despite objectively being better off.
  - kube-system 3y ago
    Maybe the tone used by journalists in newspapers isn’t equally representative of the satisfaction of all Americans.
mikeravkine 3y ago
In terms of economics specifically, in what way have things "gotten better"? Purchasing power has collapsed, the poor sentiment here seems the correct sentiment to me.
- galimaufry 3y ago
  > Purchasing power has collapsed But is this actually true, or just something that declining economic sentiment in the newspapers has led us to believe? People are consuming more food, more education, more square feet of house, more travel. My sense is that is surprisingly hard to find a quantitative signal that purchasing power has collapsed. Maybe it is just that positional goods (access to the best neighborhood in the best city) get harder to obtain as the population grows?
  - giantg2 3y ago
    I mean, real wages have stagnated or declined over the past 50 years. Sure, we're eating more food, but it's increasingly garbage. Yes, we have more education, but the quality has gone down and is really only a response to the barriers to entry that have increased for most professions. It does seem travel has increased and new houses are bigger, but these seemed to be aligned to a particular class of person. I doubt the middle class is doing much of that. Perhaps the increase in income in equality is reflected by a larger upper class skewing those metrics. https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/ https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/
    - eru 3y ago
      The labour share of GDP has held more or less constant over the last 70 years. It bounced between 60 - 65%. See eg https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LABSHPUSA156NRUG https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LABSHPUSA156NRUG If you want to argue that real wages have stagnated, you need to argue that real GDP has stagnated. > Yes, we have more education, but the quality has gone down and is really only a response to the barriers to entry that have increased for most professions. Yes, that is a problem. See 'The Case against Education' by Bryan Caplan. > I doubt the middle class is doing much of that. What's your definition of the middle class in this context? Have you checked any statistics? > Perhaps the increase in income in equality is reflected by a larger upper class skewing those metrics. The first few decades after the second world war were really rough. But fortunately, global equality has massively improved in the last few decades. Numerically, that's mostly due to China (but also India and recently Africa) first falling behind and then starting to catch up. There was probably never a time since at least the Industrial Revolution when global consumption was as equal as today, and the situation is set to keep improving.
tqi 3y ago
Their chart actually seems to show both economic and non-economic sentiment trending down at the same time.
concordDance 3y ago
> Things are getting better Doesn't that depend on what you look at? E.g. if you look at gdp then things are getting better but if you look at growth rate then things are getting worse?
- eru 3y ago
  Absolute growth isn't too bad, ie how many more inflation adjusted dollars do you get to spend your after year. (If you look at growth as the ratio between years, instead of as a difference, then yes, growth has slowed down.)
thunderbird120 3y ago
News organizations are businesses and bad news sells. People are evolutionarily wired to pay more attention to bad news because bad news is theoretically useful for trying to avoid or mitigate threats. Problems is, once you have a limitless firehose of news from all over the world 24/7 what you end up with is essentially a limitless supply of bad news which inundates people constantly. This causes issues, since any mild gradual improvements to the world get drowned out. The amount of actual yearly improvement needed to give the impression that things are improving ends up being dramatically more than the small incremental improvements which are normally seen.
- gumby 3y ago
  > News organizations are businesses and bad news sells. The paper discusses this and the ft article quotes it: > particularly if one adheres to the view that traditional media fulfills a watchdog/surveillance function. Although this argument could explain the average level of negativity in news reporting, it does not address its increasingly downward trend. … Fighting the media negativity bias, the local Russian newspaper City Reporter decided in 2014 to report only positive news for a day and lost two-thirds of its readers.
giantg2 3y ago
"Things are getting better yet sentiment is falling." Have they? By what measures? Real wages have stagnated or fallen. Workforce participation is at a low. We can't compete on costs with much of the world. Population is mostly stagnate. It's hard to see how a system built on consumerism is not in trouble when our products must be subsidized to compete on exports (ag), the population is mostly stagnate, and a large portion of the population is either not working or is making just enough to survive. Looks pretty bleak to me. I suppose it looks better if you wrap assets in multiple layers of derivatives.
- yorwba 3y ago
  Since you don't specify which country you're talking about, I assume you're in the US. In which case labor force participation is at a high https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060
  - galleywest200 3y ago
    Labor force participation being high does not mean people are making enough money to be comfortable.
    - eru 3y ago
      The parent comment talked specifically about workforce participation being low.
  - MisterBastahrd 3y ago
    The average person is working. The average person has always been working. The cost of living has risen faster than wages, which have have stagnated except for those who are either in the C-suite or making their money primarily through capital. My father made half of what I make at the same age. But his mortgage was 1/8th of the size of mine for the same basic home.
  - giantg2 3y ago
    That's interesting. I wonder what the difference is, because the BLS shoes something very different. https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-labor-force-participation-rate.htm https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-lab...
boplicity 3y ago
It's not for sure, but there seems to be significant evidence that partisan bias is affecting economic sentiment more than the reality of jobs/prices/etc. > https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/09/opinion/economy-survey-republicans.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Mk0.R8Iu.UySU3SzcdsNY&smid=url-share https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/09/opinion/economy-survey-re...
colinsane 3y ago
> Things are getting better yet sentiment is falling. Does that mean things aren’t getting better or does it mean expectations are rising? i'm not sure the two can actually be decoupled. why do people work? as a means to fulfill their needs and desires. how do you measure if a person's needs and desires are being fulfilled? you can try to ground economic measurements in something like Maslow's hierarchy, but you can't escape that a person's sentiment is real. give a person shelter, but in such a way that they feel it could be taken away from them at any moment (e.g. "living paycheck-to-paycheck"), and you've only sort of fulfilled their base needs. give a person the exact same shelter but in such a way that they feel secure in it, and it's hard to argue that's not meaningfully better. so whatever macro measurements you're using, if your goal is for them to reflect anything real to the individual, they ought to have some correlation to sentiment. "household savings" and "job openings" often do proxy the difference between being secure v.s. insecure in your housing. but, speaking to the article, worries you'll see captured and reinforced by the news such as "the other half of the country wants to take away my healthcare" or "the other half of the country wants to obsolete my coal/oil/manufacturing job" proxy these same feelings of in/security, but are likely not captured by any formal measurement... except "sentiment". so if these sentiments aren't proxied by your "things are getting better" measurement, then yes, it would mean that things aren't getting as better as your measurement claims.

epups 3y ago

This seems to map pretty well to that famous graph showing the divergence between productivity and wage gains [1]. It also at least correlates with the start of a relative predominance of China and other third-world countries in economic growth, which kept wage growth lower in the West than it could have been - empowered, of course, by the policies of people like Reagan and Thatcher. [1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/11/productivity-workforce-america-united-states-wages-stagnate/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/11/productivity-workforc...

tootie 3y ago
It's also pretty similar to the constant belief that crime is rising regardless of whether it's actually falling: https://news.gallup.com/poll/404048/record-high-perceive-local-crime-increased.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/404048/record-high-perceive-loc...
hash872 3y ago
How did Reagan and Thatcher 'empower' other countries to rise up and compete with the US & Europe? If they passed the right combination of laws, we would've prevented billions of smart, hard-working people from daring to compete with the West? Do you think it's moral to impoverish billions of people to keep the West economically pre-eminent? (Should the US have kept Europe impoverished post-WW2 to prevent the competition?) I strongly disagree with the idea that the government is a magic God-like wizard, who can bend objective reality and achieve any economic or social outcome by twisting the right knobs here or there. Other countries rose economically to compete with the West and that's not something that the government can magically outlaw, any more than it can pass a law against the tide coming in tomorrow
- eru 3y ago
  > I strongly disagree with the idea that the government is a magic God-like wizard, who can bend objective reality and achieve any economic or social outcome by twisting the right knobs here or there. Agreed. See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38838608 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38838608 on a similar topic recently. You might like my sibling comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38953586 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38953586

casualrandomcom 3y ago

Just read the title... can something that happens over a 50 years span be correctly described as a "collapse"? go figure

atticora 3y ago
Cosmologists discuss gravitational collapse that takes place over billions of years.
jononomo 3y ago
Yes. I would say that it took more than ten minutes for the Roman Empire to collapse, for example.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

tqi 3y ago

I can't access the NBER paper so I can't see the methodology - how did they choose which papers to include? I'm always wary of studies that tout the size of their data set. Did they dedupe wire stories? Control for which newspapers were included? I feel like more often than not, it turns out these effects are mostly due to mix shift / selection bias / other methodological artifacts.

atticora 3y ago
Here's a PDF of the paper: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w32026/w32026.pdf https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w32026/w320...

dahfizz 3y ago

In my opinion, this is a graph of the downfall of journalism rather than some larger indicator of the attitudes of Americans. Journalism now is primarily ragebait and self-gratifying garbage.

novagameco 3y ago
Hasn't journalism always been that way? Was there ever truly a "golden age" of journalism? What I remember from history class is that William Randolph Hearst published lies to sell more newspapers which resulted in the Spanish American war. Early British and American newspapers were just partisan pamphlets meant to rile up support for a particular politician. Whenever we hear about good journalism in the past, I think it's usually the exception rather than the rule. Perhaps there was a period around the 1970s where journalists were willing to go to war zones and risk prosecution to report on the Viet Nam war or the Watergate scandal, but I'm not sure if that's indicative of the entire body of work of the era.
- MrBuddyCasino 3y ago
  And even the Watergate scandal was really a coup by the deep state, which was vehemently opposed to the changes Nixon had in mind [0]. Even if you don't buy the whole story, it should give you pause that the Watergate burglars were connected to the CIA. Or, put differently: "49 state landslide, 520 electoral votes, and a year later half the country genuinely believed he had to break into an office building to win" [1]. [0] https://theamericansun.com/2019/11/10/impeachment-unified-theory-of-watergate/ https://theamericansun.com/2019/11/10/impeachment-unified-th... [1] https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1710010371464122508 https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1710010371464122508
  - hedora 3y ago
    How does the coup theory explain the audio tapes of Nixon implicating himself? I'd explain his resignation differently: Back then, there was more of an expectation that politicians would obey the law, or at least get punished if caught.

giantg2 3y ago

Financial sentiment has collapsed over the last 50 years? No shit... Real wages have stagnated or declined. Barriers to entry for good careers have increases. Entire industries have been outsourced, mainly effecting lower skilled workers. Workforce participation is extremely low. Multiple financial crises. A system built on consumerism that is dependent on almost free money not to crumble. If the system doesn't look like a house of cards, then I don't know what does...

eru 3y ago
> Real wages have stagnated or declined. Wages as a proportion of GDP, ie the so called 'labour share' has been relatively steady. If you believe that real GDP has increased, then real wages have increased. > Workforce participation is extremely low. https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/labor-force-participation-rate https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/labor-force-parti... says it's about 62.5%.
- bendbro 3y ago
  Total real wages have gone up, while median real wages have stagnated. Your 62.5% labor force participation rate only aligns with the past if you completely discount women's unpaid and unaccounted work in the home and elsewhere. The male labor force participation rate has declined from around 90% to around 68%. Thanks to our glorious new economy instead of basically everyone getting a house, spouse, and kid, now many will rent, work and die. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300001 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300001
  - eru 3y ago
    Huh? When women do stuff at home, you want to count that. Sure. But when men do stuff at home, you refuse to count that? > Total real wages have gone up, while median real wages have stagnated. An investigation of median wages can be interesting. The comment only talked about wages in general. > Thanks to our glorious new economy instead of basically everyone getting a house, spouse, and kid, now many will rent, work and die. The US doesn't build enough housing, yes. Though renting by itself isn't a problem, but that housing (whether rented or owned) has become less affordable. That's mostly because of various regulations (especially zoning) that limit how much developers can build. See eg https://www.amazon.com/Shut-Out-Shortage-Recession-University/dp/1538122146 https://www.amazon.com/Shut-Out-Shortage-Recession-Universit...

swimwiththebeat 3y ago

I can think of a few reasons for this besides the reason that life has genuinely become worse: 1. Profit-seeking news orgs: it's no secret that negative and controversial news sells significantly more. With all the destruction of locally run papers in favor of the national consolidation of news by a lot of private equity investors, there are increased expectations to make a profit and therefore increase the amount of negative-sentiment news over the recent years. 2. 24-7 news cycle: people are also much more aware of all the bad news around them with smartphones and social networks. Readers' sentiment will just bleed into the papers over time. Ignorance is bliss. 3. Sampling bias: which kind of papers did they measure sentiment for back then versus now? There could be a divergence in the sources they use and different sources could have different sentiment tendencies. (I don't have access to the actual paper) 4. Rising expectations: humans are many orders of magnitude more powerful than our ancestors. We live like gods compared to them. Yet there are so many people who still aren't happy. Why? It's because our expectations also rise endlessly. Things may be better than before, but maybe it's not better relative to our expectations. Point is, this isn't necessarily indicative of life becoming worse. There could be other plausible explanations.

al_hag 3y ago
I agree, life does not need to have become worse for the narratives reflected in this analysis to have become wise to the complexities of global society.
andrewmutz 3y ago
> Point is, this isn't necessarily indicative of life becoming worse It probably isn't indicative of life becoming worse. These articles are about economics, and the nice thing about macroeconomics is that its reasonably well measured. We can just look at the numbers to see in aggregate what the conditions are like. To choose just the most dramatic example from the graph: sentiment was generally been more negative from 1975-2020 than it was during the great depression in the 1930s. Things aren't perfect, but no one would claim that economic conditions in the US have been worse than the great depression for the last 50 years. I suspect that this trend holds outside of economics as well, but of course I have no data to back this up. Specifically, I suspect news-based sentiment of the world conditions have been declining while conditions in the world have not been declining.

vcg3rd 3y ago

Did it take into account the feedback loop of journalism and sentiment? Recent example: the TV show that finally compelled action in the British Post Office scandal by increasing awareness and altering sentiment?

lamontcg 3y ago

The start seems to about align with 1980 and falling interest rates and increasing corporate profits and rising income inequality.

red-iron-pine 3y ago
a lil earlier than that -- "wtf happened in 1971?" https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/