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If you go to the doctor with a problem and get a blood test and they say that everything looks fine, but you don’t feel fine, then you don’t say: “well the numb

by _1tem 2y ago

If you go to the doctor with a problem and get a blood test and they say that everything looks fine, but you don’t feel fine, then you don’t say: “well the numbers are right, I should feel fine”. Rather you try to find what the numbers aren’t capturing, because you know something is wrong. Same with the economy. The perception of the economy being bad is really pervasive as demonstrated by the last election, and perception matters, because selective numbers don’t tell the whole story.

Havoc 2y ago
That’s also not a US phenomenon. Hearing the exact same in UK too. The stats say things are ok but people standing at grocery checkout disagree Strong divergence of 1% and rest
- adamc 2y ago
  As someone doing OK economically, when I go to the grocery I see the same thing they do: Prices are going up on key items much faster than income is rising. I didn't vote based on that, but that doesn't mean they are wrong that it's a problem. It's easy to imagine that if you were barely making it, things are worse now. Rising income isn't a phenomenon that hits everyone equally.
  - eitally 2y ago
    Indeed. The problem is that for most people income doesn't really go up unless they change jobs. Or, at least it goes up so slowly (0-3%/yr) as to be undetectable compared to, for example, the price of a loaf of bread going from $4.99 (2020) to $5.99 (2023) to $6.99 (July 2024) to $7.99 (December, 2024). I think the "vibecession" concept makes sense when considering CPI of consumables since individuals are far more attuned to price changes than they are for durable goods.
michaelcampbell 2y ago
"The map is not the territory"
0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago
My understanding is: * Perception of the economy depends tremendously on whether the president is of your preferred party. Whenever the presidency changes hands, you see a massive and rapid flip in which party supporters are satisfied with the state of the economy. * If you ask Americans about how they are doing personally, as opposed to how they believe the economy is doing, their response is much rosier. See also: "vibecession"
- immibis 2y ago
  AFAIK the former effect has been found to be much stronger among Republicans, though it exists in both parties. It was something like a 50% swing in approval rating versus 10%.
- throwaway2037 2y ago
  I never saw the term vibecession before. Wiki has a separate page for it! I wonder if this trend also appears in other highly advanced economies. Example: When UK switched from conservative to labour, was there a similar sentiment swing? My guess: Yes. Netherlands also moved much more right in the last election after PM Mark Rutte stepped down after 8 years. However, broadly, the NL economy is doing much better than UK economy. Maybe the vibecession effect is stronger when the economy is weak? Could be.
ithkuil 2y ago
Perception can be manipulated in many ways. People get used to things and give for granted things that used to be luxuries a few generations back (see "hedonic treadmill") Combine that with active participants who control the media landscape and have a vested interest in painting a bleak picture so they can be the ones fixing it. And then of course there is the fact that things are of course objectively hard for many people because not everybody can be the average person. So in a sense it's correct to say that these numbers don't capture reality while being technically correct. And that's because reality is much more complex than the things those numbers measure. The question is: are those indicators useful? Provided you understand what they actually measure, can that be used as a control signal to help make choices that will go in the right direction and improve quality of life for everybody? Perhaps the improvement will be marginal and not everybody's problems will be fixed, but is it unreasonable to think that problems cannot be fixed by a quick single intervention and that instead they will compound over time? Look at the progress humanity has made in so many fronts. Ask anybody to pick a time in history where they would like to travel back and have a better life. The most frequent answer is either now or a few years ago when they were young and everything was better (likely because of nostalgia for youth or childhood). Very few people would really want to be the average person in an era with poor sanitation, corporeal punishment, no education, illiteracy, expensive and faint artificial lighting, widespread diseases, non-existent dental care, low life expectancy
- _1tem 2y ago
  > Perception can be manipulated in many ways. Numbers are even easier to manipulate.
  - ithkuil 2y ago
    I think perception about what numbers mean is even easier to manipulate
    - ithkuil 2y ago
      There are so many metrics. The act of selecting one metric or another metric to drive a point across is a key way to "lie with numbers". The numbers themselves are usually correct but they paint a misleading picture nevertheless. A similar thing happens with fiddling with the axis on graphs, e.g. not starting a graph at zero or using the wrong scale.
renewiltord 2y ago
This is exactly what I tell software engineers. They’re always like “but the software is complex and it’s not straightforward to do what you’re saying” and they gave some nonsense metrics for what complex is. It’s as easy as adding a button to a webpage to create an XML that integrates with this other tool we use but they can never explain why it’s hard. They come up with some “cyclomatic complexity” but it’s obviously easy: a single button. If it’s so easy, as my perception shows, then any numbers they’re coming up with are obviously wrong and they should just make numbers that match what I feel. And once those numbers show that it’s easy, they can just do it instead of making numbers that show it’s hard.
- shermantanktop 2y ago
  I really hope you forgot the /s?
StackRanker3000 2y ago
And sometimes the reason you don’t feel fine end up being anxiety, and reframing your experience can make the problem go away. I visited the emergency room with chest pains several times before it actually sunk in that it was my neuroticism getting the better of me In the US, look at how sentiments about the economy shift depending on party affiliation and who happens to be in power at the time. I do not think it’s as straightforward as saying ”if people think things are worse than they used to be, they definitely are”. There are way too many variables affecting people’s subjective experience
vasco 2y ago
> perception of the economy being bad is really pervasive as demonstrated by the last election How does the election tell you anything about the economy? Are you injecting a bunch of your reasons why you think people voted for X or Y or is there a factual argument behind that sentence?
- yccs27 2y ago
  There was a poll asking "what was your motivation to vote the way you did", and "the state of the economy" ranked pretty high among Trump voters (don't remember where I saw it though, sorry).
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - throwaway2037 2y ago
    As a general rule, it is very hard to win a popular vote (again) when the economy is weak for middle class and below. By definition, this would mean that more than 50% of people are not benefitting enough from current economic growth.
- bormaj 2y ago
  There is an argument that elections can be understood as a referendum on the previous 4 years. E.g. voting for the incumbent candidate/party means more of the same.
  - vasco 2y ago
    Yes but how would that say anything specifically about a particular topic unless it was a defining and undeniable circumstance that happened during the presidency like a war or major scandal - and even then I think it's hard to confidently say "this is why people voted for X" without proper polling (and even that we know how accurate it is - but at least it'd be data).
    - coding123 2y ago
vishnugupta 2y ago
More so when the blood test is measuring something that was deemed important 100 years ago and doctor is ignoring all the advances in the field since then.
weberer 2y ago
Its entirely because you're looking at different numbers. When the average person complains about grocery prices doubling in the past few years, they're not looking at the GDP. People take "How much money do I get in my pocket at the end of each month?" and compare it with "How much does it cost to buy what I need?". The first answer is generally tracked by the Employment Cost Index. The second is by the Consumer Price Index. If the second increases at a faster rate than the first, then people get angry.
- Akranazon 2y ago
  [dead]
yapyap 2y ago
a good economy ≠ a good lower or middle class, just means the rich people got richer
throwaway2037 2y ago
When you see a headline GDP growth figure, remember that this number does apply equally to all people. The US and its economy is vast, like all 50 countries of Europe put together. Recently, we are seeing that middle class and below really suffered in the last few years from high inflation, but the economic groups above fared much better. Also, new immigrants (usually unskilled) are doing better than natives. To be clear, I don't any of this post with spite for those doing well.
- paulryanrogers 2y ago
  > Also, new immigrants (usually unskilled) are doing better than natives Is this true in the US?
  - throwaway2037 2y ago
    Yes, it has been widely discussed by economists in the last few years. https://www.npr.org/2024/10/04/nx-s1-5140039/labor-market-jobs-economy-interest-rates https://www.npr.org/2024/10/04/nx-s1-5140039/labor-market-jo... > Friday's report shows 150,000 people joined or re-joined the workforce last month. Much of this growth is driven by immigration. The foreign-born workforce has grown rapidly over the last year, adding 1.4 million workers, while the native-born workforce shrank by nearly 600,000 workers.
    - paulryanrogers 2y ago
      That does look like a problem. Yet it doesn't mean unskilled immigrants are going to do better than natives, rather that both will have wages suppressed. And natives will still benefit from social services that may be unavailable to immigrants until they become citizens. So I think the statement is still misleading. Immigrants are only doing better than their choices back in their country of origin, not better than what natives could attain in the new country.
      - coding123 2y ago
        It's a huge problem. If we keep allowing corporate interests to hire from a pool that is willing to live in 3rd world conditions (all these immigrants are sharing a living space in such a way that natives do not) then not only are we suppressing wages, but suppressing jobs from natives. That leads to homelessness of natives trying to maintain a lifestyle they were previously accustomed to. Some moved back to parents house, some just moved onto the streets.
matthewdgreen 2y ago
I'm not saying the economy is good. But according to polling, many folks who said the economy was "poor" before the November election now believe it's doing great. All in a very partisan fashion, of course: https://jabberwocking.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/blog_michigan_consumer_expectations_november_2024-scaled.jpg https://jabberwocking.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/blog_mi...
- coding123 2y ago
  That says "expectations index"... I do not think it means what you think it means.
- commandlinefan 2y ago
  Not to put words in your mouth, but this comment seems to imply that politicians successfully painted a negative picture of the economy that didn't reflect reality and used that to win the last election. While I wouldn't put that past them, why was it successful this time and not every time? Nobody even tried to pretend the economy was bad when Clinton, Bush or Obama were up for re-election, because it obviously wasn't.
  - troyvit 2y ago
    My guess is that journalism failed this election and social media won it. * Advertising is failing for news sites, so paywalls are becoming the new thing. Those are a barrier to entry for most potential readers. * As one of the largest social media platforms, X did made two key moves. First, they limited reach for users who share external links.[1] That breaks news sites' revenue and readership models. Second, the CEO of X came out as a massive Trump amplifier on that platform. Neither of these things limited users' access to information, but it deeply affected their access to truth. * At the same time Meta backed completely out of the "breaking news" business (maybe on both FB and Threads ... I don't keep track that well). * Trust in MSM was already declining. Once the fourth estate was hobbled, social media, podcasts and chat platforms became the dominant means for storytelling. Not only were the Democrats not getting their act together on those platforms, but neither was the press. Personally? Measured by the number of homeless people I see around me I think the economy is still pretty crappy even though my stock and crypto portfolio is doing great. [1] https://techround.co.uk/news/musk-limiting-external-links-x/ https://techround.co.uk/news/musk-limiting-external-links-x/
diatone 2y ago
Not exactly a watertight metaphor as https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypochondriasis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypochondriasis and anxiety exist, but I certainly agree that it’s possible to lie or mislead with statistics.
codexb 2y ago
Typically, loans and credit being more difficult and costly to obtain, higher prices for everything, and a growing number of large layoffs aren't signals of a booming economy. Inflation has a tendency to well, inflate productivity metrics. If we're spending twice as much for the exact same stuff as we did 5 years ago, we haven't doubled productivity.
deleted 2y ago
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kabaka 2y ago
The unemployment rate is very low in the US while tightening of money supply is happening, it is a weird thing to witness as a new comer to the US. But one has to admit Jerome Powell did accomplish something significant given what his detractors like Summers were painting was going to happen given the covid bonus US citizens got.
- lowkey 2y ago
  While unemployment rate is relatively low this measure masks deeper problems felt by those working to try and make a living. Specifically, labor participation is near an all-time low so discouraged workers, who aren’t counted in unemployment numbers, are excluded. Also, there has been a marked and ongoing shift from full-time jobs with benefits to part-time, casual, and gig work. Finally, the widely cited consumer price index is a very politicized and skewed measure of the true inflation facing consumers. It ignores the real cost of home ownership via owner equivalent rent measures. It uses a process called substitution to replace suddenly expensive goods with cheaper goods. It includes arbitrary adjustments for improved quality of goods that aren’t always perceived by purchasers who only see the higher prices and these adjustments only work in one direction to skew CPI lower. That’s why consumers often perceive inflation to be higher than the CPI measure.
Tiktaalik 2y ago
An idea I've seen floated is that during the pandemic a lot of people got a lot of support from the government and under Biden a lot of that was phased out. So even if "the economy is doing fine" there would have a been a large number of people who would have had something taken away. People got a glimpse of a more interventionist social democratic government during the pandemic and then it disappeared. So yea for people who benefited from that absolutely everything got worse after.
PittleyDunkin 2y ago
> The perception of the economy being bad is really pervasive as demonstrated by the last election, and perception matters, because selective numbers don’t tell the whole story. Well saying "the economy is good" or "the economy is bad" out of context is simply moronic. Good for whom? Bad for whom? It's no secret our entire society is stacked to favor investors and owners rather than workers. The market certainly treats people extremely differently based on where they are in society. Much of the population never economically recovered from the 2008 crash at all—something that won't be reflected by GDP, stock performance, "jobs created", or how many people are collecting unemployment (which is, confusingly, a wildly different figure from counting people who want jobs but can't find one—as best I can tell, a metric not reported by the federal government at all, but appears to be about twice as large as the "unemployment" metric pimped: https://www.richmondfed.org/research/national_economy/non_employment_index https://www.richmondfed.org/research/national_economy/non_em.... And this isn't even touching underemployment). The CPI is a little better, but only by a small amount. And you'd have to be blind to not notice a minimum wage job is no longer sufficient to afford rent in most major metro areas.
- lumost 2y ago
  I also wonder how much the USD's role as the reserve currency plays into this. If I build a home for 1 MM USD today which used to cost 150k USD in 2008 - this looks like economic growth, despite the home largely being the same between the two periods. Certain categories of the CPI have experienced extreme inflation over the last 16 years, this gets reflected in the wages of the economically mobile and in turn raises the GDP - however we don't really price housing into the CPI in a sensible manner, and due to USD dominated trade - imports and products which compete with imports don't inflate. The discrepancy between PPP and nominal (USD) GDP seem to be telling a story.
  - ericmay 2y ago
    Remember that the U.S. Dollar is one of many reserve currencies in the world. Other popular ones include the Japanese Yen, the British Pound, and the Euro. The dollar is just the one that is most dominant and for generally good reasons including sophisticated capital markets, rule of law, and the military might to force resolution of international disputes. I think the main issue I see with your note about the difference in home prices is that you could stretch that out to say 1915 and 1950, and you’d be hard pressed to explain that economic growth was fake or don’t occur. Even in your example, the economy didn’t grow 6x, but how has resource utilization changed or supply and demand globally? I think a further analysis will show many factors going into that home price, and some of those very much are just simple economic growth and/or supply and demand of materials. As always it’s also the location. Look at home prices in, idk, Toledo, Ohio. How have those fared in your same time period?
tlogan 2y ago
We currently lack comprehensive metrics to effectively capture critical factors that normal people consider when asked “is economy doing well”. Here’s what we need: Home Rent Affordability: Analyzing affordability by profession and location to reflect real-world dynamics. Home Price Affordability: Assessing how accessible homeownership is across regions. Education Costs: Understanding the burden of education expenses on families. School Quality: Measuring the actual quality of education available. Healthcare Cost Affordability: Evaluating access to essential healthcare without financial strain. Drug crisis. Crime. Vacations and similar things. Developing such metrics would provide a more accurate picture of economic well-being and social equity.
- alwa 2y ago
  Luckily smart people have resources and a mandate to study each of those questions at scale. You might be interested in the work that the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (https://www.bls.gov/ https://www.bls.gov/) does on the economic side of labor conditions, and that the Census department’s American Community Survey (https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs) does on the demographic and social side. Both of these groups study questions like those you asked in ways designed to be broadly comparable over time. The Housing and Urban Development department calculates fair market rents at the county level to support their rent assistance programs (e.g. [0]), although that starts to get at part of the complexity: for your metric do you care about the economic cost or the amount families actually have to pay after assistance? On the NGO side, groups like the NBER (https://www.nber.org/ https://www.nber.org/) disseminate more exotic socioeconomic studies, and there are others. And of course you can find a mountain of data at data.gov, the federal portal for such things. I think the harder part (and the part the policy community specializes in) is grappling with the nuances of those kinds of numbers. What do such high-level observations actually mean in something as complex as a continent-wide collection of 10^9 people, and how much human messiness polluted their measurement? [0] https://www.huduser.gov/portal/datasets/fmr.html https://www.huduser.gov/portal/datasets/fmr.html
  - tlogan 2y ago
    Yes, the data exists, but it’s so nuanced and complex that you can interpret it to fit almost any narrative. Take California, for example: asking rents have increased by 26% over the last two years. But this figure reflects only asking rents, not what people actually pay—especially in areas with rent control. If you’re looking to upgrade to a bigger place (e.g., moving in with a partner or preparing for a baby), it might feel like the economy is in shambles. On the other hand, if you’re staying put in a rent-controlled apartment, things might seem manageable. The data is there—it’s the context and perspective that shape the story.
beepbopboopp 2y ago
Th
whateveracct 2y ago
political propaganda via the skinner boxes in everyone's pockets is probably the reason for the disconnect let's not act like people's feelings inherently reflect the truth
tshaddox 2y ago
Are you suggesting that it's impossible to have mistaken feelings about the economy or about one's own health? I'm pretty sure it's possible for people to deliberately deceive other people about the state of the economy or even the state of their own health.
tomrod 2y ago
Yeah, stop excluding food, housing, and energy from the CPI basket, they are the largest items people purchase!
jimkleiber 2y ago
Or they go to the doctor thinking they have a heart attack and it's really a panic attack and despite all the tests for physical ailments, it is an emotional one.
pie420 2y ago
You're describing hypochondria
EasyMark 2y ago
I’m pretty sure it’s combination of most of the money flowing uphill to millionaires and billionaires, and people in general are also being fed a ton of propaganda that the USA is falling apart which is BS. We have issues but so does every country. It’s hard to feel great if you have no free time to enjoy life, and as a society for some reason we have become very very consumerist, not taking (or even worse not having any) time to smell the roses, and the world is falling apart every night on the internet and/or television even thought it isn’t really.
deleted 2y ago
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araes 2y ago
> The perception of the economy being bad is really pervasive Because the economy is bad, and this is a "drank the Silicon kool-aid" article. In the most recent tax filing season data available, there were tax returns of: Top 1% Top 5% Top 10% Top 25% Top 50% Bottom 50% All Taxpayers Number of Returns 1,535,899 7,679,495 15,358,991 38,397,477 76,794,954 76,794,954 153,589,908 Average Income Taxes Paid $653,730 $187,468 $108,251 $50,963 $27,891 $667 $14,279 Adjusted Gross Income (Millions) $3,872,395 $6,182,180 $7,745,525 $10,613,602 $13,191,209 $1,531,038 $14,722,247 If we then break those into the actual groups, and numbers per group, then we find their Average Per Capita Income 1 5 10 25 50 100 Number of Returns 1,535,899 6,143,596 7,679,496 23,038,486 38,397,477 76,794,954 Income Taxes Paid (Millions) $1,004,063 $435,594 $222,966 $294,234 $185,068 $51,225 Adjusted Gross Income (Millions) $3,872,395 $2,309,785 $1,563,345 $2,868,077 $2,577,607 $1,531,038 Average Tax Rate 25.9% 18.9% 14.3% 10.3% 7.2% 3.3% Average Per Capita Income $2,521,256.28 $375,966.29 $203,573.91 $124,490.69 $67,129.59 $19,936.70 This entire "booming" part, is the 1-5%. Out the rest of America, there are 38,397,477 making $67,129 on average and 76,794,954 making $19,936 on average. The filing thresholds are "single, under 65 = $12,950" and "head of household, under 65 = $19,400". Most of the bottom 50% of America "barely" would even qualify to file based on the Average Per Capita Income stated on their tax forms. 76,794,954 tax filers "barely" qualify to even file taxes they make so little money. Half. How about, lets look at it a different way. Anybody notice what happened to McDonalds over the last decade and a half? Corporate McDonalds used to have 465,000 employees, now, McDonalds has 150,000. 300,000 employee reduction. 1/3 remain. [1] Btw, they're also -5,000,000,000 under water in equity [2] while they keep making happy meal financial reports. 2/3 reduction in workforce, barely even covered by the news. The situation looks very similar with almost every peer company. Notably, some of the main jobs where people in the bottom 50% work. Jack in the Box (-$851,798,000, 45,700 -> 1,090 employees), Papa Johns (-$430,933,000, 23,100 -> 13,200), Yum Brands (-7,674,000,000, 90,000 -> 25,000), Dominos (-3,976,640,000, 14,500 -> 11,200). They all went submarine on equity and started shedding employees, yet all anybody will write about is the "booming" tech sector. [1] https://tradingeconomics.com/mcd:us:employees https://tradingeconomics.com/mcd:us:employees [2] https://tradingeconomics.com/mcd:us:equity-capital-and-reserves https://tradingeconomics.com/mcd:us:equity-capital-and-reser...
falkensmaize 2y ago
The numbers are FAKE. How else can you describe a 30% downward revision in jobs numbers this year?

by _1tem 2y ago

Havoc 2y ago

That’s also not a US phenomenon. Hearing the exact same in UK too. The stats say things are ok but people standing at grocery checkout disagree Strong divergence of 1% and rest

adamc 2y ago
As someone doing OK economically, when I go to the grocery I see the same thing they do: Prices are going up on key items much faster than income is rising. I didn't vote based on that, but that doesn't mean they are wrong that it's a problem. It's easy to imagine that if you were barely making it, things are worse now. Rising income isn't a phenomenon that hits everyone equally.
- eitally 2y ago
  Indeed. The problem is that for most people income doesn't really go up unless they change jobs. Or, at least it goes up so slowly (0-3%/yr) as to be undetectable compared to, for example, the price of a loaf of bread going from $4.99 (2020) to $5.99 (2023) to $6.99 (July 2024) to $7.99 (December, 2024). I think the "vibecession" concept makes sense when considering CPI of consumables since individuals are far more attuned to price changes than they are for durable goods.

michaelcampbell 2y ago

"The map is not the territory"

0xDEAFBEAD 2y ago

My understanding is: * Perception of the economy depends tremendously on whether the president is of your preferred party. Whenever the presidency changes hands, you see a massive and rapid flip in which party supporters are satisfied with the state of the economy. * If you ask Americans about how they are doing personally, as opposed to how they believe the economy is doing, their response is much rosier. See also: "vibecession"

immibis 2y ago
AFAIK the former effect has been found to be much stronger among Republicans, though it exists in both parties. It was something like a 50% swing in approval rating versus 10%.
throwaway2037 2y ago
I never saw the term vibecession before. Wiki has a separate page for it! I wonder if this trend also appears in other highly advanced economies. Example: When UK switched from conservative to labour, was there a similar sentiment swing? My guess: Yes. Netherlands also moved much more right in the last election after PM Mark Rutte stepped down after 8 years. However, broadly, the NL economy is doing much better than UK economy. Maybe the vibecession effect is stronger when the economy is weak? Could be.

ithkuil 2y ago

Perception can be manipulated in many ways. People get used to things and give for granted things that used to be luxuries a few generations back (see "hedonic treadmill") Combine that with active participants who control the media landscape and have a vested interest in painting a bleak picture so they can be the ones fixing it. And then of course there is the fact that things are of course objectively hard for many people because not everybody can be the average person. So in a sense it's correct to say that these numbers don't capture reality while being technically correct. And that's because reality is much more complex than the things those numbers measure. The question is: are those indicators useful? Provided you understand what they actually measure, can that be used as a control signal to help make choices that will go in the right direction and improve quality of life for everybody? Perhaps the improvement will be marginal and not everybody's problems will be fixed, but is it unreasonable to think that problems cannot be fixed by a quick single intervention and that instead they will compound over time? Look at the progress humanity has made in so many fronts. Ask anybody to pick a time in history where they would like to travel back and have a better life. The most frequent answer is either now or a few years ago when they were young and everything was better (likely because of nostalgia for youth or childhood). Very few people would really want to be the average person in an era with poor sanitation, corporeal punishment, no education, illiteracy, expensive and faint artificial lighting, widespread diseases, non-existent dental care, low life expectancy

_1tem 2y ago
> Perception can be manipulated in many ways. Numbers are even easier to manipulate.
- ithkuil 2y ago
  I think perception about what numbers mean is even easier to manipulate
  - ithkuil 2y ago
    There are so many metrics. The act of selecting one metric or another metric to drive a point across is a key way to "lie with numbers". The numbers themselves are usually correct but they paint a misleading picture nevertheless. A similar thing happens with fiddling with the axis on graphs, e.g. not starting a graph at zero or using the wrong scale.

renewiltord 2y ago

This is exactly what I tell software engineers. They’re always like “but the software is complex and it’s not straightforward to do what you’re saying” and they gave some nonsense metrics for what complex is. It’s as easy as adding a button to a webpage to create an XML that integrates with this other tool we use but they can never explain why it’s hard. They come up with some “cyclomatic complexity” but it’s obviously easy: a single button. If it’s so easy, as my perception shows, then any numbers they’re coming up with are obviously wrong and they should just make numbers that match what I feel. And once those numbers show that it’s easy, they can just do it instead of making numbers that show it’s hard.

shermantanktop 2y ago
I really hope you forgot the /s?

StackRanker3000 2y ago

And sometimes the reason you don’t feel fine end up being anxiety, and reframing your experience can make the problem go away. I visited the emergency room with chest pains several times before it actually sunk in that it was my neuroticism getting the better of me In the US, look at how sentiments about the economy shift depending on party affiliation and who happens to be in power at the time. I do not think it’s as straightforward as saying ”if people think things are worse than they used to be, they definitely are”. There are way too many variables affecting people’s subjective experience

vasco 2y ago

> perception of the economy being bad is really pervasive as demonstrated by the last election How does the election tell you anything about the economy? Are you injecting a bunch of your reasons why you think people voted for X or Y or is there a factual argument behind that sentence?

yccs27 2y ago
There was a poll asking "what was your motivation to vote the way you did", and "the state of the economy" ranked pretty high among Trump voters (don't remember where I saw it though, sorry).
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- throwaway2037 2y ago
  As a general rule, it is very hard to win a popular vote (again) when the economy is weak for middle class and below. By definition, this would mean that more than 50% of people are not benefitting enough from current economic growth.
bormaj 2y ago
There is an argument that elections can be understood as a referendum on the previous 4 years. E.g. voting for the incumbent candidate/party means more of the same.
- vasco 2y ago
  Yes but how would that say anything specifically about a particular topic unless it was a defining and undeniable circumstance that happened during the presidency like a war or major scandal - and even then I think it's hard to confidently say "this is why people voted for X" without proper polling (and even that we know how accurate it is - but at least it'd be data).
  - coding123 2y ago

vishnugupta 2y ago

More so when the blood test is measuring something that was deemed important 100 years ago and doctor is ignoring all the advances in the field since then.

weberer 2y ago

Its entirely because you're looking at different numbers. When the average person complains about grocery prices doubling in the past few years, they're not looking at the GDP. People take "How much money do I get in my pocket at the end of each month?" and compare it with "How much does it cost to buy what I need?". The first answer is generally tracked by the Employment Cost Index. The second is by the Consumer Price Index. If the second increases at a faster rate than the first, then people get angry.

Akranazon 2y ago
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yapyap 2y ago

a good economy ≠ a good lower or middle class, just means the rich people got richer

throwaway2037 2y ago

When you see a headline GDP growth figure, remember that this number does apply equally to all people. The US and its economy is vast, like all 50 countries of Europe put together. Recently, we are seeing that middle class and below really suffered in the last few years from high inflation, but the economic groups above fared much better. Also, new immigrants (usually unskilled) are doing better than natives. To be clear, I don't any of this post with spite for those doing well.

paulryanrogers 2y ago
> Also, new immigrants (usually unskilled) are doing better than natives Is this true in the US?
- throwaway2037 2y ago
  Yes, it has been widely discussed by economists in the last few years. https://www.npr.org/2024/10/04/nx-s1-5140039/labor-market-jobs-economy-interest-rates https://www.npr.org/2024/10/04/nx-s1-5140039/labor-market-jo... > Friday's report shows 150,000 people joined or re-joined the workforce last month. Much of this growth is driven by immigration. The foreign-born workforce has grown rapidly over the last year, adding 1.4 million workers, while the native-born workforce shrank by nearly 600,000 workers.
  - paulryanrogers 2y ago
    That does look like a problem. Yet it doesn't mean unskilled immigrants are going to do better than natives, rather that both will have wages suppressed. And natives will still benefit from social services that may be unavailable to immigrants until they become citizens. So I think the statement is still misleading. Immigrants are only doing better than their choices back in their country of origin, not better than what natives could attain in the new country.
    - coding123 2y ago
      It's a huge problem. If we keep allowing corporate interests to hire from a pool that is willing to live in 3rd world conditions (all these immigrants are sharing a living space in such a way that natives do not) then not only are we suppressing wages, but suppressing jobs from natives. That leads to homelessness of natives trying to maintain a lifestyle they were previously accustomed to. Some moved back to parents house, some just moved onto the streets.

matthewdgreen 2y ago

I'm not saying the economy is good. But according to polling, many folks who said the economy was "poor" before the November election now believe it's doing great. All in a very partisan fashion, of course: https://jabberwocking.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/blog_michigan_consumer_expectations_november_2024-scaled.jpg https://jabberwocking.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/blog_mi...

coding123 2y ago
That says "expectations index"... I do not think it means what you think it means.
commandlinefan 2y ago
Not to put words in your mouth, but this comment seems to imply that politicians successfully painted a negative picture of the economy that didn't reflect reality and used that to win the last election. While I wouldn't put that past them, why was it successful this time and not every time? Nobody even tried to pretend the economy was bad when Clinton, Bush or Obama were up for re-election, because it obviously wasn't.
- troyvit 2y ago
  My guess is that journalism failed this election and social media won it. * Advertising is failing for news sites, so paywalls are becoming the new thing. Those are a barrier to entry for most potential readers. * As one of the largest social media platforms, X did made two key moves. First, they limited reach for users who share external links.[1] That breaks news sites' revenue and readership models. Second, the CEO of X came out as a massive Trump amplifier on that platform. Neither of these things limited users' access to information, but it deeply affected their access to truth. * At the same time Meta backed completely out of the "breaking news" business (maybe on both FB and Threads ... I don't keep track that well). * Trust in MSM was already declining. Once the fourth estate was hobbled, social media, podcasts and chat platforms became the dominant means for storytelling. Not only were the Democrats not getting their act together on those platforms, but neither was the press. Personally? Measured by the number of homeless people I see around me I think the economy is still pretty crappy even though my stock and crypto portfolio is doing great. [1] https://techround.co.uk/news/musk-limiting-external-links-x/ https://techround.co.uk/news/musk-limiting-external-links-x/

diatone 2y ago

Not exactly a watertight metaphor as https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypochondriasis https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypochondriasis and anxiety exist, but I certainly agree that it’s possible to lie or mislead with statistics.

codexb 2y ago

Typically, loans and credit being more difficult and costly to obtain, higher prices for everything, and a growing number of large layoffs aren't signals of a booming economy. Inflation has a tendency to well, inflate productivity metrics. If we're spending twice as much for the exact same stuff as we did 5 years ago, we haven't doubled productivity.

deleted 2y ago

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kabaka 2y ago

The unemployment rate is very low in the US while tightening of money supply is happening, it is a weird thing to witness as a new comer to the US. But one has to admit Jerome Powell did accomplish something significant given what his detractors like Summers were painting was going to happen given the covid bonus US citizens got.

lowkey 2y ago
While unemployment rate is relatively low this measure masks deeper problems felt by those working to try and make a living. Specifically, labor participation is near an all-time low so discouraged workers, who aren’t counted in unemployment numbers, are excluded. Also, there has been a marked and ongoing shift from full-time jobs with benefits to part-time, casual, and gig work. Finally, the widely cited consumer price index is a very politicized and skewed measure of the true inflation facing consumers. It ignores the real cost of home ownership via owner equivalent rent measures. It uses a process called substitution to replace suddenly expensive goods with cheaper goods. It includes arbitrary adjustments for improved quality of goods that aren’t always perceived by purchasers who only see the higher prices and these adjustments only work in one direction to skew CPI lower. That’s why consumers often perceive inflation to be higher than the CPI measure.

Tiktaalik 2y ago

An idea I've seen floated is that during the pandemic a lot of people got a lot of support from the government and under Biden a lot of that was phased out. So even if "the economy is doing fine" there would have a been a large number of people who would have had something taken away. People got a glimpse of a more interventionist social democratic government during the pandemic and then it disappeared. So yea for people who benefited from that absolutely everything got worse after.

PittleyDunkin 2y ago

> The perception of the economy being bad is really pervasive as demonstrated by the last election, and perception matters, because selective numbers don’t tell the whole story. Well saying "the economy is good" or "the economy is bad" out of context is simply moronic. Good for whom? Bad for whom? It's no secret our entire society is stacked to favor investors and owners rather than workers. The market certainly treats people extremely differently based on where they are in society. Much of the population never economically recovered from the 2008 crash at all—something that won't be reflected by GDP, stock performance, "jobs created", or how many people are collecting unemployment (which is, confusingly, a wildly different figure from counting people who want jobs but can't find one—as best I can tell, a metric not reported by the federal government at all, but appears to be about twice as large as the "unemployment" metric pimped: https://www.richmondfed.org/research/national_economy/non_employment_index https://www.richmondfed.org/research/national_economy/non_em.... And this isn't even touching underemployment). The CPI is a little better, but only by a small amount. And you'd have to be blind to not notice a minimum wage job is no longer sufficient to afford rent in most major metro areas.

lumost 2y ago
I also wonder how much the USD's role as the reserve currency plays into this. If I build a home for 1 MM USD today which used to cost 150k USD in 2008 - this looks like economic growth, despite the home largely being the same between the two periods. Certain categories of the CPI have experienced extreme inflation over the last 16 years, this gets reflected in the wages of the economically mobile and in turn raises the GDP - however we don't really price housing into the CPI in a sensible manner, and due to USD dominated trade - imports and products which compete with imports don't inflate. The discrepancy between PPP and nominal (USD) GDP seem to be telling a story.
- ericmay 2y ago
  Remember that the U.S. Dollar is one of many reserve currencies in the world. Other popular ones include the Japanese Yen, the British Pound, and the Euro. The dollar is just the one that is most dominant and for generally good reasons including sophisticated capital markets, rule of law, and the military might to force resolution of international disputes. I think the main issue I see with your note about the difference in home prices is that you could stretch that out to say 1915 and 1950, and you’d be hard pressed to explain that economic growth was fake or don’t occur. Even in your example, the economy didn’t grow 6x, but how has resource utilization changed or supply and demand globally? I think a further analysis will show many factors going into that home price, and some of those very much are just simple economic growth and/or supply and demand of materials. As always it’s also the location. Look at home prices in, idk, Toledo, Ohio. How have those fared in your same time period?

tlogan 2y ago

We currently lack comprehensive metrics to effectively capture critical factors that normal people consider when asked “is economy doing well”. Here’s what we need: Home Rent Affordability: Analyzing affordability by profession and location to reflect real-world dynamics. Home Price Affordability: Assessing how accessible homeownership is across regions. Education Costs: Understanding the burden of education expenses on families. School Quality: Measuring the actual quality of education available. Healthcare Cost Affordability: Evaluating access to essential healthcare without financial strain. Drug crisis. Crime. Vacations and similar things. Developing such metrics would provide a more accurate picture of economic well-being and social equity.

alwa 2y ago
Luckily smart people have resources and a mandate to study each of those questions at scale. You might be interested in the work that the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (https://www.bls.gov/ https://www.bls.gov/) does on the economic side of labor conditions, and that the Census department’s American Community Survey (https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs) does on the demographic and social side. Both of these groups study questions like those you asked in ways designed to be broadly comparable over time. The Housing and Urban Development department calculates fair market rents at the county level to support their rent assistance programs (e.g. [0]), although that starts to get at part of the complexity: for your metric do you care about the economic cost or the amount families actually have to pay after assistance? On the NGO side, groups like the NBER (https://www.nber.org/ https://www.nber.org/) disseminate more exotic socioeconomic studies, and there are others. And of course you can find a mountain of data at data.gov, the federal portal for such things. I think the harder part (and the part the policy community specializes in) is grappling with the nuances of those kinds of numbers. What do such high-level observations actually mean in something as complex as a continent-wide collection of 10^9 people, and how much human messiness polluted their measurement? [0] https://www.huduser.gov/portal/datasets/fmr.html https://www.huduser.gov/portal/datasets/fmr.html
- tlogan 2y ago
  Yes, the data exists, but it’s so nuanced and complex that you can interpret it to fit almost any narrative. Take California, for example: asking rents have increased by 26% over the last two years. But this figure reflects only asking rents, not what people actually pay—especially in areas with rent control. If you’re looking to upgrade to a bigger place (e.g., moving in with a partner or preparing for a baby), it might feel like the economy is in shambles. On the other hand, if you’re staying put in a rent-controlled apartment, things might seem manageable. The data is there—it’s the context and perspective that shape the story.

beepbopboopp 2y ago

whateveracct 2y ago

political propaganda via the skinner boxes in everyone's pockets is probably the reason for the disconnect let's not act like people's feelings inherently reflect the truth

tshaddox 2y ago

Are you suggesting that it's impossible to have mistaken feelings about the economy or about one's own health? I'm pretty sure it's possible for people to deliberately deceive other people about the state of the economy or even the state of their own health.

tomrod 2y ago

Yeah, stop excluding food, housing, and energy from the CPI basket, they are the largest items people purchase!

jimkleiber 2y ago

Or they go to the doctor thinking they have a heart attack and it's really a panic attack and despite all the tests for physical ailments, it is an emotional one.

pie420 2y ago

You're describing hypochondria

EasyMark 2y ago

I’m pretty sure it’s combination of most of the money flowing uphill to millionaires and billionaires, and people in general are also being fed a ton of propaganda that the USA is falling apart which is BS. We have issues but so does every country. It’s hard to feel great if you have no free time to enjoy life, and as a society for some reason we have become very very consumerist, not taking (or even worse not having any) time to smell the roses, and the world is falling apart every night on the internet and/or television even thought it isn’t really.

deleted 2y ago

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araes 2y ago

> The perception of the economy being bad is really pervasive Because the economy is bad, and this is a "drank the Silicon kool-aid" article. In the most recent tax filing season data available, there were tax returns of: Top 1% Top 5% Top 10% Top 25% Top 50% Bottom 50% All Taxpayers Number of Returns 1,535,899 7,679,495 15,358,991 38,397,477 76,794,954 76,794,954 153,589,908 Average Income Taxes Paid $653,730 $187,468 $108,251 $50,963 $27,891 $667 $14,279 Adjusted Gross Income (Millions) $3,872,395 $6,182,180 $7,745,525 $10,613,602 $13,191,209 $1,531,038 $14,722,247 If we then break those into the actual groups, and numbers per group, then we find their Average Per Capita Income 1 5 10 25 50 100 Number of Returns 1,535,899 6,143,596 7,679,496 23,038,486 38,397,477 76,794,954 Income Taxes Paid (Millions) $1,004,063 $435,594 $222,966 $294,234 $185,068 $51,225 Adjusted Gross Income (Millions) $3,872,395 $2,309,785 $1,563,345 $2,868,077 $2,577,607 $1,531,038 Average Tax Rate 25.9% 18.9% 14.3% 10.3% 7.2% 3.3% Average Per Capita Income $2,521,256.28 $375,966.29 $203,573.91 $124,490.69 $67,129.59 $19,936.70 This entire "booming" part, is the 1-5%. Out the rest of America, there are 38,397,477 making $67,129 on average and 76,794,954 making $19,936 on average. The filing thresholds are "single, under 65 = $12,950" and "head of household, under 65 = $19,400". Most of the bottom 50% of America "barely" would even qualify to file based on the Average Per Capita Income stated on their tax forms. 76,794,954 tax filers "barely" qualify to even file taxes they make so little money. Half. How about, lets look at it a different way. Anybody notice what happened to McDonalds over the last decade and a half? Corporate McDonalds used to have 465,000 employees, now, McDonalds has 150,000. 300,000 employee reduction. 1/3 remain. [1] Btw, they're also -5,000,000,000 under water in equity [2] while they keep making happy meal financial reports. 2/3 reduction in workforce, barely even covered by the news. The situation looks very similar with almost every peer company. Notably, some of the main jobs where people in the bottom 50% work. Jack in the Box (-$851,798,000, 45,700 -> 1,090 employees), Papa Johns (-$430,933,000, 23,100 -> 13,200), Yum Brands (-7,674,000,000, 90,000 -> 25,000), Dominos (-3,976,640,000, 14,500 -> 11,200). They all went submarine on equity and started shedding employees, yet all anybody will write about is the "booming" tech sector. [1] https://tradingeconomics.com/mcd:us:employees https://tradingeconomics.com/mcd:us:employees [2] https://tradingeconomics.com/mcd:us:equity-capital-and-reserves https://tradingeconomics.com/mcd:us:equity-capital-and-reser...

falkensmaize 2y ago

The numbers are FAKE. How else can you describe a 30% downward revision in jobs numbers this year?