7 ms·

Are Americans' perceptions of the economy and crime broken?

59 points by bediger4000 2y ago

pylua 2y ago
I feel like Americans perceptions of the economy are accurate. It comes across as very disingenuous to state that how people are feeling aren’t aligned with the facts. Maybe the data doesn’t tell the whole story or is being carefully curated. We probably shouldn’t try to piece together micro trends with coarse macro level statistics, as there is no guarantee that the macro effect is happening at the micro level.
- Retric 2y ago
  Americans have noticed how little the overall economy correlates with their lives. That doesn’t mean they are making accurate statements about the economy, but rather that the economy isn’t something that matters to them. Many things are done that are hypothetically good for the economy, and bad for most Americans. That’s objectively true but runs into ideological issues and the pocketbooks of those who do benefit. On the flip side you have things that are bad for the economy and benefit millions of Americans like farm subsidies which are rarely attacked on economic grounds. It’s used more as a political talking point than an actual rational stance.
  - happytoexplain 2y ago
    Yes, but this starts to get into semantics. If a person complains about the economy (as in the relative-to-the-past QoL of common citizens), and an economist says the economy is great, they're talking past each other by using the word economy differently (colloquial vs formal).
    - scarmig 2y ago
      In this situation, though, it's economists who are using an out-of-the-norm term and upset when people don't immediately abandon existing usages. Economy literally means "home management," after all. That confusion is born of ideology: there's an abstraction, which economists think should capture the usual meaning in a more rigorous way, and when it doesn't, it's upsetting. So it's the people who must be wrong.
      - PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
        The primary definition of the word "economy" in the Oxford is: > the wealth and resources of a country or region, especially in terms of the production and consumption of goods and services. so, yes, it does have other meanings too, but it does not "literally mean home management".
      - Retric 2y ago
        The sense of "wealth and resources of a country" (short for political economy) is attested from 1650s That’s long before economists became a thing. Kings looked about the economy in terms of tax revenue, so it’s not just some arbitrary abstraction.
      - dragonwriter 2y ago
        > Economy literally means "home management," No, it doesn't. "Etymologically derives from an older term that meant" is not the same as "literally means", though for some reason the confusion of etymology and meaning is common on HN.
        scarmig 2y ago
        You're wrong, here. Words are defined by how people use them, and the way people actually use the term "economy" is much closer to the original etymological meaning than how economists use it. Economists are free to take a term and redefine it for their own purposes, but the public meaning is every bit as valid. They don't have a trump card that invalidates every other meaning because they want to use it to designate a particular abstraction.
        Retric 2y ago
        There’s two definitions of the same word both of which predate economics, but the slightly older one mostly died out. “Home economics” was used in the 1950’s to distinguish it from the more common use of the term back then, while economics classes don’t need that clarification. Today few people are aware of the older definition.
  - pylua 2y ago
    I don’t think it’s that. I think it’s the coarse, high level statistics provided by the article aren’t in line with what the majority of Americans are experiencing. For instance, crime may be decreasing, but it could be increasing where there are more people, meaning more people think crime is increasing. I’m not sure if that is true or not, but I feel like it is with perceptions of the economy.
    - Retric 2y ago
      Crimes way down in populated areas. EX: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_New_York_City#/media/File:New_York_Murders_Annually_-_1928-2023.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_New_York_City#/media/... Note that’s absolute numbers not rates. I know people who have noticed the massive reduction in crime inside cities, and still think it’s up overall. Part of the issue is news stories harp on bad news when rates are slightly higher than last year, but not when they drop so random noise ends up looking like a steady increase.
      - pylua 2y ago
        I don’t understand the crime one personally. Just a guess: 1) people who migrate to larger cities are exposed to more crime 2) not many people from the 1950s around that can really compare accurately
        Retric 2y ago
        NYC crime only really fell in the 90’s, that’s in living memory for a large chunk of the population and there where noticeable improvements up until COVID. Though you could be right with how many young people moved to cities after things improved.
        phil21 2y ago
        In my city I could very much believe overall crime is down, but due to recent social events crime is far more spread out. Areas that used to experience very little crime are now seeing far more. Areas that saw crazy levels of crime leveled off some. Crimes that were basically unheard of in my neighborhood 5 years ago (carjackings and armed muggings, for example) are now a weekly common occurrence. This will absolutely create the impression for residents in my neighborhood that crime is up. It went from something you barely thought about, to something you now plan your night around to not be walking home alone in the dark. Reporting is also a problem. I know of two people who were violently mugged to the point of one being hospitalized who did not report it to the police since they knew it was utterly pointless to do so.
  - SirMaster 2y ago
    I think it's just a terminology or definition problem then. I think when the average person talks about if the economy is doing good or bad they are mostly thinking about their own wallet and what they can buy etc and how much things cost compared to previously. If things keep getting more expensive and they don't feel like they can afford as much as before, they might think that the economy must be doing bad if all these companies need to raise their prices so much just to survive or make a profit. I think most people would associate things being cheap and plentiful as a good economy, and things being expensive and hard to get (out of stock, long lead times, etc) as a bad economy.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
- tonyedgecombe 2y ago
  > I feel like Americans perceptions of the economy are accurate. I think most of the rest of the world would disagree.
  - pylua 2y ago
    How so?
    - tonyedgecombe 2y ago
      They think Americans are a bunch of cry babies because they think they are poor when it is obvious that even the poorest among them are wealthier than the majority of the people outside America.
- hedora 2y ago
  The simpler explanation is that the (well documented) right wing propaganda outlets in the US convinced people that the economy was bad. The poll asked people for their personal experiences at the micro level, and the respondents said things were great. The macro statistics were also great. The only negative was people’s perception of the economy.
  - djohnston 2y ago
    Also the cost of food, the impossibility of affording a home, etc. Not really just "perception" is it?
  - readthenotes1 2y ago
    Or perhaps the well-documented left wing propaganda outlets have you convinced that the economy is good for everyone?
  - aliasxneo 2y ago
    Ironic to bring in partisan politics when the article was explicitly talking about how deluded things become when you go down that path.
  - pylua 2y ago
    Peoples financial situation has increased overall, just like mine has. Even though it’s increased and I’m content with the increase I also see that there is less opportunity than there was a few years ago.
    - WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
      > Peoples financial situation has increased overall, Some people's. Since 2020 our housing doubled. So did our auto insurance. We're housed because my children became adults and added 3 incomes to the household. With 4 typical incomes we make basic bills + afford knock-on expenses like repair and medical bills. We also make just enough money to pay less for many expenses. Something that changed all over: Couples generally can't afford living expenses on 2 typical wages.
  - 2y ago
- PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
  If GDP keeps increasing, but the percentage of GDP that flows to labor keeps decreasing, then both of these things are true: * the economy has grown * people are worse off People's feelings about the economy can be both accurate ("we are worse off") and inaccurate ("the economy is worse"). The lesson here is that we need to clear about what the metrics we are using (e.g. GDP or disposable income after housing/health/food/transportation is accounted for) are actually good for. Rising GDP really does indicate a larger and/or more productive economy. But because of the way wealth is distributed and controlled in the US, a larger and/or more productive economy does not have any direct relationship to individual people's economic situation.
lispforlife 2y ago
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djohnston 2y ago
It seems wrong to mix crime and economic perceptions here. With crime, there's a clearcut explanation of objective statistics going down and media focus giving the perception that things are more dangerous than they truly are. Fair enough. Although, I'm not sure the drug zombies are counted in these statistics and they've proliferated like rabbits in most major cities. Whether crime is down, the social fabric of these places has definitely been tarnished. With the economy, the financialization of everything has completely disconnected macro-economic statistics (GDP) from the consumer experience. Inflation skyrocketed in 2022 - that's not debatable. The rate has come down, which just means things are getting more expensive but more slowly. Homes are out of reach for most young people - which did not used to be the case. GDP is up - who the hell cares?
- bluescrn 2y ago
  It's easy to make crime statistics go down. Much harder to make actual crime go down.
  - djohnston 2y ago
    Right, there are definitely perverse incentives afoot from a reporting standpoint on the part of police departments. Additionally, my allusion to the opiate issue is meant to convey that - while a horde of drug addicts at the train station may not actually commit a crime, they certainly make the place feel less safe, which is what people actually experience.
  - 0xcde4c3db 2y ago
    It's easy for any one agency or police department to cook the books, but I don't think that scales to the kind of huge shift across multiple categories and data sources shown in the article.
  - scarmig 2y ago
    Homicides are generally considered pretty reliable for statistics, and those have gone down. Though it's possible for those to go down while lower level crimes go up.
  - 2y ago
righthand 2y ago
Very much so, most people have bought into the idea that education is lame and therefor do not apply themselves and let go of their abilities to do things like mathematics, even simple math in their head. Let a lone being able to discern statistical data. Finances are kept in poor places, such as banks and bitcoin, the stock market instead of better investment strategies like Bonds and ETFs. This allows the rich to eat the poor. As financial knowledge decisions get branded as wall-street-only information, people do not bother to read the details. Even though many brokerage accounts have a $0 minimum with low risk of failure. There has also been a big fall in literacy rates, again ensuring people cannot read the details. Now we are stuck with pearl grippers and hysterics preaching absolute nonsense. Personally it has caused a rift between myself and my parents because they chose to hop on the bandwagon and spread lies. While I believe they are entitled to spread lies, I cannot back the incentive to do so. I can however enable more like minded people who may be uneducated on topics to learn more about brokerage accounts for example, and help alleviate the stigma.
- djohnston 2y ago
  "Hey, I know your granddad bought the family home with his job at the local grocer, and you need to saddle 100K in student debt just to have a shot of buying a home by the time you're 35, but don't be sad, SP500 is at an all-time high!"
  - righthand 2y ago
    Not what I’m suggesting at all. This last December I was talking to a store clerk in Colorado. The store clerk mentioned needing to switch banks because their current bank wasn’t great. I advised instead they look into a Cash Management account at a financial service firm which would give you 5% investment on your money instead of letting it sit in a checking account. Explained that the 5% return was important to helping inflation proof your money on average inflation years. And that you can use it like a checking account, in-fact it was backed by one. You can always move your money back to the bank if dissatisfied. There are obviously more nuanced things to understand such as “cash equivilent bonds/etfs” but that is what they should figure out. It’s about undoing the stigmas not solving the housing crisis. We keep people in the dark with this belief that financial strategies aren’t to be talked about publicly.
rqtwteye 2y ago
American perceptions of a lot of things seem to be based on whether "their" party is in power or not. When democrats are in power, republicans feel inflation is bad, democrats don't see a problem. As soon as a republican gets in power, republicans don't worry about inflation anymore but democrats do. Same for many other things. It's a really bad state to be in. Real data doesn't matter anymore. It's all about what they are being fed by their favorite super biased media (Fox News or MSNBC and CNN come to mind).
- PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
  Thanks to Media Matters for America, I'm very aware of actual data on how Fox coverage of inflation changes depending on the party in power (e.g. a massive drop in coverage after a Republican wins an election). Do you have any links to actual data that suggests that MSNBC or CNN do the same thing?
aliasxneo 2y ago
> I think part of the challenge is that, when we talk about crime, what do you mean by crime? As I was processing the article, I was subconsciously asking this in my head. My first thought on whether I believe crime was going up was yes, but for me, it related more to the increase in public overdoses in my town. Naturally, I would assume if I see more overdoses, then more illicit drugs must be getting sold, and therefore crime must be going up. But this raises a lot of questions: Are the same overdoses increasingly spilling out into the public? Are the illicit drugs getting stronger and thus causing more overdoses? Answering yes to either of these may mean the actual crime rate hasn't changed. Anyway, it was just a rabbit hole I went down in my head that I think speaks to what is being said here.
ChuckMcM 2y ago
Sigh. This is an important topic, probably not an HN topic but still it is important, and the topic isn't "perceptions of the economy and crime" is "ability to discern discourse from propaganda" If you can make someone believe something, you can use that belief to get them to act against their own self interest. This isn't even a controversial thing for most people to understand. The canonical example that illustrates this was Jim Jones making his followers believe that their best choice was to kill themselves and their children by drinking cyanide laced Kool-aid. This effect is weaponized through persuasive narratives being repeatedly presented. Once the belief is set, the narratives add in the action that is required next. That the "media" is the primary tool of setting this narrative is, and always has been, the case. One of the reasons the very first amendment to the US constitution protected the right to a 'free press' was to explicitly allow the media to present narratives that were different than what the government wished to present. Further that they could do this without fear of reprisal. The "media" has its own agendas and influences, we have a shortage of voices which are both independent and trusted. It is informative to watch the response by established media when such voices emerge.
- grajaganDev 2y ago
  Yes, if you can be made to believe absurdities, you can be made to commit atrocities.
  - dallasg3 2y ago
    I want people to believe in stop signs.
- llamaimperative 2y ago
  IMO we have plenty of independent and trusted media, the issue is that they are independently, and increasingly monomaniacally, pursuing financial outcomes. Not an obviously terrible thing except when they each independently discovered that the best way to make $number go up is to produce outrage. For the most part, the less you understand a topic, the more easily you'll be outraged about it, and the more viewership ($$$) you'll drive to the people who give you outrage and withhold understanding. The most dangerous meme in existence is Friedman's extremist view of shareholder supremacy, which we saw drawn to its obvious conclusion the past few weeks in the Rotunda.
jparishy 2y ago
More and more I think these types of problems come down to (a) smaller attention spans, married with (b) dimensionality reduction, and (c) advertising optimization techniques. Meaning that as the content we consume becomes shorter, the motivation for its existence and the message it's trying to communicate has to get compressed. You have to reduce the contextual load, and rely on a set of unspecified assumptions. When I talk to you, the economy is X. When I talk to the mayor, the economy is Y. When I talk to a CEO, the economy is Z. This gets deeply corrupted by advertising, imo. Since content is mostly made to sell stuff, there is a really strong pressure for that to be the main CTA you get from what you're watching: buy the thing/experience/status. So, messaging gets shorter and shorter, and the people seeing the ads are all getting hyper targeted feeds. The main message is to buy something, but that's not what the ad actually says. It says whatever is short and sweet and releases pleasant brain chemicals. So now we have some proxy "vibes" which is what people are actually feeling, but have lost the ability to communicate due to this compression. Seems natural to me that we will become unable to see things in a larger context. I could spend an entire day talking through the economy and how it works, but in the news all you will see is a question like: "is the economy in good or bad shape?". This isn't enough detail to answer the question. But we also won't dedicate enough combined attention to have the larger conversation, so everyone is just annoyed that no one is hearing the same thing even when we all use the same words. There's a lot of parallels to how AI works and this whole misaligned-on-purpose-to-make-advertisers-money system, but I haven't gotten the words yet. Maybe ChatGPT can help.
karaterobot 2y ago
> But there also seems to be something more fundamental happening. Before the covid pandemic, consumer sentiment was relatively predictable based on economic fundamentals. The hard data and the survey responses tended to move up and down in something like unison. But since 2020, they’ve become disconnected, with a wide and pessimistic gap opening up between them. It’s hard to look at that phenomenon and see the impact of a changed media environment. I don't understand that last sentence. I suspect I'm reading it wrong, but am having trouble parsing it in a way that doesn't mean: this data cannot be explained by a changing media environment since 2020. It's very easy for me to look at the disconnect between survey responses and economic data and see that how people receive and process news is largely responsible for it. The disconnect between facts and opinions has been widely observed, and while the pandemic didn't start it, it seems to have been an accelerator for it.
- planetpluta 2y ago
  Anecdotally, I completely agree that consumption of media has shifted since the pandemic and could reasonable explain this gap
- derbOac 2y ago
  I've read before with interest the phenomena discussed in this article, and I find it fascinating. This is one of the better-written about it in my opinion. It seems like it should be possible to model this along with surveys of media consumption, at the individual level? Maybe I'm mistaken in this impression but I imagine some of the larger social surveys track news consumption habits. Of course that assumes they're accurate reporters, which might be problematic.
planetpluta 2y ago
In a sense, the macro trend is irrelevant and mainly used as a talking point by the media. Individuals experience the world from an individual level — it is easy to go along with any trend that fits your desired narrative because until it is at odds with your individual experience, it doesn’t really matter. (I’m being a bit reductive and haven’t fully fleshed out this thought, but think the sentiment is accurate)
- analog31 2y ago
  In my view, macro trends are important if you're trying to formulate policy or debate about it.
black_13 2y ago
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crackercrews 2y ago
Do any of these sources adjust for the fact that people are not reporting crime in many places? When prosecutors don't enforce, police don't investigate, and people don't report crimes.
9283409232 2y ago
> Americans believed the economy was in the tank, despite loads of evidence showing the opposite. The evidence they use is in the form of the financial markets. Blue collar workers don't care about the market. Nurses don't care about the market, construction workers don't care about the market. They care about can they afford food, can they afford a home, and can they afford healthcare. The answer is more and more becoming no.
- summermusic 2y ago
  Exactly! There probably is a disconnect in perception driven by political agenda like the essay suggests, but Americans who exist in the real world and not in the quirky stock market graphs world know that how well the stock market is doing is more and more disconnected from how well the average American is doing. The phenomenon in the article can in large part explained by rampant wealth inequality.
adminu 2y ago
@dang why is this flagged? Can we unflag it?
lesuorac 2y ago
I do think there's a bit of a faulty premise to the start of the article. > A responsible news media has a lot of jobs, but here’s one of the most important: giving audiences an accurate image of the state of the world around them. Most "News" orgs aren't News Orgs. They're entertainment companies with a goal of selling ad space. I.e. the weather channels routinely overestimates the chances of a weather event because it gets you to keep paying attention. Painting an accurate imagine can be at odds with generating revenue and so an inaccurate image will be painted. Then we get into probably another fault premise that the economy as graphed by a single metric is fine. There was all this talk about a K-shaped recovery post covid. It's very possible your single metric will look at good but there can still be a lot of people doing worse as long as it's outweighed by a few people doing very well. The article had a very interesting comment one crime though about if homelessness counted. I think it'd be a bit more interesting to ask if immigration counted. But the guy definitely hits the nail on the head in saying that nobody is reporting crime correctly in the news so it's not a surprise that people listening to it don't have a clue.

59 points by bediger4000 2y ago

I feel like Americans perceptions of the economy are accurate. It comes across as very disingenuous to state that how people are feeling aren’t aligned with the facts. Maybe the data doesn’t tell the whole story or is being carefully curated. We probably shouldn’t try to piece together micro trends with coarse macro level statistics, as there is no guarantee that the macro effect is happening at the micro level.

Retric 2y ago
Americans have noticed how little the overall economy correlates with their lives. That doesn’t mean they are making accurate statements about the economy, but rather that the economy isn’t something that matters to them. Many things are done that are hypothetically good for the economy, and bad for most Americans. That’s objectively true but runs into ideological issues and the pocketbooks of those who do benefit. On the flip side you have things that are bad for the economy and benefit millions of Americans like farm subsidies which are rarely attacked on economic grounds. It’s used more as a political talking point than an actual rational stance.
- happytoexplain 2y ago
  Yes, but this starts to get into semantics. If a person complains about the economy (as in the relative-to-the-past QoL of common citizens), and an economist says the economy is great, they're talking past each other by using the word economy differently (colloquial vs formal).
  - scarmig 2y ago
    In this situation, though, it's economists who are using an out-of-the-norm term and upset when people don't immediately abandon existing usages. Economy literally means "home management," after all. That confusion is born of ideology: there's an abstraction, which economists think should capture the usual meaning in a more rigorous way, and when it doesn't, it's upsetting. So it's the people who must be wrong.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
      The primary definition of the word "economy" in the Oxford is: > the wealth and resources of a country or region, especially in terms of the production and consumption of goods and services. so, yes, it does have other meanings too, but it does not "literally mean home management".
    - Retric 2y ago
      The sense of "wealth and resources of a country" (short for political economy) is attested from 1650s That’s long before economists became a thing. Kings looked about the economy in terms of tax revenue, so it’s not just some arbitrary abstraction.
    - dragonwriter 2y ago
      > Economy literally means "home management," No, it doesn't. "Etymologically derives from an older term that meant" is not the same as "literally means", though for some reason the confusion of etymology and meaning is common on HN.
      - scarmig 2y ago
        You're wrong, here. Words are defined by how people use them, and the way people actually use the term "economy" is much closer to the original etymological meaning than how economists use it. Economists are free to take a term and redefine it for their own purposes, but the public meaning is every bit as valid. They don't have a trump card that invalidates every other meaning because they want to use it to designate a particular abstraction.
        Retric 2y ago
        There’s two definitions of the same word both of which predate economics, but the slightly older one mostly died out. “Home economics” was used in the 1950’s to distinguish it from the more common use of the term back then, while economics classes don’t need that clarification. Today few people are aware of the older definition.
- pylua 2y ago
  I don’t think it’s that. I think it’s the coarse, high level statistics provided by the article aren’t in line with what the majority of Americans are experiencing. For instance, crime may be decreasing, but it could be increasing where there are more people, meaning more people think crime is increasing. I’m not sure if that is true or not, but I feel like it is with perceptions of the economy.
  - Retric 2y ago
    Crimes way down in populated areas. EX: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_New_York_City#/media/File:New_York_Murders_Annually_-_1928-2023.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_New_York_City#/media/... Note that’s absolute numbers not rates. I know people who have noticed the massive reduction in crime inside cities, and still think it’s up overall. Part of the issue is news stories harp on bad news when rates are slightly higher than last year, but not when they drop so random noise ends up looking like a steady increase.
    - pylua 2y ago
      I don’t understand the crime one personally. Just a guess: 1) people who migrate to larger cities are exposed to more crime 2) not many people from the 1950s around that can really compare accurately
      - Retric 2y ago
        NYC crime only really fell in the 90’s, that’s in living memory for a large chunk of the population and there where noticeable improvements up until COVID. Though you could be right with how many young people moved to cities after things improved.
      - phil21 2y ago
        In my city I could very much believe overall crime is down, but due to recent social events crime is far more spread out. Areas that used to experience very little crime are now seeing far more. Areas that saw crazy levels of crime leveled off some. Crimes that were basically unheard of in my neighborhood 5 years ago (carjackings and armed muggings, for example) are now a weekly common occurrence. This will absolutely create the impression for residents in my neighborhood that crime is up. It went from something you barely thought about, to something you now plan your night around to not be walking home alone in the dark. Reporting is also a problem. I know of two people who were violently mugged to the point of one being hospitalized who did not report it to the police since they knew it was utterly pointless to do so.
- SirMaster 2y ago
  I think it's just a terminology or definition problem then. I think when the average person talks about if the economy is doing good or bad they are mostly thinking about their own wallet and what they can buy etc and how much things cost compared to previously. If things keep getting more expensive and they don't feel like they can afford as much as before, they might think that the economy must be doing bad if all these companies need to raise their prices so much just to survive or make a profit. I think most people would associate things being cheap and plentiful as a good economy, and things being expensive and hard to get (out of stock, long lead times, etc) as a bad economy.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
tonyedgecombe 2y ago
> I feel like Americans perceptions of the economy are accurate. I think most of the rest of the world would disagree.
- pylua 2y ago
  How so?
  - tonyedgecombe 2y ago
    They think Americans are a bunch of cry babies because they think they are poor when it is obvious that even the poorest among them are wealthier than the majority of the people outside America.
hedora 2y ago
The simpler explanation is that the (well documented) right wing propaganda outlets in the US convinced people that the economy was bad. The poll asked people for their personal experiences at the micro level, and the respondents said things were great. The macro statistics were also great. The only negative was people’s perception of the economy.
- djohnston 2y ago
  Also the cost of food, the impossibility of affording a home, etc. Not really just "perception" is it?
- readthenotes1 2y ago
  Or perhaps the well-documented left wing propaganda outlets have you convinced that the economy is good for everyone?
- aliasxneo 2y ago
  Ironic to bring in partisan politics when the article was explicitly talking about how deluded things become when you go down that path.
- pylua 2y ago
  Peoples financial situation has increased overall, just like mine has. Even though it’s increased and I’m content with the increase I also see that there is less opportunity than there was a few years ago.
  - WarOnPrivacy 2y ago
    > Peoples financial situation has increased overall, Some people's. Since 2020 our housing doubled. So did our auto insurance. We're housed because my children became adults and added 3 incomes to the household. With 4 typical incomes we make basic bills + afford knock-on expenses like repair and medical bills. We also make just enough money to pay less for many expenses. Something that changed all over: Couples generally can't afford living expenses on 2 typical wages.
- 2y ago
PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
If GDP keeps increasing, but the percentage of GDP that flows to labor keeps decreasing, then both of these things are true: * the economy has grown * people are worse off People's feelings about the economy can be both accurate ("we are worse off") and inaccurate ("the economy is worse"). The lesson here is that we need to clear about what the metrics we are using (e.g. GDP or disposable income after housing/health/food/transportation is accounted for) are actually good for. Rising GDP really does indicate a larger and/or more productive economy. But because of the way wealth is distributed and controlled in the US, a larger and/or more productive economy does not have any direct relationship to individual people's economic situation.

lispforlife 2y ago

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djohnston 2y ago

It seems wrong to mix crime and economic perceptions here. With crime, there's a clearcut explanation of objective statistics going down and media focus giving the perception that things are more dangerous than they truly are. Fair enough. Although, I'm not sure the drug zombies are counted in these statistics and they've proliferated like rabbits in most major cities. Whether crime is down, the social fabric of these places has definitely been tarnished. With the economy, the financialization of everything has completely disconnected macro-economic statistics (GDP) from the consumer experience. Inflation skyrocketed in 2022 - that's not debatable. The rate has come down, which just means things are getting more expensive but more slowly. Homes are out of reach for most young people - which did not used to be the case. GDP is up - who the hell cares?

bluescrn 2y ago
It's easy to make crime statistics go down. Much harder to make actual crime go down.
- djohnston 2y ago
  Right, there are definitely perverse incentives afoot from a reporting standpoint on the part of police departments. Additionally, my allusion to the opiate issue is meant to convey that - while a horde of drug addicts at the train station may not actually commit a crime, they certainly make the place feel less safe, which is what people actually experience.
- 0xcde4c3db 2y ago
  It's easy for any one agency or police department to cook the books, but I don't think that scales to the kind of huge shift across multiple categories and data sources shown in the article.
- scarmig 2y ago
  Homicides are generally considered pretty reliable for statistics, and those have gone down. Though it's possible for those to go down while lower level crimes go up.
- 2y ago

righthand 2y ago

Very much so, most people have bought into the idea that education is lame and therefor do not apply themselves and let go of their abilities to do things like mathematics, even simple math in their head. Let a lone being able to discern statistical data. Finances are kept in poor places, such as banks and bitcoin, the stock market instead of better investment strategies like Bonds and ETFs. This allows the rich to eat the poor. As financial knowledge decisions get branded as wall-street-only information, people do not bother to read the details. Even though many brokerage accounts have a $0 minimum with low risk of failure. There has also been a big fall in literacy rates, again ensuring people cannot read the details. Now we are stuck with pearl grippers and hysterics preaching absolute nonsense. Personally it has caused a rift between myself and my parents because they chose to hop on the bandwagon and spread lies. While I believe they are entitled to spread lies, I cannot back the incentive to do so. I can however enable more like minded people who may be uneducated on topics to learn more about brokerage accounts for example, and help alleviate the stigma.

djohnston 2y ago
"Hey, I know your granddad bought the family home with his job at the local grocer, and you need to saddle 100K in student debt just to have a shot of buying a home by the time you're 35, but don't be sad, SP500 is at an all-time high!"
- righthand 2y ago
  Not what I’m suggesting at all. This last December I was talking to a store clerk in Colorado. The store clerk mentioned needing to switch banks because their current bank wasn’t great. I advised instead they look into a Cash Management account at a financial service firm which would give you 5% investment on your money instead of letting it sit in a checking account. Explained that the 5% return was important to helping inflation proof your money on average inflation years. And that you can use it like a checking account, in-fact it was backed by one. You can always move your money back to the bank if dissatisfied. There are obviously more nuanced things to understand such as “cash equivilent bonds/etfs” but that is what they should figure out. It’s about undoing the stigmas not solving the housing crisis. We keep people in the dark with this belief that financial strategies aren’t to be talked about publicly.

rqtwteye 2y ago

American perceptions of a lot of things seem to be based on whether "their" party is in power or not. When democrats are in power, republicans feel inflation is bad, democrats don't see a problem. As soon as a republican gets in power, republicans don't worry about inflation anymore but democrats do. Same for many other things. It's a really bad state to be in. Real data doesn't matter anymore. It's all about what they are being fed by their favorite super biased media (Fox News or MSNBC and CNN come to mind).

PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
Thanks to Media Matters for America, I'm very aware of actual data on how Fox coverage of inflation changes depending on the party in power (e.g. a massive drop in coverage after a Republican wins an election). Do you have any links to actual data that suggests that MSNBC or CNN do the same thing?

aliasxneo 2y ago

> I think part of the challenge is that, when we talk about crime, what do you mean by crime? As I was processing the article, I was subconsciously asking this in my head. My first thought on whether I believe crime was going up was yes, but for me, it related more to the increase in public overdoses in my town. Naturally, I would assume if I see more overdoses, then more illicit drugs must be getting sold, and therefore crime must be going up. But this raises a lot of questions: Are the same overdoses increasingly spilling out into the public? Are the illicit drugs getting stronger and thus causing more overdoses? Answering yes to either of these may mean the actual crime rate hasn't changed. Anyway, it was just a rabbit hole I went down in my head that I think speaks to what is being said here.

ChuckMcM 2y ago

Sigh. This is an important topic, probably not an HN topic but still it is important, and the topic isn't "perceptions of the economy and crime" is "ability to discern discourse from propaganda" If you can make someone believe something, you can use that belief to get them to act against their own self interest. This isn't even a controversial thing for most people to understand. The canonical example that illustrates this was Jim Jones making his followers believe that their best choice was to kill themselves and their children by drinking cyanide laced Kool-aid. This effect is weaponized through persuasive narratives being repeatedly presented. Once the belief is set, the narratives add in the action that is required next. That the "media" is the primary tool of setting this narrative is, and always has been, the case. One of the reasons the very first amendment to the US constitution protected the right to a 'free press' was to explicitly allow the media to present narratives that were different than what the government wished to present. Further that they could do this without fear of reprisal. The "media" has its own agendas and influences, we have a shortage of voices which are both independent and trusted. It is informative to watch the response by established media when such voices emerge.

grajaganDev 2y ago
Yes, if you can be made to believe absurdities, you can be made to commit atrocities.
- dallasg3 2y ago
  I want people to believe in stop signs.
llamaimperative 2y ago
IMO we have plenty of independent and trusted media, the issue is that they are independently, and increasingly monomaniacally, pursuing financial outcomes. Not an obviously terrible thing except when they each independently discovered that the best way to make $number go up is to produce outrage. For the most part, the less you understand a topic, the more easily you'll be outraged about it, and the more viewership ($$$) you'll drive to the people who give you outrage and withhold understanding. The most dangerous meme in existence is Friedman's extremist view of shareholder supremacy, which we saw drawn to its obvious conclusion the past few weeks in the Rotunda.

jparishy 2y ago

More and more I think these types of problems come down to (a) smaller attention spans, married with (b) dimensionality reduction, and (c) advertising optimization techniques. Meaning that as the content we consume becomes shorter, the motivation for its existence and the message it's trying to communicate has to get compressed. You have to reduce the contextual load, and rely on a set of unspecified assumptions. When I talk to you, the economy is X. When I talk to the mayor, the economy is Y. When I talk to a CEO, the economy is Z. This gets deeply corrupted by advertising, imo. Since content is mostly made to sell stuff, there is a really strong pressure for that to be the main CTA you get from what you're watching: buy the thing/experience/status. So, messaging gets shorter and shorter, and the people seeing the ads are all getting hyper targeted feeds. The main message is to buy something, but that's not what the ad actually says. It says whatever is short and sweet and releases pleasant brain chemicals. So now we have some proxy "vibes" which is what people are actually feeling, but have lost the ability to communicate due to this compression. Seems natural to me that we will become unable to see things in a larger context. I could spend an entire day talking through the economy and how it works, but in the news all you will see is a question like: "is the economy in good or bad shape?". This isn't enough detail to answer the question. But we also won't dedicate enough combined attention to have the larger conversation, so everyone is just annoyed that no one is hearing the same thing even when we all use the same words. There's a lot of parallels to how AI works and this whole misaligned-on-purpose-to-make-advertisers-money system, but I haven't gotten the words yet. Maybe ChatGPT can help.

karaterobot 2y ago

> But there also seems to be something more fundamental happening. Before the covid pandemic, consumer sentiment was relatively predictable based on economic fundamentals. The hard data and the survey responses tended to move up and down in something like unison. But since 2020, they’ve become disconnected, with a wide and pessimistic gap opening up between them. It’s hard to look at that phenomenon and see the impact of a changed media environment. I don't understand that last sentence. I suspect I'm reading it wrong, but am having trouble parsing it in a way that doesn't mean: this data cannot be explained by a changing media environment since 2020. It's very easy for me to look at the disconnect between survey responses and economic data and see that how people receive and process news is largely responsible for it. The disconnect between facts and opinions has been widely observed, and while the pandemic didn't start it, it seems to have been an accelerator for it.

planetpluta 2y ago
Anecdotally, I completely agree that consumption of media has shifted since the pandemic and could reasonable explain this gap
derbOac 2y ago
I've read before with interest the phenomena discussed in this article, and I find it fascinating. This is one of the better-written about it in my opinion. It seems like it should be possible to model this along with surveys of media consumption, at the individual level? Maybe I'm mistaken in this impression but I imagine some of the larger social surveys track news consumption habits. Of course that assumes they're accurate reporters, which might be problematic.

planetpluta 2y ago

In a sense, the macro trend is irrelevant and mainly used as a talking point by the media. Individuals experience the world from an individual level — it is easy to go along with any trend that fits your desired narrative because until it is at odds with your individual experience, it doesn’t really matter. (I’m being a bit reductive and haven’t fully fleshed out this thought, but think the sentiment is accurate)

analog31 2y ago
In my view, macro trends are important if you're trying to formulate policy or debate about it.

black_13 2y ago

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crackercrews 2y ago

Do any of these sources adjust for the fact that people are not reporting crime in many places? When prosecutors don't enforce, police don't investigate, and people don't report crimes.

9283409232 2y ago

> Americans believed the economy was in the tank, despite loads of evidence showing the opposite. The evidence they use is in the form of the financial markets. Blue collar workers don't care about the market. Nurses don't care about the market, construction workers don't care about the market. They care about can they afford food, can they afford a home, and can they afford healthcare. The answer is more and more becoming no.

summermusic 2y ago
Exactly! There probably is a disconnect in perception driven by political agenda like the essay suggests, but Americans who exist in the real world and not in the quirky stock market graphs world know that how well the stock market is doing is more and more disconnected from how well the average American is doing. The phenomenon in the article can in large part explained by rampant wealth inequality.

adminu 2y ago

@dang why is this flagged? Can we unflag it?

lesuorac 2y ago

I do think there's a bit of a faulty premise to the start of the article. > A responsible news media has a lot of jobs, but here’s one of the most important: giving audiences an accurate image of the state of the world around them. Most "News" orgs aren't News Orgs. They're entertainment companies with a goal of selling ad space. I.e. the weather channels routinely overestimates the chances of a weather event because it gets you to keep paying attention. Painting an accurate imagine can be at odds with generating revenue and so an inaccurate image will be painted. Then we get into probably another fault premise that the economy as graphed by a single metric is fine. There was all this talk about a K-shaped recovery post covid. It's very possible your single metric will look at good but there can still be a lot of people doing worse as long as it's outweighed by a few people doing very well. The article had a very interesting comment one crime though about if homelessness counted. I think it'd be a bit more interesting to ask if immigration counted. But the guy definitely hits the nail on the head in saying that nobody is reporting crime correctly in the news so it's not a surprise that people listening to it don't have a clue.