TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
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User ID: 373
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
3yr ago
This is the best image I've seen to understand the symmetry of the woke left and Trump-right when it comes to foreign affairs. Partisans are willing to jam round pegs into square holes, and so leftists squint and see the Israel vs Palestine conflict as white colonizers vs oppressed brown natives. This worldview is incoherent when you do deeper analysis, but it has sufficient surface level appeal to rip left coalitions apart in circular firing squads around the world. The right (ala Trump) is steadfast in its support of Israel apart from the unironically antisemitic fringe who'll end up throwing in their lot with Trump anyways as part of the coalition process.
Hlynka's analysis is basically just that the woke left and Trump right both want change and are willing to flirt with authoritarianism to get it. There's some stuff about Locke vs Hobbes in there but that's just intellectual salad dressing for the previous sentence. If status quo bias and democracy vs authoritarianism are the only thing you care about, then yeah the two sides probably look pretty similar. But go beyond those and the differences are massive.
So is Hlynka right? Are we going to see the far right attempt to form an alliance with the left in the hopes that their shared antisemitism will be sufficient to gain political power?
No lol. If anything, expect Israel vs Palestine to simply become more partisan. As leftists become more flippantly pro-Palestine, expect the right to use this as ammo to justify tacking towards Israel to an even greater degree. Public polling backs this up.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
3yr ago
I made this post because I've seen left-leaning types handwave national statistics in favor of smaller anecdotes and "lived experiences", and be called out on this forum as the "peak of leftist bullshit" or somesuch. I generally would have agreed, using different language.
But then, lo and behold, people are essentially doing the exact same thing here when the roles are reversed. The motte is "national statistics can apply unevenly which can lead to people being more pessimistic than is expected/warranted". The bailey is "meat at my local grocery store went from $10 to $16 which proves national statistics are fraudulent". There were plenty of people in the previous thread making the bailey argument, while almost no one in this thread is defending it and everyone is instead at the motte. This, to me, is pretty telling.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
3yr ago
I have a hunch that this phenomenon has always existed to some extent, although I'd bet that increasing negative partisanship has made it worse. If you have some data on it going back in time, I'd love to see it. I haven't seen a lot of people talking about this effect.
Also, a lot of people in this and the previous thread very much did not thing it was obvious, basically implying I was a Democratic party operative for mentioning it. They were adamant that the national statistics were fraudulent, and, if anything, that liberals must be the delusional ones for not thinking the economy is currently in a disastrous state.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
3yr ago
Unless I missed something in your post, it seems like we're basically agreeing with each other. Anecdotes aren't worthless, as they can give insight into the uneven distribution of a problem or potential alternative causes that national statistics don't get at. But they're obviously subject to limitations and care should be made not to overgeneralize (nonrandom selection, confirmation bias, misattributed causes, etc.). If Ezra was using his anecdotal experience to say stuff like "not all black people commit crime" or "they can still get roughed up by the police regardless", then that's valid. But if he starts claiming "that proves FBI crime statistics are rigged", then he needs to bring a lot more evidence or use a different source entirely.
Likewise the people using anecdotes to say the economy can feel worse than national statistics would imply since local changes are not evenly distributed, that's reasonable. Pointing to meat at the local supermarket going from $10 to $16 and claiming that proves national inflation statistics must be rigged is less so.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
3yr ago
There were absolutely people who were equivocating the two, see many (though not all) of the examples I posted above.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
3yr ago
This is a lot of words to write, "I don't understand why aggregate statistics don't apply to the individual".
That is not an accurate description of what I wrote. Like, at all.
There were many people who said "local costs are up in some goods more than average statistics would suggest". My beef isn't with people who concluded that "because of this + negativity bias, things feel worse than they actually are", it's with the people claiming "because of this, economic data are rigged and useless".
Is bordering on outright delusional. There are more Americans than just Democrats and Republicans and you don't get 55% fair/poor personal financial situation from just Republicans (no matter how much I'd love for 55% of Americans to be Republicans, alas).
Nothing in the article you posted contradicts what I said in either of my posts. Also, the "bordering on outright delusional" line is unnecessarily hostile.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
3yr ago
- The sentiment isn't based on a snapshot. People know that not only are prices still going up, but they HAVE gone up a lot since 2021. All that inflation in 2021 and 2022 is still affecting sentiment. Memory of those supply shortages hasn't faded away either. And people do still remember the pre-pandemic times and remember that they were better. If this was 1984 when the memory of the stagflation of 1980 was in mind, it would seem great. But it isn't.
The notion that the negative sentiment is mostly holdover is one that other people have claimed, and it makes sense. The direction on economic sentiment is clearly upwards although it might take another year or more before people realize things have gotten better (assuming things stay on the current path). That said, as per my original post it's still strange how Republicans are so vastly more pessimistic about the economy than Democrats.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
3yr ago
Average americans have precious little disposable income.
Well that's just not correct. Americans are at the top 1 or 2 spots when it comes to disposable income depending on how you measure it.
So the americans are squeezed hard and obviously the economy is not doing well. The cost disease has been fucking up americans since the 70s with couple of boom years in the 90s excluded. And I don't think it is slowing, let alone reversing.
I agree with cost disease in terms of things like education and healthcare (largely because of the Baumol effect) as well as for housing since the US has become a build-nothing country But both of these issues are structural problems that stretch way further back than 2020. The former issue is mostly because of a lack of productivity, while the latter is due mostly to strangling regulations.
In my neck of the woods prices of food, especially animal products almost doubled since pre 2020. Now the absolute price per shitty calorie is still low, especially if you cook at home. But you enjoy either lower quality diet or less discretionary spending for trips to italy. either way your standard of living is lower. If for enough people standard of living is getting lower, the economy is obviously not doing well, no matter what metrics say.
On the issue of food specifically, cost has gone up by ~19% since the start of Biden's term, which is significant but food is a pretty tiny portion of most US household's budgets. And again, average incomes also increased to offset this, either mostly or totally depending on the specific economic indicators looked at.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
3yr ago
First just want to say that you should really tag people with @ when you talk about them. It's not nice to mention people without letting them know.
Perhaps I should have, but on the other hand that might have seemed unnecessarily antagonistic, like I was specifically calling them out. My point wasn't really to target any individual, but rather to take stock of a broader phenomenon. I was debating whether to include peoples' names at all. I probably should have gone one or the other.
Also, I'm pretty sure Reddit prevents notifications if you ping more than 3 people and am not sure if that carried over to this site.
Maybe it's entirely fine, the economy is great, and there's no smoking gun problem. But at least this is unexpected, and therefore unsettling, and people should acknowledge that instead of just saying "what are your talking about? everything is completed normal"
I don't know of basically any economist who said "everything is fine" when there was 9% inflation going on, let alone that it was a broad consensus like you're implying here. At most there were people saying it would be more transitory than it was, or people predicting before it started that it wouldn't go that high. Krugman was probably the most notable individual saying it wouldn't get that bad, but he had a mea culpa when it did.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
3yr ago
Agreed, while Nate Silver wasn't a great pundit in 2016 especially during the primary, his model was better than basically anything else with a track record.
On the use of anecdotes and “lived experiences” to contradict statistical data.
Say for the sake of argument that you’re arguing with a left-leaning individual (let’s call him “Ezra”) on the issue of police bias. You both agree the police has a least a little bit of bias when it deals with blacks, but you disagree on the root cause. Ezra contends this is due to structural racism, i.e. that laws are created in such a way such that blacks will always bear the brunt of their enforcement. He further contends that local police departments are often willing to hire white men with questionable backgrounds in terms of making racist remarks. This inherent racism exacerbates issues of uneven enforcement, and in the worst cases can lead to racist white police officers killing unarmed black men. While you agree that black men are arrested at disproportionate rates, you claim the reason for this is more simple. Black men get arrested for more crimes because… black men commit more crimes. You cite FBI crime statistics to back this up. In response, Ezra says that the FBI data you cited is nonsense that doesn’t match up with reality, but rather is cooked up by racist data officials putting their thumbs on the scales to justify the terrible actions of the criminal justice system on a nationwide basis. After all, Ezra knows quite a few black people himself, and none of them have committed any crimes! And while none of them have been arrested, a few of them have told him stories of run-ins with the police where they were practically treated as “guilty before proven innocent”. In short, Ezra’s lived experiences (along with those of people he knows) contradicts your data while buttressing his own arguments.
Do you think Ezra’s lived experiences are a valid rebuttal here?
Yesterday I made a post on the partisan differences in economic outlook. The three main points were that 1) the US economy is doing fairly well, 2) Republicans think the economy is doing absolutely terribly, much worse than Democrats think, and 3) that most of this perception difference is because Biden, a Democrat, currently occupies the White House. I initially thought I was going to get highly technical arguments quibbling over the exact measurement of data. Economic data is highly complex, and as such, reasonable people will always be able to disagree about precisely how to measure things like unemployment, GDP, inflation, etc. It’s not particularly hard to cherrypick a few reasonable-sound alternatives that would tilt measurements one way or the other. For instance, how much of housing costs should be calculated in the inflation of consumption prices? Rent can be seen as pretty much pure consumption, but homes that are purchased also have an investment aspect to them. As such, the current inflation calculations use “owners’ equivalent rent” to account for this. Most economists think this is overall the better way to calculate inflation on this particular measure, but again, reasonable people could disagree, and getting a few of them on record saying “the current measurements are faulty” is an easy way to throw doubt on data. While I did get a few of these types of comments (example 1 , example 2), they weren’t the majority of the responses by a long shot.
Instead I got plenty of arguments about “lived experiences” which people claimed as disproving the data I cited. These weren’t quite to the level of “Chicken costs $5 more at my local supermarket, therefore all economists are liars with fraudulent data”… but it wasn’t that far off.
Don’t believe me? Here’s 9 examples:
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WhiningCoil says inflation numbers are “literally impossible to square with the lived experience” of housing costs going up, or the prices of staple foods doubling.
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haroldbkny says inflation has been unprecedented in all his “life experience”, and he hasn’t seen the wages of anyone he knows growing to match it.
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Walterodim says it’s “incredibly obvious” that people have “personally experienced much sharper increases in prices” than officials claim, and that officials must be “cooking the books”.
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JTarrou says his personal standard of living went down, and that he’s paying “a third higher to double on most normal expenses (energy, groceries, etc.), and as such my national metrics smell of “statistical bullshit”and that “economic metrics are bullshit statistical lies”.
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JTarrou further claims that economics is staffed by people who “all drank the same koolaid”, and that while anecdote is small data, it’s the only data he’s sure “isn’t horseshit”
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HlynkaCG says he “has receipts” and linked to a 2 year old post where his local price of cheap meat went from $5/lb to $6.75 (a 35% increase) whereas the national meat price index at the time had only gone up by 9.5% over that period.
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SlowBoy says recent economic events have been like “receiving Biden’s twelve inches”, and that the data are all gamed by lying government officials.
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No_one implies people are waking up to statistical lies by linking to a Tweet of someone who went to their local grocery story where the cost of meat has jumped from $10 to $16.
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freemcflurry says he makes more money than he used to, but “things just feel shitty”; the prices of chicken breast as his local grocery store doubled from $2/lb to $4/lb, and there are now masses of homeless people in his city walking around “like zombies with festering sores all over their skin.”
To be clear, a few of these above examples don’t say that their anecdotes prove economists are lying, and are instead using their personal experiences to say how economic conditions feel worse, although they were typically at least ambiguous on whether they trusted their own experiences over economic data at the national level. On the other hand, there were some who were quite unequivocal that economic data is fabricated in whole or in part since the things economists say don’t match with how the economy seems in their personal lives.
Going back to the example of bias in policing that I mentioned earlier, I’d say that the vast majority of people on this forum would say that you can’t really use “lived experiences” to contradict data. Anecdotes aren’t worthless, as they can give you insight into peoples’ perceptions, or how the consequences of data can be uneven and apply more to some locations than others. But at the end of the day, you can’t just handwave things like FBI crime statistics just because you know some people that contradict the data. As such, it feels like a rather blatant double standard to reject “lived experiences” when it comes to things like racism, only to turn around and accept them when it comes to the economy.
The cop-out argument from here is to point at the people preparing the data and say that they’re the ones at fault. The argument would go something like this: “My outgroup (the “elites”, the “leftists”, the “professional managerial class”, the “cathedral”, or whatever) are preparing most of the data. Data that disagrees with my worldview (like the current economic outlook) is wrong and cooked up by my outgroup to fraudulently lie to my face about reality. On the other hand, data that does agree with my worldview (like FBI crime statistics) is extra legitimate because my outgroup is probably still cooking the data, so the fact that it says what it does at all is crazy. If anything, the “real” data would probably be even more stark!”
This type of argument sounds a lot like the controversy around “unskewing” poll results. Back in 2012, Dean Chambers gathered a fairly substantial following on the Right by claiming polls showing Obama ahead were wrong due to liberal media bias. He posted “corrected” polls that almost monotonically showed Romney ahead. He would eventually get his comeuppance on election day when Obama won handily. A similar scenario played out in 2016 when many of the more left-leaning media establishment accused Nate Silver of “unskewing” poll results in favor of Trump. Reporters don’t typically have the statistical training to understand the intricacies of concepts like “correlated errors”, so all they saw was an election nerd trying to make headlines by scaring Democrats into thinking the election was closer than it really was. They too were eventually forced to eat their words when Trump won.
While issues of polling bias can be resolved by elections, the same can’t be said of bias in our examples of racism and the economy, at least not as cleanly. If someone wants to believe their anecdotes that disproportionate black arrests are entirely due to structural racism, they can just go on believing that for as long as they want. There’s no equivalent to an election-loss shock to force them to come to terms. The same is true of economic outlooks. Obviously this is shoddy thinking.
The better alternative is to use other economic data to make a point. If you think unemployment numbers don’t show the true extent of the problem, for instance, you can cite things like the prime age working ratio if you think people are discouraged from looking for work. Having tedious debates on the precise definitions of economic indicators is infinitely better than retreating to philosophical solipsism by claiming economic data is broadly illegitimate. Economic rates of change tend to be exponential year over year, so if large scale fraud is really happening then it’s hard to hide for very long. There would almost always be other data you can point to in order to make a case, even if it’s something as simple as using night light data to estimate economic output. Refusing to do even something like this is akin to sealing yourself in an unfalsifiable echo chamber where you have carte blanche to disregard anything that disagrees with your worldview.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
3yr ago
Like funding a bunch of wars or something?
Hardly a new phenomenon. The US was in Afghanistan for 20 years. Ukraine aid is ~6% of the Pentagon's budget.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
3yr ago
No because hyperinflation is typically devastating for an economy and can have impacts that take years to resolve. 1000% is Zimbabwe tier.
After several years of regular 2% inflation though, things would mostly get back to normal, minus societal trust issues that 1000% inflation was ever possible in the first place of course. This is assuming that people's incomes mostly kept track with inflation, which usually happens unless there are other economic shocks.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
3yr ago
You seem to be confused by the terminology. "Inflation" is the rate-of-change. "Price levels" are the absolute number. Inflation increases price levels, such that price levels can remain elevated even though inflation has decreased.
High inflation really is the enemy more than price levels. High inflation skews lots of things and eats into purchasing power if wages don't keep pace. Price levels are arbitrary, and all that really matters is how much stuff people can buy relative to what they could purchase yesterday (or 10 years ago). This more important phenomenon usually gets shortened to the term "real income", i.e. income adjusted for inflation. As per the sources in the OP and stuff like this, real income is up.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
3yr ago
Both average real incomes and real disposable incomes have beat inflation.
Maybe people are so used to increasing wages and stagnant prices that even mild decreases or wages and prices keeping track feels like a decline?
Perhaps, although the second point of the post was that the noticing is inexplicably much, much more severe by the party not occupying the White House.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
3yr ago
Real incomes have gone up, not down. Inflation was high but there was also a corresponding increase in wages. Total wealth is also up.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
3yr ago
A deep and enduring “vibecession” – Partisan differences are increasingly dominating perceptions of the economy.
By almost every metric, the US economy is doing quite well at the moment. There are many ways to evaluate economic vitality. The most obvious is the headline unemployment rate, which was used throughout the Great Recession to monitor the (slow) recovery. Today, though, unemployment is hovering near record lows at <4%.
Beyond this, there are somewhat nerdier, more technical measurements that still capture important aspects of the economy. Things like inflation, GDP growth, and the stock market. All of these indicators are somewhere between “good” and “great”. Inflation has come way down and is now around 3.7%. Core inflation, a better measurement of long-term inflation that excludes volatile commodities like gas prices, is even lower at around 2.5%, essentially hitting the Fed’s 2% target. GDP growth is surprisingly high for Q3 at 4.9%. The stock market is also doing fairly well, with the S&P500 being less than 10% off its all-time high at the end of 2021 and being well-above the pre-COVID high in Jan 2020.
Drilling even deeper, at this point you start to get the indicators people and the media can “fish” for in order to find bad news. Things like median wage growth, wealth inequality, and prime-age labor participation rate. The thinking with these metrics is that even if the more commonly cited stats are doing well, they might not paint a full picture. For instance, if the economy is growing but the rich are eating all the gains, then things like wage growth and inequality can show how most people aren’t benefitting. Likewise, if the unemployment rate has fallen because people have become discouraged and just don’t bother looking for work any more, then labor participation can show what’s really going on. The steelman of these metrics is that they can be helpful in painting a fuller picture, although in practice I’ve often only seen them used when people are willing to use motivated reasoning to paint the economy as underperforming (e.g. politicians, doomers, or the media just trying to create a story). That said, even by these metrics the US economy is doing well. Median wage growth is very high and is well-above inflation. Regular Americans are getting richer, and wealth inequality has fallen.. The prime age employment rate is also near record highs.
In spite of all of this though, many peoples’ opinions of the economy remain in the dumps. The consumer sentiment index has recovered only slightly from its record low a few months ago, but is still barely better than during the worst parts of the Great Recession. What gives? Well, there’s quite a bit of evidence that it’s just partisan emotional expression, i.e. “vibes”. There’s plenty of data showing that Americans tend to rate the national economy as being much worse than their own personal financial circumstances. Kevin Drum has some evidence that this national-personal split is mostly being driven by Republicans. 71% of Democrats and 57% of Republicans say the economy is doing well in terms of their personal situation. But in terms of the nation as whole, 58% of Democrats and just 5% (!!!) of Republicans say the economy is doing well on a national scale. So you have this goofy scenario where Republicans across the country say things are going well for them individually, but as a collective things must simply disastrous. Where is this “disaster” occurring? “Well, not here, but it’s surely happening somewhere”. The 5% mark is particularly interesting because it perfectly matches Republican’s approval rating of Biden. In other words, it seems like asking people how well the economy is doing is just a proxy for “what do you think of the current sitting president”. I’d doubt the numbers would correlate this perfectly all the time, but there’d still be a significant relationship. Whichever party doesn’t control the White House will see the economy in much more pessimistic terms.
Currently this is just applied to Republicans being pessimistic, but it’s almost certainly symmetrical. When Republicans eventually take back control of the presidency, it’s not hard to predict that Democrats will suddenly think the sky is falling in economic terms.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
3yr ago
Because poisoning Republican primaries has been the Democratic parties MO the last 8 years.
There's very little evidence of this happening on either side. Every election there's people who talk up the potential of the other side voting in droves for crazies in open primaries, but it never materializes. Getting people to vote for candidates they like is already hard enough, getting them to try to strategically sabotage the competition is simply too much for all but the most dedicated partisans.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
3yr ago
While low candidate quality has certainly been a moderate factor in R downballot declines, a lot of it (probably the majority) is due to the increasing nationalization of races. Moderate Rs or Ds used to be able to win in solidly blue or red areas respectively. That's almost completely disappeared over the past decade or two. As such, a more even split is probably baked in pretty strongly now.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
3yr ago
It's likely to be true in limited cases, although unlikely to be widespread since nothing in the statement indicated it was such. I wouldn't be surprised if some limited cases also happened on the UA side here and there, although it'd almost certainly be even less prevalent than the times it happened on the RU side.
If you think the claim is true, do you think Russia’s actions are likely to have a positive or negative effect on Russian troop morale moving forward?
It has a negative effect, but that's already baked in pretty hard at this point. I wouldn't be surprised if it's happening mostly to the convicts, in which case the regular soldiers could feel a modicum of safety since it's only happening to a lower class of soldiers.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
3yr ago
If you think all regulations can be monolithically grouped into a giant "is bad" category then there's probably no convincing you no matter what I say. If the difference between "bad regulations" and "good regulations" don't matter since you think legislators will almost always do the wrong thing, then yeah, no point in trying I guess.
:)
bless your heart Charlie Brown
Comments like these are pretentious and unnecessary.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
3yr ago
he first thing mentioned in that article is that housing isn't being built because the government is actively getting in its way.
Correct, and when governments are broken the old regulations stay in place. YIMBYs are constantly stymied by all the veto points present in American politics.
but it'll (at least temporarily) stop lawmakers from tossing even more monkey wrenches into an already-completely-dysfunctional system.
Surely you must think at least some regulations are good, like "don't put poisonous substances in the drinking water". Other regulations can obviously be abused by rent-seekers, while others still can be bad if they were just poorly thought out. The solution to the latter two is to... just make better regulations. This is hard and it won't always go in the right direction, but it's pretty dang important for a functional society.
The "regulations are always net-negative" idea is a goofy right-libertarian version of Whig history that will have us drinking the equivalent of cyanide-laced water for some future problem. Sure, it might look like there's nothing critically important to regulate right now, but society and technology move on, and it's not very helpful if the machinery of state is completely paralyzed by people endlessly throwing sand in the gears because they thought regulations were impossible to ever do correctly.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
3yr ago
There's some parts of the US that are doing well, like computers and renewables, but a lot of other places have devolved to an ossified gerontocracy. And a broken government, really, really doesn't help.
TheAntipopulist
Voltaire's Viceroy
3yr ago
You shouldn't. Stasis is ignorable for now, but it has huge costs across society that we'll have to pay one way or the other, either through direct payments for debt or future wars, or indirectly from stifled development.
The polling following the immediate aftermath of Hamas' attacks was done with the slaughter of over a thousand Israelis fresh in mind. That turn towards Israel will not hold over the long term for the D side.
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