Tomato
2mo ago
What happens when the whining is so intense that it actually distorts people's perception of reality?
Have you considered that you’re affected by the same thing? Honestly everything you wrote sounds like a really unhinged rightoid conspiracy theory to me. Maybe this is just evidence that everyone’s brain is broken.
Tomato
2mo ago
You can’t borrow real things from the future, and when people are discussing the economy being good they are talking about real consumption, investment, etc.
Tomato
6mo ago
I mean sure, if 3% vs 12% is what changes your mind then fine, but this seems like totally missing the point. I can find some other small sliver of consumption where prices are down or flat. Most people are out there acting concerned as if food is 50% of people’s spending.
Tomato
1mo ago
Fortunately none of them were raped, but it goes way beyond the MRA strawman of “trying to flirt while being unattractive.”
Tomato
2mo ago
I’m 40. If you denominate those prices in hours worked you should be much better off, unless you are facing a major and unusual skill issue.
Tomato
6mo ago
Throw whatever food categories you want, the point is people spend a tiny amount of their income on food.
In my area I had a buddy's rent jump up 25% in one year when he renewed.
Yeah I mean landlords are famously slow and chunky while adjusting. Sorry that happened to a guy you know.
The point is people are out here talking like there’s some conspiracy to hide the fact that prices 100% higher than they used to be when in fact they aren’t and wages have increased along with the modest price increases.
All that aside, the following facts:
- majorities think their own situation is good
- dems think others’ situations are good
- reps think others’ situations are bad
Really kind of gives away what’s happening, right?
Tomato
10mo ago
Right, what I'm asking is why it's so obvious that the decision rule we use to decide who gets that status should be based on who got a 1600 on their SAT in high school, or some similar measure of pre-college merit. Why shouldn't it be based on our best estimate of who will benefit most from that status? Maybe these things overlap, but it's not obvious that they do.
Tomato
1mo ago
it doesn’t reach the men it’s supposed to reach, and only reaches men who don’t need feminist messages in the first place
This is asserted a lot in spaces like this with a kind of nerd-smugness but I don’t think it’s true. Why would one expect the proverbially socially adept frat bro who never heard of /ssc/ to have worse social awareness than the only-rarely-interacts-with-women loser who receives this messaging? My Bay Area female friends/fwbs/hookups/etc have showed me plenty of receipts from respectable seeming nerds who very clearly need some social education.
Tomato
6mo ago
There are a lot of economic data conspiracy theories out there but they can never point us to what data we're actually supposed to be looking at. What do you want us to consider aside from vibes and anecdotes? Anyway for your specific points:
Not to mention that "core inflation" excludes housing and gas and food
There's a lot to discuss on why it makes sense to think about non-core or core for the purposes of various policy decisions and evaluations. Nevertheless they are both calculated and easy for people to look up, and they are usually pretty close. Incidentally non-core inflation was lower in September than core inflation. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/cpi.pdf
as if home prices reaching unaffordable highs is some sort of triviality when The Economy Is Doing Great.
Since most people own homes this is in fact a good thing
Unemployment is good because the numbers are gamed in a million ways. A typical pattern these last few years has been for employment figures to be "better than expected" when first announced, then quietly revised to much lower numbers a few months later. But it's always been a gamed figure, when people who stop looking for work are no longer counted as employed.
Propose an alternate measure and defend it. The most obvious alternative that gets at what you're worried about is the labor force participation rate, which is also high and increasing. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART. There are good reasons that this isn't the default measure but obviously the data is out there.
The economy is growing?
Yes, real output increased 4.9% year over year.
Remember when they changed the definition of a recession because they didn't want to admit we were in one?
They did not, but anyway whether we're technically in a recession or not is an even coarser economic measure than GDP growth (which is doing very well) so it's not clear why people harp on this so much.
The economy must be doing well, because we've proclaimed it. And since no one believes us, we have to understand what's causing all this irrationality.
They went out and measured it, and the found out that unemployment is low, GDP growth is high, and inflation, however you measure it, is coming down. As I said you are free to come up with and defend your own measures but you should come to the table with more than vibes and anecdotes.
Are Republicans just that impervious to the truth?
Republicans are doing a weird thing where they say their own situation is good but think that other people's situations are bad. It would be helpful to understand this phenomenon.
Tomato
10mo ago
Why do these libertarians take the view that their abstract notion of merit entitles them to a Harvard education? Why suddenly hate the laisses-faire outcome of Harvard deciding how to allocate Harvard's resources?
Tomato
2mo ago
As a dirty dozen but not politically obsessed elite, I unironically believe most voters are just uninformed and not really equipped to think about certain important issues like climate change or immigration. The typical voter can’t articulate what an externality is or reliably identify one in nature. The typical voter has empirically incorrect ideas about immigration and its connection to crime and the economy. I’m not in the politically obsessed “we should cheat at elections” camp but I do firmly believe the current US government is doing an outstanding job all things considered and people who disagree either have incoherent ideas about what’s going on or are politically motivated and think that because Trump isn’t president, the economy must be bad. I think Biden is old but I don’t care because the deep state is benign and competent, so I hope he and his crew win.
Tomato
2mo ago
I think you visit cities incorrectly. Before I was married my trick was to go on a dating app and arrange a couple dates with locals. You’ll meet in some real neighborhood, go to a nice bar, see where people actually live, and get laid if you play your cards right. The last time I was in Seattle, a bit post pandemic, I had a really fabulous time. Lovely city, lovely people.
Same in SF, same in LA, same in San Diego.
Tomato
6mo ago
The rhetorical dynamic is the following:
-
economists have thought really hard about how to measure inflation and have sophisticated data and tools to do it. They do their thing and say that year over year inflation is 4% or whatever.
-
weird zerohedge people notice that mayonnaise prices at target are higher by 75% and from this conclude that the federal reserve is lying about inflation.
I think people in #2 get confused because food is so important to live while flat screen tvs are not. So when food prices go up they think a lot of people must be about to starve. It’s useful to point out to these confused people that food, while necessary to live, is so cheap relative to Americans’ income that food prices can increase a lot and it doesn’t really matter. Hence headline inflation can be low even though mayonnaise at target seems expensive, and nevertheless headline inflation is the thing we should care about.
Tomato
6mo ago
Well, experts think people’s situations are good, the consensus people have is that their own situation is good, and there’s a partisan split on whether they think others’ situations are good. There’s a little logic 101 game we can play here in identifying who is wrong about what.
Tomato
6mo ago
This is a weird thing to say because most people already own houses and they're financed through long-term fixed rate mortgages so when house prices go up they're happy and when interest rates increase it doesn't affect them. There is the so called mortgage lock-in effect but this is quantitatively small when compared to the former things (most people don't move that much anyway).
Anyway people who think house prices are too high should be complaining about local zoning laws that restrict supply, not Joe Biden.
Tomato
10mo ago
I sort of have the view that Harvard/Stanford/Whatever is good at churning out elite but not exciting folks like programmers and doctors and bankers and lawyers, but for truly world-changing things to the extent that there's any correlation there it's all selection rather than treatment. If Harvard is good at doing the former and not the latter, I think it kind of makes sense to "uplift" a bunch of people into those positions that don't require true genius to do well, and not really worry whether the next Einstein goes to Harvard or Ohio State for undergrad. Anyway, as you said, it would be hard to identify this in the data anyway, but I just don't think it's the open and shut case that a lot of people here make it out to be.
Tomato
10mo ago
But 'society' doesn't get a say in who gets to go to Harvard.
We're literally discussing SCOTUS, abstractly representing society, having a say in who gets to go to Harvard so it's worth thinking about what we as a society are aiming for.
Tomato
10mo ago
I'd rather send A+ students to Harvard in a way that turns them into people who contribute amazing world-changing things, than sending C- students to Harvard in a way that turns them into upper-middle class middle management, even if the latter would mean larger Harvard marginal treatment effect.
Really what I'm asking for is some evidence for the assertion that sending A+ students to Harvard is the way to maximize the number of people who contribute amazing world-changing things, and that the C- student who got affirmative actioned into Harvard isn't doing that.
Tomato
6mo ago
I genuinely don’t know what you’re looking for. People say they’re doing good. Dems think other people are doing good. Republicans, who also think they’re doing good, think other people are doing bad. I’m not sure who these other people republicans are worried about are but I hope things get better for them (in the minds of republicans!)
Tomato
6mo ago
My economic life and the lives of everyone around me is incredibly good, so it’s useful for me to look at statistics to see how far-off people in different areas with different professions and backgrounds are doing. And when I look at the data it turns out they’re doing great too!
Tomato
6mo ago
"Housing costs" as defined in that link would be housing costs for someone becoming a homeowner for the first time. I agree that it's rough if you're a first-time homeowner but that's a pretty small slice of the population. Most people already have homes (so house price increases are good) and have fixed rate mortgages (so rate increases are irrelevant).
The rent chart you showed has rental prices increasing at about a 6-7% annual rate, which I agree is annoyingly high but doesn't seem catastrophic?
Staple foods are a pretty small share of people's consumption basket. (Food at home is about 4% of people's expenditures: https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistics-charting-the-essentials/food-prices-and-spending/)
Ultimately you're getting at something correct, but I don't think in the way you meant it to be. There's a huge disconnect between what people think the economy is (that people mostly consume lettuce and mayonnaise and half of the economy are coal miners) and what it actually is.
Tomato
6mo ago
I think this is completely consistent with the stats above. Your economic situation is good, you think other people's economic situation is bad, and the few homeless people (who are understandably very anecdotally salient) you see notwithstanding, almost everyone's economic situation is similar to yours.
I also think people are over-sensitive to anecdotes of what's going on in their own sector. Some tech people getting laid off is a nearly negligible part of the economy but if you're a tech person it obviously looms much much larger. A few days ago on twitter everyone was dunking on some VC guy who claimed we had a "rolling recession" because some industries were doing well and some not so well (this is a nonsensical concept to be clear).
Tomato
5mo ago
I think Biden's and Trump's domestic policy will look basically identical.
Biden did the painful but necessary task of getting us out of Afghanistan. I guess Trump didn't start any wars but he didn't end any either.
I think Biden has done a great job building international coalitions, particularly as a counter to China, and I don't think that foreign leaders trust Trump to do that (and I also think he's too erratic and untrustworthy).
Tomato
6mo ago
Put aside all the arguments about statistics or how to calculate inflation or whatever.
When asked how they’re doing economically, the vast majority of people say they’re doing well.
Maybe you aren’t doing well.
One way that could happen is that everyone else is actually doing badly but they’re all lying about it and the official statistics are also made up.
Another way that could happen is that even though most people are doing well, not everybody is, and unfortunately maybe you or friends are among those who aren’t. Fortunately things are very cyclical and dynamic idiosyncratically so this is unlikely to last for long.
I certainly have a view about which one is more likely (my view doesn’t require a bunch of people to be lying) but it’s not likely something that can be resolved on this forum.
The original poster is absolutely right though. This double standard with which this place scoffs at most “lived experiences” arguments but seems so vulnerable to it when the argument is on the “other side,” so to speak, really speaks to a lack of what you might call intellectual empathy.
This comment kind of perfectly encapsulates what I’m saying. Everything you’re saying about the state of the economy, for example, is just wrong and easily disprovable from tons of independent data sources.
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