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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   9947 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 22, 2025

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US GDP figures are in and they're surprisingly strong:

Real gross domestic product (GDP) increased at an annual rate of 4.3 percent in the third quarter of 2025 (July, August, and September), according to the initial estimate released by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. In the second quarter, real GDP increased 3.8 percent.

https://www.bea.gov/news/2025/gross-domestic-product-3rd-quarter-2025-initial-estimate-and-corporate-profits

These are truly enviable numbers. In Australia we get half that and almost totally driven by immigration, no productivity growth. Europe and the UK barely get real GDP growth at all. US immigration is down, yet growth is up.

But are the US figures made up?

The federal government shutdown that occurred in October and November resulted in delays in many of the principal source data that are used to produce estimates of GDP. This initial estimate of GDP for the third quarter of 2025 reflects a combination of data and methods that are typically used for the advance and second current quarterly estimates.

I imagine that there was pressure on the statisticians to fiddle the figures to put Trump in a better light.

Yet there is also the example of the Fed resisting Trump's demands for interest rate cuts. One also imagines that the economists who calculate GDP are unlikely to be Trump/tariff fans. I don't know how these factors balance out. It does seem rather surprising for US GDP growth to be so high, especially since it seems to be consumption driven rather than investment driven via the AI boom.

Personally I've long thought that GDP figures (real, PPP and especially nominal) are overvalued. Making houses more expensive by raising demand via financial schemes or immigration isn't productive economic activity, nor is much of the financial services industry (high speed trading for instance). There is obviously a role for banking and capital allocation, futures and derivatives yet it should be weighted lower compared to production of goods like iron, food, energy and aircraft engines. In many rich countries there's a whole class of highly paid consultants, officials and managers who disrupt productive activity. The food and health sector also seems rather unproductive, encouraging people to gorge on unhealthy food and then expensively treating the symptoms of obesity, shovelling money into keeping the very old alive for a few more, low-quality years... You could have a society with lower GDP but higher real-world prosperity and national power.

But the GDP figures do tell us something. More growth is usually good, especially if it's derived from productivity gains.

Do people think that the US economy is doing well? Faked numbers? K-shaped growth? Or just a result of massive deficit spending?

I don't have a sophisticated enough opinion on how GDP figures are collected and controlled to speak on them directly, but I agree that as an indicator they don't mean a whole lot for me as an individual citizen. Sure, overall the economy may be trending up, but it's clear that it's a tale of two cities. As far as I can tell, some sectors, mainly tech (AI) and finserv, are carrying the rest, and recent economic gains haven't been felt by most consumers. This year, the only sector to really gain jobs has been healthcare, which is hardly an economic engine more than it is an indicator of our aging population. Time will tell if these GDP gains are sustainable across sectors or just reverberations of the continued siren song of AI.

As far as I can tell, some sectors, mainly tech (AI) and finserv, are carrying the rest, and recent economic gains haven't been felt by most consumers.

In terms of GDP, consumer spending has increased in both Q2 and Q3. In Q2 it was finance and tech at the top, but nondurable goods increased by quite a bit as did professional and technical services and durable goods. In Q3 the top was health care services and recreational goods and vehicles, mostly "information processing equipment", but the detailed info won't be out until mid-January.

Gotcha, thanks for the extra detail. Interesting to hear consumer spending has had some gains despite the "vibecession."

The vibecession is mostly a vibe among democrats, indicating at the very least that it isn't a general poor economy- it might be localized or something, but you'd expect everyone to have a negative outlook if it there were truly broad-based economic problems the official metrics are missing.

I'm a rightwing chud who voted for Trump 3 times and I've got bad vibes about the economy too, but maybe that's because I work in tech and am waiting for the AI bubble to pop.

There's a few other possibilities to explain it too:

  1. Some stuff is cheaper, some stuff is more expensive; if the more expensive stuff is essentials, but the cheaper stuff is everything else, people can feel squeezed by the economy without actually being squeezed. (Picture a toy model where someone has $10, food costs $1, shelter costs $1, and consumer goods cost $4 each; if the costs of food + shelter go up to $2 apiece, and consumer goods go down to $2 apiece, each person can individually afford more consumer gifts, while still having less space in their budget for consumer gifts).
  2. People are able to substitute goods for cheaper substitutes, which means that their spending is relatively unimpeded, but they are accepting a lower return on each purchase they make. (So for example, maybe I used to buy steak at $4.00/lb. Steak is now $8.00/lb, but ground beef is $4.00/lb, so I now buy ground beef).
  3. Everything went up by a specific percentage, including wages; wage increases feel like a benefit of me working hard, while price increases feel like people trying to take more money from me. As a result, I feel like I'm not doing as well, because my hard work to get more money was invalidated by everything else becoming more pricey as a part of it.
  4. People have given up on certain staples like housing; as such, instead of saving for housing, they're spending the money they would be putting towards it towards consumer goods.
  5. Some demographics are spending way more, while others are spending way less.

Here's what I would assume would be observable in each case:

  1. Breakdowns of spending will reflect higher percentages of household income spent on housing and food than per usual. This would be disprovable if the percentage is similar.
  2. "Budget" companies have their share prices improve, while luxury companies start offering more budget goods. Companies that only offer luxuries start struggling.
  3. Average income goes up by a similar percentage basis to costs. This should be observable based on the fact that people have published stats on average income for many years, so I assume that someone somewhere is observing it.
  4. The boom in consumer spending is almost exclusively in luxuries; it would also die off in a few months to years, but that's probably indistinguishable from the natural flow of the economy.
  5. Spending is concentrated amongst goods that some portions of the population use. For example, if healthcare spending is way up, but bars are struggling, I'd consider this to be met.

Some stuff is cheaper, some stuff is more expensive; if the more expensive stuff is essentials, but the cheaper stuff is everything else, people can feel squeezed by the economy without actually being squeezed.

For what it's worth I feel like this is the opposite of what is happening, and I think this may explain much of the disconnect between how different demographics view the economy. I Imagine that for a single urban professional living in the city the current economy kind of sucks, housing is at a premium and consumer goods (especially imported consumer goods) have gone up in price. In the meantime, if you are a married couple with 2.5+ kids and a dog living in the 'burbs, two of your biggest expenses, food and transportation, have not only stabilized after climbing steadily for 4 years but in some areas are starting to trend downwards so naturally those people are feeling more optimistic about their situation than they were a year ago.

Yeah, the suburban lifestyle has gotten more manageable- mostly due to gas prices that are stabilizing on a bad day and declining on a good one- with grocery inflation largely stalled. IDK about rents, I think they're getting worse in blue states and better in red ones, but doordash/fast food has gotten more expensive. That's a recipe for 'blue intelligentsia hate the economy, everyone else is largely fine with it'.

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