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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.
I'm sure a lot of it is partisan but I do think, even setting that aside, that things just feel shitty. Yeah inflation is slowing down but the inflation that already happened is still here. For 10 years before 2020 prices barely budged so I got used to certain numbers in my head. Now every time I go to the grocery store I feel irritated that chicken breast is $4/lb when my brain is telling me it should only cost $2/lb. There are still random shortages showing up occasionally (contact lenses is one I noticed) which I don't remember ever happening before 2020. I'm reading about layoffs constantly in the news so I feel like I don't have job security even if statistically I probably do.
Homelessness and panhandling have exploded like nothing I've ever seen before. The downtown area of my city always had a few homeless, but it's just unreal now with tent cities and stoned people walking around like zombies with festering sores all over their skin. Even in the suburbs a lot of major intersections now have somebody standing there with a cardboard sign.
So yeah I make more money than I did a few years ago, but everything just feels precarious and unpleasant in a way it didn't before. It's like asking somebody about the weather when they're standing in the eye of a hurricane, it feels fine now but I'm not exactly celebrating yet.
The thing is though, if you ask people most say that they themselves are in the eye of the hurricane. At which point we have to ask how significant the hurricane really is.
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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).
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