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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.
My dismay at the statistical illiteracy of the average person only continues to grow.
America is one of the few countries in the world that is doing well after COVID, sure prices are sticky and have coalesced at a higher level than they were pre-pandemic, but wages have grown too. The labor market is red hot.
Nothing blackpills me more than realizing it's not possible to simply educate people into seeing anything but what they're primed to do by others, and claiming the US is going downhill has become fashionable at the least.
I'm honestly curious, where have wages grown to match the price increases over the past year? What labor markets are red hot? I don't see this in my industry, and I'm in an industry that generally has been at the forefront of all such changes for decades. That's not to say it always will be and has to be, but I'm surprised if it's not.
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I think there’s the real world issue that people always see the economy in personal terms, as whether they themselves are better or worse off. And to the degree that an individual has higher costs without getting raises to match (keep in mind that raises aren’t evenly distributed and those in high-demand jobs are getting more raises than the rest of the people) they’re going to react to that. And they aren’t wrong. How the economy works for you is heavily dependent on where you live, what you do, and where you sit on the dominance hierarchy. So while they’re not right about the general United States economic health stats, they’re also not wrong about how that economy is working for them.
A thousand times this. It seems like every person I talk to who thinks the economy is doing well is because they're doing well, and every person who thinks it sucks is looking at moths fly out of their wallet, and hearing the economy makes them feel like they are losing their minds.
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You're ironically demonstrating your own illiteracy. There's a word for what you're describing: innumeracy.My apologies. Mea culpa.
Dude, if I ever get a second language on par with @self_made_human 's handling of English, I will be incredibly pleased with myself.
I'm chuffed at the high praise!
I will point out, that English is far and foremost my best language, while I'm fluent in my mother tongue and conversational in another, it's certainly not to this extent. My brain just turned out hyperoptimized/fixated on English over all else, and I speak and think in it so exclusively since I was old enough to remember my internal monologue that the usual connotations of first or second language seems suspect haha
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I would rather @self_made_human not call you a pain-in-the-ass pedant, but you are being a pain-in-the-ass pedant for no evident purpose other than to insult him. You keep doing this.
@naraburns and I have both repeatedly told you to chill out, and that your accumulation of crappy comments (in which no one comment is really bad) paint a picture of someone uninterested in civil discourse and unable to refrain from low-effort shitting on people.
Banned for two weeks. Don't bother DMing me with griping and resentment like last time - you've been warned, multiple times, and frankly I'm pretty sure I'm just delaying the inevitable by not permabanning you this time.
For what it's worth he sincerely apologized to me via DM, and while I was modestly annoyed by his initial comment, I'd rather not see him banned for it. Then again, it's not like this one seems to be the only reason, given your statement about his pattern of behavior, but I personally won't hold a grudge against anyone who can acknowledge their error.
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If you're going to be a pain-in-the-ass pedant, then please do me the courtesy of being right about perceived "errors":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_literacy
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One of my personal betes noires is people confusing Inflation, a rate of change, with price levels, a numeric value. "The inflation that happened is still around." No, the price changes are still around, the Inflation is the rate of change in prices over time. Yes, after a period of inflation, prices will remain permanently elevated relative to their prior levels, unless we hit a period of sustained deflation (which will have all kinds of other, likely worse for most people, negative effects). It really grinds my gears.
Well when inflation is always positive and never negative, I don't blame anyone for confusing speed and location. When people complain about inflation, they're really complaining about price, so until we get deflation their complaints are never addressed.
As someone who wants to be paid in silver quarters, because that lays bare the debasement of our currency, this is missing the point. You need to address the ratchet that only allows prices to move in one direction.
And a good thing too that they never will be, deflation is bad.
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One obvious problem is that no one can see a derivative function on the price at the grocery store. Everyone can easily remember that things were 20% cheaper a couple years ago, but seeing whether they're currently continuing to change is inherently more difficult. It would be nice if there was a way to sharpen people's thinking about this, but convincing someone that the rate of inflation is low isn't going to change their desire to punish whoever was in charge of causing the price change in the first place.
This doesn't really address the original arguments in the post. If this is the explanation, then why are ratings of 'am I personally doing well economically' high? The puzzling thing is the discrepancy, this explanation does not address.
I don't think it's puzzling, I think people think they're being lied to when American Pravda insists that the economy is doing great. They look at pricing of the goods that they have the most exposure to (food, energy, housing), they look at debt, they look at Covid policies, and they conclude that it's actually not great. If you ask them how they're doing, they say that they're basically fine at the moment, but they're nervous about the signals they see. The response amounts to, "I'm fine at the moment, but the whole thing seems pretty shaky".
This is a ridiculous extrapolation to make beyond data which cannot be stretched that far. And the question's word was not 'fine' it was 'good'!
Well good thing we don't need to operate on these general anecdotes and vibes, we can in fact look at statistics.
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