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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   24882 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 30, 2023

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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 smell statistical bullshit.

My normal standard of living has taken a noticeable if not disastrous turn. My pay is roughly the same, my costs are a third higher to double on most normal expenses (energy, groceries etc.). My rent is up 30%, the value of my savings is down 20%, and the cost of buying a house is up 50%.

Three years ago I had a lot more disposable income. Now, all that might fit fine within the "economy is doing fine" narrative, but it doesn't feel fine to me. What I hear from posts like this is "economic metrics are bullshit statistical lies". I am noticeably poorer today than I was in 2020. All the statistics in the world aren't going to change that.

You may well be poorer than you were three years ago. Most people are not - incidentally, much, certainly more than normal, of the wage growth of the recent period has gone to lower income workers, which perhaps indicates why this discourse of a bad economy is tolerated despite the evidence to the contrary. Not sure what else to tell you is that, surprisingly, number continue to the best means of measuring things.

There is no way anyone on this forum would tolerate for a second this kind of 'lived experience' rhetoric if it was about, say, racism.

Go ahead and not tolerate it, Harold.

Actually, there's a decent bit of evidence behind the claim that statistics aren't accurately measuring what's happening to people in their actual lives. What are family formation rates looking like? Education costs and student debt? Property/housing costs? Food quality/price shifts? Giant tent-cities full of homeless people? I mean, I'm not a trained economist, but the presence of hordes of homeless drug addicts in such huge numbers that famous cities have problems with street lamps collapsing due to so many homeless people urinating on them don't seem to me like an indication of a healthy economy. Hell, the most straightforward measure of economic activity, energy usage per capita, hasn't recovered either.

Would you be willing to stand behind the claim that official measures of inflation, cost-of-living etc accurately reflect what's happening in the economy as opposed to being massaged and shaped for political messaging purposes? My personal contention is that while costs in a lot of areas have been reduced, many of the things people consider essential for a satisfying life have been pulled out of reach for vast numbers of people, and various statistical shell-games have been played to obscure this.

How are homeless drug addicts evidence that the government is lying about inflation? How is a lack of family formation evidence of that?

Successful economies generally don't have large populations of homeless drug users terrorising major cities and rendering vast swathes of infrastructure/real-estate effectively worthless. At the same time, family formation is an extremely important life-goal for most people and one that's heavily tied to economic success (i.e. being able to support a home and raise children). It isn't necessarily a sign that the government is directly lying about inflation, but if the government is saying that the economy is in an extremely healthy state, these phenomena make the case that the government is being deceptive in some way. Maybe they're telling the truth about inflation but hiding the shortfalls elsewhere - I'd need to make this a full-time job to really get to the bottom of it from here.

Successful economies often have large populations of homeless drug users in their major cities. In fact, the wealth of these countries probably why so many people can afford to be homeless drug users. If we were poorer, there wouldn't be enough charity or social welfare to support them.

There is a very strong negative correlation between wealth and fertility on a societal level. In developed countries, the fertility rate has steadily fallen as we've gotten richer over the last 150 years. In Africa, people clearly living in extreme poverty have several times the number of children as we do. The problem is not that people cannot afford to have children.

Successful economies often have large populations of homeless drug users in their major cities. In fact, the wealth of these countries probably why so many people can afford to be homeless drug users. If we were poorer, there wouldn't be enough charity or social welfare to support them.

Often? I was unaware that the presence of giant groups of homeless indigents was a positive sign for an economy. I'm not going to try and argue on this point, but I'd like to see some more evidence that this is a good thing as opposed to a social problem, because I imagine that in an actually functioning economy these people would have jobs/homes/better things to do. If the economy generating large numbers of crazy hobos with knives who randomly assault passers-by in major cities is a sign that it is functioning well I think there are some problems with how we define "functioning well".

In Africa, people clearly living in extreme poverty have several times the number of children as we do. The problem is not that people cannot afford to have children.

African economies and countries are so incredibly different to the west that I don't think this is a good comparison. In extremely terrible economies having large numbers of children is heavily incentivised for a variety of other reasons - that's your replacement for medical technology, retirement savings, childcare, extra labour etc. In the modern west, most of the childless members of my cohort explicitly tell me that there are financial reasons behind their childlessness, and a lot of them tell me that they would prefer to have more children if they weren't limited by the costs of doing so. That seems to be borne out by the statistics I look at as well.

What are family formation rates looking like? Education costs and student debt? Property/housing costs? Food quality/price shifts?

Why would we use other statistics which are not the thing we are trying to measure to get an approximation of something we can, in fact, measure? To paraphrase Sir Humphrey, why are your family formation statistics facts but my real wage facts merely statistics?

energy usage per capita

Source?

Would you be willing to stand behind the claim that official measures of inflation, cost-of-living etc accurately reflect what's happening in the economy as opposed to being massaged and shaped for political messaging purposes?

Yes. Or rather, I have not yet seen any evidence of the latter, so I have no reason to believe it.

Why would we use other statistics which are not the thing we are trying to measure to get an approximation of something we can, in fact, measure?

Because I think that in terms of life satisfaction and happiness, those items listed are far more important and meaningful to people's actual lives than the cost of a replacement flat-screen TV. Real wages are important so far as they let people lead satisfying and meaningful lives, but they're not what actually make people happy or give them meaning in their lives. Family formation, getting onto the property ladder - these are much better indicators of human thriving than real wage numbers. You're totally right when you say that we should be measuring what we actually want to measure, which is why I look at the statistics I do.

Source?

Energy usage is the basis of almost all economic activity - and that number is DOWN. Technically if you go by energy usage rates the USA didn't actually recover entirely from the 2007 economic collapse. I find that fairly plausible, given that there weren't armies of fentanyl zombies and giant homeless tent cities before then.

Yes. Or rather, I have not yet seen any evidence of the latter, so I have no reason to believe it.

Why aren't people having children anymore? Why is there a giant fentanyl crisis? Why are people so miserable(women especially)? Why is political extremism and polarisation increasing at such a rapid clip? Why is there a massive illegal immigrant population and what are they doing to wages? Why is domestic infrastructure falling apart? Why are politics so hopelessly corrupt? There are giant blinking warning lights and sirens sounding all over society, and these things simply would not be happening if society was economically successful and doing well in the way that your real wage statistics are claiming. This is why I'm distrustful of statistics that claim that everything is hunky dory - because if I look at US society as a whole I see a society in crisis/collapse, and yet the statistics you're talking about are claiming that everything is better than fine.

This article is from 2016 and is more about Donald Trump than anything else, but the lens it uses to look at American society throws some of these issues into stark relief. I think it held up rather well, given the predictions made, but I'm just going to quote the relevant portions if you don't want to go read it. https://www.resilience.org/stories/2016-01-21/donald-trump-and-the-politics-of-resentment/

Here’s a relevant example. It so happens that you can determine a huge amount about the economic and social prospects of people in America today by asking one remarkably simple question: how do they get most of their income? Broadly speaking—there are exceptions, which I’ll get to in a moment—it’s from one of four sources: returns on investment, a monthly salary, an hourly wage, or a government welfare check. People who get most of their income from one of those four things have a great many interests in common, so much so that it’s meaningful to speak of the American people as divided into an investment class, a salary class, a wage class, and a welfare class.

...

There’s a vast amount that could be said about the four major classes just outlined, but I want to focus on the political dimension, because that’s where they take on overwhelming relevance as the 2016 presidential campaign lurches on its way. Just as the four classes can be identified by way of a very simple question, the political dynamite that’s driving the blowback mentioned earlier can be seen by way of another simple question: over the last half century or so, how have the four classes fared?

The answer, of course, is that three of the four have remained roughly where they were. The investment class has actually had a bit of a rough time, as many of the investment vehicles that used to provide it with stable incomes—certificates of deposit, government bonds, and so on—have seen interest rates drop through the floor. Still, alternative investments and frantic government manipulations of stock market prices have allowed most people in the investment class to keep up their accustomed lifestyles.

The salary class, similarly, has maintained its familiar privileges and perks through a half century of convulsive change. Outside of a few coastal urban areas currently in the grip of speculative bubbles, people whose income comes mostly from salaries can generally afford to own their homes, buy new cars every few years, leave town for annual vacations, and so on. On the other end of the spectrum, the welfare class has continued to scrape by pretty much as before, dealing with the same bleak realities of grinding poverty, intrusive government bureacracy, and a galaxy of direct and indirect barriers to full participation in the national life, as their equivalents did back in 1966.

And the wage class? Over the last half century, the wage class has been destroyed.

In 1966 an American family with one breadwinner working full time at an hourly wage could count on having a home, a car, three square meals a day, and the other ordinary necessities of life, with some left over for the occasional luxury. In 2016, an American family with one breadwinner working full time at an hourly wage is as likely as not to end up living on the street, and a vast number of people who would happily work full time even under those conditions can find only part-time or temporary work when they can find any jobs at all. The catastrophic impoverishment and immiseration of the American wage class is one of the most massive political facts of our time—and it’s also one of the most unmentionable. Next to nobody is willing to talk about it, or even admit that it happened.

The destruction of the wage class was largely accomplished by way of two major shifts in American economic life. The first was the dismantling of the American industrial economy and its replacement by Third World sweatshops; the second was mass immigration from Third World countries. Both of these measures are ways of driving down wages—not, please note, salaries, returns on investment, or welfare payments—by slashing the number of wage-paying jobs, on the one hand, while boosting the number of people competing for them on the other. Both, in turn, were actively encouraged by government policies and, despite plenty of empty rhetoric on one or the other side of the Congressional aisle, both of them had, for all practical purposes, bipartisan support from the political establishment.

Real wages are important so far as they let people lead satisfying and meaningful lives, but they're not what actually make people happy or give them meaning in their lives. Family formation, getting onto the property ladder - these are much better indicators of human thriving than real wage numbers. You're totally right when you say that we should be measuring what we actually want to measure, which is why I look at the statistics I do.

This is perfectly reasonable, but then you are straying considerably from the question of 'is this a good economy' as most Americans would conceive it. On the basis of home ownership and family formation, 1982 was better year than 1995, yet surely only a madman would suggest that the former year represented a 'better economy' than the latter year. Claiming that the economy is doing well at the moment doesn't mean one is claiming 'society', broadly construed, in improving, though I would argue that the latter is indeed true.

Energy usage is the basis of almost all economic activity - and that number is DOWN. Technically if you go by energy usage rates the USA didn't actually recover entirely from the 2007 economic collapse. I find that fairly plausible, given that there weren't armies of fentanyl zombies and giant homeless tent cities before then.

Well when I said source I meant a source for the fact that energy consumption is down, but doesn't matter now, I've found one. However, not only, it transpires, has energy consumption been flat since 2008, it was also flat (not even accounting for population) between 2000 and 2007/8, which is impossible to account for unless we accept that energy consumption is not a reliable indicator of prosperity from year to year. Over the long run of course more prosperity is usually accompanied by more energy consumption, but on a short-term basis it is evidently less than ideal as a measure.

Why aren't people having children anymore? Why is there a giant fentanyl crisis? Why are people so miserable(women especially)? Why is political extremism and polarisation increasing at such a rapid clip? Why is there a massive illegal immigrant population and what are they doing to wages? Why is domestic infrastructure falling apart? Why are politics so hopelessly corrupt? There are giant blinking warning lights and sirens sounding all over society, and these things simply would not be happening if society was economically successful and doing well in the way that your real wage statistics are claiming. This is why I'm distrustful of statistics that claim that everything is hunky dory - because if I look at US society as a whole I see a society in crisis/collapse, and yet the statistics you're talking about are claiming that everything is better than fine.

There are two things to add here. The first is the same point as above. It may indeed be that economic growth is no longer the best way to improve human happiness. However that is no reason to deny the fact that these are relatively good economic times now. The second is that I find this roundabout question-asking method of argumentation less than convincing; if you are going make a charge as serious as you do about economic statistics, I expect you to be able to point to where and how the statistics are being manipulated, or how they are wrong and misleading. Look at this way, how are your beliefs falsifiable? What evidence or statistics could I present that would make you change your mind? If the answer is nothing, then why shouldn't everyone just dismiss you as a hack?

In 1966 an American family with one breadwinner working full time at an hourly wage could count on having a home, a car, three square meals a day, and the other ordinary necessities of life, with some left over for the occasional luxury

If you want to live like a 1960s American, with a 1960s standard of living, you absolutely can still do this with much greater ease. Go to a regional mid/small-sized city and you can live a lot better on one income than the vast majority in the 1960s could. The grain of truth in this characterisation is the rapid increase in housing costs, but if that's the problem, your quarrel is with NIMBY local and state politicians and the people to whom they pander, not Biden.

Terribly sorry for the late reply - I fell ill and have been spending the last few days away from the internet. I totally understand if you don't want to continue this here and start a new topic, but I feel bad about leaving a substantive reply unanswered so I'm going to respond late anyway.

This is perfectly reasonable, but then you are straying considerably from the question of 'is this a good economy' as most Americans would conceive it. On the basis of home ownership and family formation, 1982 was better year than 1995, yet surely only a madman would suggest that the former year represented a 'better economy' than the latter year. Claiming that the economy is doing well at the moment doesn't mean one is claiming 'society', broadly construed, in improving, though I would argue that the latter is indeed true.

I think that the problem here comes when "the economy" gets increasingly decoupled from what's actually happening in the lives of the people involved. From the perspective of the individual person, I think that their ability to form a family and sustain themselves is one of the main reasons that they actually go and participate in the economy, and one of the main desired outputs they have of the system. As for 1982, wasn't that the ending of a minor recession and a significant year in financial policy? I don't know how much value there is in comparing individual years when what matters is the trendline as a whole, as this kind of data can be noisy on a year to year basis.

Well when I said source I meant a source for the fact that energy consumption is down, but doesn't matter now, I've found one.

Oh, my apologies. My mistake!

However, not only, it transpires, has energy consumption been flat since 2008, it was also flat (not even accounting for population) between 2000 and 2007/8, which is impossible to account for unless we accept that energy consumption is not a reliable indicator of prosperity from year to year. Over the long run of course more prosperity is usually accompanied by more energy consumption, but on a short-term basis it is evidently less than ideal as a measure.

I think there are two big countervailing factors here governing that period. The first is that a significant portion of energy was spent somewhere else during those years - something fairly important happened in 2001 and a lot of US energy consumption shifted overseas to places like Afghanistan and Iraq. I don't think overseas military activity is counted in a measure of domestic energy consumption, even though it obviously represents a significant investment of energy and fossil fuels. The second is that you're talking about the period largely recognised as the formation of the housing bubble. Speculative bubbles may indeed make economic numbers look a lot higher, but I don't think they're real productive activity in any way.

There are two things to add here. The first is the same point as above. It may indeed be that economic growth is no longer the best way to improve human happiness. However that is no reason to deny the fact that these are relatively good economic times now.

To use some statistics from April (I find no reason to believe that things have changed since)... https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/04/07/evaluations-of-the-economy-and-the-state-of-the-nation/

19% of Americans think that these are "good economic times". 46% of Americans think that the economy is getting worse not better, and 77% of them believe that the economy is unfairly arranged in order to benefit powerful interests. A majority of the population is concerned with the price of basic staple items and the cost of housing. If these are good economic times, why are they only perceived as such by a slim minority of people? My answer is that they're accurately perceiving the shifts in costs/income/value available to them - if you're in the 20 percent these are great times, if you're not then they really aren't.

The second is that I find this roundabout question-asking method of argumentation less than convincing; if you are going make a charge as serious as you do about economic statistics, I expect you to be able to point to where and how the statistics are being manipulated, or how they are wrong and misleading.

I expect you to be able to point to where and how the statistics are being manipulated, or how they are wrong and misleading.

Sure, but there's a big list. First of all - measures of inflation are altered and massaged in ways that make it less than accurate. This is done both for political messaging purposes and to keep inflation-indexed payments at a lower value. The second is that there's a lot of economic activity in the financial sector that doesn't actually relate to or account for any real tangible wealth creation - and in fact usually leads to wealth destruction and misallocation of capital. Third is that a lot of "economic activity" actually consists less of productive work and wealth generation than it does consumption - outsourcing and off-shoring included here. Someone who sells a productive asset (like a manufacturing base) to someone else (like China) would make economic indicators go up in several big ways in the short-term, but actually do so in ways that are negative for the economy from a longer-term outlook. Flooding the labour force with illegal immigrants saves costs in some ways and again artificially juices economic numbers, but a lot of the costs associated with them don't show up in easily measurable economic statistics.

Look at this way, how are your beliefs falsifiable? What evidence or statistics could I present that would make you change your mind? If the answer is nothing, then why shouldn't everyone just dismiss you as a hack?

There are absolutely statistics and evidence that would change my mind here, but they're going to be exceedingly annoying to find and generate. For my contention that inflation is understated, you'd have to go back over decades of economic data and re-calculate inflation measures using more accurate metrics. With regards to family formation, that's also falsifiable - if you can present a compelling and rigorous explanation for why people are no longer having children or forming families that doesn't involve economic concerns I'd absolutely admit to being wrong(but good luck making that case). For some of these claims I'm not sure exactly how you'd falsify them because the data you'd have to present is just totally at odds with the world we're living in - I will be extremely impressed if you can somehow demonstrate that selling the productive manufacturing base to China hasn't caused substantial problems for the US while the entire US government considers China to be their greatest current danger in no small part due to their incredible manufacturing capacity.

If you want to live like a 1960s American, with a 1960s standard of living, you absolutely can still do this with much greater ease. Go to a regional mid/small-sized city and you can live a lot better on one income than the vast majority in the 1960s could. The grain of truth in this characterisation is the rapid increase in housing costs, but if that's the problem, your quarrel is with NIMBY local and state politicians and the people to whom they pander, not Biden.

I don't think that's necessarily true. Take an American worker with no college degree and wage-based employment living in a mid-sized city and I think they're going to have a much harder time finding a job that pays enough to support a family in the same way that people in 1960s America could. I also think the phrase "1960s standard of living" also requires some interrogation, because while something like an internet connection very clearly isn't in the 1960s standard of living, it is also effectively a requirement to participate in polite society in the modern day given how closely tied it is to employment and government services etc. Somebody in the 1960s didn't have a smartphone but if you don't have even a shitty smartphone in the modern day you are just not employable in the wage economy.

As for Biden, I don't really have any problems with him per se - he's little more than an empty suit who is barely cognitively there at this point. He played a part in the economic reconfigurations which have caused so many issues, but I don't think he really makes any important decisions himself now. Sure he's nakedly corrupt and made vast amounts of money through influence-selling and corruption, but I don't think he had a particularly prominent or influential role during the time when the economy got hollowed out. I'm not sure you can even point to the direct decision-makers involved in a lot of these changes and I'm not suggesting a giant conspiracy either - a lot of the people involved in the process were taking steps which were exceedingly rational for them at the time. I don't blame a factory owner for outsourcing manufacturing when he faced with a choice between getting outcompeted by someone who did (and then going bankrupt) or making a gigantic temporary profit.

Whether people are happy is a different question than whether their purchasing power has gone up. It doesn't make sense to say that people's purchasing power has actually gone down because, even though it's gone up, they're actually less happy.

It's fine to say that there are more important things than the economy and that people's lives can be getting worse even if the economy is doing well, but that is not an argument that the economy is actually doing badly.

It's fine to say that there are more important things than the economy and that people's lives can be getting worse even if the economy is doing well, but that is not an argument that the economy is actually doing badly.

My perspective on this matter is that the purpose of the economy is to serve humans and make human life better, not the other way around. Assisting with family formation and human reproduction/flourishing is in fact one of the primary purposes of the economy, which is why the fact that it isn't actually doing that is important. To use a car metaphor, this would be a situation where the car's dashboard is reporting a speed of 80km\h while getting lapped by someone riding a skateboard - the car is very clearly not doing what it is supposed to even though the indicators say that everything is fine.

That's a great argument for saying that there is more to human happiness than the economy. It's not an argument that the economy is doing badly.

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