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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 think the heart of the complaints is best shown with this graph. CPI is up about 15% in the last roughly 2 years (Jan 2021 to the present) while Employment Cost Index for all workers is only up about 10% in the last two years. I think ECI is a better measure of most peoples actual wages, as it adjusts for changes in the composition of the labor force so it's a better measure of wages real households are getting from period to period without retraining.
Why would we want to adjust for that with ECI? Is workers retraining into better roles not part of an improving economy?
Because it provides relevant, if less flattering, data that provides a another framework for understanding views besides 'public discontent over the economy is a result of Republican lies.'
Given the failures of 'learn to code' neoliberalism that simultaneously had oversights in critical areas like regional disparate impacts, the emerging implications of AI technologies in many service/digital economic areas which might be more resilient to distance dynamics, American economic categorization that systemically ignores unemployed persons not actively seeking jobs, and the state of the American (re)education system given it's advancing degrees of political capture that have already affected various fields, whether American workers as a collective are actually retraining into better roles is entirely up for dispute.
It's not irrelevant, but if we want to assess how people are doing why would we ever use it instead of real wages?
We can avoid this whole question though if we just look at real wages. Which are currently rising.
Because there are many, many more things that are used to assess how people are doing besides real wages, particularly in the context of not-terribly-distant economic history which considerably disrupted things like savings, regional economic systems, physical and mental health, and that's not even touching ongoing macroeconomic challenges.
We could avoid a whole lot of questions if we ignored most things to focus on the favored economic statistics of the people who want to push a particular point.
This is not a particularly compelling reason to avoid questions, even if it would be much simpler to do so.
I was never suggesting that real wages are the only measure of a healthy society and contended citizenry. Only that it's superior than ECI is making the general assessment of whether Americans are doing better or worse than they were X months/years ago.
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