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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   24896 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 30, 2023

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On the use of anecdotes and “lived experiences” to contradict statistical data.

Say for the sake of argument that you’re arguing with a left-leaning individual (let’s call him “Ezra”) on the issue of police bias. You both agree the police has a least a little bit of bias when it deals with blacks, but you disagree on the root cause. Ezra contends this is due to structural racism, i.e. that laws are created in such a way such that blacks will always bear the brunt of their enforcement. He further contends that local police departments are often willing to hire white men with questionable backgrounds in terms of making racist remarks. This inherent racism exacerbates issues of uneven enforcement, and in the worst cases can lead to racist white police officers killing unarmed black men. While you agree that black men are arrested at disproportionate rates, you claim the reason for this is more simple. Black men get arrested for more crimes because… black men commit more crimes. You cite FBI crime statistics to back this up. In response, Ezra says that the FBI data you cited is nonsense that doesn’t match up with reality, but rather is cooked up by racist data officials putting their thumbs on the scales to justify the terrible actions of the criminal justice system on a nationwide basis. After all, Ezra knows quite a few black people himself, and none of them have committed any crimes! And while none of them have been arrested, a few of them have told him stories of run-ins with the police where they were practically treated as “guilty before proven innocent”. In short, Ezra’s lived experiences (along with those of people he knows) contradicts your data while buttressing his own arguments.

Do you think Ezra’s lived experiences are a valid rebuttal here?

Yesterday I made a post on the partisan differences in economic outlook. The three main points were that 1) the US economy is doing fairly well, 2) Republicans think the economy is doing absolutely terribly, much worse than Democrats think, and 3) that most of this perception difference is because Biden, a Democrat, currently occupies the White House. I initially thought I was going to get highly technical arguments quibbling over the exact measurement of data. Economic data is highly complex, and as such, reasonable people will always be able to disagree about precisely how to measure things like unemployment, GDP, inflation, etc. It’s not particularly hard to cherrypick a few reasonable-sound alternatives that would tilt measurements one way or the other. For instance, how much of housing costs should be calculated in the inflation of consumption prices? Rent can be seen as pretty much pure consumption, but homes that are purchased also have an investment aspect to them. As such, the current inflation calculations use “owners’ equivalent rent” to account for this. Most economists think this is overall the better way to calculate inflation on this particular measure, but again, reasonable people could disagree, and getting a few of them on record saying “the current measurements are faulty” is an easy way to throw doubt on data. While I did get a few of these types of comments (example 1 , example 2), they weren’t the majority of the responses by a long shot.

Instead I got plenty of arguments about “lived experiences” which people claimed as disproving the data I cited. These weren’t quite to the level of “Chicken costs $5 more at my local supermarket, therefore all economists are liars with fraudulent data”… but it wasn’t that far off.

Don’t believe me? Here’s 9 examples:

To be clear, a few of these above examples don’t say that their anecdotes prove economists are lying, and are instead using their personal experiences to say how economic conditions feel worse, although they were typically at least ambiguous on whether they trusted their own experiences over economic data at the national level. On the other hand, there were some who were quite unequivocal that economic data is fabricated in whole or in part since the things economists say don’t match with how the economy seems in their personal lives.

Going back to the example of bias in policing that I mentioned earlier, I’d say that the vast majority of people on this forum would say that you can’t really use “lived experiences” to contradict data. Anecdotes aren’t worthless, as they can give you insight into peoples’ perceptions, or how the consequences of data can be uneven and apply more to some locations than others. But at the end of the day, you can’t just handwave things like FBI crime statistics just because you know some people that contradict the data. As such, it feels like a rather blatant double standard to reject “lived experiences” when it comes to things like racism, only to turn around and accept them when it comes to the economy.

The cop-out argument from here is to point at the people preparing the data and say that they’re the ones at fault. The argument would go something like this: “My outgroup (the “elites”, the “leftists”, the “professional managerial class”, the “cathedral”, or whatever) are preparing most of the data. Data that disagrees with my worldview (like the current economic outlook) is wrong and cooked up by my outgroup to fraudulently lie to my face about reality. On the other hand, data that does agree with my worldview (like FBI crime statistics) is extra legitimate because my outgroup is probably still cooking the data, so the fact that it says what it does at all is crazy. If anything, the “real” data would probably be even more stark!”

This type of argument sounds a lot like the controversy around “unskewing” poll results. Back in 2012, Dean Chambers gathered a fairly substantial following on the Right by claiming polls showing Obama ahead were wrong due to liberal media bias. He posted “corrected” polls that almost monotonically showed Romney ahead. He would eventually get his comeuppance on election day when Obama won handily. A similar scenario played out in 2016 when many of the more left-leaning media establishment accused Nate Silver of “unskewing” poll results in favor of Trump. Reporters don’t typically have the statistical training to understand the intricacies of concepts like “correlated errors”, so all they saw was an election nerd trying to make headlines by scaring Democrats into thinking the election was closer than it really was. They too were eventually forced to eat their words when Trump won.

While issues of polling bias can be resolved by elections, the same can’t be said of bias in our examples of racism and the economy, at least not as cleanly. If someone wants to believe their anecdotes that disproportionate black arrests are entirely due to structural racism, they can just go on believing that for as long as they want. There’s no equivalent to an election-loss shock to force them to come to terms. The same is true of economic outlooks. Obviously this is shoddy thinking.

The better alternative is to use other economic data to make a point. If you think unemployment numbers don’t show the true extent of the problem, for instance, you can cite things like the prime age working ratio if you think people are discouraged from looking for work. Having tedious debates on the precise definitions of economic indicators is infinitely better than retreating to philosophical solipsism by claiming economic data is broadly illegitimate. Economic rates of change tend to be exponential year over year, so if large scale fraud is really happening then it’s hard to hide for very long. There would almost always be other data you can point to in order to make a case, even if it’s something as simple as using night light data to estimate economic output. Refusing to do even something like this is akin to sealing yourself in an unfalsifiable echo chamber where you have carte blanche to disregard anything that disagrees with your worldview.

both sides use anecdotal evidence when it suits their biases/beliefs and narrative. No one is ever unfailing consistent in their beliefs. But sorta in defense of erza, one can make an argument that the higher incidence of black crime relative to whites ignores crimes which have many victims relative to the number of perpetrators, like fraud. The collapse of FTX was perpetrated by a single white/jew and his handful of accomplices , yet had thousands of victims/claimants,. But this would be recorded as a single crime "wire fraud" in the stats, same as a black who steals a bike, but SBF stole the same as millions of bikes to the sum of $ 8 billion.

We know that the academic-government-NGO complex is cooking the scientific books in service of whatever the short-term political goal is for their class. COVID proved this beyond a shadow of any doubt, and in short enough timespans for a lot of people to notice. This may not matter much for most of the hard science that is not politically salient, but it matters a lot for "science" that is directly impacting public policy. Economics as a profession has always had this weakness.

You seem pretty big mad that a few of us are not gonna roll over for Euler anymore. Institutional trust is a thing, and it is a thing that has been entirely destroyed. If your "experts" and their fan club want to be taken seriously, they need to clean house. People who abuse positions of trust and authority to promote false science to the public need to be publicly punished, those who enabled and repeated the lies need to be publicly punished, and the entire superstructure needs to be completely re-oriented to avoid such obvious bullshit in the future.

If you start now, you might get back to the position of trust in fifty years or so. Until then, your data is meaningless, your appeals to authority hollow. It could be correct in any specific instance, to be clear. But it can't be trusted, because it's being produced by partisan hacks who will lie their heads off for any or no reason at all. None of us have the time to investigate every paper to see if it's hogwash or not.

So you can stop appealing to that particular naked monarch. If you want to be able to appeal to "science", you best start with making the science trustworthy.

I'll wait.

They too were eventually forced to eat their words when Trump won.

Sam Wang, probably the most prominent "Nate Silver is over-correcting and Hilary has it in the bag" pollster didn't just have to eat his words - he had to eat a bug on live TV.

This rather puts in perspective the endless mockery that both ordinary people and the mainstream media get here; turns out all the Very Smart People here are just as capable of pulling mid-afternoon Fox News level arguments out of their other cheeks as anyone else. 'Inflation is coming down? Tell that to my local chicken prices'.

As ever, Lord Kelvin's words bear remembering - if you cannot measure it, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind. If you're going to rubbish one set of statistics, you really must have an alternative better than your own reckonings and guesses.

Do you think Ezra’s lived experiences are a valid rebuttal here?

The description you give of Ezra's beliefs is long, but the only part of what you described that actually is a lived experience amounts to "there are innocent black people and they are mistreated by police". To which I'd say, sure, there are innocent black people and they are mistreated by police. Any conclusion about how the police mistreat black people preferentially isn't coming from that lived experience. I'd conclude that the police probably mistreat everyone in that city.

To me it's obvious that if "vibes" and official inflation measures disagree significantly, the official inflation measures are broken and don't measure what's actually relevant to people. Housing prices are more important to most people by a massive margin than the price of cheap consumer crap from China. The second artificially pushes down inflation measures while having ultimately very little effect on quality of life.

For quite a few years I've thought that an inflation measure that better matches peoples' lived experience could be built on just two things: Housing prices in the parts of the country that get the top 30% population growth and the price of a cup of coffee. The first is a fairly good measure of the parts of country that actually matter (what the inflation is in some place that'll be half empty in 20 years is largely irrelevant) and that will be even more relevant in the future. The second captures "opportunistic inflation" that measures price pressure for consumer visible businesses (the ones driving inflation) and is immediately felt by ordinary people.

Housing prices in the parts of the country that get the top 30% population growth

Ft worth, Phoenix and San Antonio are not known for having expensive housing. Or if you look at it by metro area rather than city, neither are Dallas, Houston or The Villages (FL).

https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2023/subcounty-metro-micro-estimates.html

Pop growth is disproportionately in areas that allow houses to be built, for fairly mechanical reasons.

Housing prices are more important to most people by a massive margin than the price of cheap consumer crap from China.

This is a common talking point, but the CPI reflects that. Shelter is weighted at about 35%, "recreational commodities" at about 2.2%, plus 0.87% for "Education and communication commodities" (which includes cellphones and computers).

This is a common talking point, but the CPI reflects that. Shelter is weighted at about 35%

And how do they determine it?

And how do they determine it?

Partly from actual rent, largely from something called "Owners Equivalent Rent" which may involve voodoo.

Bingo, and that is 30%.

Which still says nothing about cheap consumer crap from China. Rent is up about 28% from the start of the Biden administration, OER only 18%, but just because I call OER "voodoo" doesn't mean it's actually wrong.

Are those good weights? Do those match the actual spending or preferences of the people whose "vibes" we are deriding?

35% is much larger than 3.07% (by a margin of 11.4:1), which is sufficient to defeat the implicit claim that the "the official inflation measures are broken" because they don't reflect that "Housing prices are more important to most people by a massive margin than the price of cheap consumer crap from China." They do in fact reflect that.

Note "parts of the country that get the top 30% population growth" which is the key. This measures the inflation for new adults who are moving on their own and starting families which is the segment that matters much more than pensioners who have already paid off their houses or living in areas that will have few people in 20 years. It addresses the very common complaint that the wages are no longer enough to buy a reasonable house / apartment even though the official inflation says everything is perfectly fine.

It is one of the few significant parts where the cost is largely determined by policy (ie. city planning, building permits and, if necessary, public projects).

I don't think that would get you the results you expect

https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2023/subcounty-metro-micro-estimates.html

And of course declaring that one particular generation is the only one which matters is not going to be particularly convincing to most.

Oh boy...

To try and defend the vibecession a bit: we can bemoan the prevalence of vibes over data for the next three Presidential terms, but I think we have to accept that vibes simply rule the day, and perhaps they always have. Pinker jinxed the world, entropy only ever increases over time, etc. Right now, it does feel like things are getting worse and the world as we know it is perched on a cliff looking over one long fall, and every other day, we can hear the little tink-tink of tiny pieces of rock breaking off of the cliff face underneath us and falling into the abyss.

If anything, I think waving the data as a weapon might only entrench the vibes. Everything looks good, which can only mean that things are about to get bad if they aren't already. An example, for the sake of narrative: everything was probably all peachy-keen and boring on the morning of September 11th, 2001. President Bush was reading to schoolkids. People were at work like any other day. If you'd tried to tell people on that morning, or the day before, that 9/11/2001 would be the harbinger of decades of death and ruin for many, they'd have probably walked away, muttering under their breath about how you should be in the loony house.

Even now, there are two newsworthy wars happening right now, and multiple other, lesser-known conflicts (as documented in the excellent Transnational Thursdays threads), with any single one carrying the tiny potential to spill over into something greater. So far, we've dodged the bullet of WW3 starting, but being lucky is not a vindication of rationalism.

Sure, maybe it's all purely psychology, and you can't reason the sheeple out of a perception they never reasoned themselves into, but again, entropy (i.e. chaos) always increases over time, and betting that things will get worse is probably a safer investment than actual financial instruments right now.

The vibe-cession is real and the statistics are lying.

The true working class is those in their 20s and 30s, and they don't have houses. They are the ones complaining. Those in their 20-30s are the vibes. This has always been true. When people complain about the plight of an era, they are talking about those who are trying to setup the foundations for life as an adult. Not those who have been at it for decades.

First, Post-covid inflation and job growth were localized phenomenon. Housing prices are down in downtown-cores and rural areas. But, there are no jobs in rural areas and downtown cores are zombie-towns no one wants to live in. Elsewhere, Housing shot up in 50-100% over covid and it never came down. So even if average salaries have gone up and average inflation has stayed within range....... the localized inflation & job growth taken together might not paint as rosy of a picture. (as an aside, If I had sudden windfall, I would spend some time doing pro-bono work on improving economic metrics. How is economics stuck with such crude metrics in 2023)

Second, a bonus is a bonus and a promotion is a promotion. That's not supposed to be natural wage growth. (or so people think). In the run-up to Covid, a lot of people were getting huge bonuses and promos. This led to people thinking they have worked themselves out of the middle class. So, they spent like it, they lived like it and the ensuing whiplash was huge. The people who got swift career growth in the late 2010s, are now realizing that all those gains have been for naught. At the same time, they are stuck with higher responsibilities and the insane hours that come with the promise of a promotion or a bonus. Now yes, their wages have kept up with inflation, so things look all good. But, to them, it feels like they had been cheated out of a better life.

Even the big-mac index becomes a bad measure when 70s McDonalds is unrecognizable from the disgusting place that it has become today. Portion sizes are smaller, fast food tastes a lot worse and everyone working there sounds so much more miserable. Inflation measured in isolation tells you nothing about the ground reality. It's like statistics that go : "The average American is a millionaire".

The average American is a millionaire, but 57% have less than $1,000 in a Savings account.

Lies, damn lies, and statistics.

To further lend support for a vibes based argument...

Times of plenty are over. For people, for businesses, for nations, on all levels, people are switching to a scarcity mindset. No amount of data is going to change this. Inflation is squeezing people, even if their income has kept up, of which I'm highly skeptical. Businesses are experiencing a massive credit crunch with rates going up as high, as quickly, as they have. And nations are sweating constant supply chain ripples that still haven't stopped in the aftermath of COVID. Factory shut downs gave way to trade wars and hot wars. It feels like everything is coming apart at the seams on all levels, which is going to motivate agents at all levels of society to make decisions that cause the seams to come apart faster. I'm fearful every day the other shoe will finally drop with Taiwan.

Chaos and destabilization rule the day. People aren't just looking at their quality of life now, which has likely gotten measurably worse, but can feel the vibe that nobody is making any actual headway in making tomorrow better.

I think maybe I didn't get my point across very well, I wasn't trying to argue that the numbers were fake but to try to explain why people feel the way they do about the economy despite the numbers.

Anyway, when it comes to lived experience I think it's a perfectly fine way to form opinions about the world but it's not something you should expect strangers to find convincing. If it's something I personally have experienced or someone that I know and trust then I will weigh that heavily when forming my opinion. If it's a celebrity or some rando on reddit then I don't care. So for me I consider the FBI crime statistics reliable (the criterion of embarrassment suggests it's probably true), I consider my lived experience of living in a high crime neighborhood reliable and I don't care about Ezra's lived experience at all. In exchange I don't expect him to care about my lived experience either.

I took Economy 101 and the measure of inflation seemed like it was basically made-up. One could argue that the average modern poor person in a Western country is immensely wealthier than one 400 years ago due to great technological developments but 400 years ago every single food item was fully organic, non-GMO, non-processed, free of microplastics (perhaps including different types of pollutants)... A physician at the time probably had a live-in cook and nanny to handle all the domestic work. A lot of that work has been automated but you still see billionaires pushing buttons to call elevators for some reason.

Even if you go back a couple years. Somebody who graduated in 2020 probably paid roughly the same price as somebody who has yet to graduate and spent perhaps a full year of watching essentially youtube videos and being forced to wear a muzzle and other humiliating rituals.

Entertainment is cheaper? Are the 2020s versions of Lord of the Rings equivalent to the 2000s? Are the 2010-20s versions of Star Wars equivalent to the previous ones?

Does $1 million spent in real estate in SF or NYC give you the same quality of life than 20 years ago?

Uh, 400 years ago we were subsistence farmers. Which famously leads to malnutrition and stunted growth, as we can see with height rising in europe over the last centuries. People raised on non-organic lentils and meat are mostly substantially healthier than farmers who ate organic nongmo grain.

Entertainment is cheaper? Are the 2020s versions of Lord of the Rings equivalent to the 2000s? Are the 2010-20s versions of Star Wars equivalent to the previous ones?

Star Wars and LOTR are still available, and in fact cheaper. And we have anime now!

Does $1 million spent in real estate in SF or NYC give you the same quality of life than 20 years ago?

Yes which is bad but that has a specific identifiable cause (pervasive land use restrictions) rather than the economy being bad.

People raised on non-organic lentils and meat are mostly substantially healthier than farmers who ate organic nongmo grain.

Who is that? The average Westerner eats processed food and micro-plastics, and drinks artificial hormones and corn syrup. European farmers were not vegans, idk where you got this idea from.

Star Wars and LOTR are still available, and in fact cheaper. And we have anime now!

Avatar the last airbender came out in the 2000s, I'm not aware of any other successful Western-made anime. If anything the new Pixar and Disney cartoons are worse than the past ones.

Does $1 million spent in real estate in SF or NYC give you the same quality of life than 20 years ago? Yes which is bad but that has a specific identifiable cause (pervasive land use restrictions) rather than the economy being bad.

The mayor of NYC blames it on immigration. City-dwellers need to learn to tackle their crime problem before they preach to others about increasing population density.

European farmers were not vegans, idk where you got this idea from.

Vegan? I said their diets relied on grain, and that they had many more health problems than modern people, as demonstrated by lower heights caused by stunted growth.

The US doesn't make anime, but USians watch anime, so they aren't poorer by your standard. I don't like the current state of western media, but that's not super relevant to the point.

The mayor of NYC blames it on immigration

Yeah, he's wrong, Eric Adams is twitter famous for saying a ton of funny contradictory incoherent things.

as demonstrated by lower heights caused by stunted growth.

What evidence do you have this was caused by malnutrition? I haven't taken a direct look at the skeletal remains, but royal beds were tiny by our standards. And I don't know if they meant it to be accurate, but some museums I visited opted to portray the richest men at the time as pretty short as well.

It's the scientific consensus? This is a review on the topic.

In regard to your specific objection, a recent study found that those in higher social classes were taller: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8516076/

It's the scientific consensus?

So?

In regard to your specific objection, a recent study found that those in higher social classes were taller: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8516076/

There's a trend there, but not as massive as you're implying. The gentry is about the same height as the wealthier craftsmen. Also, what you said sounded like the difference in height between people now and then comes to malnutrition, and to my knowledge that simply cannot by supported. The aristocrats wouldn't be just a few centimeters above average, if that was the case, they would be towering giants.

It's the scientific consensus? So?

The (very broad) review I linked itself links to other reviews that go into the evidence for why nutrition was a component.

The gentry is about the same height as the wealthier craftsmen. Also, what you said sounded like the difference in height between people now and then comes to malnutrition, and to my knowledge that simply cannot by supported. The aristocrats wouldn't be just a few centimeters above average, if that was the case, they would be towering giants.

I imagine it saturates, you can't become a giant today by eating 4kcal/day. And I think some of the growth stunting was caused by disease.

More comments

A physician was able to have a live-in cook and nanny because things were bad for cooks and nannies, not because things were good for physicians. It's like saying "150 years ago a physician was able to keep a slave. Quality of life has gone down for physicians", except less extreme.

Are the living conditions of the lower-class absolutely worse than a couple centuries back?

A physician was able to have a live-in cook and nanny because things were bad for cooks and nannies, not because things were good for physicians.

Is it worse to live in a comfortable household working for smart people than working a Walmart job (or several) you have to drive to, pay rent, pay medical bills, etc...?

Out of all the jobs one could do in the 18th or 19th century, working for physicians was probably not among the worst.

On one hand working conditions have greatly improved in many ways, with fatalities going down (at least in the West, while importing from dangerous facilities still operating elsewhere). On the other hand it seems that the general quality of many things that matter to the human experience has degraded.

Is it better for a black man to work hard in a field for a white master, who provides food, shelter and medical care, sometimes even education, or to be nominally free in a society where the food, shelter, medical care and education are still largely organized and provided by white people, but with no meaningful work, structure or community to speak of?

Is it worse to die under the lashes of an abusive master or "in mutual combat" with another "free" black man?

I'd be curious to see the rate of violent death of young black men then vs now.

I would wager that the under-class of a 100-years ago was somewhat more literate than the current one, and perhaps better-mannered. At least I'd imagine the ones that did have access to education ended up more literate than now that education is ubiquitous. I believe religion and family were more important, terrible life choices were possible and had direr consequences than now, but were actively discouraged, rather than incentivized, by society.

The most conservative Amish seem to be technologically-backward, and I don't know what economists would say about their economy, but they seem to live peaceful, well-organized, productive lives with tight-knit communities able to lift up their members in times of weakness.

Collectively, American society does extend a helping hand through government programs, churches, charities, technological innovations, but it's still hard for those who suffer of obesity, broken families, lack of meaningful employment, lack of adequate medical care, drug use, to be told that 'everything is fine, no, better than ever'.

Is it worse to die under the lashes of an abusive master or "in mutual combat" with another "free" black man?

The abusive master is far worse. Being enslaved sucks donkey balls. Fuck slavers; that dude in the ghetto is at least nominally free, he's not liable to get bought and sold like a fucking cow, and he has at least nominal rights. He may be killed by cops or something, but even if he gets murdered by really goddamn bad cops they have to at least half ass hiding the body. And this is being rather uncharitable about our hero's rights.

Being enslaved sucks donkey balls.

While the idea of freedom is an interesting one, I do not believe that there is anybody free of any master. One can only hope for a gentle master.

Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light...

Fuck slavers; that dude in the ghetto is at least nominally free, he's not liable to get bought and sold like a fucking cow, and he has at least nominal rights.

If it's not a literal slave to a planter, he probably is beholden to some type of landlord. Anybody living on welfare is at the mercy of some policymakers changing eligibility rules or other people's money drying up. He's also a slave to his passions (sin).

I suppose it's a matter of degree, but at least in the 'hood you're not being treated like literal livestock. Tyrone is free to walk out of the hood and go where he likes; if he wants to go to a new city, nobody will be hunting him down with bloodhounds and mutilating or killing him if they catch him.

A physician at the time probably had a live-in cook and nanny to handle all the domestic work.

...which means there was a large impoverished underclass whose best option was to serve said physicians. But our very lowest today are in such massively greater material conditions that perhaps a physician could afford one or two, but that would wreck their finances.

Not having a significant portion of society in such great poverty that they would gladly live in my spare room and be my servant for a small portion of my disposable income is probably a good thing.

fully organic, non-GMO

Good things those are all nonsensical to worry about eh?

A physician at the time probably had a live-in cook and nanny to handle all the domestic work.

Well this physician has all of those, not that I'm in the West. Might not be feasible on a UK salary, but if an American doctor cared, they could afford the same too. Especially if they're a double income couple.

A lot of that work has been automated but you still see billionaires pushing buttons to call elevators for some reason.

Presumably because it's an utterly trivial inconvenience? Mechanical lifts were likely far harder to operate safely back then. It's not like it even saves them much in the way of time to tell someone where they're going versus pressing a single button..

Entertainment is cheaper? Are the 2020s versions of Lord of the Rings equivalent to the 2000s? Are the 2010-20s versions of Star Wars equivalent to the previous ones?

I suppose it's really nice that we have access to both eh? Anyone not enamoured by the current Star Wars soyslop can watch the older movies too, and cheaply.

The amount of media available for consumption only tends to increase, and faster than you can watch it all.

Well this physician has all of those, not that I'm in the West. Might not be feasible on a UK salary, but if an American doctor cared, they could afford the same too. Especially if they're a double income couple.

You have a live in cook and nanny? What are you paying them, in comparison to your salary?

Well, my parents are doctors who are quite well advanced in their careers.

I think it would be possible for me to hire one personally for about 50 to 100 dollars a month assuming you want them full time. In comparison, my salary is about 600 dollars a month. I haven't checked the latest currency conversion rates, but that's a fair place to peg it.

With double salaries, it becomes significantly easier, not that I particularly prioritize it. Labor is cheap in most of the third world.

I suppose it's really nice that we have access to both eh? Anyone not enamoured by the current Star Wars soyslop can watch the older movies too, and cheaply.

No they can't. Last I checked, there is not a single available legal source for the original films. In fact, they keep getting remastered even harder unannounced as time goes on.

We're also rapidly moving into an era where physical releases are no longer being considered, and streaming services regularly take down even their own original content, or edit it after the fact such that the original version can never be viewed again.

The long term goal is clear. The bean counters are slathering at the fact that you'll have to pay a monthly for your entertainment, locked in an ever present cycle of consooming. And the thought controllers are excited that you'll be forced to be exposed to their demoralization propaganda because nothing else will be available.

I know it's not legal, but you should just download the Harmy's Star Wars Despecialized Edition. I'm so glad I did.

At some point I acquired a fan edit of the original trilogy that attempted to combined the highest fidelity sources available of the original version. I know there are a ton, and I honestly can't tell you which one I got. But I can confirm I've watched it several times and no longer feel gaslit about how I remember the movie looking and feeling.

consooming

If I parse your post as you seem to have meant it, watching original Star Wars movies is just consuming, but watching reedited ones is "consooming". Could you clarify exactly what the distinction is between consuming and consooming?

Oh, clearly I consume the things I like, and you consoom the things you like because you suck.

I'm kidding, that's a really good question. To me, there is almost a level of abuse in the average consoomer relationship. Publishers almost treat them like paypigs. Just actively shit all over them, to see how much they can get away with. Kill off their favorite characters, utterly humiliate their demographic repeatedly, all while preaching that it's important to show everybody (except you) being heroic, moral and capable.

There is an element of disposability to it all. The whole meme, near as I know, spawned from a Red Letter Media line like "Don't ask questions. Just consume product, and then get excited for next product".. The full parody video is also worth a watch. Timeless classic IMHO. Consoom RLM, ahem what?

But it's just this endless spigot of low quality, disposable, formulaic entertainment products. You aren't meant to rewatch, there is barely time, the next thing is already on the way. We went from an MCU with 6 movies in 5 years for phase 1, 6 movies in 3 years for phase 2, 11 movies in 3 years for phase 3, to a quantity of films and tv shows on such a compressed timescale it's taking me actual work to add it all up. 9 movies in 2 years, plus 8 6-9 episode tv series?! Jesus fucking christ. It's almost threatening. Like, you enjoyed this franchise. You want to be in the cool kids club and not miss out on current thing. But instead of abusing 2 hours of your time a year, they are abusing probably closer to 100 hours of your time! And it went from the price of a movie ticket to 4 movie tickets and 12 months of an online subscription service!

Maybe it's all a false distinction. Maybe I'm consooming just as much when I rewatch my hard copy of Lord of Illusions every year around Halloween, or National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation during the holidays. Maybe my sense of cultural continuity, enjoying the same "classic" films my father enjoyed, and exposing them to my children as well, is a thin veneer over generational consooming. Maybe reading the original Dune every few years, and finding new things to appreciate isn't any less consooming than picking up the latest Dune novel and giving it a go.

Oh god I think I threw up in my mouth a little bit.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I feel in my bones there is a qualitative and quantitative difference between consuming and consooming. Maybe phase 1 of the MCU was consumption. Maybe it was on the line of consooming. We're so far past that now in phase 5?!, there is only consoom.

I'd say the difference is personal, not in the product personally. You don't have to watch all the Marvel content. you can watch all of it if you like, or none of it if you like. You can watch the stuff that has your favourite characters and ignore the rest if you like.

I'd personally say the "consoom" prototypical example is from the 80s. Pretty much every Saturday morning kids cartoon was there to sell toys. Transformers, Action Force (or G.I. Joe), Visionaries, He-Man, Care-Bears, MASK, Rainbow Brite, My Little Pony, Thundercats, Gobots, Centurions and probably more. Compared to the shows I watched in the 70s they were much more product focussed I think. To the extent in Transformers that except the main characters, most of the side characters would be left blank in the story until they knew which toy was being sold that they needed to insert. Watch show, pester parents to buy toy, and repeat with the next new show and toy.

Though of course the Hot Wheels cartoon was in 69, so all of those were just building off that.

You can watch the stuff that has your favourite characters and ignore the rest if you like.

Possible, but politically unsound.

Is it? I admit I have not noticed that. No-one seemed to care when my answer of "Have I seen the new Antman movie? was Nah, I might catch it on streaming if I have a couple of hours when I am bored one day. Or when I hadn't watched Ms Marvel as I didn't really care about her as a character.

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There's a phenomenon where a show is created to sell toys but the writers have free reign to do what they want as long as the toys are included in the show. That has resulted in a lot of good children's programming despite the intent being to sell toys.

I'd also point out that it just isn't true that all Marvel movies do well. If some Marvel movies are good, some are bad, and the audience is able to tell the difference and stays away from Eternals, can you really call it consooming?

And I'm skeptical that Han Didn't Shoot First counts as consooming. It wasn't Disney that originally made that change--it was Lucas. Lucas is the creator (or at least a major creator) of Star Wars, and he didn't change the scene to sell more product, he changed the scene because that was his idea, as the creator, for what the scene should be like.

If some Marvel movies are good, some are bad, and the audience is able to tell the difference and stays away from Eternals, can you really call it consooming?

Personally I thought Eternals was a good movie, better than quite a lot of their other offerings, but there we go. I am not sure the product being good insulates it from the claim in any case. Even if I really liked MASK, it seems a pretty good example of consumer culture. It was created specifically to get us to consume more, and not just to see more of the show itself.

Yeah revisions to Star Wars are their own trope, literally - George Lucas Altered Version in this case. He seems to see revising his movies as technology improves to simply be bringing them closer to his vision. He even did it to American Graffiti and THX 1138, which I don't think are great examples of consumerism.

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Reporters don’t typically have the statistical training to understand the intricacies of concepts like “correlated errors”, so all they saw was an election nerd trying to make headlines by scaring Democrats into thinking the election was closer than it really was. They too were eventually forced to eat their words when Trump won.

I mostly remember them doubling down and implying that Silver was somehow super-extra-wrong and had lost credibility by saying Trump had only a 30% chance... never mind that most other pollsters were much further off (many had it more like 1%) and didn't get the same treatment.

Everyone who estimated trump's chance of winning as being above 0% chance, was right. Things with a 30% chance of happening, or a 1% chance of happening, still happen. Nate Silver and all the other pollsters would only have gotten their comeuppance if Harrison Ford had won.

I mean, there's tricky questions (both practical and philosophical) about what probability statements even mean when we're talking about singular events. But that doesn't change the fact that (a) they do sometimes help us make useful predictions, at least in the aggregate, and (b) there's a tolerably clear sense in which Silver was less wrong than someone who had Trump at 1%.

Yeah, when everyone is claiming up to election day that Trump has no chance, and he says, "no, Trump Is Just A Normal Polling Error Behind Clinton,", and then that exact thing happened, people should not be dumping on him.

Agreed, while Nate Silver wasn't a great pundit in 2016 especially during the primary, his model was better than basically anything else with a track record.

Silver had Trump much lower throughout the election and only rated Trump higher at the last moment. It's only in the retroactive history-making that he chose to portray himself as being mostly right in hindsight. But for months leading up to the election Silver and his cohort spent a lot of time explaining how Trump had no shot whatsoever.

Based on the information available at the time, that was a reasonable claim. Trump was a highly unconventional and unpopular candidate, running against an incumbent party at a time of (relative) peace and economic stability. Silver always says, that his analyses that are 3/6/12/18 months before the election, that those analyses assume a next-day election, that he doesn't price in the chance of poll numbers changing or events occurring over the remaining time - because that IS pure punditry. Some people did, of course, anticipate the convergence in poll numbers over 2016 - but what evidence was that based on? Nothing but the same old 'vibes'.

Silver got it wrong, everybody got it wrong, the polls were wrong in 2016, but ever since there's been this contrarian strain of the discourse that wants to argue that the polls were right, or whatever. Look at some of the state polling, which was wildly wrong, in some of the swing states by 10 points or more. (Similar happened in a few of the Democratic primary states Bernie was not expected to win.) In fairness, I seem to remember Silver owning up to being partially-wrong and attempting to explain why. But it doesn't mean he was right.

I guess you can argue that polling is same-day or whatever, but if polling experts all say the same thing for six months and then at the end still don't predict the correct outcome, then what value is polling? What, Silver gave Trump 30% at the last possible moment, therefore he was "reasonable"? That's all unfalsifiable augury, because as long as there's any >0% odds of an outcome Silver """predicted""" it. It's not any different from what you dismiss as "vibes".

The polls were also wrong in 2012. In fact, the error was larger in 2012, it just didn't end up changing the result.

The point is not that the polls were right. The point is that if you want to know how people are going to vote in November of 2016, there's only so much you can determine by asking them in February of 2016. There's a limit to what polling can determine, to how accurate polls can be, and that accuracy will be better the day before the election rather than six months before. As to what the point of this kind of polling is - if you're reading it, it's for you. It fills newspapers and websites, which can then sell ads. The quality of such polls is not great - after all, you're getting it for free. There's good polling out there, but it's not being used to fill space between ads, people pay money for it so they can use it to guide campaign strategy, marketing decisions, etc.

Yes, it is in fact, very reasonable to say that there isn't enough evidence to commit to one side or another.

That's all unfalsifiable augury, because as long as there's any >0% odds of an outcome Silver """predicted""" it.

No offense, but if you don't understand statistics and probability, maybe you really shouldn't be reading Nate Silver. Statistics by it's own nature cannot give certain predictions of the future.

it was a hands-off model once initiated, what are you talking about? Yes his punditry (like every other left-of-center media person) was awfully miscalibrated during the primary. but the model only rated Trump higher at the last moment because a combination of factors led to a sizable poll bump in the final two weeks prior to the election

First just want to say that you should really tag people with @ when you talk about them. It's not nice to mention people without letting them know.

Second, I want to talk about what I think may be part of the core issue. @Glassnoser just informed me via a comment that it's unskilled wages that seem to be going up, whereas skilled workers pay has been constant for this period of economic growth. So if the core claim is that the economy is doing better than ever because unskilled workers wages are going up to match inflation, then of course people will complain about it here. I'd venture to bet that most people here are in the skilled category.

Furthermore, if I'm not mistaken, this whole thing with unskilled wages rising faster than skilled is rather strange. I'd say it's unprecedented, but I don't know that for a fact. Generally in my life I've expected to see, and I think I've seen, skilled workers being the primary recipient of most economic growth. So for people to say that this is completely normal seems to me to be disingenuous. Maybe it's entirely fine, the economy is great, and there's no smoking gun problem. But at least this is unexpected, and therefore unsettling, and people should acknowledge that instead of just saying "what are your talking about? everything is completed normal"

So for people to say that this is completely normal seems to me to be disingenuous.

Skills are valuable when they're in short supply. When everyone is getting a college degree and a white-collar job, there is no scarcity, so the pay is commensurate with the market value (remember all the lectures about why the minimum wage is a bad idea and if your job only pays you $8/hour, then that's all your labour is worth?) That applies just as much to the people who were saying about others that they are only worth $8 not $12 minimum wage which is why they'll be replaced by immigrants who will work for that lower rate.

If you can't get enough construction workers to work on the building projects for new housing, offices, manufacturing plants and so on, then wages are going to rise there. If you need someone to work in a care home taking care of the elderly, wages will rise there if you can't get enough cheap labour to fill the jobs. Maybe eventually there will be brick laying robots and ass-wiping robots, but not right now.

Right now, it's looking like it'll be easier to replace the 'skilled' (or at least some of them) with AI than to replace the 'unskilled' service and manual labour jobs. Trust the market, yes? The market sets the value, the market is nearly always right! (or so I keep getting told in these economics posts) 😀

But I think my point still stands, of whether or not we've ever seen something like this happen before, at least in our lifetimes. That skilled labor may be the ones that are getting replaced, and unskilled labor is not. It's not like people going to college and trying to earn more than unskilled labor is some kind of new phenomenon. So if people are panicking, it's seems to me because this is something that we haven't seen before, and it's unprecedented. So it's not right to just wave away the concerns with "the statistics show everything's fine, so you must be an anti-intellectual who hates statistics and believes whatever you want regardless of the numbers". Maybe the statistics that are being cited in this thread aren't capturing exactly why this situation is different.

And is that even the case that coders and other skilled labor is being replaced? I know everyone expects chat GPT to do that, but it certainly is not doing it yet, not en masse. So where is all this replacement of skilled labor coming from, driving down the cost of skilled labor?

I'm more amused that the same kind of people who were quite happy that all was right with the world and the market was working as intended, when blue-collar labour was losing out to outsourcing, because hey the economy is booming! you can buy cheap smartphones!, are now losing their minds when it's their turn for the chopping block.

Innovation, progress, the march of science, technology makes life better, dude! Nobody wrote a guarantee that a college degree was going to be the ticket to riches for ever and ever, amen. If miners and the rest of the 'unskilled'/semi-skilled were supposed to suck it up and learn to do jobs that were in demand, then the same applies even harder for the skilled/educated. After all, they're so creative and productive and wealth-producing, right? That's why they made the big bucks. Now Fortune's wheel has turned in its inexorable rotation, and suddenly they're the ones panicking?

If manual labour is now more valuable than skilled labour, then perhaps - just perhaps - the value they earned was not down to them being superior in brains and work ethic and willingness to do what it takes, but just that they had the particular knack for what was in short supply at the time. Now, for whatever reason, a different requirement is in short supply, and hence valuable, and they don't have that knack.

I'm more amused that the same kind of people who were quite happy that all was right with the world and the market was working as intended, when blue-collar labour was losing out to outsourcing, because hey the economy is booming! you can buy cheap smartphones!, are now losing their minds when it's their turn for the chopping block.

That's one hypothesis. But I'm reminded of Heath Ledger's Joker's speech:

Nobody panics when things go "according to plan." Even if the plan is horrifying! If, tomorrow, I tell the press that, like, a gang banger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics, because it's all "part of the plan". But when I say that one little old mayor will die, well then everyone loses their minds.

It's "part of the plan" that the unskilled workers will be having a tougher time. They are less skilled after all. They worked less to get there, and therefore everyone expects them to face more difficulties. When the skilled laborers face this, it might be an indication that there's some deeper or new problem. At the very least, it's not what's expected, and therefore can cause people to seriously freak out.

If manual labour is now more valuable than skilled labour, then perhaps - just perhaps - the value they earned was not down to them being superior in brains and work ethic and willingness to do what it takes, but just that they had the particular knack for what was in short supply at the time. Now, for whatever reason, a different requirement is in short supply, and hence valuable, and they don't have that knack.

That's one hypothesis. Another would be that they have the aptitude to learn many things, and the specifically trained in one skill set for many years, applying their aptitude towards what they were told would be the most lucrative. And they spent many many years and resources on doing that. And now they feel like they've been promised something in exchange for that, and they're not getting it. They're upholding their end of the bargain, and the world failed them.

I'm wondering if, in the post-AI future, the generations after us will look back at the assumption that the "skilled workers" (who may or may not be the PMC) were just plain obviously superior to the unskilled the way we look at past generations' beliefs that aristocrats just were plain obviously superior to the common folk. Being the son of a gentleman and a gentleman yourself meant you were better than the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker. You just were because of your blue blood and so forth. There was a whole slew of assumptions going along with your status as a noble or a gentleman about your innate superiority to the common herd, and naturally nobody had to provide evidence that this was so because well, everyone just knows that the viscount/skilled coder is better than the commoner/plumber, don't they?

Post-AI when you don't need any skill higher than "push the button", will our descendants think we were just worshipping a social idol?

First just want to say that you should really tag people with @ when you talk about them. It's not nice to mention people without letting them know.

Perhaps I should have, but on the other hand that might have seemed unnecessarily antagonistic, like I was specifically calling them out. My point wasn't really to target any individual, but rather to take stock of a broader phenomenon. I was debating whether to include peoples' names at all. I probably should have gone one or the other.

Also, I'm pretty sure Reddit prevents notifications if you ping more than 3 people and am not sure if that carried over to this site.

Maybe it's entirely fine, the economy is great, and there's no smoking gun problem. But at least this is unexpected, and therefore unsettling, and people should acknowledge that instead of just saying "what are your talking about? everything is completed normal"

I don't know of basically any economist who said "everything is fine" when there was 9% inflation going on, let alone that it was a broad consensus like you're implying here. At most there were people saying it would be more transitory than it was, or people predicting before it started that it wouldn't go that high. Krugman was probably the most notable individual saying it wouldn't get that bad, but he had a mea culpa when it did.

I don't know of basically any economist who said "everything is fine" when there was 9% inflation going on, let alone that it was a broad consensus like you're implying here.

I'm referring to several people from the thread yesterday who were indicating that the economy has been doing better than ever, since the inflation has reduced and wages are up, and unemployment is down.

I think part of the problem is that people have short memories when it comes to the economy, and tend to look at the past with rose-colored glasses. Younger people, meanwhile, have no recollection of being adults during a real economic downturn. People don't remember that if you were a young college graduate from about 2009 to 2012 it was very difficult to find a normal desk job unless you majored in engineering or computer science, and even then the market wasn't exactly gangbusters. Now companies are bitching about how they can't find enough employees. Hell, even the steel mills in the Mon Valley are accepting open applications from people off the street with no experience, a situation which was unthinkable since at least the mid-'70s.

About a week ago a guy I drink with on occasion was lamenting the bleak outlook young people have today with all the inflation, the war in Ukraine, the Hamas attack, etc. The only problem was that he was born in 1956; inflation back then was an order of magnitude worse than it is now, the situation in the Middle East was arguably worse (especially with respect to Israel), and the whole of Eastern Europe was controlled by a Soviet state with international influence Putin can only dream of. He doesn't remember it that way, of course, but no one ever does.

How much did it cost your friend to buy a house, a college degree, or a car? Did his wife work?

Average americans have precious little disposable income. there are numerous studies that show that X% of americans lack the capacity to cover emergency expence of Y dollars where Y is some trivial sum compared to the GDP per capita. And the things that are excluded usually from inflation measures include stuff like food, fuel, housing etc.

So the americans are squeezed hard and obviously the economy is not doing well. The cost disease has been fucking up americans since the 70s with couple of boom years in the 90s excluded. And I don't think it is slowing, let alone reversing.

In my neck of the woods prices of food, especially animal products almost doubled since pre 2020. Now the absolute price per shitty calorie is still low, especially if you cook at home. But you enjoy either lower quality diet or less discretionary spending for trips to italy. either way your standard of living is lower. If for enough people standard of living is getting lower, the economy is obviously not doing well, no matter what metrics say.

Simple math - if food, gas and housing are 50% of your income, 10% increase in their cost leaves you with 20% less discretionary money.

Average americans have precious little disposable income.

Well that's just not correct. Americans are at the top 1 or 2 spots when it comes to disposable income depending on how you measure it.

So the americans are squeezed hard and obviously the economy is not doing well. The cost disease has been fucking up americans since the 70s with couple of boom years in the 90s excluded. And I don't think it is slowing, let alone reversing.

I agree with cost disease in terms of things like education and healthcare (largely because of the Baumol effect) as well as for housing since the US has become a build-nothing country But both of these issues are structural problems that stretch way further back than 2020. The former issue is mostly because of a lack of productivity, while the latter is due mostly to strangling regulations.

In my neck of the woods prices of food, especially animal products almost doubled since pre 2020. Now the absolute price per shitty calorie is still low, especially if you cook at home. But you enjoy either lower quality diet or less discretionary spending for trips to italy. either way your standard of living is lower. If for enough people standard of living is getting lower, the economy is obviously not doing well, no matter what metrics say.

On the issue of food specifically, cost has gone up by ~19% since the start of Biden's term, which is significant but food is a pretty tiny portion of most US household's budgets. And again, average incomes also increased to offset this, either mostly or totally depending on the specific economic indicators looked at.

I meant discretionary not disposable sorry. Aka the stuff with which you can do as you please. So what is left in your pocket after taxes, housing, transport, heating, eating and internet are removed.

For the other - I think that we are this point at which the cost disease starts to really hurt - the exponential functions have this nasty habbit of turning from no big deal to the biggest deal ver fast.

For the definition used there, the terms are somewhat interchangeable. It's also not wrong to say real disposable income is below trend. On a cross-sectional basis, @Ben___Garrison cites the US as doing well, but vibes often have to do with expectations, which is along the time axis.

Failing to consider the longitudinal or integrated aspect of the indicators OP chose is the real fatal flaw with the analysis, and why there is such an incongruity with the claimed “goodness” of the indicators and the “badness” of vibes.

Addressing the four main points from the original post:

Unemployment is hovering near record lows

Being near record lows is very good for people desperately in need of any form of employment; it is not a sign of an overall healthy labor market. Unemployment being below the frictional rate means that people end up in positions that do not best utilize their talents.

Inflation has come way down and is now around 3.7%...

This is still 85% above the target rate. That means we’re continuing to move away from trend for long term price levels; might as well returning to trend.

GDP growth is surprisingly high for Q3 at 4.9%.

Yes, GDP growth has been surprisingly robust. Does anyone seriously take a single quarter as their landmark though? How many cheered 2023Q3 but also mourned the consecutive negative 2022Q1&2?

The stock market is also doing fairly well

It’s a bit odd to compare a forward-looking aggregation of people's outlooks and say it disproves another forward-looking aggregation of people's outlooks. That being said, the stock market must be greater than or equal to 10% of the previous high for the vast majority of its history; how is that an indicator of anything? If anything, the stock market being off its high but not cratered for a sustained period is an indicator of the opposite, that there are heterogeneous or uncertain outlooks for the future which lines up perfectly fine with vibes.

We then go into the fishing section. I have no idea why you would compare wages with inflation and not compare levels. No, wages have not caught up to prices, not even remotely close.

I personally am hopeful for a soft landing, for everyone’s quality of life, but it’s far too early to declare victory and say that inflation was tamed without any economic pain.

there are numerous studies that show that X% of americans lack the capacity to cover emergency expence of Y dollars where Y is some trivial sum compared to the GDP per capita.

No, it's the same survey every time (just a different year) and it's always misquoted in just that way.

To address the concrete point, real median pay is basically flat from its pre-pandemic value. The number you cited in your post was nominal.

Unemployment is also basically flat from pre-Covid (ditto for employment).

So, if people are subconsciously replacing the survey questions with "am I economically better off compared to pre-Covid?", then we should see about as many people answer "yes" as "no".

Don’t take this an attack, Knot, but do you now feel that you were often wrong when you defended the low inflation predictions of mainstream economists(and the bond market) ?

Wrong in the sense that the official data turned out to be false? No. The one time someone gave me concrete anecdotal data - it closely matched the official data. So, I haven't been given any evidence the official data was wrong/falsified.

Wrong in the sense that high inflation ended up persisting higher than I (or the market/Fed) expected? Yes.

Wrong in the sense that I think my approach to the question was worse than the competition. Not really. I don't think "who got that one random prediction right" is a good way to check who will do the best at predicting in general. I will say, my view has become a little more nuanced, but it's fundamentally the same.

I will also note that few on this site (any?) actually gave a concrete predictions on which to judge them, so I'm not even sure any of them did do better. Predicting "inflation will be higher than expected" has a 50% chance of being right by default and even higher if you allow yourself degrees of freedom of what "expected" means.

Well that suggests real wages increased ratably.

Imagine a situation where wage increases lagged price increases but stabilized. During the interim, people would’ve need to dip into savings / borrow.

So even if from a flow perspective today everyone is the same from a stock perspective they are worse off.

And we do seem to see that (lower savings, more borrowing) suggesting people’s economic position is more fragile.

Maybe. OTOH, we also had those stimulus checks. Who knows how it all shook out.

Well, we know credit card debt has increased by 20% from pre pandemic levels.

We know savings have decreased from pre pandemic.

So yeah basically the average person has less net assets.

Sure, but was that due to inflation? Or was it due to ~0% interest rates making borrowing more attractive? Or temporary pandemic-induced unemployment making borrowing more necessary? etc.

Does it matter? The claim is the economy is doing great so why do people say otherwise. Well this explains the otherwise.

Makes sense.

As far as I can tell, there are two general "good news" claims. One, that current economic data show the economy is doing fairly well. Two, that Fed report that shows 2022 was THE BEST YEAR EVAH!!!!!1111. That second one is a steaming heap of dung which is measuring the paper effects of stimulus before the resulting inflation hit and doesn't reflect anything real. The first is, I think, not inconsistent with sentiment -- and sentiment is not that great for Republicans OR Democrats. Only 28% of Democrats think the economy is "good" or "excellent" now, compared to 38% just pre-Pandemic (and under Trump). It's not partisan bias (which should work the other way). It's mostly two things

1) While the most recent economic figures aren't terrible, they're still not as good as we had pre-pandemic

and, more importantly

2) The sentiment isn't based on a snapshot. People know that not only are prices still going up, but they HAVE gone up a lot since 2021. All that inflation in 2021 and 2022 is still affecting sentiment. Memory of those supply shortages hasn't faded away either. And people do still remember the pre-pandemic times and remember that they were better. If this was 1984 when the memory of the stagflation of 1980 was in mind, it would seem great. But it isn't.

  1. The sentiment isn't based on a snapshot. People know that not only are prices still going up, but they HAVE gone up a lot since 2021. All that inflation in 2021 and 2022 is still affecting sentiment. Memory of those supply shortages hasn't faded away either. And people do still remember the pre-pandemic times and remember that they were better. If this was 1984 when the memory of the stagflation of 1980 was in mind, it would seem great. But it isn't.

The notion that the negative sentiment is mostly holdover is one that other people have claimed, and it makes sense. The direction on economic sentiment is clearly upwards although it might take another year or more before people realize things have gotten better (assuming things stay on the current path). That said, as per my original post it's still strange how Republicans are so vastly more pessimistic about the economy than Democrats.

That said, as per my original post it's still strange how Republicans are so vastly more pessimistic about the economy than Democrats.

What's strange? There's been a partisan gap since Bush I, with the exception of the GFC when everyone thought the economy sucked. Republicans think Biden will screw it up, Democrats think he'll make it better.

I have a hunch that this phenomenon has always existed to some extent, although I'd bet that increasing negative partisanship has made it worse. If you have some data on it going back in time, I'd love to see it. I haven't seen a lot of people talking about this effect.

Also, a lot of people in this and the previous thread very much did not thing it was obvious, basically implying I was a Democratic party operative for mentioning it. They were adamant that the national statistics were fraudulent, and, if anything, that liberals must be the delusional ones for not thinking the economy is currently in a disastrous state.

I have a hunch that this phenomenon has always existed to some extent

It didn't exist during the Clinton years, for some reason, although it probably did at the tail end of Reagan (I don't have data further back).

basically implying I was a Democratic party operative for mentioning it

That's probably mostly priors.

This is a lot of words to write, "I don't understand why aggregate statistics don't apply to the individual".

Subsets of aggregate data can move in different directions from the summary statistics of the whole dataset. Trying to understand why people don't take selected macro statistics as gospel truth about their own lives is, to use a common phrase, extremely out of touch.

And stuff like this:

  1. Republicans think the economy is doing absolutely terribly, much worse than Democrats think, and 3) that most of this perception difference is because Biden, a Democrat, currently occupies the White House.

Is bordering on outright delusional. There are more Americans than just Democrats and Republicans and you don't get 55% fair/poor personal financial situation from just Republicans (no matter how much I'd love for 55% of Americans to be Republicans, alas).

What's actually going on here is that the chattering classes and the politicians and bureaucrats they support are finding, once again, that they can't actually tell people what to think about their personal lives. It's baldly obvious that this group doesn't actually know what they're talking about any functionally better than most people and that their ability to cite macro statistics is more an attempt to cast a magic spell than a real explanation of ground truth.

This is a lot of words to write, "I don't understand why aggregate statistics don't apply to the individual".

That is not an accurate description of what I wrote. Like, at all.

There were many people who said "local costs are up in some goods more than average statistics would suggest". My beef isn't with people who concluded that "because of this + negativity bias, things feel worse than they actually are", it's with the people claiming "because of this, economic data are rigged and useless".

Is bordering on outright delusional. There are more Americans than just Democrats and Republicans and you don't get 55% fair/poor personal financial situation from just Republicans (no matter how much I'd love for 55% of Americans to be Republicans, alas).

Nothing in the article you posted contradicts what I said in either of my posts. Also, the "bordering on outright delusional" line is unnecessarily hostile.

There were many people who said "local costs are up in some goods more than average statistics would suggest". My beef isn't with people who concluded that "because of this + negativity bias, things feel worse than they actually are", it's with the people claiming "because of this, economic data are rigged and useless".

Perhaps you might have saved yourself a lot of words had you considered, "Maybe I'm wrong about the actual state of things for many people", and, "The economic data are accurate within the gamut of what they're actually measuring", aren't mutually exclusive things.

There were absolutely people who were equivocating the two, see many (though not all) of the examples I posted above.

Trying to understand why people don't take selected macro statistics as gospel truth about their own lives is, to use a common phrase, extremely out of touch.

It depends on the purpose of the discussion.

Is it to discuss policy? Is it to discuss aggregate public perception? Averages matter.

Is it to vent? They don't.

The question to ask: why are we on this forum?

Is it to discuss policy? Is it to discuss aggregate public perception? Averages matter.

Which averages matter a lot.

Of course, there is no real policy discussion going on with these discussions of macro statistics. It's just Lefty professionals sneering at the rest of the country and saying, "Why won't you just do what I tell you and vote for the Democrats?"

Again and again, I see people here assuming that because the press and twitter academics are biased, it obviously implies that stats nerds in the BEA and BLS are biased. But, again, I've never seen evidence for this.

Reasons for skepticism:

  1. For a while, the numbers differed material from ADP’s numbers until ADP figured out the adjustment BLS was making. Generally you’d expect these numbers to be somewhat similar but BLS was running materially different and hot for awhile. So it wasn’t just the difference but the consistent direction of the difference.

  2. Job numbers continue to surprise the market to the upside sometimes beating expectations by multiple sigmas. That shouldn’t statistically happen MoM unless something screwy is happening with the numbers.

  3. I forget how many consecutive months there was a downward adjustment to the numbers but it was a number of months. Curious again the uniform direction.

  4. The establishment and household departed pretty drastically.

  5. Given what we’ve seen the last five years about DC bureaucracy why should we assume the BLS is different?

Just to be clear, from your points it looks like you've completely abandoned the topic of inflation, right? We're now dealing entirely with job numbers?

  1. I would love a link to know what you are referring to here. The only discussion I've heard around that topic is adjusting for seasonality, but that shouldn't cause a "consistent direction of the difference".
  2. The normality assumption is rarely perfectly matched and multi-sigma events happen all the time. This is an oft-recurring them in my job. I'm not sure what job numbers surprising the market has to do with proving the job numbers are bullshit.
  3. All that is evidence for is that errors aren't always independent month-to-month. Again, as anyone who has worked with real data will tell you (especially time series) independence is almost never a valid assumption. Real life is not Stats 101.
  4. What does this mean? Is this just "lived experience". If so, the one time someone on this forum provided their receipts, they closely matched the official data. So, I'm not seeing this.
  5. Because virtually all charges I've seen levied on this forum that have evidence are about politicians/academics/journalists being biased and misinterpreting data or intentionally emphasizing certain data over others to serve a narrative. I don't think I've ever seen anyone on this forum provide evidence that nerds outputting the metrics are biased, let alone that they're falsifying metrics or following biased methodologies.

  1. ADP is a payroll company. They put out numbers. The numbers generally are close to BLS because well ADP is the primary payroll provider in the US. About a year ago, there started to be a pretty big divergence.

  2. Some of the beats were something like six sigma. It is weird to have that many very large sigma events on one data source.

  3. Yes of course things aren’t independent. My suggestion is it isn’t independent because the BLS is cooking the books.

  4. There are two data points BLS puts out. The first is establishment survey which goes into unemployment number. The second is the household survey. Granted, the latter is measuring something slightly different. But historically these two surveys end up with total number of employed that are very similar. There has been a large difference for about 1.5 years since BLS started aggressively applying adjustment to establishment. The household correlates very well with street expectations. The Philly fed even put out a paper on this. Again, this suggests the establishment is being manipulated. Latest household suggests we are in recession range for jobs.

  1. Can you please provide a link?
  2. I'm saying is that, for anyone who works with temporal datasets, what you are saying is not much of a red flag. Unless there is additional context (maybe a link?).
  3. Again, for anyone who works with temporal datasets, what you are saying is not much of a red flag. Unless, again, there is additional context (maybe a link?)
  4. "The Philly fed even put out a paper on this" - can you provide a link?
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Very few of these sneers are coming from the BEA or BLS directly, who mostly are just grinding out the incredible work they have always done (along with all the other statistical agencies in the Federal government), and whose feet I worship at.

But the sneers themselves remain dumb. They come from the ideologically incurious. The puffed up underinformed. The boys at the BLS know that the sub-aggregates matter, too, that's why they do stuff like break things down by industry, region, or state. But the commentariat just knows the national macro aggregates look good, so why won't the deplorable love Biden? He's an on old white guy, isn't he? They love that shit.

I assumed you were like a plurality of commenters here who think the stats themselves are bogus. Mea culpa.

Not a problem. It may have behooved me to be explicit with where my concerns lay. I have respect verging on awe for the amount of statistics various branches of the Federal government collect and release to the public.

Because the same power that wants people's minds to be made up by academia doesn't allow this forum to exist elsewhere. That's why.

Statistics are a useful mathematical tool. Statistics made by other people about anything remotely political is almost necessarily nonsense propaganda.

The incentives that econometrics have to lie are so great you might as well ask a Soviet Factory manager how many tons of steel he actually produced.

And yes that means one's lying eyes are back in the competition for an epistemic framework on those issues.

The one time someone tried to prove to me that the official data was too low by citing their own personal receipts, the receipts ended up matching the official data.

It would be great if one of the numerous people here making these claims had evidence that the CPI stats are being gamed instead of having to resorting to "academia and the media is biased => the BEA and BLS stats nerds are biased"

We can look at the various changes to the basket of goods and how it really doesn't measure anything except the cost of living for NEETs (the heavy underemphasis on energy and housing I see as clear deliberate manipulation for instance).

And this is to say nothing of unemployment numbers which have been cooked to hell and back by essentially every government of every State.

the heavy underemphasis on energy and housing I see as clear deliberate manipulation for instance

Let's look at the weights of the CPI-U as of 2022-Dec:

  • 7.5% - Rent of primary residence
  • 25.4% - Owners' equivalent rent of residences
  • 3.6% - Household energy
  • 3.3% - Motor fuel

I've ensured no overlap between the categories.

So, that's 32.9% of the CPI is housing and 6.9% is energy.

You believe these numbers are heavily underemphasized and are a "clear deliberate manipulation".

Please elaborate.

unemployment numbers... have been cooked to hell and back by essentially every government of every State.

Please elaborate.

There's different opinions on what is under/overstated in CPI so you might disagree on specifics, but the tricks you can use to manipulate it are well known at this point.

One is to readjust the methodology to the new habits of consumers, which allows you to pretend adaptations to higher costs of living are normal and lower the measured impact of inflation or to game the new and improved allocation to fit to local price changes and constantly change the methodology. Gas is so much more expensive people drive less? Cost of living is not going up, people just choose to spend more on Netflix and less on driving around.

Another is to use good substitutions and the other mechanisms by which you pick which actual goods to track. You can either substitute for cheaper goods as if they had equal value or fail to report shrinkflation and keep tracking the price of a good that is cheaper under the same name.

As for unemployment, there's as many methods to cheat as there are systems to measure it. In France the traditional way to cheat is to exclude from the numbers people who can't find work after a certain time and vary that amount of time to massage the figure. But we also cook it by excluding people from it if they're on some government benefits and in other situations that you can make a plausible argument for but apply to a lot of people who do work to live in practice.

I'm well aware of those nuances (i.e. Paasche vs Laspeyres indices).

  1. I don't see what that has to do with your claim that housing and energy are "heavily underemphasized".
  2. CPI is mostly a Laspeyres index, which means it is generally biased upwards compared to other indices (i.e. GDP deflator).

Re unemployment, I'm not sure this matters much unless you can show that the definitions have been changed to benefit someone.

More generally, you're basically saying "there exist degrees of freedom in defining these metrics".

Sure.

But the distance between that and allegations of "clear deliberate manipulation" and "cooked to hell and back by essentially every government of every State" is HUGE. You haven't even begun to cross that line.

#MotteAndBailey

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We can also compare CPI with uh, unorthodox measures of inflation, e.g. https://truflation.com/. Truflation alleges 24% inflation since January 2020 whereas the CPI has increased 18% in the same timeframe.

Year on year, truflation says 2.4% and CPI says 3.7%.

The point being: you can quibble, as you said, about the details of how exactly we should measure inflation and you can get numbers somewhat higher or lower than CPI. But I don't think there's a good argument that actual inflation over the past few years is double or more what CPI would suggest.

Do you think Ezra’s lived experiences are a valid rebuttal here?

If you beleive Ezra's anecdotes as true, then yeah maybe you should update your simplistic model slightly. I think you're doing some bullshit leading by calling this 'Ezra's lived exerience'. These are datapoints that can help us question other data sets we might be suspicious of, or help us complexify our model.

So if we can accept as true Ezra's claims of several isolated instances of black aquaintances being treated poorly by cops, we can try to better understand those anecdotes:

Does Ezra live somewhere that is typical of the racial crime statistics? Are Ezra's friends a nonrandom selection of black people, especially regarding crime statistics? How much can we tease Ezra's friends' experiences from confirmation bias / misatrributed causes. That is, are white people treated similarly by cops but interpret it differently or report it back to Ezra less frequently?

Notice that these are all increasingly difficult to answer questions and the last one is near impossible for Ezra to tease out. To treat this 'lived experience' as comparative to a much cleaner objective anecdote like my expenses went up by this %, brings serious dubiousness to my accepting your 'analogy', but nevertheless.

Suppose we can answer all of those satisfactorily, and Ezra's 'lived experiences' still disagree with the data.

Next you might be able to come up with some kind of alternative theory that reconciles those experiences within your statistics. Maybe these people are hassled by the police because black people do commit more crimes, so they are more likely guilty than a white person. perhaps Ezra's experiences are true, but his causation is backwards?

I'm not sure what the analagous frame is for economic explanation. But Ezra's second hand experience, if trusted, provide evidence toward how the system works.

Or maybe, Ezra's friends stories are credible examples of black people being unreasonably hassled by police at a rate within his circle quite higher than chance or satisfactorily explained by the above explanation or considerations. (maybe Ezra's lived a few places and this rules out local corruption).

In such a case, if the question isn't whether we beleive Ezra, but whether his anecdata should cause us to update our interpretation / understanding of the actual raw statistics, then yes of course it should. At least to some degree.

Unless I missed something in your post, it seems like we're basically agreeing with each other. Anecdotes aren't worthless, as they can give insight into the uneven distribution of a problem or potential alternative causes that national statistics don't get at. But they're obviously subject to limitations and care should be made not to overgeneralize (nonrandom selection, confirmation bias, misattributed causes, etc.). If Ezra was using his anecdotal experience to say stuff like "not all black people commit crime" or "they can still get roughed up by the police regardless", then that's valid. But if he starts claiming "that proves FBI crime statistics are rigged", then he needs to bring a lot more evidence or use a different source entirely.

Likewise the people using anecdotes to say the economy can feel worse than national statistics would imply since local changes are not evenly distributed, that's reasonable. Pointing to meat at the local supermarket going from $10 to $16 and claiming that proves national inflation statistics must be rigged is less so.

I think I’d use Ezra’s stories to add context. The important issues still need to be addressed especially where, when, and doing what in the case of Ezra’s story. Being hassled might well have more to do with location and time of day. A kid, any kid, out at 3am is going to be hassled by police simply because he’s not supposed to be on the streets at 3am. Likewise, being in a high crime neighborhood makes being hassled more likely. Being out of context for a given area (looking like you’re poor in a very rich neighborhood, being a black guy in the white parts of town, being in places where people usually don’t hang out in general) is also likely to get you hassled.

I think the same is true for economics versions of lived experience. I don’t know what HylinkaGC or the rest are living like, and almost all of those things matter to your “lived inflation”. Not all industries gave raises, and of they did, they didn’t give them all at the same rate. This varies by industry, and job title and experience and even in some cases job performance. How much your rent goes up depends on your city and where you live in that city. The costs of goods depend on your city but also where you shop. National chains have bargaining power that local shops don’t, and goods bought locally are somewhat cheaper than things trucked in from far away.

This is something that a lot of people miss in simply going after blind statistics — they’re aggregated versions of the mean experience and while they’re certainly useful, they don’t necessarily tell the whole story. I suspect that a lot of “MAGA thinks the economy sucks” headlines are missing the context of the difference in the local economy in the blue collar sector and in rural areas where there’s no economics of scale to keep prices low and where the pay for the jobs MAGAs tend to hold (or the businesses they own or run) cannot pay more.

I don’t know what HylinkaGC or the rest are living like

Well, the one time he provided concrete examples of runaway inflation, his "lived experience" almost perfectly matched the official data. So, there's that...

Indeed, I feel like people are reacting against the vibes rather than the actual numbers.

"Inflation was high but it has subdued to a normal level" has a very different feel to "Prices have gone crazy over the last few years and they're still going up" but they're both accurate ways of describing the same reality.

Well inflation is still pretty hot compared to most of the 2010s and it is hot on a much higher base.

That is another accurate way of describing the same reality. The 2010s of course featured unusually low inflation.

Anecdotes can trump statistics in the context of a specific type of argument, of the following form: "I don't give a shit about how 'the economy' is doing, I care about how me and my family are doing, so aggregate economic indicators are of no interest to me when I have my own lived experiences." Similar types of arguments could be made about other subjects, like policing.

I think quite often, even when people don't explicitly make this argument, it's what they're really saying. For obvious reasons, most people support or oppose policies based on how they think those policies will impact them personally, regardless of whether the policy is "good" or "bad" in the aggregate.

You can't tell a mass of people who have watched their prices skyrocket and housing prices and rental prices skyrocket and also that many are having a harder time finding jobs for the equivalent pay that "things are fine".

It's been constantly debated whether or not economic indicators are direct abstractions over reality, and to tell people who are feeling down that "things are fine, actually" is akin to mass gaslighting. When talking to a group of people who are used to constantly being lied to and therefore eternally skeptical of establishment that their beliefs and understanding of reality are wrong or incorrect, this is especially egregioius.

Now, you mention that there's no way of bringing about an equivalent to election-loss shock to show the flaws in polls, and then argue about the use of other economic data to make a point. While a useful metric, the establishment groups will use whatever metrics they want to say things are "fine, actually" so long as they have enough donations and electoral support that they don't get voted out each election. I've never, for example, seen major party leaders ever cede a point and change their policies or messaging until after it lost them an election.

As such, economic data debates are only as useful if the establishment is willing to listen and hear out and change their views accordingly.

I think citing the “lived experience” as false in this economy is a vast simplification. It depends who you are in this economy.

For retirees living off investments this is full-stop a terrible economy for them. All their asset prices have crashed due to high rates especially if they weren’t loaded in magnificent 7 stocks.

If you are in family formation mode this is a terrible economy for you. Housing costs are thru the roof because of Bidenomics. Both because the infrastructure bill raised the costs of building by pulling workers to government projects and because high interest rates (and high real rates) has crushed home affordability.

I think you are looking at net stats. A lot like the stock market this year. If you owned big cap tech your feeling great. If you don’t own that stuff it’s a depression. If you average them all up it’s ok. But the typical person isn’t the average of results. Hence this economy really is bad for a lot of people.

You are consuming averages (economy ok in a lot of ways) with a lot of variance in personal situations.

Having tedious debates on the precise definitions of economic indicators is infinitely better than retreating to philosophical solipsism by claiming economic data is broadly illegitimate.

These debates are tedious because the conclusions are so obvious. A quick review:

  • The Replication Crisis: Scientific papers of all sorts, in all fields, broadly fail to replicate, at surprisingly high rates. Observably, we see that academics are tempted to "publish or perish," p-hacking is a well-known phenomenon, peer review and professional ettiquette shut out unusual voices. Moreover, a lot of research is conducted by parties with a financial incentive for the results to come out a certain way. (How does the FDA determine when a new substance is "Generally Recognized as Safe?")

  • Weapons of Mass Destruction:Top Bush-administration officials lied, repeatedly, about war crimes committed by Saddam Hussein's government as justification for war. Reams of documents "proving" such-and-such a case. Is it any wonder? -- Consider the Nayirah Testimony, James Clapper claiming the NSA did not spy on Americans, the letter from Intelligence Experts claiming that the Huntsr Biden laptop was a Russian election plot. The intelligence agency routinely lies, and often produces quite-sophisticated documents in support of their claims.

  • Covid: Masks work, then they don't, lockdowns save lives, unless you're protesting racism, the vaccine is 100% effective, 90% effective, 50% effective, you only need two shots, and one booster, and two boosters, and annual boosters. The virus obviously came from a wet market, the lab leak hypothesis is a preposterous conspiracy -- until it's taken seriously, and it turns out scientists were pressured against giving the idea any seriousness at all. Every time, Fauci, NIH, FDA, and all the other institutions dutifully produce official explanations and reams of evidence supporting the latest position. Experts who look at the data announce that it all matches up.

Jeffrey Epstein, "You can keep your doctor," mass graves in Canada, "fake news", Russian election interference, -- I'm bored, this is tedious, we're all familiar with a hundred such examples.

The press lies, the people quoted in the press lie, the statistics quoted in the press were made by the people who lie. They lie because the incentive is there, they lie because they want to manipulate us, they lie because they can. This isn't a central conspiracy or anything grand, it's a natural consequence of the people in our government doing whatever they can to do whatever they want, and finding that bullshit statistics and papers and experts and frauds sound really good when they want to manipulate you for political purposes. Quite often, these people are so stupid they're even manipulating themselves.

Now you want to talk about inflation, and economic figures, and am I supposed to treat these any less skeptically? Inflation isn't a measurement that springs out of the ground, it's a highly-arbitrary and malleable concept. If a model of car goes up 2% in price, but also includes some better safety and features, who's to say if that's inflation or not? Some economist sits around making up models and guesses. If your wages stay the same but the value of your house goes up? If costs rise in some sectors and shrink in others? If prices go up but they might have gone up anyways? Someone has to sit around deciding. And the more people involved in this process, the less objective it becomes, the more open to political manipulation, so that, say, every quarter the number of Jobs added in Biden's presidency is announced, and two quarters later, it is consistently revised downward. Or when Obama wants proof that Obamacare will save money, magically, OMB produces a report saying it will. And on and on and on.

Basic skepticism here is justified, they sre conning us all the time, and I'm not some post-truth conspiracy nutjob for saying so. You're the one getting conned! You're the one asserting that inflation numbers should be trusted a priori. And, at this point, the stuff I'm laying out is basic background. It's not even that interesting anymore, repeating all this is tiresome even to me.

So, what, I'm supposed to believe these probable lies because I don't have a better bullshit metric? Food prices have been rising, prices have been rising, we all know it, we've all experienced it, and I'm supposed to believe the economy is doing great because bullshit numbers that have nothing to do with anything anymore say otherwise? The people who think inflation going from 8% to 4% is "inflation going down" want to explain to me how I'm ignorant. At a certain point, this is stupid. This whole argument is stupid. There is no argument even to be had. You have not connected the dots we are talking about, and are only talking past us.

Put aside all the arguments about statistics or how to calculate inflation or whatever.

When asked how they’re doing economically, the vast majority of people say they’re doing well.

Maybe you aren’t doing well.

One way that could happen is that everyone else is actually doing badly but they’re all lying about it and the official statistics are also made up.

Another way that could happen is that even though most people are doing well, not everybody is, and unfortunately maybe you or friends are among those who aren’t. Fortunately things are very cyclical and dynamic idiosyncratically so this is unlikely to last for long.

I certainly have a view about which one is more likely (my view doesn’t require a bunch of people to be lying) but it’s not likely something that can be resolved on this forum.

The original poster is absolutely right though. This double standard with which this place scoffs at most “lived experiences” arguments but seems so vulnerable to it when the argument is on the “other side,” so to speak, really speaks to a lack of what you might call intellectual empathy.

How well people perceive themselves is also not a direct answer to how they feel about the economy overall. I can be better off financially than I was and spend the exact same amount on groceries but feel like the economy is shit because I'm buying a carton of 4 eggs instead of a dozen. Is the economy how financially secure most people feel personally? Is it inflation? Is it the GDP? Whatever it actually is doesn't really matter if people don't use that as their own definition. Most people feel like the economy is bad if their rent goes up and eggs cost a hell of a lot more.

Also, I think it's quite an extraordinary claim to say that people scoff at "lived experiences". I don't recall that being the case here at all, in fact most people here tend to defer to them when there's no data and when the data is contradictory it's posted and nobody usually mentions or scoffs at the "lived experience." Unless you mean of people that aren't posting here which I think is entirely different but even then I'd say that number is really low. It's really only applies to "racism" where "lived experience" is used as a trump card. You'll notice that most of the people responding didn't say that his numbers were wrong but they disagreed with what they mean or that they're the wrong numbers to measure what they're trying to measure. This is not using a lived experience to trump someone's argument, it's fundamentally saying that they disagree with the foundation of the definition. They may be using anecdotes and not "rebutting" the data provided but that's not the same thing.

OP pretending like he is the master of knowing exactly what the economy means, especially to other people without even defining it, and then throwing shade over nearly anyone who disagrees is not only petty but exceedingly arrogant. He asked people to provide data but then apparently when half the posts do he cites them personally as being unacceptable because it wasn't acceptable data. Food cost apparently does not matter at all to him, and using that as a reason automatically means it's "lived experience" and most of those reasons he cited were culled down to a headline to make them look as bad as possible. This just not the way we should communicate here and reads as someone who has only empathy for people who agree with him.

When asked how they’re doing economically, the vast majority of people say they’re doing well.

The way people feel about the economy is bullshit ne plus ultra par excellence je ne sais quois. It has always been bullshit. Quinnipiac has always been bullshit. Nobody here would care about this metric at all, except that, this time, it's phrased ready-made as a gotcha hypothetical. (Oh, you think it's bullshit now that it's inconvenient for you, but I bet you wouldn't have said that last year! - It was bullshit then too.)

Honest question---do you think your views about the state of the economy are falsifiable? What are some things you could see that would make you change your mind?

Here are some examples of things that if a few of them were happening at once would make me think the economy was bad:

  • A few quarters of negative real GDP growth
  • Big increases in unemployment
  • Big increases in inflation
  • Increasing household default or delinquency
  • Increases in the number of people who say the economy is bad

BTW here's a list of things I think are not good in the economy, but these are all longer-to-medium term issues and I think my ability to forecast is not great. These things are themselves not directly bad but can cause bad things on the preceding list.

  • Growing national debt with no real political way out (Ds want to keep doing dumb fiscal stimulus, Rs want to keep doing dumb fiscal stimulus (through tax cuts))
  • Lack of housing supply (a national issue that's the sum of a thousand local issues)
  • Lack of meaningful innovation (I increasingly think a ton of tech/vc stuff is run by charlatans and is totally fake and gay, including AI/LLM stuff)
  • Low fertility (although the US is probably better situated here than anybody else)

I agree with the bulk of your comment, just want to make a tangential comment about the night lights analysis.

To me it seems like a pretty questionable approach in general because once a nation reaches a certain level of industrialization and electrification, wouldn't night light intensity begin growing much more slowly after that? Even if the US economy grew by a factor of 10 in very real and impactful ways, there are still limits to how bright most people want it to be at night.

Also, modern high-tech economic activity tends to be concentrated in small specialized regions. It seems to me that without very careful analysis, one might be more impressed by 100 villages all getting street lights for the first time than by one high-tech chip factory that is built in the corner of some already-bright city and largely draws its power from existing plants and its raw materials from existing mines, hence does not increase the country's overall night light intensity very much at all, and which yet contributes even more to the country's economy than the 100 villages getting street lights for the first time.

Am I missing something?

Also, in Europe there is some movement to outright reduce light pollution.

And is is more efficient to lit ground (where roads and sidewalks are) rather than emit it in the sky.

Though for example refineries are well lit and having two refineries rather then one will cause light emissions to increase.

If we're talking about national level statistics, it's perfectly possible that the lived experience and the statistics are both picking up on true things. It could be true both that the San Francisco police only arrest black men in the absolute most blatant cases of violent crime, and that Chicago police are racists, sending otherwise reasonable black men to prison for possession of a bit of cocaine. (I have neither anecdata nor data on either of these specific possibilities, but the Chicago police do have a reputation of practicing the soft bigotry of letting underclass black people murder each other.) In which case, it would be good if San Francisco police were harsher and Chicago police were more careful. In the national statistics, this might look like a wash, but on the local level it isn't. San Francisco can't really atone for Chicago's racism.

Meanwhile, in the economy, it could, for instance, both be true that food makes up a relatively small part of people's overall expenses, and that it's the main expense they are able to control in the short term, so it fluctuating is more painful than durable goods fluctuating, since it's usually easier to put off buying new durable goods. Maybe it feels worse to not be able to buy beef than to not be able to buy (whatever it is that didn't inflate as much, I'm spending so much on food I haven't really considered buying it, whatever it is...)

Additionally, part of it for me is the expense breakdown and where the cuts have to be made. There are several unavoidable expenses, and a very small field of adjustable expenses. As such, all tightening of the belt has to be done out of a very small portion of the overall budget.

Heating, and gas cannot be adjusted. I already use them as little as possible, and any further reduction would be stupid and harmful. Any increase in heating or gas costs then, has to be cut out of something else. Hard goods (furniture, dishware, clothing, appliances etc) likewise cannot be adjusted, as I pay nothing for them (hooray Facebook Marketplace!)

Food and other consumables can be adjusted, but only by dropping in quality noticably. Because this is my only flex point, it is where almost all of the change in standard of living occurs. Say my overall spending power drops by 10%. That's not a lot, but this category makes up only 20% of my spending, and is the only area where change can occur, so I have to take a very large hit to the quality of consumables just to break even. This hurts a lot. Eating cheaper makes me feel worse, noticably, both physically and emotionally.

I think many experience a similar effect. If only 10% of your budget is discretionary spending and your real purchasing power drops by 10%, you now have no discretionary spending money at all. That is a massive hit to quality of life. Straight from "well I work a lot but I get fun outings and the occasional vacation," all the way to "I literally just work to live to continue working."

This is my experience as well.

In our case, we switched to both working, and are sending our children (toddler and pre-k) to childcare, because the state pays for 90% of the childcare cost. This is fine, I think the kids like it well enough, but it pads out the GDP without necessarily improving living standards in comparison to having more households with stay at home mothers in them. This is the kind of detail that makes me suspicious of some of the economic figures.

There are positives to the current situation, but it also feels more fragile -- when someone is sick, it's a bigger problem, including calling out from work (and we aren't supposed to call out morning of, so we have to decide the day before), and a general lack of flexibility with the children. This is part of what's going on with being unable to suspend kids or even have them home sick -- there's nobody around to look after them. There are kids I teach who are clearly stressed out, lashing out, disrupting things for the others, and shouldn't be in a large school 7 hrs a day, but there isn't an alternative, there's nobody else they're able to be with, everyone is following very strict rules watching one another's children and elderly, without any slack.

Everyone has an anecdote about living in the world and spending money (existing within the economy). I've literally never been the victim of a prosecuted or investigated crime. If you went into a forum that was specifically for people that had been victims of muggings regardless of their obvious bias on the situation they're going to chime in with their anecdotes about crime data because they have anecdotes to share. This just seems like a silly overreaction to an unwanted response.

I made this post because I've seen left-leaning types handwave national statistics in favor of smaller anecdotes and "lived experiences", and be called out on this forum as the "peak of leftist bullshit" or somesuch. I generally would have agreed, using different language.

But then, lo and behold, people are essentially doing the exact same thing here when the roles are reversed. The motte is "national statistics can apply unevenly which can lead to people being more pessimistic than is expected/warranted". The bailey is "meat at my local grocery store went from $10 to $16 which proves national statistics are fraudulent". There were plenty of people in the previous thread making the bailey argument, while almost no one in this thread is defending it and everyone is instead at the motte. This, to me, is pretty telling.

Buddy, I regret to inform you that you're seeking a Fully Generalized Solution to Disagreement, and if I or any other Mottizen had it, you'd know, if only because we'd be on stage for the Nobel Prize for Peace.

And I'm one of the people who pushed back on the narrative that the US is doing poorly. I lied, or at least was inaccurate, because the ratio of downvotes to upvotes reveals that as a pretty good scissor statement, and blackpills me harder on the quality of general epistemics than even the typical American Idiot claiming their lives and that of most other people in the States are getting harder when it comes to finances.

Oh well, I guess we all have to settle for doing our thankless jobs on the margins.

I lied, or at least was inaccurate, because the ratio of downvotes to upvotes reveals that as a pretty good scissor statement, and blackpills me harder on the quality of general epistemics than even the typical American Idiot claiming their lives and that of most other people in the States are getting harder when it comes to finances.

I encourage you to give the median person both slightly more and slightly less credit. Give them less credit when it comes to their ability to answer the specific question without regard to any adjacent considerations - they will express their emotions, they will express what they think advances their cause, they will express what the questioner wants to hear, they will express what the questioner doesn't want to hear, they will answer what they think the questioner is implying, they will misunderstand questions, and they will do many other things that are not just answering the fucking question. When you ask someone, "is the economy improving?", they will not be answering whether they think the annualized GDP real growth rate is 0.2% higher or lower than last year. When you ask someone, "do you think people are doing better financially?", they will not be answering with whether they suspect the median nominal savings account is higher or lower than the previous year.

On the flip side, give them slightly more credit that they are actually trying to understand the world around them and are modeling quite a few complex interactions. They probably don't know the actual numbers, they almost certainly don't care what the experts say, but they may well be picking up on actual signals related to real-world considerations that are poorly captured by metrics that are probably at least a bit shaped by Goodhart's Law. Someone that received helicopter money may in fact have more money than they did pre-helicopter while having an uneasy feeling that this isn't how wealth is actually built.

I blame Fauci.

Its hard to come out of Covid without some sense that "the science lies to us". I generally like to trust experts, but now it constantly feels like a slight level of uncertainty has crept into all my interactions with experts. The idea of an entire group of academics capture by a single interest group and willing to lie to our faces ... no longer seems very far fetched. At most you'll get a couple of the experts that defect and say all of their colleagues are wrong.

What it often requires me to do is to go look at the data the experts have, rather than what they say about their own data. At which point I get frustrated about even having experts in the first place. I usually have to rely on other smart people that I actually trust to go and check the data.

Things where I am suspicious about what the experts say:

  1. Lockdowns
  2. Covid vaccines in the young
  3. Death rates of covid
  4. What the "intelligence community" says about political things
  5. Runaway global warming
  6. Economists on the topic of currency

Since Fauci isn't really being punished for any lies, I can assume most experts picked up on the hint: say what we want you to say and you'll be protected.

I still tend to have a lot of trust for economists, but that is maybe because I have found economists I actually trust, and I don't read the economists that would ruin my trust.

I can believe that we are in a great economic period right now. Nothing in my life suggests anything is great or terrible economically, so its not hard to think that either scenario is possible. There are multiple measures of employment, and I really wish news orgs would just report the full table of employment measures, U1-U7 (if I remember correctly). I feel like any one of them is potentially misleading individually, but altogether they give a great picture.

I have a very hard time trusting economists related to currency. The topic has always seemed like black magic to me. There is a joke among the academics I work with that monetary economists are always a bit on the weird side. I personally feel that its because monetary economics is a bit like studying cthulu. Simply witnessing it and understanding it drives you a little crazy. Also if there is any place where apparatus of government control has an incentive to get economists to lie, then that place is gonna be monetary economics. You simply cannot have modern sized governments without currency manipulation and money printing. I don't think they tend to lie too often about inflation numbers, or I at least believe that the numbers they give are consistently measured. Its more of a big giant lie that I worry about, rather than tiny lies to benefit one specific administration.

I share your gut-level distrust of economics and general suspicion of experts, but at the same time I must admit that I have not given a serious attempt at learning economics and if I did, I might realize that at least parts of it are trustworthy.

With regard to such issues in general, I often use the "would many separated groups, even enemies, mostly agree about it?" heuristic. Obviously there is no reason to trust the intelligence community by this heuristic, since different countries' intelligence communities will, for obvious reasons, often completely disagree with each other in public.

On the other hand, most scientific communities and governments in the developed world, even ones in countries that are each others' enemies, support widespread COVID vaccination and treat climate change as a somewhat serious threat. I find it unlikely that the US academic community and the Chinese academic community, and the two countries' respective bureaucracies, are both controlled by one overarching global cabal of consenus-makers. Which leads me to increase my estimate of how likely it is that the so-called scientific consensus about COVID and climate change are accurate.

most scientific communities and governments in the developed world, even ones in countries that are each others' enemies,

The response to the great Barrington declaration suggested to me that this consensus was manufactured. I also think the US government hands out a majority of infectious disease research money. So the impression of an independent international scientific community is misleading. Wuhan lab reviewed funding multiple times from the US.

treat climate change as a somewhat serious threat

I don't believe they treat it as a serious threat at all. I think they treat as an excuse for economic control. If they treated it seriously there are sub trillion dollar solutions that they could implement: sulfur dioxide seeding in the upper atmosphere, or a large sun shade in outer space.

Things where I am suspicious about what the experts say:

I can't say I disagree but for the majority, I'd go so far as to say that instead of being merely suspicious, I'm in flagrant opposition.

On the matter of COVID death rates, it depends on whether you are considering the initial claims of CFR in the first few months, or the more reasonable values that emerged later down the line. A 0.1-0.5% CFR seems reasonable enough to me, at least until the vaccines came out.

As for economics, shrugs, I'll care to be better informed when I'm in a position to dictate fiscal policy for any organization larger than my household. I'm content in crossing the very low bar of being better than average.

Wait. Aren't you an economist or trained in the field? It deeply concerns me that you too are forced to believe the last claim, but then again you economists are a contentious lot, each content to claim the other is ruining a noble field.

On the other hand, I'm hardly as uncertain when it comes to claims that are tangentially related to medicine, doctors do tend to agree on most things that matter, for noble or ignoble reasons I guess!

it depends on whether you are considering the initial claims of CFR in the first few months, or the more reasonable values that emerged later down the line.

We already had reasonable values by late Feburary 2020 due to the diamond princess outbreak. They just weren't widely advertised.

On the matter of COVID death rates, it depends on whether you are considering the initial claims of CFR in the first few months, or the more reasonable values that emerged later down the line. A 0.1-0.5% CFR seems reasonable enough to me, at least until the vaccines came out.

I think the lack of testing available combined with us not knowing how to treat it led to artificially inflated death rates. And then for a while afterwards many hospitals and medical orgs were given money for COVID cases and deaths, so they of course started reporting it more heavily.

Wait. Aren't you an economist or trained in the field? It deeply concerns me that you too are forced to belief the last claim, but then again you economists are a contentious lot, each content to claim the other is ruining a noble field.

Undergrad economics degree. Mostly gave me a sense that there are weird academic holdouts on obscure topics that aren't corrupted by politics. But anything that politics touches becomes corrupted.

I still tend to have a lot of trust for economists, but that is maybe because I have found economists I actually trust, and I don't read the economists that would ruin my trust.

They were the first class of experts to lose my trust, after 2008. Hmm, actually, maybe the second after Iraq and the GWOT. Of course I never believed the "gender" and "psychology" experts in the first place, so there is that too.

I studied economics between 2009-2013. It was a contentious time for economics. I don't trust an expert just because they have a PhD in economics, but I think some basics of the field have held up really well. And I think the field in general has robust data gathering and adversarial checking of data.

Out of curiosity, how much stock do you put in the polls of economists that IGM Chicago puts out? Presumably such polls dilute out individual cranks and their idiosyncrasies all come out in the wash, but it would still be of limited use if there's systematic biases and blind spots.

Low to no usefulness.

To be a useful survey question of economists, a question needs to:

  1. Be very limited in scope
  2. Have a clear preference in how the economists answer (i.e. Strongly agree or Strongly disagree clearly wins)
  3. Not be a rephrased basic econ question (I will caveat that this is maybe useful sometimes)

Given those limitations not all the survey questions are useful.

Many of them have a huge scope like asking "would regulation of x industry be [good]". That becomes basically a vibes questions about how you feel about regulation in general. Even the staunchest libertarian leaning economist can acknowledge regulation is sometimes helpful. And even the staunchest statist pro-regulator out there can acknowledge that some regulations are harmful. So the question really becomes 'what quality of regulation do you think is likely'.

If the economists don't clearly come down on one side of the question, then you are back to a foundational problem of "how do you know which experts to trust if the experts disagree with each other?" This seems useful for someone that wants to organize a panel discussion between economists that disagree with each other, but less useful if you are just a pleb trying to figure out what the experts say on a topic.

Sometimes there are questions about price movements, or supply and demand movements. You can predict what economists will say by understanding a basic econ 101 textbook. You'll typically see fewer "uncertain" answers for these questions. It is maybe useful to have a professional economist interpret a current political problem and translate the econ 101 rules for everyone. But I do believe that people can do this for themselves. And typically when they fail to make this translation it is because they willfully don't want it to be true, and no amount of expert consensus will get through to them.

https://www.kentclarkcenter.org/surveys/women-and-the-labor-market/

Question A: By enabling women’s life choices about education, work and family, the contraceptive pill made a substantial contribution to closing gender gaps in the labor market for professionals. Weighted response: 48% strongly agree, 52% agree.

Question B: Gender gaps in today’s labor market arise less from differences in educational and occupational choices than from the differential career impact of parenthood and social norms around men's and women’s roles in childrearing. Weighted response: 19% strongly agree, 74% agree, 8% uncertain.

Question C: The gender gap in pay would be substantially reduced if firms had fewer incentives to offer disproportionate rewards to individuals who work long and/or inflexible hours. Weighted response: 17% strongly agree, 70% agree, 13% uncertain.

I'll go through this survey on their website to demonstrate.

Question A: (rephrased basic econ question) If you take someone out of the labor force for a few years will they be paid more or less than someone that continued to work during that time? Obviously they will be paid less. Ok, what would be the effect of them not leaving the labor force at all. They would be paid the same.

Question B: (not limited in scope, agreement slightly unclear) It is comparing two treatment effects and asking which one is bigger. This can be very misleading: Treatment A might be huge, while treatment B might only be large. Or Treatment A is small, while treatment B is non-existent. In both cases the economist would answer the same. In this specific question you can go to the comments and find that while they think Treatment A is bigger, many seem to think Treatment B matters too.

Question C: (Agreements slightly unclear, This may be a useful one) I do think the economists didn't read the question very closely, or else there is an interpretation of "substantially" that I don't understand. This type of regulation would only address one of the things that cause a difference in pay for mothers vs not-mothers. And quite a few economists said in the previous example, that educational and occupational choices still matter. What this question is implying through the answer and the other survey responses: There is a gender pay gap. This gender pay gap has at least two major causes (educational and occupational choices vs parenthood and social norms around men's and women’s roles in childrearing). A partial solution for only one of the more major causes will substantially cause the gender pay gap to close. Removing the word "substantially" from the question would remove my objection, but it would also render the question much closer to a basic econ question.

Micro or macro? If macro, can you explain what it means that M1 and M2 money supply has been FALLING? Most of the pundits seem to be saying "nothing to see here", whereas the stopped clocks are saying it's a harbinger of recession.

That just means V is up. During COVID the Fed flooded the market with liquidity but my guess is a lot of that was semi trapped in interest on excess reserves.

By the same token during COVID you would have expected far more inflation based off of base money growth.

I preferred Micro. If I had any specialty it would have been public choice.

Macro is dark wizardy

If you like public choice, then you like would’ve enjoyed law and economics.

They had some overlap for sure. The law and econ stuff sometimes got too close to straight philosophy for my taste. Public choice was ultimately grounded in making predictions about politicians and political outcomes.

Perhaps but L&E ended up rather accurately “backing into” common law rules that evolved over time. It definetly made me think “this framework is prettt strong”

More comments

Good god, it's been a while since I've cracked open my econ degree.

TLDR, M1 and M2 are basically how much free-flow, readily available cash is in the hands of the public(as opposed to Banks, the federal deposit, and other entities.)

Or, put another way, how much money do civilians and John Q Public have available at quick notice.

If it's been falling, well... that means they have less cash on-hand. Why that is could be due to... well, a long list of reasons.

Also, that redefinition of m1 annoys me to a horrendous degree for some odd reason.

The M1 redefinition makes estimating models annoying too, although M3 is a good enough measure nowadays given how liquid even savings accounts and GICs are.

I'll add nutrition "experts" to the pile as one of the groups that I started losing trust in. I still can't believe I fell for the idea that sodium is "bad for you" above the recommended 2300mg/day recommendation. Preventing muscle cramps by cranking up my sodium intake and following up on the empirical evidence for low-sodium diets was one of my first indications that the public health professionals are either ignorant or lying.

Nutrition is protoscience, barely better than psychology.

at least psychology has IQ going for it, which is useful.

Really? So what can I know about the food I eat?

Specific about given food - fine. How to avoid scurvy and similar - fine.

That we should avoid extremely processed food, overeating, sugary drinks and similar traps - many clear cases that should be avoided are known.

But science based guide for optimal diet? Hahaha. No.

Eat more calories to gain weight and less to lose weight is pretty solid.

That's physics, not nutrition, to be fair.

Quite a lot actually. We know that lack of Vitamin C will cause scurvy, lack of Vitamin D will cause rickets, and lack of Iodine will cause goiter. The last two were extremely common prior to the 20th century.

Unfortunately, nutrition science didn't build on these successes but started to make conclusions which weren't supported by evidence.

The other problem is that the job got a lot harder. We have basically invented entire new classes of food since then, and more importantly there's been a lot of population mixing. Given that the optimal diet for one group (not even race, much narrower genetic groups than that) can be completely opposite that of another, it's a damn hard nut to crack now.

I can't say I disagree, as an aspiring psychiatrist who currently has to occasionally write diet charts.

Well, at least the drugs work, regardless of the theoretical grounding of more hand-wavey stuff like therapy.

Going back to the example of bias in policing that I mentioned earlier, I’d say that the vast majority of people on this forum would say that you can’t really use “lived experiences” to contradict data.

I think that almost no one believes data that contradicts what they see with their own eyes. And that is good, because there are million ways data can be limited, poorly recorded, confounded, erroneous, etc. And that applies a hundred times more so to numbers that are not "data" but complex statistical creations.

Data is useful as a check on personal experience. If the two contradict, then one simply has to do the work to see which is more likely to be wrong. There is no shortcut.

The one that bothers me personally is when I've seen people point to total crime data to show that crime hasn't risen in the major US cities. But as someone who lives in such a city, I know that simply reporting a crime is a very burdensome process of waiting hours for the police show up, and the police won't do anything anyways. I know that many (most) people don't report crimes in the city that would likely be reported as a crime in the burbs. Thus total crime number is rate-limited by the police capacity to arrive on the scene and take down a report; it has nothing to do with the actual rate of minor crimes. Thus trend data is absolutely useless. But you would only know this if you knew actually knew something about the city in question, and didn't blindly think that "data" is the highest source of truth.

However, we should remember why the specific phrase "lived experience" became the target of much ire. People have forever validly cited personal anecdotes during debates; but citing "lived experience" was a novel and obnoxious argumentation tactic. The appeal to "lived experience" was specifically being made when the person could not actually specifically describe the evidence they had seen with their own eyes. Rather than say something specific like, "I've had X many racist interactions in these situations in Y years ..." etc the person citing "lived experience" was citing something far more amorphous and undefinable. Or, the context was often that the person citing "lived experience" was claiming the sole right to interpret events that had happened to them. So person A says, "I have experience racism all the time, such as people asking me where I am really from." And B says, "Eh, I don't think that is racist, white people get asked about their ancestry to, that's just a result of living in a country that is a melting pot" and person A then responds, "how dare you deny my lived experience of racism."

In contrast something like this is a valid contribution to a debate:

HlynkaCG says he “has receipts” and linked to a 2 year old post where his local price of cheap meat went from $5/lb to $6.75 (a 35% increase) whereas the national meat price index at the time had only gone up by 9.5% over that period.

HlynkaCG's claims are worth taking seriously. We should investigate this discrepancy. And maybe we find that he just had the bad luck of liking one kind of meat which has risen in price the most and when you do a more broad analysis the government numbers are correct... or maybe we find that the government economists are actually cooking the books.

The better alternative is to use other economic data to make a point. If you think unemployment numbers don’t show the true extent of the problem, for instance, you can cite things like the prime age working ratio if you think people are discouraged from looking for work.

This only works if accurate and relevant data actually exists in published form, which often it does not. You must avoid the "looking for the keys under the lamppost fallacy."

Do you think Ezra’s lived experiences are a valid rebuttal here?

It's at least worthy of further investigation. Where did Ezra live? Who are his friends? If he grew up in a rich suburbs and all his black friends were friends he made at the Black Student Union at a private boarding school, then the reason for the discrepancy becomes obvious. His friend circle is not at all representative of the general population. If Ezra lived in very typical black neighborhood in south-side Chicago and all his friends were all from the neighborhood and public school, then his claims would be puzzling and worthy of more investigation. If Ezra was the only person saying this, I might think he was just making it up, or was ignorant of his friends behavior. But if other people like Ezra kept making the same claim, I might suspect there was something wrong with the government data.

In reality though, your Ezra is fictional The anecdotal evidence, even as supported by black activists like Ta-Nehisi Coates, corroborate the FBI numbers. Personally, I don't believe that blacks have a higher crime rate solely because of the FBI data, I believe it because of lots of anecdotes and from what I see with my own eyes. Actually, based on what I read from news stories and what I see with my own eyes, the FBI data likely significantly understates the black crime problem, because FBI data does not distinguish public crime (knock-out game against strangers) from private crime (eg, a bar fight).

The "lived experience" thing made me realize something, which I guess I'll put here:

I think it's actually a bit of a cheap trick by the OP to bring up the term "lived experience," as used by The Hated Woke, and try to equivocate it to the "Republican vibecession." The thing that makes the term "lived experience" noxious is precisely because it was often a lazy, vague justification presented by progressives for the idea of Massive Systemic Changes to Society. If Hlynka and others were vaguely citing their lives and pairing that with "therefore, we should change the order of things," that likely would get my hackles up, but they haven't really done that.

The anecdotal evidence, even as supported by black activists like Ta-Nehisi Coates, corroborate the FBI numbers. Personally, I don't believe that blacks have a higher crime rate solely because of the FBI data, I believe it because of lots of anecdotes and from what I see with my own eyes.

The best rebuttal against the argument that black arrest rates aren't reflective of actual crime rates is the government's own National Crime Victimization Survey, which, as I understand it, corroborates FBI offender data.

I think this is a false equivalence. Crime stats are about broad groups, not individuals (e.g. "Black men in America"). Even if you are a black man in America with a lived experience, it is impossible to have the lived experience of all black men in America as a collective whole. Thus, you can use lived experience to say "I have been victimized by a police officer," and most reasonable people would accept that, but you cannot use lived experience to say "all black men are victimized by all police officers."

But inflation is about the experience of individuals, not groups. No one is out there saying that inflation disproportionately affects Muslims because the CPI is racist (OK I'm sure someone somewhere is saying that, but I don't care.) A single individual can experience the effects of inflation on their personal food budget without needing to make any claims about the experiences of others. An individual saying "food costs more than it used to" is exactly what inflation is, and exactly what inflation statistics are supposed to measure. If the statistics don't match the experience, then the statistics are wrong.

Moreover, the same government agencies that purport to measure inflation have a pretty big incentive to say that inflation isn't a problem, since inflation reflects badly on the government that signs their paychecks. Not only would we expect them to downplay inflation, we've watched them do it in real time with claims about inflation* being low where inflation* is calculated to exclude food, rent, and education.

In the latter case, it's not just that the sticker price of food has increased, which it certainly has, it's whether it's increased grossly disproportionate to the increase of wages. And even then, as others have shown, the cost of food is a minuscule portion of most individual budgets unless they're really addicted to DoorDash.

As mentioned in my other comment, the problem is that food, while a comparatively small portion of the budget, is one of the only parts that is highly flexible. This means that food, and a few other flexible spends, bear all the weight of the lost money from the inflexible spends increasing in price. This adds a sort of salt-in-the-wound effect when the food is more expensive as well. I think this is a big part of why people fixate on food prices in particular.

It's not miniscule. It has a weight of 13.380%, which puts it as the third largest category of spending (Shelter, then "Commodities less food and energy commodities").

That's small enough I have no shame in calling it miniscule, but YMMV.

An individual saying "food costs more than it used to" is exactly what inflation is, and exactly what inflation statistics are supposed to measure. If the statistics don't match the experience, then the statistics are wrong.

Not necessarily:

  1. The person might live in a particular geographic location which has particularly bad inflation.
  2. The person might suffer selective outrage, noticing the prices that have risen the most, but ignoring products whose prices have remained flat, and ignoring that if you actually average them all out they do match the government numbers.
  3. The person might have specific shopping habits that don't match those of the average consumer.
  4. The inflation on particular product SKU's often exceeds CPI inflation as corporations try to sneak by price increases on lazy existing customers, while giving discounted prices to new customers. So you see the product list price go up and think high inflation. But maybe you forgot about that time you called your cable company, threatened to cancel, got your SKU slightly changed, and are actually are paying the same as you were three years ago for a bundle that is just as satisfactory. And when you average it all out, the actually increase in what you pay is not as high as the increase in the list price.

Do you think Ezra’s lived experiences are a valid rebuttal here?

Honestly, if my own lived experience completely contradicted FBI crime data, I would probably be pretty suspicious of the FBI crime data. If I literally never encountered dangerous or threatening black guys, but had seen people harassed and attacked by Asian women, I would think it's pretty weird that the data doesn't reflect that. If someone insisted on ignoring murder rates (which are probably the easiest thing to get a reasonably accurate measurement of) in favor of the Racial Crime Index that used different sorts of crimes from year to year and excluded major categories of crime, I might think they're trying to pull a fast one on me.

That said, I wouldn't necessarily expect my anecdotal experience to be persuasive to someone that genuinely saw things differently. I completely understand how someone that has personal experience that is consistent with the official stats would say, "dude, it's right here, look, this is actually quite clear". I would probably find that to be a frustrating interaction and be stuck saying, "Yeah, I don't know man, I see those numbers, but I don't think they tell the story very well" and moving on.

The better alternative is to use other economic data to make a point. If you think unemployment numbers don’t show the true extent of the problem, for instance, you can cite things like the prime age working ratio if you think people are discouraged from looking for work. Having tedious debates on the precise definitions of economic indicators is infinitely better than retreating to philosophical solipsism by claiming economic data is broadly illegitimate.

People referenced the lack of utility of increased housing prices for measuring true wealth, the greatly increased interest rates, the bloated national debt, and greatly increased monetary supply as reasons for believing that the economy isn't actually doing great. The responses you received were a combination of personal anecdotes with data that support the underlying claim that things aren't as good as some cherrypicked and (potentially) manipulated data look. To return to the racial crime analogy, these replies would be the equivalent of bringing up the homicide rate in reply to the Racial Crime Index; sure, it might annoy the very serious criminologists that spent a lot of time engineering the Index, but it is actually a real dataset that gives a different impression.

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