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Notes -
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.
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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:
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.
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