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Notes -
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:
WhiningCoil says inflation numbers are “literally impossible to square with the lived experience” of housing costs going up, or the prices of staple foods doubling.
haroldbkny says inflation has been unprecedented in all his “life experience”, and he hasn’t seen the wages of anyone he knows growing to match it.
Walterodim says it’s “incredibly obvious” that people have “personally experienced much sharper increases in prices” than officials claim, and that officials must be “cooking the books”.
JTarrou says his personal standard of living went down, and that he’s paying “a third higher to double on most normal expenses (energy, groceries, etc.), and as such my national metrics smell of “statistical bullshit”and that “economic metrics are bullshit statistical lies”.
JTarrou further claims that economics is staffed by people who “all drank the same koolaid”, and that while anecdote is small data, it’s the only data he’s sure “isn’t horseshit”
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.
SlowBoy says recent economic events have been like “receiving Biden’s twelve inches”, and that the data are all gamed by lying government officials.
No_one implies people are waking up to statistical lies by linking to a Tweet of someone who went to their local grocery story where the cost of meat has jumped from $10 to $16.
freemcflurry says he makes more money than he used to, but “things just feel shitty”; the prices of chicken breast as his local grocery store doubled from $2/lb to $4/lb, and there are now masses of homeless people in his city walking around “like zombies with festering sores all over their skin.”
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.
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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