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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   24902 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 30, 2023

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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.

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