This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
A deep and enduring “vibecession” – Partisan differences are increasingly dominating perceptions of the economy.
By almost every metric, the US economy is doing quite well at the moment. There are many ways to evaluate economic vitality. The most obvious is the headline unemployment rate, which was used throughout the Great Recession to monitor the (slow) recovery. Today, though, unemployment is hovering near record lows at <4%.
Beyond this, there are somewhat nerdier, more technical measurements that still capture important aspects of the economy. Things like inflation, GDP growth, and the stock market. All of these indicators are somewhere between “good” and “great”. Inflation has come way down and is now around 3.7%. Core inflation, a better measurement of long-term inflation that excludes volatile commodities like gas prices, is even lower at around 2.5%, essentially hitting the Fed’s 2% target. GDP growth is surprisingly high for Q3 at 4.9%. The stock market is also doing fairly well, with the S&P500 being less than 10% off its all-time high at the end of 2021 and being well-above the pre-COVID high in Jan 2020.
Drilling even deeper, at this point you start to get the indicators people and the media can “fish” for in order to find bad news. Things like median wage growth, wealth inequality, and prime-age labor participation rate. The thinking with these metrics is that even if the more commonly cited stats are doing well, they might not paint a full picture. For instance, if the economy is growing but the rich are eating all the gains, then things like wage growth and inequality can show how most people aren’t benefitting. Likewise, if the unemployment rate has fallen because people have become discouraged and just don’t bother looking for work any more, then labor participation can show what’s really going on. The steelman of these metrics is that they can be helpful in painting a fuller picture, although in practice I’ve often only seen them used when people are willing to use motivated reasoning to paint the economy as underperforming (e.g. politicians, doomers, or the media just trying to create a story). That said, even by these metrics the US economy is doing well. Median wage growth is very high and is well-above inflation. Regular Americans are getting richer, and wealth inequality has fallen.. The prime age employment rate is also near record highs.
In spite of all of this though, many peoples’ opinions of the economy remain in the dumps. The consumer sentiment index has recovered only slightly from its record low a few months ago, but is still barely better than during the worst parts of the Great Recession. What gives? Well, there’s quite a bit of evidence that it’s just partisan emotional expression, i.e. “vibes”. There’s plenty of data showing that Americans tend to rate the national economy as being much worse than their own personal financial circumstances. Kevin Drum has some evidence that this national-personal split is mostly being driven by Republicans. 71% of Democrats and 57% of Republicans say the economy is doing well in terms of their personal situation. But in terms of the nation as whole, 58% of Democrats and just 5% (!!!) of Republicans say the economy is doing well on a national scale. So you have this goofy scenario where Republicans across the country say things are going well for them individually, but as a collective things must simply disastrous. Where is this “disaster” occurring? “Well, not here, but it’s surely happening somewhere”. The 5% mark is particularly interesting because it perfectly matches Republican’s approval rating of Biden. In other words, it seems like asking people how well the economy is doing is just a proxy for “what do you think of the current sitting president”. I’d doubt the numbers would correlate this perfectly all the time, but there’d still be a significant relationship. Whichever party doesn’t control the White House will see the economy in much more pessimistic terms.
Currently this is just applied to Republicans being pessimistic, but it’s almost certainly symmetrical. When Republicans eventually take back control of the presidency, it’s not hard to predict that Democrats will suddenly think the sky is falling in economic terms.
I smell statistical bullshit.
My normal standard of living has taken a noticeable if not disastrous turn. My pay is roughly the same, my costs are a third higher to double on most normal expenses (energy, groceries etc.). My rent is up 30%, the value of my savings is down 20%, and the cost of buying a house is up 50%.
Three years ago I had a lot more disposable income. Now, all that might fit fine within the "economy is doing fine" narrative, but it doesn't feel fine to me. What I hear from posts like this is "economic metrics are bullshit statistical lies". I am noticeably poorer today than I was in 2020. All the statistics in the world aren't going to change that.
You may well be poorer than you were three years ago. Most people are not - incidentally, much, certainly more than normal, of the wage growth of the recent period has gone to lower income workers, which perhaps indicates why this discourse of a bad economy is tolerated despite the evidence to the contrary. Not sure what else to tell you is that, surprisingly, number continue to the best means of measuring things.
There is no way anyone on this forum would tolerate for a second this kind of 'lived experience' rhetoric if it was about, say, racism.
Actually, there's a decent bit of evidence behind the claim that statistics aren't accurately measuring what's happening to people in their actual lives. What are family formation rates looking like? Education costs and student debt? Property/housing costs? Food quality/price shifts? Giant tent-cities full of homeless people? I mean, I'm not a trained economist, but the presence of hordes of homeless drug addicts in such huge numbers that famous cities have problems with street lamps collapsing due to so many homeless people urinating on them don't seem to me like an indication of a healthy economy. Hell, the most straightforward measure of economic activity, energy usage per capita, hasn't recovered either.
Would you be willing to stand behind the claim that official measures of inflation, cost-of-living etc accurately reflect what's happening in the economy as opposed to being massaged and shaped for political messaging purposes? My personal contention is that while costs in a lot of areas have been reduced, many of the things people consider essential for a satisfying life have been pulled out of reach for vast numbers of people, and various statistical shell-games have been played to obscure this.
How are homeless drug addicts evidence that the government is lying about inflation? How is a lack of family formation evidence of that?
Successful economies generally don't have large populations of homeless drug users terrorising major cities and rendering vast swathes of infrastructure/real-estate effectively worthless. At the same time, family formation is an extremely important life-goal for most people and one that's heavily tied to economic success (i.e. being able to support a home and raise children). It isn't necessarily a sign that the government is directly lying about inflation, but if the government is saying that the economy is in an extremely healthy state, these phenomena make the case that the government is being deceptive in some way. Maybe they're telling the truth about inflation but hiding the shortfalls elsewhere - I'd need to make this a full-time job to really get to the bottom of it from here.
Successful economies often have large populations of homeless drug users in their major cities. In fact, the wealth of these countries probably why so many people can afford to be homeless drug users. If we were poorer, there wouldn't be enough charity or social welfare to support them.
There is a very strong negative correlation between wealth and fertility on a societal level. In developed countries, the fertility rate has steadily fallen as we've gotten richer over the last 150 years. In Africa, people clearly living in extreme poverty have several times the number of children as we do. The problem is not that people cannot afford to have children.
Often? I was unaware that the presence of giant groups of homeless indigents was a positive sign for an economy. I'm not going to try and argue on this point, but I'd like to see some more evidence that this is a good thing as opposed to a social problem, because I imagine that in an actually functioning economy these people would have jobs/homes/better things to do. If the economy generating large numbers of crazy hobos with knives who randomly assault passers-by in major cities is a sign that it is functioning well I think there are some problems with how we define "functioning well".
African economies and countries are so incredibly different to the west that I don't think this is a good comparison. In extremely terrible economies having large numbers of children is heavily incentivised for a variety of other reasons - that's your replacement for medical technology, retirement savings, childcare, extra labour etc. In the modern west, most of the childless members of my cohort explicitly tell me that there are financial reasons behind their childlessness, and a lot of them tell me that they would prefer to have more children if they weren't limited by the costs of doing so. That seems to be borne out by the statistics I look at as well.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link