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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 11, 2024

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"We show that if we make an effort to reconstruct the CPI of Okun’s era [1970s]—which would have had inflation peak last year around 18%, we are able to explain 70% of the gap in consumer sentiment we saw last year."

I'm really confused at why this is supposed to be compelling. Can't you say this about any two things that changed by roughly the same size?

But maybe that's because I'm confused by what the units on "user sentiment" are in this tweet. Without that, it's not even clear why you'd expect "user sentiment" to be linearly related with inflation — if the gap between inflation metrics was higher, would he be saying this explained 110% of user sentiment?