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Comment by dazilcher | Hacker News Reader

The mental gymnastics some commenters use to turn this into bad news...

Occam must be spinning in his grave.

I think there’s a non-trivial number of Americans who have adopted a belief system that we’re a crap country and don’t want to hear anything that contradicts that narrative. It seems like a lot of folks also shift into and out of that category when their preferred red or blue team is in the White House.

Yeh the america is bad crowd is out here in full effect trying to say other places have it better. When the reality is life is hard and its actually much hard everywhere else. There is no easy mode to this.

Generally everyone in the US views the US negatively right now.

maybe some mumbo jumbo stat that has nothing to do with the real world says things are better. Or maybe they frankly are not better.

These numbers are pre-COVID. Obviously things are bad now, there’s a global pandemic.

Pre-COVID, personal satisfaction in the US was at all time highs, so these numbers shouldn’t be all that surprising to anyone outside the HN bubble...

Ahh yes, "personal satisfaction." I'd love to see the survey that made that statistic marketable.

It’s Gallup: https://news.gallup.com/poll/284285/new-high-americans-satis...

Anyway, it sounds like you’ve really made up your mind here, and no amount of data appears to be sufficient to reverse the dogma.

"The latest figure bests the previous high of 88% recorded in 2003."

lol wow. 2% of difference. Am I really supposed to believe this nonsense you spew? What a meaningless statistic, all to support YOUR dogma.

See what I mean? You seem easily convinced, so stick around and I'll have your whole world upside down.

The difference between 88 and 90 isn’t important here. This is directly in response to your claim that “Generally everyone in the US views the US negatively right now.”

Perhaps that’s true in late 2020 amidst a once-in-generation pandemic and the inevitable economic fallout that’s gripped the entire world. But these pre-COVID US Census numbers mostly line up with the overwhelming pre-COVID sentiment. I don’t know why that’s so surprising/off-putting to you.

Unfortunately you simply do not comprehend the subject matter in the article. Please reread your link.

This is "personal satisfaction survey." Not a US satisfaction survey. Completely different things.

Your narrative games don't work on actual intellectuals. Sorry.

"US satisfaction" surveys don't do a good job of telling us how people feel about their economic well-being, because it is also a survey of social issues, foreign policy, etc. It's a survey of how Americans feel about the government. While important, it's a polluted data-point in the context of income and poverty in the United States, which is the topic at hand here.

The personal satisfaction survey captures exactly what we're talking about: how Americans feel about their personal well-being, and that's primarily driven by their personal access to resources/goods/services — in other words, their economic well-being.

> Your narrative games don't work on actual intellectuals. Sorry.

Not going to touch this, but you might be overestimating the positive effect statements like this have on your argument's credibility.

No a weird subsect view america that way

Multiple subsects, on both sides.

When individual incomes are up nowhere near as much, there is obviously more going on than just good economic news.

Real median individual income is the highest it's ever been: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N

According to BEA, "State personal income increased 4.4 percent in 2019, after increasing 5.6 percent in 2018". This is not median data, so the median would likely have increased even less.

[1] https://www.bea.gov/news/2020/state-annual-personal-income-2...

The linked FRED data is median data.

Why is it at such variance with the BEA data? That is my question.

Oh you’re not talking about the FRED data, which examines real median personal income over time (which has been constantly increasing).

You’re talking about why the BEA data doesn’t line up with the US Census Bureau data for 2019. That’s probably because the BEA data is average growth while the US Census data shows the median income growth. For year 2019, we noticed that wage growth was largely driven by the lower quintiles: https://www.hiringlab.org/2019/03/05/february-jobs-report-pr...

This can largely explain the discrepancy. In other words, the assertion that “median would have increased even less” actually turned out to not be true, empirically.

Ah, so a one-off anomaly. Over time it seems that median income is considerably underperforming. [1][2]

[1] https://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WRA516-1.html [2] https://www.fastcompany.com/90550015/we-were-shocked-rand-st...

Sure, we have seen "anomalous" years for median earners from time to time, but it's important to remember that over time real median income has still been increasing as a function of the business cycle — I.e. the first derivative has always been positive during bull economies (see: FRED historic data). Sometimes the second derivative is also positive, which isn't uncommon. In 2019, the second derivative was not only positive, it was very positive.

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