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Comment by standardUser | Hacker News Reader

I don't think you're wrong about perceptions, but by virtually every fact-based metric the economy is doing fucking great. The inflation spike has been a setback, but it's a minor blip compared to the 70's (and overdue considering how low inflation was for 20 years). The long-term trend of housing costs sucks, but it pre-dates the last few administrations and most of the blame should fall on local governments.

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It's not just a perception.

I can tell you that every family that I know in my department, unless they're independently wealthy, is seriously hurting compared to any time in the past decade. That includes faculty and students.

Metrics don't include many things. For example, the fact that your ability to buy a house has fallen dramatically. Or the fact that rents in my city have gone up 25%+ in the past 3 years and now graduate students have to share 1 bedroom homes (they use curtains to separate out the living room). Or that the cost of childcare has skyrocketed to the point where it's far higher than a mortgage.

Home ownership is looking normal if you include places outside large cities, but those cities are where the grad students and media are.

https://www.redfin.com/news/gen-z-millennial-homeownership-r...

By https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/largest-cities-by-populat...

Somewhere over half of Americans live in cities. Not just grad students and media

I didn't say otherwise.

We had essentially been exporting inflation to places like China for about 30 years until 2018 or so. As soon as our free trade policies changed under the previous admin it was clear that we were in for some inflation. Throw in covid and this is the result - the choice was either let the economy fall into another great depression or send checks out to people. We kind of did the latter. I think the inflation we're experiencing now is better than the alternative.

That's a false dichotomy. We could have done nothing and the economy would have been. Sending people checks was only excused because of an inexcusable shutdown.

people don't vote on data but on perceptions and real feelings.

if the gvt report say unemployment is down. but you're having a hard time finding a job who are you to believe ?

if the gvt says grocery prices are down. but then you go into the shop with $20 and only buy two things who are you to believe.

I don't know man, I paid $9 and change for a coffee and croissant today. Things feel expensive.

Old people are doing great, while young people are getting squeezed.

Some old people are doing great ... meanwhile:

The elderly are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37641471

Looks like 2020 data? Social security COL increase was 8.7% this year. That’s pretty great compared to engineering salaries in the linked article.

Great? 2020?

* I'm pretty sure that the bulk of those that became homeless are still homeless and that more ederly are still becoming homeless at high rates.

* How many of those do you think are getting the kind of Social Security that is sufficient to meet needs?

* You'd rather a social security pension with an 8.7% increase over a median engineering salary of US $169,000?

This makes no sense. Inflation should hit old people the worst. They aren't exactly getting promotions and parking their nest eggs in high risk investments...

And yet you had no qualms about making that completely discretionary purchase. You’re doing fine.

By McNamara's fact-based metrics, we were winning the Vietnam War. These aggregate measurements might be good at the high level, but say nothing about an individual's perception of reality. People know their personal economic situation is bad right now, they don't really care about the macroeconomics, that's not what "The Economy" is to the average American.

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