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Comment by xnx | Hacker News Reader

Perception is reality. It seems that changing the direction of a trillion dollar economy ended up being easier than peoples feelings about it. "Truthiness" is an appropriate word here. The rapid step-change in the price of goods (robbery!) is overpowering the less visible gains in wages (hard-earned by the sweat of my brow!).

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Or maybe those wage gains are not evenly distributed.

Definitely: "from the end of 2019 to the end of 2023, the lowest-paid decile of workers saw their wages rise four times faster than middle-class workers and more than 10 times faster than the richest decile."

That said, 1% of one million is ~double 10% of $45,000.

Theyre not. Most of the gains are going to the poorest and richest. The poorest especially are doing better than they have ever before.

I'd imagine most of that "doing better" is wiped out by much higher housing costs and food inflation for the least fortunate.

Maybe what people feel is more real / closer to practical reality than the numbers the elites point to argue otherwise?

Yes. Feeling is believing, but I don't know how policy makers should handle it when so much of how people feel is dependent on if their "team" is in the White House: https://news.clas.ufl.edu/partisan-politics-and-consumer-sen...

That's not surprising at all. People expect their preferred candidate to set policies that benefit them, so their sentiment rises.

People have a preferred candidate? Jesus, how?

> Maybe what people feel is more real / closer to practical reality than the numbers the elites point to argue otherwise?

Bingo.

People who argue the economy is doing well based on some coarse high-level numbers are missing a lot, because the numbers are coarse and high-level. The most charitable interpretation is they're confusing the map for the territory.

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