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Comment by _1tem | Hacker News Reader

If you go to the doctor with a problem and get a blood test and they say that everything looks fine, but you don’t feel fine, then you don’t say: “well the numbers are right, I should feel fine”. Rather you try to find what the numbers aren’t capturing, because you know something is wrong. Same with the economy. The perception of the economy being bad is really pervasive as demonstrated by the last election, and perception matters, because selective numbers don’t tell the whole story.

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Perception can be manipulated in many ways.

People get used to things and give for granted things that used to be luxuries a few generations back (see "hedonic treadmill")

Combine that with active participants who control the media landscape and have a vested interest in painting a bleak picture so they can be the ones fixing it.

And then of course there is the fact that things are of course objectively hard for many people because not everybody can be the average person.

So in a sense it's correct to say that these numbers don't capture reality while being technically correct. And that's because reality is much more complex than the things those numbers measure.

The question is: are those indicators useful? Provided you understand what they actually measure, can that be used as a control signal to help make choices that will go in the right direction and improve quality of life for everybody?

Perhaps the improvement will be marginal and not everybody's problems will be fixed, but is it unreasonable to think that problems cannot be fixed by a quick single intervention and that instead they will compound over time?

Look at the progress humanity has made in so many fronts. Ask anybody to pick a time in history where they would like to travel back and have a better life. The most frequent answer is either now or a few years ago when they were young and everything was better (likely because of nostalgia for youth or childhood).

Very few people would really want to be the average person in an era with poor sanitation, corporeal punishment, no education, illiteracy, expensive and faint artificial lighting, widespread diseases, non-existent dental care, low life expectancy

Tangently, being poor in a wealthy area is far different than being poor in a poor area.

An example being "cast offs". In my early 20s, I moved from a poorer rural area, to a well to do city suburb.

Walking to various places, I noticed things cast aside that would never, ever be thrown away in the area I grew up in.

Examples being:

* an expensive propane bbq, with damage to one of the hoses. A $10 repair and I had a bbq worth hundreds.

(Even looked brand new)

* A set of cutlery, and plates. One of 8 plates had a crack. The cutlery was missing one fork out of a set of 8.

(For a young man eating off of one plate, this was a big bonus)

* a coat rack, mild discolouration

(10 cents in paint out of a spray can to fix)

Anyhow, you get the point. Very usable items cast off, and I would never have found this treasure trove in a poor neighbourhood.

Just being surrounded by a society of greater wealth, means better access generally.

I take your point. I was at a very preppy east coast school whose name you've definitely heard of.

One day I was walking past a high-end apartment complex where I knew a lot of sorority girls lived. There was one of those expensive chrome-plated Kirby vacuums in a trash dumpster. I took a closer look and it appeared to be brand new.

I pulled it out of the dumpster and carried it down the street to my much more modest apartment complex and plugged it in out on the terrace. Turns out the only thing wrong was the dust bag was full. I had some extra bags, so it didn't cost me anything to get one of the best vacuums money can buy almost brand new.

I couldn't believe someone had pitched it in the bin just because the bag was full. But apparently wealthy people do stuff like that all the time.

Not having to be scanning for threats 24/7 also frees up mental bandwidth for more productive activities.

We moved from a dangerous inner city suburb where that was the case, to the edges of an affluent enclave as a kid, and my grades improving and extra curricular activities like getting good at computers and getting a holiday job which kickstarted my tech career, all followed that move.

So the people who are fed up with how things are currently going are according to your argument here either

- manipulated / brainwashed - entitled / spoiled - outliers (the few who have it bad are too loud). - the problems can’t be fixed anyway - don’t realise how much worse it was in the past ?

I disagree that the sentiment of the general population is not a useful indicator of how good things are going for the general population. I think it is the best indicator, but people in power (and I would count most on this forum among then) don’t want to see anything that threatens their status quo.

Yes people are fed up. Nobody is arguing that people are happy and somebody is misrepresenting that.

What I'm trying to say is that there is an explanation for why this sentiment exists despite measures of material wealth and economic success being positive.

The fact that there is an explanation doesn't magically make people feel better.

I think it all boils down to the attitude one has towards seeking explaination.

One is a scientific approach where one aims at understanding the dynamics of a phenomenon in a way that is detached from it as much as possible.

The other approach is moral one where one seeks an explanation in order to convince oneself (and others) how one should feel about it. "You shouldn't complain, you have indoor plumbing your grandparents had to pump water from a well; shut up".

I'm not making the latter, moral, argument. I'm trying to make the scientific one

> despite measures of material wealth and economic success being positive

Are they? GDP is a measure of national economic success not of personal economic success.

The latter is measured by metrics such as: value of a home relative to wages, value of rent relative to average wage, disposable income relative to the prices, food prices relative to wages.

These are the numbers you don't often hear about in the media, you only tend to hear about GDP and the time derivative of prices, neither of which have much relevance to ordinary people.

Most of those are measures of the housing market and not the economy though. We've chosen to make housing an artificially scarce good which is making fortunes for some people and making life hard for many more. But as far as I can tell, the have-nots are also in favor of keeping everything expensive low density SFH. They just want to be in the have group.

> But as far as I can tell, the have-nots are also in favor of keeping everything expensive low density SFH.

I have no clue why you would think this. Basically ever poor person I know (and I know a lot of poor people) has simply given up on ever experiencing home ownership. None of them can afford to live by themselves. High density or low density, zoning laws, etc, don't even enter the picture because not one of those will actually bring housing into any kind of affordable range. It's just that politicians refuse to campaign on anything but "what type of housing supply should we hope developers build—low or high density" that there's any confusion here.

"When education is not liberating, the dream of the oppressed is to become the oppressor"

And we get into the root of the issue. I wouldn't be surprised if much of the Gen Z support for left wing positions doesn't just boil down to Gimmeism that they'd quickly abandon once they're part of the elite.

Another example is constant controversy over Elite College Admissions, ignoring the 99% of perfectly good but not as reputable State Colleges with high admissions rates.

Normative approach versus a descriptive/empirical approach.

Thanks. In a first draft I used the words descriptive and prescriptive but then I decided to avoid possibly using the wrong terminology. Would "prescriptive" be a synonym for "normative" in this case or is there an important difference?

Yep, positive vs normative might be the words you are looking for.

> I disagree that the sentiment of the general population is not a useful indicator of how good things are going for the general population

I think that there's a factual case that general sentiment is no longer a useful indicator of "how good things are going for the general population".

Sources:

https://www.newsweek.com/economy-strength-politics-yougov-da...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jun/09/is-e...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-03-21/consumer-...

Yes, people readily concerned with the defensiveness of their position are easily manipulated. The conviction towards or against a position is the subjective basis open to modification.

A battery of competing measures compared against historical trends are almost certainly the best gauge of how things are.

It feels like the opposite is true. Things that used to be fairly common like owning a home or living in a major city have now become luxuries.

In New York City the homeownership rate has been about the same over the last 25 years, about 32%, about about 1% from pre pandemic. Looking at the national average it is about the same 65.5%, up about 1% from 5 years ago, with small changes over the last 50 years. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N

In 2024, the average age of homebuyers hit a record high of 56.

This highlights how any statistic can be used to support a narrative.

For instance, while the national average for homeownership rates remains relatively stable, it now comes with the reality that people are working harder and longer to achieve it. On the flip side, homes today are often larger and more feature-rich than in the past, which some might argue offsets the challenge.

The real question is: which of these factors—delayed homeownership or improved home quality—has a greater impact on how people perceive their economic well-being?

Compare the savings rates and this picture no longer looks rosy due to data disappearing when averaged out.

What you have is a bimodal distribution of people who almost never will own a house and those who will. And a bunch of rich people who have whole fleets of houses.

This is why nobody should ever use averages and rates alone without a supporting histogram.

> not everybody can be the average person.

Averages are often misleading.

If one person is a billionaire, and 999 have nothing, the average person is a millionaire. That average is of little comfort to the 999 however.

> Perception can be manipulated in many ways.

Numbers are even easier to manipulate.

I think perception about what numbers mean is even easier to manipulate

There are so many metrics. The act of selecting one metric or another metric to drive a point across is a key way to "lie with numbers". The numbers themselves are usually correct but they paint a misleading picture nevertheless.

A similar thing happens with fiddling with the axis on graphs, e.g. not starting a graph at zero or using the wrong scale.

> The perception of the economy being bad is really pervasive as demonstrated by the last election, and perception matters, because selective numbers don’t tell the whole story.

Well saying "the economy is good" or "the economy is bad" out of context is simply moronic. Good for whom? Bad for whom? It's no secret our entire society is stacked to favor investors and owners rather than workers. The market certainly treats people extremely differently based on where they are in society. Much of the population never economically recovered from the 2008 crash at all—something that won't be reflected by GDP, stock performance, "jobs created", or how many people are collecting unemployment (which is, confusingly, a wildly different figure from counting people who want jobs but can't find one—as best I can tell, a metric not reported by the federal government at all, but appears to be about twice as large as the "unemployment" metric pimped: https://www.richmondfed.org/research/national_economy/non_em.... And this isn't even touching underemployment). The CPI is a little better, but only by a small amount.

And you'd have to be blind to not notice a minimum wage job is no longer sufficient to afford rent in most major metro areas.

A couple of points:

- Headline unemployment _is_ "people who want jobs [enough to be looking for them] but can't find one". The metric you linked to is including people outside the labor force and then weighting in a fairly opaque way. Between labor force participation being at the same point as it was 2014-2016 and unemployment being lower, I don't think it's fair to say unemployment stats are misleading. The point about underemployment is still definitely valid though.

- I'm with you that minimum wage should likely be higher, but federal minimum wage has never been intended to be "comfortable wage in a major metro". Major cities have their own minimum wages -- e.g., NYCs is $16/hr. Making $32k a year in NYC would of course not be comfortable, but is doable (eg you can rent a room in an apartment for $1k/mo, live off of oats and rice, etc). It's not intended to be a "head of household" wage, but "the least amount you can ever pay anyone"

Other than these nits I'm with you that stats don't cover the lived experience of all Americans and there's more too it than simply vibes. However I also do think that some of the vibecession is due to increasingly effective media manipulation to squeeze money from consumers. I (coincidentally just now) wrote a blog post explanding on this hypothesis here - https://medium.com/@digital-cygnet/manipulated-into-malaise-...

i've certainly never been counted towards that unemployment metric any time I've been unemployed. Am I not part of the labor force? The metric only counts people who actively apply for unemployment relief. So either I'm not part of the labor force—doubtful, as I'm employed—or "unemployment" doesn't mean "wants a job and doesn't have one".

Simply: the way the federal government employs the word "unemployment" is, at best, disingenuous; I suspect it is intentional, though, to obscure the intent to leave some part of the population without employment to keep the labor market weak.

In the USA, unemployment is based on a periodic, 60k household survey. You may not have ever been contacted but that's just the nature of sampling. It's true that some countries report unemployment as those who are actually registered as unemployed, but that's not best practice (and a good reason to be careful comparing country unemployment rates)

You can read more on the US system here - https://www.bls.gov/cps/faq.htm#Ques3

I agree it's a bad outcome that someone who gets so fed up with the labor market that they stop looking for work no longer counts as unemployed, but that's why we have labor force participation (and why imho that should be reported in headlines along with unemployment, after adjusting for age and education)

These are usually based on surveys not just the numbers summed up from whatever unemployment offices.

Assigning such intent to a huge bureaucracy is going to lead you to strange and mostly incorrect conclusions.

> And you'd have to be blind to not notice a minimum wage job is no longer sufficient to afford rent in most major metro areas.

Either blind, or detached enough that you think that it's a good thing, as long as the value of your home also goes up and you have access to relatively cheap service labor.

I also wonder how much the USD's role as the reserve currency plays into this. If I build a home for 1 MM USD today which used to cost 150k USD in 2008 - this looks like economic growth, despite the home largely being the same between the two periods.

Certain categories of the CPI have experienced extreme inflation over the last 16 years, this gets reflected in the wages of the economically mobile and in turn raises the GDP - however we don't really price housing into the CPI in a sensible manner, and due to USD dominated trade - imports and products which compete with imports don't inflate.

The discrepancy between PPP and nominal (USD) GDP seem to be telling a story.

Remember that the U.S. Dollar is one of many reserve currencies in the world. Other popular ones include the Japanese Yen, the British Pound, and the Euro. The dollar is just the one that is most dominant and for generally good reasons including sophisticated capital markets, rule of law, and the military might to force resolution of international disputes.

I think the main issue I see with your note about the difference in home prices is that you could stretch that out to say 1915 and 1950, and you’d be hard pressed to explain that economic growth was fake or don’t occur. Even in your example, the economy didn’t grow 6x, but how has resource utilization changed or supply and demand globally? I think a further analysis will show many factors going into that home price, and some of those very much are just simple economic growth and/or supply and demand of materials.

As always it’s also the location. Look at home prices in, idk, Toledo, Ohio. How have those fared in your same time period?

The real question then is why there are no paying jobs in Toledo, Ohio?

After all, it's really cheap estate and lots of reserve labor...

Ah right, and here we come to the critical issue which is horizontal integration. Even shipping to Toledo is going to be more expensive, not to mention availability of variety of things.

Then you get to deal with the interesting "small town culture" vibe, and lack of educational options.

Right, but the specific plight of Toledo in this context was just to illustrate that the argument about home prices increasing is dependent on economic factors. I think the dollar and its usage is of less importance to that original point.

True, it's moronic if you expect to discuss the details of a complex economic system. But in a political context, the finer details aren't interesting

I'm not saying the economy is good. But according to polling, many folks who said the economy was "poor" before the November election now believe it's doing great. All in a very partisan fashion, of course: https://jabberwocking.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/blog_mi...

Not to put words in your mouth, but this comment seems to imply that politicians successfully painted a negative picture of the economy that didn't reflect reality and used that to win the last election. While I wouldn't put that past them, why was it successful this time and not every time? Nobody even tried to pretend the economy was bad when Clinton, Bush or Obama were up for re-election, because it obviously wasn't.

> why was it successful this time and not every time?

Isn't there a pervasive belief that Republican administrations are better for the economy than Democratic administrations, despite the economy performing better under Democratic administrations for the vast majority of postwar history?

There is a reason the market rallied when Trump was elected.

Only one reason? Is it because the winner was the side that would have tried to overthrow the election if they had lost? The market probably doesn’t like the prospect of constitutional crisis.

Is it the same reason why the Trump meme coin did also?

In 2016 they absolutely pretended that the economy was very bad, and then suddenly it was very good in February 2017.

When high gas prices are over, they go back down to being relatively low.

When high inflation is over, prices don't go back down, they just increase at a more reasonable rate going forward. But they'll still feel high for at least a few years as people mentally adjust.

Gas is around the lowest it will ever be going forward. The extra energy to pump and refine oil has been and will continue to increase.

when clinton, bush, or obama were elected, the opposing party was much less willing to engage in bad-faith arguments and outright lies for their own gain.

Oh boy. Yes, they did. For example: https://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/12/us/politics/12bai.html

"How the US Economy Is Doing Depends on Your Politics" says that the trend started in late 90s: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-03-21/consumer-...

My guess: the COVID related inflation was visible, made for a relatable talking point, and our modern day communication technologies made it easy to repeat that talking point over and over.

This. Even though inflation is just about back to where it was pre-covid, the winning candidate gave his voters the impression that he could lower the prices that had gone up during the earlier inflationary period. The majority of voters don't understand the underlying economic issues: Unless you get a negative inflation rate (deflation) you're not going to see lower prices. And the only way you get deflation is during severe economic downturns - now it could be that his promise will come true and we'll get a severe economic downturn that leads to lower pries, but I don't think the people that voted his way had that in mind.

Of course people don't really want deflation either, and most people don't really believe prices will magically drop 30% back to where they were in 2019.

But it's still reasonable to punish those who presided over the inflation spike if you think their policy choices played a role in causing it.

Except they voted for the guy who arguably started the inflation spike and will stoke inflation again by imposing tariffs on all imports (not to mention increasing deficits faster than the other guys would have).

> and most people don't really believe prices will magically drop 30% back to where they were in 2019

You'd be surprised. Most people don't, but a most of the people who voted for him did seem to that he was going to magically drop prices.

Except the causes for it are due to multiple elections of people with almost the same policies regarding regulation and taxation, leading to consolidation.

So, punished people by electing people with the same policies, just with more lies. Perverse incentive is to keep the same policies, but lie more.

> why was it successful this time and not every time?

The tools for fooling people are becoming easier to develop and deploy.

There's an ongoing trend of increased polarization, you shouldn't assume that politics and partisanship is the same as 20 years ago.

iirc Trump campaigned on the sluggishness of the Obama-era economy. It was characterized as burdened and shackled, but not downright terrible.

Yeah, there was a perception then (in 2016) that the economy was growing too slowly when in fact it was doing pretty well. Yes, the recovery from the '08 Great Recession was very slow, but by 2016 things were pretty good. Then this time around he ran on the economy being supposedly better during his first term when in fact most of that was just inherited from Obama. Towards the end of Trump's first term inflation was already starting to heat up due to the trade wars and tariffs he started. Covid hits and that inflation goes into high gear. Most of it was from covid and supply chain issues - not really Biden's fault, but it was easy for him to pin it on Biden.

My guess is that journalism failed this election and social media won it.

* Advertising is failing for news sites, so paywalls are becoming the new thing. Those are a barrier to entry for most potential readers.

* As one of the largest social media platforms, X did made two key moves. First, they limited reach for users who share external links.[1] That breaks news sites' revenue and readership models. Second, the CEO of X came out as a massive Trump amplifier on that platform. Neither of these things limited users' access to information, but it deeply affected their access to truth.

* At the same time Meta backed completely out of the "breaking news" business (maybe on both FB and Threads ... I don't keep track that well).

* Trust in MSM was already declining.

Once the fourth estate was hobbled, social media, podcasts and chat platforms became the dominant means for storytelling. Not only were the Democrats not getting their act together on those platforms, but neither was the press.

Personally? Measured by the number of homeless people I see around me I think the economy is still pretty crappy even though my stock and crypto portfolio is doing great.

[1] https://techround.co.uk/news/musk-limiting-external-links-x/

And if you read other social media platforms like reddit , you would believe that Harris would win in by a landslide.

I don't know a single person in my sphere who feels this way. I think the common sentiment is things will probably improve and the stock market is up. Would be curious to see how UoM did their polling. Does answering truthfully about the state of the stock market indicate that you think that the economy is doing better?

They may be confusing current state sentiments with possible future state expectations and those sentiments, should expectations be met.

I have people in my "sphere"[1] who definitely have positive "let the sanity begin" type responses when the economy is under discussion.

[1] I think I like that term and am referring to the body of people with whom I am familiar enough to speak about in this way. Certainly not for though. I am not doing that!

Polls were very wrong - again. Their methodology is clearly flawed. I owe my friend an expensive steak dinner because I believed the polls.

In the crisis era of non-reproducible science and bad data collection is it any surprise the polls are wrong too?

But the polls weren't wrong [1]. This was a normal polling error. If we expect polls to give us pinpoint accuracy, it's our expectations that are wrong.

[1] https://www.natesilver.net/p/the-model-exactly-predicted-the...

Normal polling errors would lead you to believe that the actual results would fall equally and normally on both sides of the polling forecast. But they don't. The polling error is nearly always in one direction. Polling consistently underreports support for Trump in every case where we have actual results. We don't have this problem with other candidates, or even with other types of polls. There are theories about "low propensity voters" and maybe they don't show up in polls, but I suspect the real reason is more complex than that and involves some amount of self-reported filtering because of the demonization of Trump.

Perhaps Trump -- and Republican -- voters avoid taking polls or some are afraid to go on the record and admit how they're going to vote. For some there is a non-zero risk certain family members may cut off contact.

> ...some amount of self-reported filtering because of the demonization of Trump.

Indeed. He demonizes himself. I was ashamed to admit I voted for him in 2016.

Anecdote:

I know plenty of people who have said they have permanently cut off friends and family for having conservative views. I don't know one single conservative who has said the same.

> I don't know one single conservative who has said the same.

Could it be that progressives haven't behaved badly enough that supporting them warrants cutting off contact?

Like say taking away rights from an enter gender, separating kids from their parents and locking them in cages, granting broad immunity to corrupt ex-Presidents, attempting a coup, openly calling for violence, threatening to use the military against political opponents, etc.

It can probably be explained as an indication that Democratic candidates are "normal" ones, and a win of one isn't a reason for drastic measures, while Republican candidates are "not normal", and a win of a Republican is enough grounds to cut off friends...

I'm ashamed to admit I didn't vote for him this time around because I haven't been in my home state and traveling - couldn't really get access to a ballot or mail in ballot due to my traveling.

Just to clarify, thats a poll about future "expectations" about the economy. Many of the people that voted for Trump based on his economic policies now have good expectations for the economy because they expect him to implement those policies.

That says "expectations index"...

I do not think it means what you think it means.

My understanding is:

* Perception of the economy depends tremendously on whether the president is of your preferred party. Whenever the presidency changes hands, you see a massive and rapid flip in which party supporters are satisfied with the state of the economy.

* If you ask Americans about how they are doing personally, as opposed to how they believe the economy is doing, their response is much rosier.

See also: "vibecession"

AFAIK the former effect has been found to be much stronger among Republicans, though it exists in both parties. It was something like a 50% swing in approval rating versus 10%.

I never saw the term vibecession before. Wiki has a separate page for it!

I wonder if this trend also appears in other highly advanced economies. Example: When UK switched from conservative to labour, was there a similar sentiment swing? My guess: Yes.

Netherlands also moved much more right in the last election after PM Mark Rutte stepped down after 8 years. However, broadly, the NL economy is doing much better than UK economy. Maybe the vibecession effect is stronger when the economy is weak? Could be.

And sometimes the reason you don’t feel fine end up being anxiety, and reframing your experience can make the problem go away. I visited the emergency room with chest pains several times before it actually sunk in that it was my neuroticism getting the better of me

In the US, look at how sentiments about the economy shift depending on party affiliation and who happens to be in power at the time. I do not think it’s as straightforward as saying ”if people think things are worse than they used to be, they definitely are”. There are way too many variables affecting people’s subjective experience

Its entirely because you're looking at different numbers. When the average person complains about grocery prices doubling in the past few years, they're not looking at the GDP. People take "How much money do I get in my pocket at the end of each month?" and compare it with "How much does it cost to buy what I need?". The first answer is generally tracked by the Employment Cost Index. The second is by the Consumer Price Index. If the second increases at a faster rate than the first, then people get angry.

That’s also not a US phenomenon.

Hearing the exact same in UK too. The stats say things are ok but people standing at grocery checkout disagree

Strong divergence of 1% and rest

As someone doing OK economically, when I go to the grocery I see the same thing they do: Prices are going up on key items much faster than income is rising. I didn't vote based on that, but that doesn't mean they are wrong that it's a problem. It's easy to imagine that if you were barely making it, things are worse now.

Rising income isn't a phenomenon that hits everyone equally.

Indeed. The problem is that for most people income doesn't really go up unless they change jobs. Or, at least it goes up so slowly (0-3%/yr) as to be undetectable compared to, for example, the price of a loaf of bread going from $4.99 (2020) to $5.99 (2023) to $6.99 (July 2024) to $7.99 (December, 2024).

I think the "vibecession" concept makes sense when considering CPI of consumables since individuals are far more attuned to price changes than they are for durable goods.

Not exactly a watertight metaphor as https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypochondriasis and anxiety exist, but I certainly agree that it’s possible to lie or mislead with statistics.

a good economy ≠ a good lower or middle class, just means the rich people got richer

More so when the blood test is measuring something that was deemed important 100 years ago and doctor is ignoring all the advances in the field since then.

We currently lack comprehensive metrics to effectively capture critical factors that normal people consider when asked “is economy doing well”. Here’s what we need:

Home Rent Affordability: Analyzing affordability by profession and location to reflect real-world dynamics.

Home Price Affordability: Assessing how accessible homeownership is across regions.

Education Costs: Understanding the burden of education expenses on families.

School Quality: Measuring the actual quality of education available.

Healthcare Cost Affordability: Evaluating access to essential healthcare without financial strain.

Drug crisis.

Crime.

Vacations and similar things.

Developing such metrics would provide a more accurate picture of economic well-being and social equity.

Luckily smart people have resources and a mandate to study each of those questions at scale. You might be interested in the work that the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (https://www.bls.gov/) does on the economic side of labor conditions, and that the Census department’s American Community Survey (https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs) does on the demographic and social side. Both of these groups study questions like those you asked in ways designed to be broadly comparable over time.

The Housing and Urban Development department calculates fair market rents at the county level to support their rent assistance programs (e.g. [0]), although that starts to get at part of the complexity: for your metric do you care about the economic cost or the amount families actually have to pay after assistance?

On the NGO side, groups like the NBER (https://www.nber.org/) disseminate more exotic socioeconomic studies, and there are others.

And of course you can find a mountain of data at data.gov, the federal portal for such things.

I think the harder part (and the part the policy community specializes in) is grappling with the nuances of those kinds of numbers. What do such high-level observations actually mean in something as complex as a continent-wide collection of 10^9 people, and how much human messiness polluted their measurement?

[0] https://www.huduser.gov/portal/datasets/fmr.html

Yes, the data exists, but it’s so nuanced and complex that you can interpret it to fit almost any narrative.

Take California, for example: asking rents have increased by 26% over the last two years. But this figure reflects only asking rents, not what people actually pay—especially in areas with rent control.

If you’re looking to upgrade to a bigger place (e.g., moving in with a partner or preparing for a baby), it might feel like the economy is in shambles. On the other hand, if you’re staying put in a rent-controlled apartment, things might seem manageable.

The data is there—it’s the context and perspective that shape the story.

Is that the same Bureau of Labor Statistics that revised their numbers down 818K, or 28% of original 2.9M jobs claimed to be added over the last year?

This is exactly what I tell software engineers. They’re always like “but the software is complex and it’s not straightforward to do what you’re saying” and they gave some nonsense metrics for what complex is. It’s as easy as adding a button to a webpage to create an XML that integrates with this other tool we use but they can never explain why it’s hard. They come up with some “cyclomatic complexity” but it’s obviously easy: a single button. If it’s so easy, as my perception shows, then any numbers they’re coming up with are obviously wrong and they should just make numbers that match what I feel. And once those numbers show that it’s easy, they can just do it instead of making numbers that show it’s hard.

I really hope you forgot the /s?

When you see a headline GDP growth figure, remember that this number does apply equally to all people. The US and its economy is vast, like all 50 countries of Europe put together. Recently, we are seeing that middle class and below really suffered in the last few years from high inflation, but the economic groups above fared much better. Also, new immigrants (usually unskilled) are doing better than natives. To be clear, I don't any of this post with spite for those doing well.

> Also, new immigrants (usually unskilled) are doing better than natives

Is this true in the US?

Yes, it has been widely discussed by economists in the last few years.

https://www.npr.org/2024/10/04/nx-s1-5140039/labor-market-jo...

    > Friday's report shows 150,000 people joined or re-joined the workforce last month. Much of this growth is driven by immigration. The foreign-born workforce has grown rapidly over the last year, adding 1.4 million workers, while the native-born workforce shrank by nearly 600,000 workers.

That does look like a problem. Yet it doesn't mean unskilled immigrants are going to do better than natives, rather that both will have wages suppressed. And natives will still benefit from social services that may be unavailable to immigrants until they become citizens. So I think the statement is still misleading.

Immigrants are only doing better than their choices back in their country of origin, not better than what natives could attain in the new country.

It's a huge problem. If we keep allowing corporate interests to hire from a pool that is willing to live in 3rd world conditions (all these immigrants are sharing a living space in such a way that natives do not) then not only are we suppressing wages, but suppressing jobs from natives. That leads to homelessness of natives trying to maintain a lifestyle they were previously accustomed to. Some moved back to parents house, some just moved onto the streets.

Agreed. It's also important not to exaggerate or misrepresent a problem, since that undermines the point.

An idea I've seen floated is that during the pandemic a lot of people got a lot of support from the government and under Biden a lot of that was phased out.

So even if "the economy is doing fine" there would have a been a large number of people who would have had something taken away.

People got a glimpse of a more interventionist social democratic government during the pandemic and then it disappeared. So yea for people who benefited from that absolutely everything got worse after.

Typically, loans and credit being more difficult and costly to obtain, higher prices for everything, and a growing number of large layoffs aren't signals of a booming economy. Inflation has a tendency to well, inflate productivity metrics. If we're spending twice as much for the exact same stuff as we did 5 years ago, we haven't doubled productivity.

> perception of the economy being bad is really pervasive as demonstrated by the last election

How does the election tell you anything about the economy? Are you injecting a bunch of your reasons why you think people voted for X or Y or is there a factual argument behind that sentence?

> How does the election tell you anything about the economy?

He didnt say it said anything about the economy, just the perception of it.

Now to answer that question, there is the simple old adage of "its the economy, stupid" that won Clinton his campaign. But the reality is that economy perception is always asked in polls, all year round. So trends can be established wtih decades of data. Secondly, voting attitudes can be understood through economic perception, when people perceive the economy is thriving incumbents do better seeing Biden's poll numbers anyone could tell that the economy perception was not good.

Exit polling asking voters their reasons for voting the way they did.

There is an argument that elections can be understood as a referendum on the previous 4 years. E.g. voting for the incumbent candidate/party means more of the same.

Yes but how would that say anything specifically about a particular topic unless it was a defining and undeniable circumstance that happened during the presidency like a war or major scandal - and even then I think it's hard to confidently say "this is why people voted for X" without proper polling (and even that we know how accurate it is - but at least it'd be data).

Because the single largest thing people vote for is how much better they're doing now than 4 years ago. That's just been true forever.

There was a poll asking "what was your motivation to vote the way you did", and "the state of the economy" ranked pretty high among Trump voters (don't remember where I saw it though, sorry).

As a general rule, it is very hard to win a popular vote (again) when the economy is weak for middle class and below. By definition, this would mean that more than 50% of people are not benefitting enough from current economic growth.

political propaganda via the skinner boxes in everyone's pockets is probably the reason for the disconnect

let's not act like people's feelings inherently reflect the truth

Or they go to the doctor thinking they have a heart attack and it's really a panic attack and despite all the tests for physical ailments, it is an emotional one.

The numbers are FAKE. How else can you describe a 30% downward revision in jobs numbers this year?

Yeah, stop excluding food, housing, and energy from the CPI basket, they are the largest items people purchase!

Are you suggesting that it's impossible to have mistaken feelings about the economy or about one's own health? I'm pretty sure it's possible for people to deliberately deceive other people about the state of the economy or even the state of their own health.

You're describing hypochondria

> The perception of the economy being bad is really pervasive

Because the economy is bad, and this is a "drank the Silicon kool-aid" article.

In the most recent tax filing season data available, there were tax returns of:

                                        Top 1%       Top 5%      Top 10%       Top 25%       Top 50%   Bottom 50%  All Taxpayers
  Number of Returns                  1,535,899    7,679,495   15,358,991    38,397,477    76,794,954   76,794,954    153,589,908
  Average Income Taxes Paid           $653,730     $187,468     $108,251       $50,963       $27,891         $667        $14,279 
  Adjusted Gross Income (Millions)  $3,872,395   $6,182,180   $7,745,525   $10,613,602   $13,191,209   $1,531,038    $14,722,247

If we then break those into the actual groups, and numbers per group, then we find their Average Per Capita Income

                                             1            5           10           25           50          100
  Number of Returns                  1,535,899    6,143,596    7,679,496   23,038,486   38,397,477   76,794,954
  Income Taxes Paid (Millions)      $1,004,063     $435,594     $222,966     $294,234     $185,068      $51,225 
  Adjusted Gross Income (Millions)  $3,872,395   $2,309,785   $1,563,345   $2,868,077   $2,577,607   $1,531,038 
  Average Tax Rate                       25.9%        18.9%        14.3%        10.3%         7.2%         3.3%
  Average Per Capita Income      $2,521,256.28  $375,966.29  $203,573.91  $124,490.69   $67,129.59   $19,936.70

This entire "booming" part, is the 1-5%. Out the rest of America, there are 38,397,477 making $67,129 on average and 76,794,954 making $19,936 on average. The filing thresholds are "single, under 65 = $12,950" and "head of household, under 65 = $19,400". Most of the bottom 50% of America "barely" would even qualify to file based on the Average Per Capita Income stated on their tax forms. 76,794,954 tax filers "barely" qualify to even file taxes they make so little money. Half.

How about, lets look at it a different way. Anybody notice what happened to McDonalds over the last decade and a half? Corporate McDonalds used to have 465,000 employees, now, McDonalds has 150,000. 300,000 employee reduction. 1/3 remain. [1] Btw, they're also -5,000,000,000 under water in equity [2] while they keep making happy meal financial reports. 2/3 reduction in workforce, barely even covered by the news.

The situation looks very similar with almost every peer company. Notably, some of the main jobs where people in the bottom 50% work. Jack in the Box (-$851,798,000, 45,700 -> 1,090 employees), Papa Johns (-$430,933,000, 23,100 -> 13,200), Yum Brands (-7,674,000,000, 90,000 -> 25,000), Dominos (-3,976,640,000, 14,500 -> 11,200). They all went submarine on equity and started shedding employees, yet all anybody will write about is the "booming" tech sector.

[1] https://tradingeconomics.com/mcd:us:employees

[2] https://tradingeconomics.com/mcd:us:equity-capital-and-reser...

I’m pretty sure it’s combination of most of the money flowing uphill to millionaires and billionaires, and people in general are also being fed a ton of propaganda that the USA is falling apart which is BS. We have issues but so does every country. It’s hard to feel great if you have no free time to enjoy life, and as a society for some reason we have become very very consumerist, not taking (or even worse not having any) time to smell the roses, and the world is falling apart every night on the internet and/or television even thought it isn’t really.

"The map is not the territory"

The unemployment rate is very low in the US while tightening of money supply is happening, it is a weird thing to witness as a new comer to the US. But one has to admit Jerome Powell did accomplish something significant given what his detractors like Summers were painting was going to happen given the covid bonus US citizens got.

While unemployment rate is relatively low this measure masks deeper problems felt by those working to try and make a living.

Specifically, labor participation is near an all-time low so discouraged workers, who aren’t counted in unemployment numbers, are excluded.

Also, there has been a marked and ongoing shift from full-time jobs with benefits to part-time, casual, and gig work.

Finally, the widely cited consumer price index is a very politicized and skewed measure of the true inflation facing consumers. It ignores the real cost of home ownership via owner equivalent rent measures. It uses a process called substitution to replace suddenly expensive goods with cheaper goods. It includes arbitrary adjustments for improved quality of goods that aren’t always perceived by purchasers who only see the higher prices and these adjustments only work in one direction to skew CPI lower. That’s why consumers often perceive inflation to be higher than the CPI measure.

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