Are Americans' perceptions of the economy and crime broken?
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niemanlab.org
If you can make someone believe something, you can use that belief to get them to act against their own self interest. This isn't even a controversial thing for most people to understand. The canonical example that illustrates this was Jim Jones making his followers believe that their best choice was to kill themselves and their children by drinking cyanide laced Kool-aid.
This effect is weaponized through persuasive narratives being repeatedly presented. Once the belief is set, the narratives add in the action that is required next.
That the "media" is the primary tool of setting this narrative is, and always has been, the case. One of the reasons the very first amendment to the US constitution protected the right to a 'free press' was to explicitly allow the media to present narratives that were different than what the government wished to present. Further that they could do this without fear of reprisal.
The "media" has its own agendas and influences, we have a shortage of voices which are both independent and trusted. It is informative to watch the response by established media when such voices emerge.
For the most part, the less you understand a topic, the more easily you'll be outraged about it, and the more viewership ($$$) you'll drive to the people who give you outrage and withhold understanding.
The most dangerous meme in existence is Friedman's extremist view of shareholder supremacy, which we saw drawn to its obvious conclusion the past few weeks in the Rotunda.
For me, a more sobering example was that Twitter was gaining trust and it seems that in response Elon Musk bought and killed it. That felt a bit more like actively denying the emergence of new media. It was also an example completely counter to Friedman's view on shareholder value as, as an action, it destroyed shareholder value. Just as Bezo's actions have destroyed shareholder value in the Washington Post.
It’s hard to emphasize how unimportant it is for national news.
However, I think it's worth pointing out what goes on at root: distrust and/or seeing oneself as having being manipulated.
On this fulcrum the actual details, facts, intent etc is rendered irrelevant: if I feel the fool telling me 2+2=4 (a fact) will to me become more evidence of bs.
The only way out in the current environment is to not get caught up emotionally in non falsafible stories, stick to facts, and regard anything from news that's not communicating data, facts as entertainment.
Opinion makers are entertainment.
It's interesting how our perception of this can be so different. From my viewpoint, Twitter had completely lost all trust by actively silencing people they disagreed with. This got particularly bad around covid. I am not much of a Twitter/X user, but at least people aren't being silenced on a massive scale anymore.
This simply isn't true.
From your comment you clearly believe that Twitter had lost trust by "actively silencing people they disagreed with" whereas I, reading the reports that the trust and safety folks were putting out, felt like the policies they had in place to moderate people who they felt were not contributing to the conversation seemed to be rooted in reasonable principles. So we had two very different beliefs leading to very different viewpoints.
The original article that kicked this off talks exactly about this. Some people believe that the economy was "bad/weak", others believe that the economy is "good/strong". Two opposite viewpoints with presumably access to the same data!
Its a reasonable thing to engage in discussion with people who believe differently than you do to understand their point of view and what sources of data or evidence they base their beliefs on. To give a commonly cited example, one person would say "I believe the earth is roughly 6,000 years old based on my source which is the Bible." and another person might say, "I believe the earth is 4.5 billion years old, based on the idea of nuclear decay and carbon dating."
In examples like this, one can often quickly come to an assessment of whether or not it is worthwhile to re-examine one's own beliefs based on the other person's sources of evidence. It doesn't end up that you'll agree, just that you will understand why they believe what they believe.
The real problem isn’t money. It’s partisanship.
Journalists are overwhelming Democrats. The available numbers are stark: 96%, as far as anyone can tell.
If the roles were reversed, would any Democrat trust a media populated 96% by Republicans?
Trickle down is a kissing cousin.
Rich people are fine; insane profits are just fine.
Imbalance however is not. Single variable local maximums are distorting leading to corrupting.
Just a nit: my understanding is that anyone who didn't drink the poison was murdered.
Not that it matters for the overall point but it’s an example of a brand being the generic name for a product category backfiring.
It began with a book called “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” (1968).
When we say “drinking the Kool Aid” we mean adopting a dumb way of thinking. Not killing yourself, or even harming yourself. Just being stupid.
We wouldn’t say “they drank the kool aid” if someone committed suicide.
More important for present discussion, “The Kool Aid Acid Test” referred to actual Kool Aid, not a generic equivalent.
The Kool Aid marketing team embraced and promoted its countercultural image. Many brands did.
But this left the brand vulnerable when the counterculture became associated with extremism.
Recent parallels to this exist.
Him and a CNN anchor were talking about crime stats being down. Newt disagreed and said Americans feel like crime is up.
Arguably it's the same problem on HN
With crime, there's a clearcut explanation of objective statistics going down and media focus giving the perception that things are more dangerous than they truly are. Fair enough. Although, I'm not sure the drug zombies are counted in these statistics and they've proliferated like rabbits in most major cities. Whether crime is down, the social fabric of these places has definitely been tarnished.
With the economy, the financialization of everything has completely disconnected macro-economic statistics (GDP) from the consumer experience. Inflation skyrocketed in 2022 - that's not debatable. The rate has come down, which just means things are getting more expensive but more slowly. Homes are out of reach for most young people - which did not used to be the case. GDP is up - who the hell cares?
That's been the case for most of my adult life, after the recovery from the Global Financial Crisis concentrated people into cities where it's against the law to build more housing.
Depending what exactly you mean, that's less than ten years. It wasn't until 2016 that median home sale prices exceeded 2008's.
Homes in Santa Clara weren’t always 2.5m.
Sadly, this is a perfect example (perhaps unintentional) of the sort of economic ignorance/elision that is at the heart of TFA.
Things only cost more (or less) if the percentage of take-home income that they cost goes up (or down). So if wages go up by more than nominal inflation, things cost less even though their nominal price has increased. Conversely, if wages go up by less than inflation, things cost more, and by more than just amount suggested by inflation.
But it gets worse ... measuring whether wages have gone up and by how much in a very diverse economy is very hard. Reducing the data to a single number ("Wages rose by X percent") inevitably misses a large amount of variance. Consequently, even if you were to write what you said here in a more accurate way, such as:
>Inflation skyrocketed in 2022, but in the period 2019-2024 wages grew by more than the total amount of inflation, and so most products and services cost the same now as they did then
... it would still be missing out the actual experiences of many people for whom wages did not rise by that amount.
The 2008 crash? Absolutely was a horrible local economy where I lived. Shops closed up left and right due to lack of customers, restaurants were basically empty, crazy deals to be had on tools on craigslist, people moving in with family, etc. The actions of the people absolutely matched the broader economic readings and it was trivial to see simply driving around for a day in the commercial/retail areas of town.
Now? I hear more complaints than I did in 2008 at the local bar, but it's jam packed and you are lucky to get a table on a Tuesday night at a mediocre middle class restaurant. Everyone seems to be talking about how expensive new(ish) cars are and how high inflation is over their $8 beer and $20 appetizers.
I understand my local perception is not 100% accurate, but it's really hard to square the "local chatter" with "local actions" at the moment. If you didn't talk to folks and only looked around at economic activity you'd think things were going pretty okay, if not great. But then you talk to folks and you get an entirely different story.
I think we're seeing a bifurcation of society, but not just at the "top 1%" like it was before. The top 20-30% seem to be doing just fine, but complaining on behalf of the bottom 50%. Everyone "feels" like they are doing poorly while engaging in economic activity I could only dream of growing up. It's really jarring to me, and I'm still trying to fully understand it. There is also the increasing asset prices (housing the primary but not only example) that may be hitting tipping point levels for people to finally notice.
Edit: A good one to talk to someone about is grocery prices. They will swear they are paying double or more than they were pre-pandemic. Absolute belief in this to the point of actively angering someone if you challenge them on it.
Then I check my actual history from those days and now? I see them more or less match the official USDA statistics of about 25%. Mine are actually around 18%. I can't square this either. It's like folks want to have inflation be far more exaggerated than it really is, and they truly believe this - regardless of political party in my case.
And the experiences of many with cash savings, pensions that haven't kept up with inflation, etc.
But public safety is more than worries about being violently attacked. If you have someone passed out on a narrow sidewalk, you then have to walk into the street to get past them: that's unsafe, and even worse for people with mobility issues. If someone relieves themself in a public space or throws away needles on the street, that's a matter of hygiene and disease.
And although opioid users aren't going to be violent, there are other drugs. Am I allowed to be concerned for my own safety when someone is smoking meth on the bus?
I suppose that not everyone has abandoned the old drug-warrior mindset yet, absurd and useless as that philosophy has proved to be.
> Am I allowed to be concerned for my own safety when someone is smoking meth on the bus?
That certainly is a different situation, and I would feel concerned about that too: but meth has been a problem for decades, while the phrase "drug zombies" has only come into use during the fentanyl era, when you now see people tipping over and passing out and otherwise shambling around unable to fully control their bodies. Those people are out of it, unable to do much of anything but breathe (usually). The fear is really unwarranted.
Here's the deal: you have no right to tell people how to feel.
A block of drug zombies, or a block doesn't have any of that?
I saw the look in his eyes, and any anger I had just vanished. There was nobody home.
But I make sure when my daughter visits, we never walk down that street, or any other streets that have similar inhabitants.
I can tell unpleasant stories of how the homeless have treated women, especially those who wear headscarves.
Buses now have recorded messages telling people to report “gender-based” aggression.
Since I’m male, I guess I don’t need to report someone defecating on my shoe.
I can see as well as you can that crime, poverty, and public drug use are related - but research shows that your intuitive explanation of causality is backward. It is housing policy which causes homelessness, which causes desperation, and desperation causes addiction - but does addiction cause crime? Not so much as you'd think: drug addicts are more likely to be victims than perpetrators of crime - which is mostly a function of poverty, a consequence of economic policy.
When someone focuses on public drug use as an issue, they mistake an ugly, visible downstream symptom for the actual disease. It is a matter of unpleasant appearances, not the meaningful problem. Trying to eliminate public drug use by focusing enforcement on the people who are using drugs in public is a cruel and pointless game of whack-a-mole, so long as the policy engine which creates those desperate addicts remains in operation.
When you have no wage increases and no cushion, as common now, all it takes is little inflation to screw you considerably. That situation isn't considered in statistic about how the economy is doing.
And the thing with crime is that when people's own situation isn't good and they're told X-that-they-can't-directly-measure is bad, they tend to believe it. And indeed, the visibility of the homeless can look like crime.
It's a really bad state to be in. Real data doesn't matter anymore. It's all about what they are being fed by their favorite super biased media (Fox News or MSNBC and CNN come to mind).
Do you have any links to actual data that suggests that MSNBC or CNN do the same thing?
The evidence they use is in the form of the financial markets. Blue collar workers don't care about the market. Nurses don't care about the market, construction workers don't care about the market. They care about can they afford food, can they afford a home, and can they afford healthcare. The answer is more and more becoming no.
I don't understand that last sentence. I suspect I'm reading it wrong, but am having trouble parsing it in a way that doesn't mean: this data cannot be explained by a changing media environment since 2020. It's very easy for me to look at the disconnect between survey responses and economic data and see that how people receive and process news is largely responsible for it. The disconnect between facts and opinions has been widely observed, and while the pandemic didn't start it, it seems to have been an accelerator for it.
It seems like it should be possible to model this along with surveys of media consumption, at the individual level? Maybe I'm mistaken in this impression but I imagine some of the larger social surveys track news consumption habits. Of course that assumes they're accurate reporters, which might be problematic.
> A responsible news media has a lot of jobs, but here’s one of the most important: giving audiences an accurate image of the state of the world around them.
Most "News" orgs aren't News Orgs. They're entertainment companies with a goal of selling ad space. I.e. the weather channels routinely overestimates the chances of a weather event because it gets you to keep paying attention. Painting an accurate imagine can be at odds with generating revenue and so an inaccurate image will be painted.
Then we get into probably another fault premise that the economy as graphed by a single metric is fine. There was all this talk about a K-shaped recovery post covid. It's very possible your single metric will look at good but there can still be a lot of people doing worse as long as it's outweighed by a few people doing very well.
The article had a very interesting comment one crime though about if homelessness counted. I think it'd be a bit more interesting to ask if immigration counted. But the guy definitely hits the nail on the head in saying that nobody is reporting crime correctly in the news so it's not a surprise that people listening to it don't have a clue.
Meaning that as the content we consume becomes shorter, the motivation for its existence and the message it's trying to communicate has to get compressed. You have to reduce the contextual load, and rely on a set of unspecified assumptions. When I talk to you, the economy is X. When I talk to the mayor, the economy is Y. When I talk to a CEO, the economy is Z.
This gets deeply corrupted by advertising, imo. Since content is mostly made to sell stuff, there is a really strong pressure for that to be the main CTA you get from what you're watching: buy the thing/experience/status.
So, messaging gets shorter and shorter, and the people seeing the ads are all getting hyper targeted feeds. The main message is to buy something, but that's not what the ad actually says. It says whatever is short and sweet and releases pleasant brain chemicals. So now we have some proxy "vibes" which is what people are actually feeling, but have lost the ability to communicate due to this compression.
Seems natural to me that we will become unable to see things in a larger context. I could spend an entire day talking through the economy and how it works, but in the news all you will see is a question like: "is the economy in good or bad shape?".
This isn't enough detail to answer the question. But we also won't dedicate enough combined attention to have the larger conversation, so everyone is just annoyed that no one is hearing the same thing even when we all use the same words.
There's a lot of parallels to how AI works and this whole misaligned-on-purpose-to-make-advertisers-money system, but I haven't gotten the words yet. Maybe ChatGPT can help.
As I was processing the article, I was subconsciously asking this in my head. My first thought on whether I believe crime was going up was yes, but for me, it related more to the increase in public overdoses in my town. Naturally, I would assume if I see more overdoses, then more illicit drugs must be getting sold, and therefore crime must be going up. But this raises a lot of questions:
Are the same overdoses increasingly spilling out into the public? Are the illicit drugs getting stronger and thus causing more overdoses?
Answering yes to either of these may mean the actual crime rate hasn't changed. Anyway, it was just a rabbit hole I went down in my head that I think speaks to what is being said here.
Individuals experience the world from an individual level — it is easy to go along with any trend that fits your desired narrative because until it is at odds with your individual experience, it doesn’t really matter.
(I’m being a bit reductive and haven’t fully fleshed out this thought, but think the sentiment is accurate)
Maybe the data doesn’t tell the whole story or is being carefully curated. We probably shouldn’t try to piece together micro trends with coarse macro level statistics, as there is no guarantee that the macro effect is happening at the micro level.
Many things are done that are hypothetically good for the economy, and bad for most Americans. That’s objectively true but runs into ideological issues and the pocketbooks of those who do benefit.
On the flip side you have things that are bad for the economy and benefit millions of Americans like farm subsidies which are rarely attacked on economic grounds. It’s used more as a political talking point than an actual rational stance.
For instance, crime may be decreasing, but it could be increasing where there are more people, meaning more people think crime is increasing. I’m not sure if that is true or not, but I feel like it is with perceptions of the economy.
I know people who have noticed the massive reduction in crime inside cities, and still think it’s up overall. Part of the issue is news stories harp on bad news when rates are slightly higher than last year, but not when they drop so random noise ends up looking like a steady increase.
1) people who migrate to larger cities are exposed to more crime
2) not many people from the 1950s around that can really compare accurately
Though you could be right with how many young people moved to cities after things improved.
Crimes that were basically unheard of in my neighborhood 5 years ago (carjackings and armed muggings, for example) are now a weekly common occurrence. This will absolutely create the impression for residents in my neighborhood that crime is up. It went from something you barely thought about, to something you now plan your night around to not be walking home alone in the dark.
Reporting is also a problem. I know of two people who were violently mugged to the point of one being hospitalized who did not report it to the police since they knew it was utterly pointless to do so.
That confusion is born of ideology: there's an abstraction, which economists think should capture the usual meaning in a more rigorous way, and when it doesn't, it's upsetting. So it's the people who must be wrong.
> the wealth and resources of a country or region, especially in terms of the production and consumption of goods and services.
so, yes, it does have other meanings too, but it does not "literally mean home management".
Kings looked about the economy in terms of tax revenue, so it’s not just some arbitrary abstraction.
No, it doesn't.
"Etymologically derives from an older term that meant" is not the same as "literally means", though for some reason the confusion of etymology and meaning is common on HN.
Economists are free to take a term and redefine it for their own purposes, but the public meaning is every bit as valid. They don't have a trump card that invalidates every other meaning because they want to use it to designate a particular abstraction.
“Home economics” was used in the 1950’s to distinguish it from the more common use of the term back then, while economics classes don’t need that clarification. Today few people are aware of the older definition.
I suspect it shifted with the rise of companies and machinery. So I agree people talk about a ships fuel economy they are referring to efficiency, but the non efficiency aspects of the original definition is absent. Meaning people talking about the economy being good because they got a raise isn’t referring to household budgets but the wider economic system.
If things keep getting more expensive and they don't feel like they can afford as much as before, they might think that the economy must be doing bad if all these companies need to raise their prices so much just to survive or make a profit.
I think most people would associate things being cheap and plentiful as a good economy, and things being expensive and hard to get (out of stock, long lead times, etc) as a bad economy.
I think most of the rest of the world would disagree.
The poll asked people for their personal experiences at the micro level, and the respondents said things were great. The macro statistics were also great.
The only negative was people’s perception of the economy.
Some people's. Since 2020 our housing doubled. So did our auto insurance. We're housed because my children became adults and added 3 incomes to the household.
With 4 typical incomes we make basic bills + afford knock-on expenses like repair and medical bills. We also make just enough money to pay less for many expenses.
Something that changed all over: Couples generally can't afford living expenses on 2 typical wages.
A lot of people had a very different experience when the post-covid inflation hit hard.
* the economy has grown
* people are worse off
People's feelings about the economy can be both accurate ("we are worse off") and inaccurate ("the economy is worse").
The lesson here is that we need to clear about what the metrics we are using (e.g. GDP or disposable income after housing/health/food/transportation is accounted for) are actually good for.
Rising GDP really does indicate a larger and/or more productive economy. But because of the way wealth is distributed and controlled in the US, a larger and/or more productive economy does not have any direct relationship to individual people's economic situation.
Finances are kept in poor places, such as banks and bitcoin, the stock market instead of better investment strategies like Bonds and ETFs. This allows the rich to eat the poor. As financial knowledge decisions get branded as wall-street-only information, people do not bother to read the details. Even though many brokerage accounts have a $0 minimum with low risk of failure.
There has also been a big fall in literacy rates, again ensuring people cannot read the details.
Now we are stuck with pearl grippers and hysterics preaching absolute nonsense. Personally it has caused a rift between myself and my parents because they chose to hop on the bandwagon and spread lies. While I believe they are entitled to spread lies, I cannot back the incentive to do so.
I can however enable more like minded people who may be uneducated on topics to learn more about brokerage accounts for example, and help alleviate the stigma.
There are obviously more nuanced things to understand such as “cash equivilent bonds/etfs” but that is what they should figure out.
It’s about undoing the stigmas not solving the housing crisis.
We keep people in the dark with this belief that financial strategies aren’t to be talked about publicly.
†https://www.cnbc.com/2024/01/24/how-much-money-americans-hav...
People with less than $500 can still start gaining that 5% yield, and it is better than the bank taking that 5% and eating it. If you don’t get that 5%, the bank will. Furthermore most people can easily calculate 5% and make the decision themselves if you don’t actively discourage them as your reply suggests.
From the article you linked:
> This leaves them vulnerable to unexpected expenses, underscoring the importance of having an emergency fund, if they’re able to build one.
The rest of the article goes on how to vet yourself to start building an emergency fund. A great emergency fund would be a very liquid, low tax, investment option. Like cash equivalent Bonds and ETFs.
If someone has a bank account with $1 it would still be better in a Fidelity Cash Management account gaining a yield than it would be in a bank not gaining at all.
2010s were a decade of paycheck to paycheck years for me+kids. We frequently ate plain white rice (only) because there wasn't enough money for a can of beans. Or 1 onion. Sometimes I couldn't swing a bag of rice. The kids had a couple of regular meals when school was in session.
I suggest your circumstances aren't as universal as they may seem to you.
That comment was directed at the previous poster’s remark than since 60% of Americans have $500 or less in their bank account that must mean all 60% have no money to save and that my advice was bad. That is the defeatist attitude. I’m definitely not insisting that some portion aren’t entirely living paycheck to paycheck.
The point of my comments is to acknowledge that people should seek out return for their money instead of keeping it in a bank. Not to squabble over who is worse off.
I had a bank account. Each month it eventually came to have the exact amount of the rent in it. Most months, anyway.
> Did you cash your paychecks at a check cashing service...
On a few occasions where utilities would be cut off in less than a day, I used a check cashing service. Specifically Ace as their fee was lowest.
> (giving them a cut?) and spend all the cash?
On those occasions I blew it on water or power.
> What were your expenses during that time that ate all your paycheck. Surely not just rice.
Not just rice, true. My expenses were rent, water, power, fuel and minimal auto insurance (until the van was stolen anyway). Water and power outweighed food because disconnected utilities were CPS threat vectors.
> The point of my comments is to acknowledge that people should seek out return for their money instead of keeping it in a bank.
For those that make more than 100% of their minimal bills sure. For the millions of us who had to live otherwise, keeping non-existent money in a bank seems unrealistic.
How am I raging? I’m passively telling people ways to better their lives. They can choose to use the info or not. You are the one raging against the idea of a better world with happier people. An extra $50 certainly does help people living paycheck to paycheck. The point of my commentary is that people should be optimizing their finances more and we should be discussing options publicly. Your insistence that it’s futile is mind bogglingly stupid.
Also, the current interest rate on a Fidelity cash management account appears to be around 2.2%, not 5%.
Even if you foolish choose the 2.2% option you would still yield more return on your money than a bank checking account which probably gives you less than 0.01% return.
You can optimize further by cutting Fidelity out of the equation and purchase Tbills on treasurydirect.gov straight from the government creating a high yield savings account with monthly yield.
Even better, Tbills are tax-free at the state and local level.
[0] https://www.fidelity.com/spend-save/fidelity-cash-management...
Why do you list stocks in the "poor" places and bonds in the good ones? Why do you see bonds as a better investment than stocks? (Certainly that has not been true historically...)