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Comment by mbgerring | Hacker News Reader

Every time I read one of these it’s the same. No one ever even tries to look at quality of life measurements, or cost of living relative to income, or measurements of precarity (e.g. How secure is my job? How secure is my housing?).

What I think everyone in this country knows intuitively is that relative quality of life is constantly getting worse, there’s no indication that it will improve any time soon, and there are plenty of indications that it will continue to get worse.

How do you measure that in a way economists can understand? I don’t know. But I trust my own intuition, and the lived experience of myself and my peers, more than an excel spreadsheet of aggregate GDP.

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Is this not addressing quality of life getting worse?

"Americans in the 21st century have experienced roughly triple the typical rate of inflation in the 2020s compared to what they’d grown accustomed to. Everything that people buy feels like it is constantly slipping out of the zone of affordability, and that is absolutely maddening to many people, no matter what the economic statistics suggest they should feel."

Yeah, the "economist" view of a country's state always seems awfully reductionists: "Those few KPIs look good, so there can't possibly be a way in which things are bad. So the rest must be 'feelings'."

I've seen plenty of people look at those metrics and they certainly do tell a story of growing inequality and instability. To me, it seems more obvious that those issues are largely unaddressed by the people in power because they're more concerned with growing their wealth than taking care of their people. I suspect that's obvious to Americans given their overwhelming distrust for institutions, politicians, etc. Unfortunately Americans seem to lack the ability to discern who actually cares about them. By seeking change we've ironically bolstered the opposition to our basic human needs.

I mean there’s that quote from Bezos: “ When the data and the anecdotes disagree, the anecdotes are usually right”

Sure a single anecdote is unreliable, but common feelings of a generation probably point to the data not capturing reality well

And why that anecdote happened is pretty informative. Someone was cooking the data to make themselves look good. It took 1 call to support to prove this was the case. I'm betting they didn't last long after that.

> relative quality of life

Relative to what?

- relative to last year

- relative to peers in other countries

- relative to my parents when they were my age

- relative to how hard I’m working to find housing or a job

- relative to the way braindead economists talk about the economy in their newsletters

Relative to itself. I.e. the QoL for the upper, middle, and poor are each getting worse.

> Relative to itself

Then it would be an absolute change, not a relative one.

I'm speaking colloquially, not statistically. More literally, I mean "absolutely, but also relative to various things." See the parent's reply to you for concrete examples.

I asked because if a coworker gets a bigger raise than Bob, then Bob is relatively poorer. But Bob isn't actually poorer.

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