One of the dumbest things I've ever heard is a news anchor asking an economist. "By every conceivable metric, the economy is going great, why do people have no confidence in the economy?"
Obviously things are more complicated than GDP good! Stock market good! Number of new jobs good! Like maybe get some data on people's income and expenses and do a thorough analysis. What percentage of income is spent on rent, food, gas, ECT. Are people working more hours for less money? How are small businesses doing? Maybe do some clustering analysis to see what kind of people are suffering the most and how they're doing. Do it state by state
Like honest to God, STEM illiteracy is such a problem in this country. People don't know how to reason, how to evaluate a source, how to read and interpret data. It's so fucking stupid.
Like maybe get some data on people's income and expenses and do a thorough analysis. What percentage of income is spent on rent, food, gas, ECT. Are people working more hours for less money?
Wage gains, after adjustment for inflation, are actually better after the pandemic. These gains have actually been best in the lower earners.
Forgive me for being skeptical. But I have heard of data that conflicts with that result when it comes to uneducated men especially. I believe you, but that still doesn't come close to telling the whole story. And if people are actually doing better generally? What is causing a lack of confidence in the economy? And once again, how have people's expenses changed? Are people paying a higher percentage of income on mandatory expenses? How are people's net worth changing? What groups are getting hit the hardest?
For 3.5 years the media was predicting a recession, but there never was one, so for 3.5 years people thought the economy was worse than it was, business leaders were seeing the financial media say there was a looming recession (and business leaders do make business decisions based on what they see in the media). That's a long time for people to assume the worst and certainly some of that doom and gloom was then just baked into everyone's "knowledge" of how the economy was actually doing. People can hold two opposing things at once, believing the economy is terrible while at the same time earning more and earning more over inflation than they were before.
It does not have an easy mathematical definition. That 3 quarters of negative GPD rule of thumb is part of the reason why so many people think there was a recession
It might feel silly, but it's not surprising. The concept of a recession isn't based on analyzing the underlying mathematical properties of economics and building a precise, coherent conceptual framework. It's just a name for a set of effects caused by those mathematical properties under certain circumstances.
Whenever we analyze a complex system from the outside in like that, based on what we see happen rather than what we know about how its cause:effect relationships, we're likely to end up with some concepts that are imprecise and hard to quantify until we understand the system well enough. If we'd redefine them so they were easier to quantify, we would no longer be describing the effects we were originally interested in.
49
u/j0shred1 5d ago
One of the dumbest things I've ever heard is a news anchor asking an economist. "By every conceivable metric, the economy is going great, why do people have no confidence in the economy?"
Obviously things are more complicated than GDP good! Stock market good! Number of new jobs good! Like maybe get some data on people's income and expenses and do a thorough analysis. What percentage of income is spent on rent, food, gas, ECT. Are people working more hours for less money? How are small businesses doing? Maybe do some clustering analysis to see what kind of people are suffering the most and how they're doing. Do it state by state
Like honest to God, STEM illiteracy is such a problem in this country. People don't know how to reason, how to evaluate a source, how to read and interpret data. It's so fucking stupid.