How do people feel financially? Do they feel worse than headline indicators like unemployment, inflation, and growth suggest they should?
This is all but impossible to answer. If you look at personal finance figures, you'll see that people are earning more than they used to and also spending more. But how do they feel after they've spent as much as they can afford? Mostly satisfied? Or do they feel like they had to make a bunch of tough choices and they're stressed about all the stuff they couldn't buy?
It could be the latter. One aspect of modern life that doesn't show up in economic indicators is how much new stuff there is now that people feel they really have to have. We've always needed food, clothing, cars, health care, housing, and other necessities. But today we also need cable TV subscriptions; multiple computers; internet access; cell phones; video games; daycare (because mom works); air conditioning (50 years ago only half of all homes had air conditioning); and so forth. Has this outstripped our higher incomes?
That's tough to answer because the cost of things like food and clothing have gone down. When you combine that with higher incomes, do people feel ahead or behind compared with how they felt 50 years ago?
I don't know. Nobody knows. But we can still get a sense of how financially stressed people are by simply asking them. And we do:
As you'd expect, the less money you make, the more likely you are to say you're dissatisfied with your finances. But has this changed for the worse over the past 50 years?
Not really. The middle class and above are less likely to dissatisfied. The working and lower classes are more dissatisfied, but only by about three percentage points over half a century. That's noise level.
If this is accurate, it means that, over the long term, people don't feel any more stressed about their finances than they ever have. And since the digital baubles of modern life haven't changed recently, headline economic indicators ought to be pretty reliable guides to financial stress in the short term
We'll never know absolutely for certain. But the evidence sure suggests that in both the short and long term, American voters aren't feeling any serious increase in financial angst.
POSTSCRIPT: Of course, one thing to keep in mind is that even a 3-point increase in dissatisfaction is still a lot of people—probably on the order of three million or so. If they're loudly unhappy, it could make a bigger difference in the national mood than the tiny percentages suggest.
The Times article provides a bevy of possible reasons for the decline, but I have my own theory. One of the most consistent findings of drug research is that drug use is faddish. In the last 50 years it's gone from heroin to cocaine to crack to marijuana to meth to fentanyl. Now fentanyl use is finally dropping off. It's never clear why a particular drug falls out of favor, but it probably has something to do with generational shifting: youngsters watch their elders dying in huge numbers and eventually turn to something else when they get old enough to use drugs themselves.
