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 peabrain says the media is telling them to be dissatisfied as that is what sells.
This is a question that should not even be asked. It's bad enough that we rely on "feelings" to evaluate things that are not that easy to measure, but if we are going to scratch our chins about whether we should evaluate data or "feelings" about things that are butt-easy to measure, like economics or science, we are well and truly fucked.
I think a lot of this foolishness comes from the advertising industry, which depends almost wholly on bullshitting people into "feeling" that their product or service is better than their competitors. The advertising industry worldview bleeds over into the media (which depends on them for revenue) and the politicians (who hire advertising industry rejects to run their campaigns).
This was actually the first presidential election in my long lifetime (75 years) where I witnessed an outcome based so much on "feelings" about the economy that were a complete reversal of the actual state of the economy. It's a new thing, and to me it's an ominous sign of the power of propaganda.
If we have any sense at all, we have to cure the public of this "feelings" nonsense when it comes to economics, not to mention science (e.g., climate change and health threats). Otherwise, we will remain a global laughingstock even after Trump is pushing up daisies.
There you go again, trying to use logic and reason.
Reality today is based on vibes, which come from Fox News. Enough with your data and evidence! That's too much thinking.
Maybe the problem is simply that people want a McMansion or an $80,000 truck, but they can't afford that. So they spend smaller amounts on vacations, Shein hauls, and Door Dash, because we all deserve a bit of fun, which then makes them feel like the McMansion and $80,000 truck are even more out of reach.
Social media feeds deliver a ton of aspirational marketing content, so you can always feel like you are behind. It's a lot more engaging and targeted content than the old magazine and tv ads.
There are just so many more luxuries available than we can afford to buy - we have to choose between luxuries, which can feel an awful lot like scarcity.
The real answer is, why choose?
We're at a media disadvantage. Legacy media is
uselessconsolidating, with large fractions of papers, radio and local TV owned by low-rent propagandists.So the answer is both, but be deliberate. Vibes rule on social media; use it. But that doesn't mean stop making and arguing serious policy. They're separate codes. People need to learn to code switch.
(Contrary to olds who, for some reason, want to object to that term for various reasons, this is not some nefarious new idea. It used to be expressed, "read the audience.")
The problem is billionaires.
We feel worse because twelve people are worth more than everyone else combined, and they are working to make it worse still.
It should be a crime to gave hoarded that much wealth.
Ils devraient être fricassées.
The problem is the data generally measures aggregates, and doesn't pay enough attention to distribution.
Dammit, I skipped right over your comment.
+1
Speak to the "vibes" but make policies based on the data. Recognize people's misconceptions and actual experiences (see Creigh on "aggregates"), but act based on reality and how it actually works. That sounds like lying, but maybe "spin" is a better term.
Don't forget those ever popular surveys saying I'm doing fine, but everyone else is suffering. One way to rationalize all the reports on what a hellscape our country is vs personal experience. Added benefit, since "I" am doing soo much better than everyone else, I must be brilliant--it's not Biden's policies that have helped me, I did it all by myself.
Wait, what's the overlap between working and middle class?
The General Social Survey is badly out of whack with most other measures of economic satisfaction and with real economic conditions. For example the University of Michigan survey of consumers asks whether people are better or worse off than a year ago. The percentage difference between "better" and "worse" ranges from -40% to +40%, and most of the time since 1947 the response has correlated well with economic indicators such as unemployment and inflation.
However since 2021 consumers' evaluation has been way worse than the real economy - it has been comparable to around 1980 when inflation and unemployment were both very high for years - this is absurd. As is well known, other surveys indicate the same. There is a huge "vibe" problem - the answers to polls and interviews do not correspond to reality.
You just have to be very careful about interpreting polls. Answers may depend critically on wording and on context, especially whether the poll itself relates to partisan matters such as elections. Although the University of Michigan poll seems to have no particular political reference.
+1
The disconnect between sentiment and reality is a key point driving so much of our politics. What drives that disconnect is usually the media that people consume.
Fox is the main culprit. It drives extreme dissatisfaction among Republicans. That's its business model when D's hold the WH. For a long time, all focus was on inflation. Economic successes like employment, wage growth, and a two-year Wall St. rally were ignored. When inflation came down, sentiment remained low because Republicans continued to give the economy low marks. The partisan gap was growing wider, but news orgs like the NY Times saw the headline sentiment number down and went searching for reasons people were still unhappy. That began the "high prices" narrative. So all news orgs are telling the public everyone is still miserable, even though most people say they themselves are doing fine. What we got is a disconnect from the historical norm of sentiment recovering as the economic recovered. Sentiment got divorced from reality. It's madness. Now our democracy is hanging on by a thread, and lord knows if and when we'll undo the damage yet to come.
With the election over, the "economy is in bad shape" narrative has ended. What's the result? Sentiment among Republicans is beginning to soar.
There is of course another explanation for the "problem" of the Biden economy: If you are routinely lied to by your primary source of information you begin to believe the lie. And if it's about the economy you feel cheated and take it out on the "culprits".
The hard question is: How do we counteract the lies of Fax News?
If consumers were rational, we wouldn't have people hoarding things like toilet paper even as prices rise. But also, people were acclimated to living with ZIRP and now cheap money has become an expectation.
But what really gets people angry is when you dismiss their opinion, even when they're empirically wrong.
Well, that's their problem, innit? There can't be a middle ground or conciliatory position on what the facts are; that's privileging these people's feelings over facts. _Their_ particular feelings and no one else's.
Being right isn't worth much if you can't get people to vote for you.
This ought to be good: Tell me, what does what you said have to do with what I said?
It was in response to you saying that's privileging these people's feelings over facts. It's not about feelings over facts; it's about connecting with people who have the facts wrong to earn their vote.
Oh dear Lord. I'm not going to bother getting into it with someone who privileges their feelings over facts. Note that concern here -- it's in the title -- is data vs vibes. Why do I get the sense that you're going to make some sort distinction between feelings and vibes 😉
Lastly, this vibes vs data conceit was covered in a recent ars technica piece; the remarks were not kind to the author. I recommend you read it, and then comments, all the comments, and then come back. Hopefully you'll have learned something.
Maybe not in the short term, maybe so in the long term. Reality always wins over the long term.
The economy IS good just not evenly distributed.
Same as it ever was.
It's easier to see the disparity now than (almost) ever before, so even if people aren't more dissatisfied on the whole, it's easier to be angrier about it.
So yes, it's vibes. And the vibes aren't wrong.
But if people were mad about disparities, they wouldn't have just voted for a government that will make those disparities worse as fast as they possibly can. People are idiots.
They would when the believe the lying liars and the lies they tell the rubes.
Especially since the general narrative is always "Democrats just tax and do wasteful spending, Republicans are good for the economy." It doesn't matter that up is down in that narrative universe. People have been falling for it for decades.
The variance in satisfaction may not be a lot, but neither were vote margins. And the variance can be attributed to families experiencing even just a few disasters in a short time.
A year ago, I would've told you my wife and I are great financial shape, especially after we both hit 10 years on PSLF and got our student loans forgiven.
But then we had a mouse infestation, which cost us $3,000 to disinfect, install preventative features (crawl space grates, gutter grates, mouse bait, etc.) and replace the moisture barrier that the mice had shredded.
Then the thermostat on our 13-year old water heater died, which was gonna cost $800 to fix on an appliance that generally is only good for 15 years. Or we could spend about $1200 to replace it outright. So we did.
Then I had to drop about $500 on maintenance, including a new tire that had been punctured by a screw, for my 13-year old car.
Then we found out when mold started growing in one of our closets that the mice had utterly shredded out A/C ductwork in the crawl space, leading to moisture build-up in the crawl space and the mold. The mold wasn't dangerous and was an easy fix, but replacing the ductwork cost $11,000, half of which we paid out of savings and half we financed.
Then we totaled my wife's car, which was only 5-years old and about two years away from being paid off. Luckily I work from home, so we're getting by with one car for now, but my car is 13-years old. It was slated to be replaced when we paid off my wife's because we didn't see a need to have two car payments when I work from home. But now we have to replace the 5-year old car, and there's no way my car is going to last another 6 to 7 years while we pay off my wife's new one, so now we'll have no choice but to have 2 car payments in the next year or two.
All of this happened in less than a year, and has us feeling very precarious financially. It also made us feel a lot better about not further pursuing IVF to have a child. We'd already dropped $10,000 on two attempts in 2022 that failed and were considering going the egg donor route for a time. But further medical complications and the prospect of spending another $35,000 had already pushed us more towards giving up before the year we just had.
Now, I know all the stats on the economy. I know my wife and I make decent money, especially for our moderate COL area (southeastern Virginia). And I know the GOP will do absolutely nothing to improve our situation. But we still feel very dissatisfied and precarious, simply because we've had a run of VERY shitty luck. And I don't think it's outside the realm that at least 3% of people nationwide has experienced a similar run of shit luck.