I was fooling around with the latest YouGov/Economist poll and marveling anew at how bad Republicans think the economy is. But the most spectacular finding is surely this:
68% of Republicans think unemployment is a serious problem in the US.
The unemployment rate last month was 3.7%. It's been under 4% for 24 straight months. The unemployment rate in 2023 was the lowest in the past half century:
Now, this is average unemployment. Maybe you think there are individual places where unemployment is high, and the survey is picking up those folks. After all, the unemployment rate in Merced is 9%! But that's not it. In the entire country, only 2.3% of all metro areas have unemployment rates over 7%—almost all of them small farming regions in California.
Nor is it anything else. Unemployment is at historic lows for white people, Black people, and Hispanic people. For men and for women. For the young and the old. By virtually any measure, unemployment is historically low for everyone and has been for the past two years.
And here's the kicker: 54% of Democrats also think unemployment is a serious problem. That's not quite as lopsided as it is for Republicans, but it's still insane. Fox News may be the leader in pushing bad economic news on its audience, but they obviously aren't the only ones.
Unemployment fell to 3.6% in March of 2022 and has stayed within a tenth of a point of that ever since. The press has had 22 months to let people know this, but to this day the vast majority still think people are struggling to find work. What in the name of God is going on?
Because people are struggling to find high paying work. And the definition of "high paying" isn't charts, its a job which is judged by taking the salary and asking: (a) how much "house" they can get for their money, (b) how far do they have to commute, (c) does it include paid health insurance and a retirement plan, and, although this pales in comparison to (a) through (c), for those who are at that stage in life, (d) what does higher education cost.
Compared to their parents, which is the key, anyone alive today is doing worse. Unemployment, per se, is as you point out, can hardly get any better.
Occasionally Kevin posts how, with other measures, life now is better, and those posts are also objectively true. But the way housing has developed in the US we have decades, at least, of discontent ahead.
So it's Hunky-Dory to blame Joe Biden for housing prices which have gone up faster than general inflation for forty years now? Well, I guess he IS about the only politician still in the game from then, 'cept his old buddy, Snapping Turtle Mitch.
The way Americans are going in their anti-the World jihad, the other 94% are going to get sufficiently sick of us to say "When can we launch, Chairman?"
I don't know where you get blaming Joe Biden. Biden, like all Democratic politicians, is the only one trying to do something about it. Republicans are the ultimate "I've got mine, Jack" party and are becoming more so by the month.
Really, you would think Republicans don't actually have children, with the policies they push.
Unless the US takes a major, and I mean major, turn to socialism (think the level of Vienna, where something like 70% of the housing in the city is public housing) - and of course the US is not going to do that -- the way we have dedicated the country to suburbia and capitalism has a completely unavoidable result of massively increasing housing costs.
And by increasing, I mean well beyond the comfort of the potential owners, I mean to outright pain.
Since most, and I think I am very safe in using that word, of the US developed after the automobile, it may all have been inevitable.
It is frustrating to watch, though.
Republicans are not comparing things to how they were in their parents' time, they are claiming that things were far better in the Trump administration. This is complete nonsense. On average, people are (slightly) better off than they were in the Trump administration - this is just the fact. If you don't accept that, you are living in the Republicans' fantasy world.
I often point out how inequality continues to decrease, but that is no worse in the Biden administration than the Trump administration.
how inequality continues to *increase*
Anyone claiming anything was far better in the Trump administration is not paying attention to whatever the F they think was better, hence their opinion is meritless.
What I was driving at above is Kevin's post appears to be the following plea: "what level of congnitive dissonance is required for someone to believe that unemployment is up?"
The answer is that (a) most people would think that in a situation with almost full employment, under a capitalist system as they have been programmed to believe it, that wages would have to increase (also, I may add, at a historic rate! to the extent unemployment is at a historic low!) and that they, and the people they know, would be kicking ass "murica!. Home of the world's highest standard of living" and all that, so (b) if that its not the case (and its not the case) the only logical conclusion is that there is a deep flaw (or many) in the way we apply capitalism in the United States.
Since at least 50% of the population will simply not accept that premise, let alone that conclusion, they might as well believe unemployment is high, or any of the other examples of fantasy highlighted in Kevin's other posts for that matter.
Most of this is kneejerk anti-Bidenism, but a lot of people also think lots of help wanted signs = high unemployment. The people that are supposed to be doing those jobs must be sitting at home doing nothing instead! That that they're getting paid more to do something else is counterintuitive to a lot of folks.
For decades, the media headlined monthly changes to the unemployment rate and placed them in historical context. That went out the window with the unprecedented employment effects of the pandemic and its accompanying lockdowns and other measures. Understandably and appropriately, journalists began to report the number of new jobs that had been created in the previous month and how they compared to "economists' expectations". These reports served primarily to evaluate the extent of the recovery from the pandemic, not to assess long-term labor markets trends.
The trouble is that journalists never reverted to their longstanding previous practice. "Economists' expectations" (which are almost always wrong) have become the default benchmark to use in reporting monthly unemployment data, but unless they read a blog like this, the reports are meaningless to most people. "190,000 new jobs were added last month, more than economists expected." But is that good or bad? Readers have no idea, because the number just floats there in a context-free vacuum. They usually have to read several paragraphs into the story to find any mention of the unemployment rate, and how it changed from the previous month.
Doom is The Brand.
It gets the Clicks, both Left and Right.
Liberals are going to put TFG back in office because Doom is now their religion.
This Doom you talk about can go either way. In 2020 Doom spelled defeat for Trump. Dems came out in huge numbers to get rid of him. I am not seeing Doom working the exact opposite way this year. Doom in 2024 will bring out Dems and Indys again, this time to keep Trump out.
Actually, I think the answer is pretty simple:
“Unemployment fell to 3.6% in March of 2022 and has stayed within a tenth of a point of that ever since. The press has had 22 months to let people know this, but to this day the vast majority still think people are struggling to find work. What in the name of God is going on?”
Kevin seems to think that there are still neutral arbiters of facts (news organizations), but that’s obviously not the case.
And liberals will of course point out that Fox is not a legitimate News organization. But neither, I would argue, are the Liberal news networks.
Once you accept these facts, the confusion experienced by Kevin vanishes. The reason that the public doesn’t seem to be familiar with reality is largely because they never hear much about it from either right wing or left wing media.
Kevin has argued in the past (and I am paraphrasing based on memory) that Fox News is a uniquely destructive and polarizing force in our society.
But I more or less completely disagree. Fox News is certainly a destructive and polarizing force, but it’s just one among many. And Liberal news sites, I would argue, are just as inaccurate and polarizing (though possibly in different ways).
Because, what it all boils down to is that no matter where the public turns, all they get is narrative. They do not get facts. Not from Fox, and most definitely not from the leftists at NPR. They get narrative, and every narrative they get is negative.
The right, of course, promotes an absurd story of American carnage (referenced by Trump in his inaugural address): a narrative in which we live in some sort of dystopian hellscape of a national nightmare of social and economic calamity (unless a Republican is in the White House).
But Left media doesn’t respond with an assertion of reality. It responds with its own story of a uniquely evil and utterly irredeemable nation conceived (in 1619) in bigotry and dedicated to the proposition that all people must be subjugated.
There are undoubtedly realists out there, and they no doubt try to assess our country with an eye on the good and the bad, the pros and the cons, the progress and the lingering peril.
But people grounded in reality (as opposed to those who are radicalized in their epistemically sealed bubbles) simply do not at present exert much influence in national politics, media, publishing, academia, or entertainment (among other things).
As long as Kevin and others of his ilk cling to the illusion that all our problems are the fault of the other tribe, their confusion will linger, and they will remain incapable of understanding our modern world.
Uh, bullshit. Both sides are not the same, and the employees at NPR are not leftists.
Something's pretty simple, your logic.
"But I more or less completely disagree."
You? Who are you?
I know Kevin loves feeding off survey data to get material, but I wish he'd adopt a more critical approach to the research design of the surveys he relies on.
For this one, "Respondents were selected from YouGov’s opt-in panel to be representative of adult U.S. citizens." In other words it was a poll of Americans who self-selected as being willing to fill out a survey with 130 questions about a host of different, unrelated issues. It's a moral certainty the respondents included many people with strong views about just about everything, who love the chance to express them. In other words it's not representative of the general population from the get-go, and no amount of fiddling with the data to weight it "according to gender, age, race, education, 2020 election turnout and Presidential vote, baseline party identification, and current voter registration status" can overcome that inherent flaw.
It's difficult to find other data to cross-check the reliability and validity of opinion surveys, but I did notice one interesting YouGov finding. A full 71% of respondents reported they had "never" contracted Covid (Table 71). Yet the CDC found that " 77.5% [of Americans] had antibodies from at least one prior infection" as at the end of 2022 (apparently they can distinguish infection from immunisation antibodies - more than 95% are estimated to have one or the other or both). This finding by itself poses obvious questions about how honest and/or conscientious members of the "opt-in panel" are about completing the survey, as opposed to giving answers which they believe will help the partisan cause they support. Similar but less dramatic differences can be found with respect to vaccination, with only 68% of respondents indicating they had had at least one shot of a vaccine, compared to other estimates for adults of above 80%.
The survey design also has many flaws. For example, how were respondents supposed to answer this question: "67. Do you favor the U.S. increasing, decreasing, or maintaining the same amount of military aid to Ukraine?" Same amount as what? The survey was conducted this month. There is currently NO US military aid authorised for Ukraine. The question is so unclear that answers are meaningless. The same criticism applies to "63. Do you favor the U.S. increasing, decreasing, or maintaining the same amount of military aid to Israel?" Do the 30% of respondents who answered "maintain the same" therefore oppose the $14 billion package proposed by the White House? Or do they consider that to be part of "the same" that America is providing now? We've no idea. I imagine many of the respondents had none either.
I could go on and on, but when I see a question like "How important are civil rights to you?" without any explanation of what the term means, I give up. The "survey" is worthless, frankly, and serves purely to give journalists at 'The Economist' material for their op-eds.
I dunno. Those two military aid questions seem pretty easy to me. Whatever the current aid is to Ukraine, let's increase it. Whatever the aid is to Israel, let's decrease it.
@ illilillili:
The only reason I can think of for why the obvious bias of NPR programming isn’t jumping out at you is that you have been listening to too much of it, too exclusively, for too long.
First of all, NPR publicly and explicitly announces its bias by publishing a DEI page: https://www.npr.org/diversity
“At NPR, diversity is the unending pursuit of meaningful inclusion in the face of historic and present-day exclusion. It is a value that must live in all that we are and all that we do, beginning with the Board of Directors and cascading down to every corner of the enterprise. It must live in our content, hiring, audience and workplace; in our business deals, our partnerships, and our collaborations with stations across the network.”
They could not possibly make it more clear. They’re not dedicating themselves to a neutral pursuit of truth (they probably consider neutrality to be an oppressive value): they openly announce their subservience to a Leftist ideology.
And it’s one of the astonishing hallmarks of our reductive and partisan age that a news organization can openly embrace and announce its pursuit of one narrow-minded perspective while its supporters STILL consider it to be objective!
But, in point of fact, NPR completely discredits itself with the above announcement. They are, by their own very public and emphatic admission, an ideological, not a journalistic, enterprise.
From a recent John McWhorter column: “D.E.I. programs today often insist that we alter traditional conceptions of merit, decenter whiteness to the point of elevating nonwhiteness as a qualification in itself, conceive of people as groups in balkanized opposition, demand that all faculty members declare fealty to this modus operandi regardless of their field or personal opinions and harbor a rigidly intolerant attitude toward dissent.”
From a recent David French column: “To put it simply, the problem with D.E.I. isn’t with diversity, equity, or inclusion — all vital values. The danger posed by D.E.I. resides primarily not in these virtuous ends, but in the unconstitutional means chosen to advance them.”
Sorry, but if you honestly believe that you are listening to actual journalism on NPR then you are every single bit as deluded as the right wing partisans who still believe that Fox News is fair and balanced.
Sorry, your right wing paranoia about DEI isn't particularly interesting.
"...What in the name of God is going on?"
People don't want to appear indifferent to the problems of people who can't find work. Or who are struggling financially in general.
> 54% of Democrats also think unemployment is a serious problem
Just because something is better than it has ever been before doesn't mean it shouldn't be even better.
‘In the entire country, only 2.3% of all metro areas have unemployment rates over 7%.’ This is why metro areas tend to vote for Democrats. Rural areas, where unemployment is at dystopian levels, vote overwhelmingly for Republicans.
The last time we achieved an unemployment rate as low as the lowest in 2023 it was achieved by drafting all of the elmentary school drop outs and sending them to combat in the korean war. No unemployment if not having a job means combat duty.