Nearly three in five Americans wrongly believe the US is in an economic recession, and the majority blame the Biden administration, according to a Harris poll conducted exclusively for the Guardian. The survey found persistent pessimism about the economy as election day draws closer.
The poll highlighted many misconceptions people have about the economy, including:
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55% believe the economy is shrinking, and 56% think the US is experiencing a recession, though the broadest measure of the economy, gross domestic product (GDP), has been growing.
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49% believe the S&P 500 stock market index is down for the year, though the index went up about 24% in 2023 and is up more than 12% this year.
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49% believe that unemployment is at a 50-year high, though the unemployment rate has been under 4%, a near 50-year low.
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It’s metrics.
American culture has an absolutely horrible relationship with metrics.
For “the economy” the metrics are profits of corporations. Because back in the day that would generally translate to employee pay, number of employees, and how much money was changing hands.
But metrics should never be the final thing you look at, it’s just an indicator.
Like, if your engine light isn’t on but black smoke is pouring out from the engine…
It’s probably best to look under the hood at what’s actually happening.
But because our economy is based of wealthy investors, and they just care about the metrics, people game the metrics and come up with this rosey view of how things are.
Regular Americans don’t care about the metrics that are being gamed. We’re looking at the crazy person who’s driving a car around that’s obviously on fire. When they wave at us like everything is normal, it’s not reassuring, it makes us think that person has no clue what’s going on, and it’s probably not a good idea to let them keep driving
That’s not just America. The whole world is addicted to a school of economics that “models” reality without ever actually studying it.
Most economists basically operate in a world of frictionless spherical cows moving in an infinite vacuum, and then from this try to infer useful data about the expected price of milk.
Most economists basically operate in a world of frictionless spherical cows moving in an infinite vacuum, and then from this try to infer useful data about the expected price of milk
😘👌
For the record, I’m pretty sure I’m paraphrasing Cory Doctorow here.
That just confirms that you’re a person of impeccable taste and also honest about attribution 😁
Recession is coming. What we are seeing is how capitalism works. Businesses are squeezing as much profitability as they can out of existing products. The stories you see about record profits drive those actions. As long as they are making money, they push the strategy. The stories we are just starting to see about price cuts (like Target lowering grocery prices and the likes) are early indicators that corporate profits are peaking and adjustments need to be made to continue sales before revenue falls off a cliff.
People suffer when they get priced out of purchasing power. Businesses will suffer when they squeeze the market too hard, which is where we are. Unfortunately, people are going to suffer on that side, too, as businesses cut jobs to try to stem the bleeding.
We are in for a few fucked up years regardless of who gets elected in the next presidency. It takes a long time for real changes in the economy to show up. A lot of what we are dealing with is from the money flooded into the economy during Covid (under both Trump and Biden) and the swings in pricing due to loss of supply chain and the stickiness of pricing associated with its return.
like Target lowering grocery prices and the like
That’s not them.lowering prices…
That’s them launching a “value brand” they slap their name on.
It’s priced low to capture market share. Why make $1 a unit you’re selling when you can make $2 a unit because you’re also the one who makes it?
Spot on, this is also referred to as Goodhart’s Law.
this exactly describes the truth of what is going on
if the inflation formula had accounted for borrowing costs like they USED TO, the inflation numbers would match much more closely with public sentiment
It is a total mystery why they removed it!
Last year, they actually put out a report stating that inflation was back to normal “when you discount the costs of groceries, power, housing and fuel” 🤦
You know, just minor luxury items that everyone can choose to forgo if they want to!
This is a great little misleading factoid – the missing piece being that inflation is also back to normal if you do include the cost of groceries, power, housing, and fuel.
The fact that they’re excluded from the usual metric isn’t some weird economic misleading-metric plot (although, those certainly exist). It’s just that the CPI usually excludes those items because their prices can swing around in ways that are different from the ways that the baseline price of everything else swings around. But, if you include them in the analysis of what’s happened since 2020, the answer doesn’t change at all.
So you’re saying that groceries, power, and housing are NOT more expensive now than in 2020? Is that seriously what you’re trying to make people believe??
the CPI usually excludes those items because their prices can swing around in ways that are different from the ways that the baseline price of everything else swings around.
The most basic things that everyone needs, the things that especially the working poor spend the vast majority of all income isn’t itself the baseline for the CONSUMER price index?
That’s as fucking useless to gauge how regular people are doing as measuring the overall economy by GDP and stock prices, then! 🤦
So you’re saying that groceries, power, and housing are NOT more expensive now than in 2020? Is that seriously what you’re trying to make people believe??
I am saying that their prices have gone up pretty much by the same amount as the general CPI, including a huge spike upwards in 2022, which means that looking at the CPI without them is exactly the same (in this particular case) as looking at the CPI with them.
Stop. Read again.
I am saying that their prices have gone up pretty much by the same amount as the general CPI, including a huge spike upwards in 2022, which means that looking at the CPI without them is exactly the same (in this particular case) as looking at the CPI with them.
Makes sense, right? Or no? I’m happy to talk in a little more detail if you want.
Here are the numbers. It’s complex, obviously, and some commodities will spike way, way up, or drop below 0% inflation and stay negative for a while. But it actually happens that if you average it all out, CPI with everything is right now more or less the same as CPI with the normal stuff excluded. Good things to highlight to see it are “All Items” or “Less Food and Energy” or “Shelter”. Between those three, it’ll give you a pretty good picture, and they all behave pretty much the same - a big hump after Covid from supply-chain shock and corporate greed, i.e. the situation Biden came in with, and then reducing steadily back down as Biden’s policies got ahold of it.
Makes sense? Or no? Like I say, I’m happy to talk about the details.
i mean it’s not like they can tell the truth about what they’re doing, they’d go to jail
Looks like too many of you are renting, not owning your home, so they track that instead
Is this another “avocado toast” moment?
Everything costs more, housing prices near me still rising, and my wage stays the same. If this is what a good economy looks like then give me a bad one.
Having lived through 2008, you keep that wish to yourself.
I bought my first house in 2009 - $125,000 on an income of $45,000. I even got a first time homebuyer credit of ~$8,000 to help make the purchase easier.
I make a little over $200,000 today, and I’m completely priced out of the market. I doubt I’ll ever own a home again and am currently living in a rundown old sailboat.
I’d take 2008 over this economy any day of the week!
Good for you. In 2008 I went from having standing offers for paid internships at a half-dozen architecture firms to not knowing of a single open entry-level position in a 500 mile radius, and it stayed that way for almost three years. I graduated in 2010 and spent the next year mostly-unemployed in my parents’ spare bedroom, applying to every listing for a fresh-out position nationwide and not getting so much an automated courtesy email to let me know my resume didn’t make it the top of the pile of hundreds of others doing the exact same thing. I spent a year working for less than minimum wage as an illegally-misclassified “contractor” sorting mail and running errands, just to get an architecture firm on my resume. My best friend from architecture school became a barista and joined the National Guard to cover his student loan payments, and didn’t land a job in the field he spent five years training to enter for another five years.
Inflation sucks right now, but this is a fucking cakewalk compared to the Great Recession. Lucky for you that you were in a position to capitalize on the misfortune of others, but don’t forget for a second that millions of us went through years of misery.
Do you live in the Bay area? I’m guessing you’ve ruled out small condos/townhomes? Why did you sell your original house and not buy a new one?
How did that impact you? For me as a union electrician that meant members sitting for upwards of 2 years, with over 1500 people unemployed on the books in my local hall.
Right now there’s 800, most since 2008 recession, never going above 300 or so since then. I don’t know what a recession means for anyone else, but for me it’s not having a job and income. But this one is worse, because while the pay is more since 2008, everything costs triple since then.
It gets worse either way, the only good times for us are when things are stable. But stability is worse than failure to someone whose occupation is Shareholder.
So everything would be the same, but you wouldn’t have a wage.
Economy health does not equate to cheap fuckin groceries and gas.
The goddamn monopolies are fleecing us because they can, that’s not the economy’s fault, you’re just literally taking their lies/excuses as fact.
Your comment screams naivety. You may think you want a bad one but the rest of us know we don’t.
While your comment is dismissive and arrogant, you make a good point (even if it’s not the point you intended).
The metrics we use the show the health of our economy do not reflect the economic circumstances of the average citizen, and that’s a real problem.
Tbf I don’t blame people for not knowing the economy is good right now. Because that shit doesn’t affect anyone positively except the wealthy.
For most of us, the economy is bad? Cost of living/groceries goes up. Economy is great? Cost of living/groceries goes up. It makes no difference to us who aren’t stock gamblers, whether the country is in recession, we certainly are. When the economy is good we see no benefit to us at the bottom whatsoever
First thing that makes sense here - income inequality has been increasing over time, and either side will see completely different economy
Because that shit doesn’t affect anyone positively except the wealthy.
When the economy is good we see no benefit to us at the bottom whatsoever
Except it’s literally the opposite of that.
The other person who talks about income inequality is also wrong. While it’s usually a safe bet that it’s rising, at any given point in US history ever since 1980, it’s actually going down now for the first time in God knows how long.
You are the first person I’ve seen claiming income inequality isn’t growing. I’d love to see a source for that. Income growth outpacing inflation is totally different than reduction in income inequality.
Sure. Two ways to visualize:
Income by race – you can literally see the lines squeezing together, as income on the higher lines falls (inflation), and income on the lower lines rises even beating inflation.
GINI coefficient is the usual statistical metric. It’s a little more abstracted, but maybe more rigorous. Anyway you can see the steady trend line of it always going up, and then a little down tick at the end as it drops. Not really like “oh okay it’s fixed now,” but definitely also not “okay Biden spiked income inequality like everyone else does,” since it started moving in the actual opposite direction.
Thank you for the sources. Some comments:
- I don’t think a narrowing of the income inequality between races is the same as a generalized reduction in income inequality across a whole nation. Yes it probably contributes, but it doesn’t tell the story.
- your article on GINI tells the exact opposite story that you’re saying here. The headline says it all: pre-tax income inequality has fallen slightly (1.2% or so) but after people pay taxes, the income inequality actually ROSE!! Easily demonstrating the regressive nature of the tax structure. The article mentions some expiring tax breaks for low income households.
don’t think a narrowing of the income inequality between races is the same as a generalized reduction in income inequality
Yeah, fair. The racial breakdown was just the first thing I found and I thought it was a good stand-in for breakdown by income levels. I just looked, and managed to find more of exactly what I was looking for – a chart explicitly broken down by income level. It shows a huge boost in income for the bottom half of Americans.
your article on GINI tells the exact opposite story that you’re saying here. The headline says it all: pre-tax income inequality has fallen slightly (1.2% or so) but after people pay taxes, the income inequality actually ROSE!! Easily demonstrating the regressive nature of the tax structure.
Well, but that’s not Biden’s fault, is it? He came in with some monster economic problems, and they ate up some of the gains of the good things he was able to do, and this is another example. To me. I don’t really know enough of the details of how the tax credits work to say that for sure, though, that’s just sort of my first interpretation.
Nice, I like that Time article better. It reinforces the GINI articles analysis: middle class folks wages didn’t go up with lower class wages. I think that’s sorta a good thing? Ideally the top 10% would not grow, but the bottom 90% would. But help getting to the bottom 50% is definitely not a bad thing.
Also, I never said the income inequality growth is Biden’s fault. But more that it’s the reason all these articles about how good the “economy” is doing might not be seen in the same light by people who are still struggling.
We can do better, and I think closing that gap is everyone’s goal, but the methods to achieve it can vary wildly.
It’s the reason all these articles about how good the “economy” is doing might not be seen in the same light by people who are still struggling.
Yeah, makes sense. I do understand how “naw you’re wrong the economy’s actually getting better yay Biden” could lead to a pretty violently disagreeable reaction.
And the efforts will take time. Maybe a generation. We’ve had right wing economic environment since Reagan and are slowly shifting back to pro-labor and pro-union environment with Biden. If we lose the momentum from the past 4 years we will certainly be worse off. I would encourage everyone to read history of labor movements in the US. They take years, decades even. But they do have lasting impacts that we often take for granted, like safer working conditions, days off, reduced child labor practices… I know it sucks for things to be more expensive right now, especially with corporate profits at all time highs, but throwing away this progress would be a huge loss for all workers in America.
Isn’t that just showing an increase in income that’s like a tiny percentage? Didn’t that “raise” come during a period when inflation increased significantly and cancelled it all out?
Honestly, it’s super annoying that you replied all defensive as if anyone was attacking Biden. It’s hard to take anything you say seriously now. I’m voting for the piece of shit but it seems insane to pretend he’s actually trying to help poor Americans at the expense of corporations and their shareholders.
There’s an ongoing class war and there’s bipartisan support for the rich in all three branches of gov.
Those are already inflation adjusted dollars - gains on the chart represent gains above inflation. The source is here with more explanation, and looking over it actually will show some important / upsetting caveats to what I said - just bear in mind that for some confusing reason, it is showing percentage change in a lot of its charts, instead of the raw underlying number.
And yeah I get that - I feel like I am becoming humorless and just yelling at people all the time good things about Biden. My feeling on it is more or less, why are you guys making me stick up for the Democrats I don’t even particularly like them. But it seems to me like people are spreading very specific malicious bullshit about them in this election, which is upsetting to me (because of the “bullshit” part and its potential impact on the US and the world if it swings the election, not because of the “Biden” part, if that makes sense).
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Yeah, it’s accurate; a lot of that monster inflation that spiked in 2022 and then came back down was Covid follow-on effects, and it definitely made people worse off even to this day. Blaming Biden for that seems weird though.
Biden did continue signing massive spending bills well after it was clearly having issues. My state had so much covid money left over they were funding all sorts of random shit just to spend it.
Your assertion is that things like the infrastructure act and CHIPS act and etc were what drove inflation (instead of driving wage growth which is what most people are saying they did)?
I’m not sure what you’re saying here; are those the bills you mean? Those are the big ones I’m aware of, and he funded them by raising corporate taxes; it wasn’t just inflationary spending.
My assertion is that after approximately 2 trillion in covid funding by Trump, the additional 3 trillion from Biden is a major contributing factor to the inflation that was observed. The follow up of an additional approximately 1.5 trillion from the bills you listed doesn’t help either though.
You can’t argue with reality my friend. I’m my lifetime alone, costs have gone up to the point where it felt like they teased us with the dream of being able to live comfortably before it was taken away. You can’t tell me the economy improving is benefiting me when it’s NOT. it adds nothing to my paycheck, it doesn’t affect my industry. The only reason I’m not underwater is because I have a union.
Wage increases on the bottom are somewhat higher on a percentage basis, so if you made $10/hr one year and then $11/hr the next, that’s a whopping 10% increase, but given how prices have increased that’s really not great. These sorts of gains would have to be sustained over multiple years (like how inflation has sustained over multiple years) to make a good difference.
Wait but I thought Biden was hurting the poor on purpose and inequality was getting worse on purpose and even having inherited a fantastic
And so on
🥅 🏃♂️
🥅 🏃♂️
🥅 🏃♂️
As a millennial in the middle class it feels like we’ve been in a recession since 2008.
IIRC, wages have been flat to down since the 1970s, so it’s likely this cuts across many generations, from the “greatest generation” on, and soon including generation alpha.
It hasn’t been felt until the millennials, for sure. That’s when the rifts really started to widen. Around the early 2000’s
Eh, that’s not my experience. I saw what corporate downsizing and Ronnie Raygunism did to the boomers and some of their parents’ generation during the 80s. Many of us Gen Xers were very cynical about corporations as a result of early 90s recession (though some may have later forgot those lessons) and the growing corporate rule and the rise of things like Manpower and temp work - many of us chuckled when we saw the usual suspects rebranding this as the “gig economy” as if this was a good thing for workers.
Of course, many of our generation got burned, and burned hard, by the boom/bust cycles like the dot-com bubble and the real-estate speculation that came after. But then, so did older and younger generations.
When the poor and middle class suffers, it’s not like just one set of people that happened to be born between certain years and are lumped into one group (mostly for marketing purposes, by the way) are the only ones affected.
As someone else points out here, though, for the first time in a long time, though, real wages have gone up in the very recent past. If that is a trend, it would be a reversal of literally decades of it not going up. I suspect it is not, being the cynic I am, and eyeing things like AI and the automation it is/will be enabling. I also think the uptick is partly a result of Covid and the powers that be seek to reverse any gains ASAP.
Lots of bad news from media milking outrage for views and clicks, in the name of News
Nah. More like employers/companies making it sound like their CEO is almost outside on the sidewalk begging for money for the company when it’s time for a end of year salary review or when negociating salaries when applying for a job.
I did like to see that Jon Stewart countered a recent author about how Gen Z has it the worst of any generation, ever, even if ever so gently. However, that author (John Della Volpe) was definitely old enough to know better - I think he is a boomer or Gen X - and I’m glad Jon didn’t just let him blow smoke the entire interview. Jon came back with some boomer trauma that they went through; I often reflect on the kind of trauma those that can remember the Great Depression or WWII might have had.
The point is that every generation has trauma and the clickbait type of stuff about how this or that generation is somehow magically different or some inflection point is just kind of silly in the broader context.
Polling isn’t going to change people’s minds about it FEELING like a recession. It certainly feels like anyone who owns or controls any sort of economic production is on a cash-grab bender, jacking up prices on absolutely everything, and finding new ways to exploit the populace while the getting is good. People can’t afford the basic staples of life. It FEELS pretty dire.
I made a post about this sometime ago about this split in expectations. People know that the economy is fine, actually great, for businesses they just don’t think its good for them.
Like I’ve said above. Economy is bad? Costs of living and items go up.
Economy is GREAT! costs of living and items go up.
The economy’s health only benefits the wealthy who can afford to play stocks, etc. It makes absolutely no difference to the rest of us who are getting fucked no matter how good the economy is
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People can’t afford rent and food. The most Biden has done to address the corporate greed and price gouging is telling them to knock it off lol. The attempts at trying to gaslight people into believing the economy is good won’t work.
Biden claims he did this haha
Biden takes credit for Target grocery price cuts: ‘They’re answering the call’
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/21/biden-takes-credit-for-target-grocery-price-cuts.html
Corpo say economy is great because green line. I went from $200 for a month of food to $400 while losing 30 pounds. Retirement is fiction. I even got a new job paying double of what my old job was just to stay stagnant.
There not playing the same game as us.
Yeah, when people’s personal experience is the same as what happens in a recession, they will think we are in a recession.
Looks like a duck, sounds like a duck, acts like a duck. Clearly thats a booming economy and not a duck.
and that game is rigged.
Any working class person living in the elements of this economy will tell you it is not good; cherry-picked indicators in these reports be damned. When the people tell you they are hurting in numbers this large, leaders must listen, not ignore.
But how can they tell, if all the indicators are good? How can they even figure out a solution if all the indicators don’t point to a problem?
They could find better indicators.
What indicators do you think would be accurate? I can probably find them for almost any metric
Corporations showing record profits tells me that it’s harder for everyday people. Record profits means cut hours, stagnated wages, outsourced labor, more expensive goods, “shrinkflation”, cheaper components, dialed back safety standards, crunch, making salaried employees perma-lance so they don’t have to worry about benefits anymore, ghost job postings that are never intended on being filled because being understaffed is the new normal, etc. And then corporations use that record profit to bribe the government into keeping it just as shitty as it is or making it worse for us.
The system is working as intended to siphon as much money and labor as it can from workers and consumers so the metrics focus on that. Then they have the nerve to tell us that we’re being crazy for thinking that things are getting difficult.
As soon as something becomes a metric, it ceases to be a functional metric.
It’s a confidence game, so they can’t blab about the score.
They can start by developing indicators that actually work, instead of indicators that make them look good.
By good economy you mean corporations making gang bucks while the people are being bled dry and putting shit on credit.
making gang bucks
I think you mean “like gangbusters,” but it’s totally possible “making gang bucks” is a term I just haven’t heard before.
Cheers!
Probably, I tend to make sayings and idioms slightly off while it still makes sense. I have a joke about myself where I say I ended up at the neighbors house again.
I get that! I’m partial to “getting two birds stoned at once” and “people in glass houses sink ships” myself.
I don’t want to kick a gift horse in the mouth, but as someone who loves mixed metaphors, I’m stealing these.
Not the sharpest bulb in the tree.
We get it, you don’t actually understand what economy means
The issue is voters talk about how regular people are doing, while politicians talk about “the economy” which is rich people and business…
For them, shits going great. Because their record profits are coming from regular Americans being priced gouged.
Also, I stopped reading when the article clearly couldn’t understand inflation compliants.
The poll underscored people’s complicated emotions around inflation. The vast majority of respondents, 72%, indicated they think inflation is increasing. In reality, the rate of inflation has fallen sharply from its post-Covid peak of 9.1% and has been fluctuating between 3% and 4% a year.
In April, the inflation rate went down from 3.5% to 3.4% – far from inflation’s 40-year peak of 9.1% in June 2022 – triggering a stock market rally that pushed the Dow Jones index to a record high.
The inflation rate is slowly going down. But it’s a rate, prices are still up and continuing to go up. That 9.1% from 2022 is still baked into the 3% increase we’re experiencing.
Like. Say it was 100, 9% increase makes it 109. 3% of 109 is more than 3% of 100…
It’s compounded, but it’s not complicated and anyone writing about economics should understand that and explain it to their readers when talking about inflation rates.
So the inflation rate should go down but it’s not like that means lower prices, it just means 1% increase now is more than a 1% increase in the past.
And that’s not even getting into the harsh truth about inflation and capitalism:
A lack of inflation means people save money. That takes money out of circulation. A lot of our problems are because the wealthy do that with huge sums.
If enough money gets taken out of circulation then it leads to a recession as there’s less money floating around and changing hands.
We need inflation to prop up this bullshit economic system the wealthy are obsessed with.
^ This!!
Inflation isn’t going down, it’s just going up slightly slower than before!
Not only is it compounding, but 3-4% inflation hasn’t happened in over a decade. To get anything comparable to the last three years you have to go back to the 80s.
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It’s not a recession, it’s outright class warfare.
Economists call this a K shaped recovery. People at the top of the economy stop being in a recession. People at the bottom of the economy stay in the recession. Net, it looks like a recovery.
Except it’s literally the opposite of that - wages at the top are not keeping pace with inflation (whether to blame Biden for the massive 2022 inflation spike is a somewhat different story), but wages at the bottom are increasing, even outpacing inflation. All the lines are squeezing together.
Those lines have been diverging for over a generation. You’ll need a vice grip the size of the Grand Canyon to squeeze hard enough make any real world difference.
Absolutely accurate. Also means it’s kind of silly to kick out (with no plan for a better replacement, and with specific plans for something much much worse) the guy who actually vice gripped them together by a little bit, though, or assert that he’s hurting everyone on purpose and that they’re actually still going apart and that’s his fault and if you try to tell me any different then (hostility).
Usually, economic policies on the scale of the whole country take quite a while to kick in and really produce significant improvement even when you can get them through congress (which, a bunch of his more aggressive than this stuff, he couldn’t).
That isn’t what your graph says at all
Want to explain a little more?
Unless you think black Americans make up the entirety of poor people that has nothing to do with high vs low income.
Saying it has “nothing” to do with it is wrong; they’re so deeply connected that you might as well use either or both, since racial disparity is fundamental enough to the American economy that they give the same answer.
But sure, it’s fair to ask for something specifically about income level instead of by race; here’s one by percentiles and here’s the GINI coefficient over time.
Goddamn people will upvote anything
You need to ask yourself why? If unemployment is low and the economy is growing, then why are 3 in 5 struggling? If you have a room with 100 people and 100 pizzas, statistically the room has plenty of food. If 60 of the people complain that they are hungry, you wouldn’t scoff and tell them, “stop complaining, look at all the statistical pizza in the room! Things are actually quite good for everyone.” Sure, maybe some are falling for propaganda, but propaganda doesn’t get you 3 out of 5 people.
It might be that, because of the new gig economy, the number of shitty jobs has increased. Unemployment might be low, but “underemployment” might be high (if there is a way to even track that at all). I bet there are a lot of people who feel trapped in their jobs right now, and that doesn’t help consumer confidence.
It is a recession for the bottom majority of the country… That’s what happens when economic growth is only benefiting the top half …
It is a recession for many folks, and that’s a real problem that pretending it’s not happening won’t erase for them.
The majority of Americans know their situation sucks, they’re just not able to express it in numbers, probably because they’re busy trying to live their lives. These articles do nothing but smugly highlight that the numbers are tracking the wrong things. Unemployment being low doesn’t mean much if a huge chunk of employment is shitty gig work. The stock market being up doesn’t anything if over 90% of the stock market is owned by 10% of people. GDP doesn’t mean shit and a prime example of that is Canada having nearly 40% of their GDP being made up by overpriced housing, in that case it’s just people selling housing at each other and jacking up prices each time while renting it out at exorbitant rates. Not really much being produced there, certainly nothing that improves people’s lives (except speculators).
