If Inflation is Down, Why Are Prices Up?
Shockingly, most people aren't economists.
WSJ’s Grep Ip: “What’s Wrong With the Economy? It’s You, Not the Data.”
In The Wall Street Journal’s latest poll of swing states, 74% of respondents said inflation has moved in the wrong direction in the past year.
This assessment, which holds across all seven states, is startling, sobering—and simply not true. I’m not stating an opinion. This isn’t something on which reasonable people can disagree. If hard economic data count for anything, we can say unambiguously that inflation has moved in the right direction in the past year.
In the 12 months through February, inflation, according to the century-old consumer-price index, was 3.2%, compared with 6% a year earlier. Use a slightly different time horizon, or a slightly different measure (such as the index the Federal Reserve prefers) and you get similar results. Take out food and energy—or for that matter look only at food and energy—and inflation is still down.
So, on the one hand, Ip is right. Inflation is definitely down from a year ago. Were I asked that question, I would have answered it “correctly.” I’m a trained social scientist, follow the news incredibly closely, and am thus understand what the question means.
But I don’t blame the 74% who got the answer “wrong.” This isn’t a case where “feel” something that just ain’t true. No, ask a normal person whether inflation has “moved in the wrong direction,” they aren’t going to compare rates but rather directions. And, since prices are noticeably higher, it’s moving in the wrong direction.
People, almost surely wrongly, expect that an end of inflation means that prices should be going down. And, hey, it happens sometimes. Gas prices are in fact down from where they were a year or so ago (but higher than they were a month or so ago). Egg prices, too, have gone down. But all sorts of things are still much higher priced than they used to be.
Indeed, Ip acknowledges this later in the piece. Sort of.
It’s tempting to chalk this up to a misunderstanding. Lower inflation means the level of prices is still rising, just more slowly than before. People sometimes conflate inflation with the level of prices and believe inflation is getting worse because the price level keeps going up (it rarely goes down).
A recently released Brookings Institution study by Harvard University economist Stefanie Stantcheva sheds light on exactly how people think and feel about inflation. It found that half of respondents defined inflation correctly, as rising prices. The other half defined it incorrectly, mentioning such things as “price gouging” or “overpriced everything.” So, some people might conflate high prices with high inflation. But enough to explain our survey results? Doubtful.
I mean, if nothing else, this explains roughly 50%. That means we just have to explain 24%. And, again, an instinctive answer isn’t necessarily a rational one. If folks had been asked “Is the rate of inflation higher or lower this year compared to last?” we’d have a much better gauge of understanding the thing Ip is trying to understand.
By 47% to 41%, more Journal poll respondents think their investments or retirement savings went in the wrong direction in the past year—a period in which the stock market roared to record highs, home values held steady or rose, and interest on savings went up.
The average customer retirement account at mutual fund giant Vanguard grew 19% last year. True, that didn’t make up for the 20% decline in 2022, especially after inflation. But it hardly qualifies as the wrong direction.
By more than 2-to-1 (56% to 25%), respondents said the economy had gotten worse rather than gotten better over the past two years. That is difficult to square with robust employment growth, unemployment near its lowest in half a century, or growth in gross domestic product, which actually accelerated last year.
So, look, we have to factor negative partisanship, the Fox News effect, and all manner of other things into the polling data. But, as the just-passed Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman explained, humans are naturally much more loss-averse than is rational. The massive rise in prices—followed by the massive hike in interest rates to combat inflation—was a crushing blow to people’s investments and retirement savings. Any money in a savings account was suddenly worth significantly less than it was. Homes, which are most people’s only source of wealth, were suddenly much harder to sell. For that matter, buying a cheap retirement home in Florida or some other warm, low-tax state suddenly became out of reach for millions.
It’s not at all unreasonable, then, that people factor that into to their reaction to polling questions that gains in the stock market, much less the GDP. Indeed, I follow this sort of thing much, much more closely than something like 95% of Americans and I couldn’t tell you what the GDP is without Googling it.
Again, Ip seems to acknowledge humans aren’t homo economicus before expecting that they should be:
To be sure, inflation and shortages were severe from 2021 through early 2023 and the improvement in the data since might not have been enough to erase those bad memories. Still, there is evidence people actually do notice things getting better around them. Surveys by the University of Michigan, for example, find consumer confidence has risen.
Moreover, while respondents rate the national economy as bad by a significant margin, they rate their own state’s economy as good by almost as much.
This is reminiscent of how voters tend to assign low marks to Congress but high marks to their own representatives. But the definition of a good Congress depends a lot on your politics, whereas the definition of a good economy ought to be somewhat objective. Everyone (except a few central bankers) wants lower unemployment. And swing states’ economies have largely tracked the nation’s.
I’m closer to homo economicus than most. I’m analytical by nature, reinforced by training. Nor do I watch Fox News or listen to right-wing podcasts and the like. But my impressions of the economy are still far more based on my personal experience than broader trends.
So, for example, I’m aware of the unemployment figures and welcome low unemployment. But, so long as my wife and I maintain our jobs, that really doesn’t much factor into my sense of how things are going. Like most, I’m irrationally aware of fluctuations in gas prices. I’m pretty well aware of grocery prices, especially meat prices, as I do most of the grocery shopping. I know that the price of new and used cars is still radically higher than it was two or three years ago. Ditto restaurant prices, even at the sort of places where I might go grab lunch.
And another thing: my sense of time on these things is much more vague than my sense of direction. I suspect that’s true of most people. So, polling on “the last year” is likely not to line up very well with the actual data. It’s just not how we’re wired.
Finally, at the point of the column where most would have stopped reading, Ip gives us this:
All of this suggests that the bad vibes about inflation and the economy are interlaced with a deeper pessimism about the country—what I’ve previously called “referred pain.”
Stantcheva’s study shows that inflation evokes broader feelings of injustice. People tend to believe that prices rise faster than wages, that companies raise prices because they can but don’t raise wages because they don’t have to, and that the rich always do better with inflation. (Those things are true at times but not over long periods of time.)
Stantcheva told me that, while inflation clearly generates bad feelings, bad feelings about the country or the economy might make them more pessimistic about inflation. For instance, her study finds that, whereas economists associate lower unemployment with higher inflation, the public believes weak growth, high unemployment and high inflation all go together. As one survey respondent said: “To me, inflation is when the economy is more than just hurting. It’s when it’s too tough just to keep positive.”
This is well outside my professional expertise but it rings true to me. Human beings are complicated creatures. Our perceptions are based on a whole lot of things, not just the data economists collect.
Given how easily mainstream punditry and conventional wisdom is manipulated by narratives that arise from rightwing media (But Her Emails! Trump tells it like it is! Crime crime crime! Red Wave 2022! Biden is too oooooold!), one need not actually watch Fox News to have one’s perceptions skewed accordingly.
The Wall Steet Journal recently published charts echoing the well-known surveys and polls showing most Americans say their own finances are fine and/or their local or state economy is getting better…but the broader national economy is somehow simultaneously getting worse.
Similarly, the Human Flourishing Lab’s surveys found this February most Americans are hopeful for their own future (82%) and their family’s future (85%), and their local community’s future (74%)…but pessimistic about the future of broader society.
Recent (as in 2022-2023) Gallup surveys have found:
– 83% of Americans satisfied with the way things are going on their own lives, but 22% satisfied with they way things are going in the US.
– 10% of Americans saying crime is a very serious problem where they live, but 51% saying crime is a very serious problem in the US overall.
– 80% of actual parents satisfied with with their oldest child’s education, but 42% of all adults satisfied with US education.
– Nearly 75% of Americans satisfied with the quality of their own healthcare, and less than 50% satisfied with the country’s overall healthcare.
The schizophrenia of the American public is a constant source of lulz on data/statistics Twitter, and I’m sure a constant frustration for the masochists who dare to serve as our elected representatives.
Of course there’s no single explanation for these disparities, and of course the constant drumbeat of negativity, doom, and gloom in legacy media and on social media plays some role.
Inflation is a compounding number. The rapid rise essentially reset prices in a much shorter time frame than people are accustomed to. People are expecting prices to “go back” to where they were in 2020. Anything short of that is perceived as “inflation and the economy are bad.”
It’s going to be damn near impossible to convince people otherwise. There’s simply not enough understanding of how the overall economy operates, and combined with “I am paying a lot more than I did 3 years ago” it’s an uphill climb.
MSNBC noted an interesting poll last night. It asked people how they felt about the economy of their home state. By a net twenty or thirty points people felt their state economy was good. MSNBC had a sideways bar chart with all the bars to the right, except strikingly one bar to the left at the bottom, where they asked the same question about the national economy. Respondents on net thought the national economy was bad by twenty or thirty points. May one speculate that this represents an absence of news stories: “Inflation still high in Ohio”, “The price of eggs is up in Texas”, “Governor Youngkin suffers from poor economy”?
@Jen: As I and others may have noted once or twice, the electorate are a box of rocks. They don’t vote on econ statistics, they vote on feels. Feels lag reality by maybe six months. We have a strong economy and seven months to the election.
@gVOR10: Yep.
New Hampshire’s unemployment rate in February was 2.6%. But I still hear people complaining about the “bad economy.”
Well, this what their teachers taught them as the answer on the test. Few actually stop and think of this, even years later. This is the answer to get the good grade so it is what was needed to be known.
@JKB:
Oh, and it’s what Joe Biden and the Democrats have been saying in different words with their “shrinkflation” campaign.
I love it when Marxist dogma bites the purveyors in the okole
@JKB: So I’m assuming you didn’t get good grades because of your “idiosyncratic” understanding of the material.
@JKB:..
Please use the doll and point to your okole.
@JKB:
I love it when people, on the left or right, who know nothing about Marxism weigh in on ‘Marxist dogma.’
@JKB: The fact that many companies are reporting record profits despite inflationary pressures is contributing to the shrinkflation discussion. To what do you attribute all of this strong economic news?
@JKB: Marxist dogma? You referring to the love letters Trump wrote Kim Kong Un after Trump saluted North Korea’s commie generals, or to the Republican Party’s corporate socialism and welfare for whiny Iowa farmers?
An important factor in this dynamic would seem to be the Biden Administration and its supporters essentially ignoring the problem of inflation for 2+ years, other than using it as an excuse to pass a lot of government spending that had nothing to do with fighting inflation. The public might be more receptive to the “things are getting better” message if they hadn’t been non-stop gaslighted about a very real rise in prices.
By the way, I can’t wait to see how much this new jobs report is revised downward when no one is paying any attention.
@Jen:
To what did you attribute all the strong economic news during the first three years of the Trump Administration?
@Jen:
Something something deep state something something MSM fake news lawfare border.
@TheRyGuy: Trump was president for four years, till Jan 2021. Not three years. Four. But only four, because he was unqualified for the gig and sucked at it.
And “the strong economic news” to which you refer wasn’t all that strong, considering economic growth slowed under Trump compared to Obama’s last three years — despite Obama not leaving Trump with mass death and record job loss like Dementia Donald did to Brandon.
The public might be more receptive to voting Republican if the right had any serious policy plan to address the economic pain they exaggerate. But since today’s conservatives are unlikeable, uninspriring, intellectually lazy, and morally bankrupt — having nothing to offer voters but doom, gloom, negativity, hate, lies, extremism, treason, Putin-fluffing, and sucking Trump’s shriveled orange rapist peen — instead Republicans keep losing winnable elections.
Missed opportunity.
@Rick DeMent:
How dare you suggest that they would demean themself by taking a class a one of those leftist indoctrination camps they call “schools.”
Of course they might have been “forced to” and if that’s the case, their only patriotic recourse would be to intentionally resist and do as little learning as possible.
@Jen: Correct and effectively universal phénomèna. Special pleading arguments from partisan motivated reasoning aside neither US punditry nor media bias nor other specific factors drive, its a fundamental broad effect, a structural human bias, the “anchoring bias” relative to values.
Partially explanatory of why globally spurts / rapid changes in inflation always produce serious political backlash.
And why recent Bohemian bourgeoisie Ledt ‘inflation-splaining’ has been fundamentally wrong headed and futile as a response as tin eared relative to working class labour in particular.
@TheRyGuy: while the Biden Administration committed a real policy error in the double stimulus bills, notably the second, it was a reasonable error at the time.
It is however inaccurate to say the Biden Administration ignored, their Treasury Secretary Yellen certainly did not and they certainly worked in line and did not try to attack Federal Reserve once the rate rises started – contrary to a certain orange cretin.
Now it is true the hard Left Progressives / the BoBo Left of largely Uni educated professional class focused on their cultural priorities engaged in rather stupid inflation denialism and continues to foolishly poo-poo the inflation impact, which was and is politically stupid, but the actual Biden Administration was rather better and has been competent.
One shouldn’t believe one’s own agitprop, it makes one dim
@Lounsbury: I don’t think it was a policy error at all. I think it was a choice they made to have some inflation, as that was better than 10 percent unemployment and flat growth.
And by “better” I mean “better for voters” not “better for investors”. Better for employees, not CEOs. To my mind, that’s how it should be. That’s why I’m a liberal not a conservative. Really, it’s the only reason.
@al Ameda: “I love it when people, on the left or right, who know nothing about Marxism weigh in on ‘Marxist dogma.’”
Wait a minute — doesn’t Marx mention the size of a Snickers bar vs. its price on page 467 of Das Kapital?
@Lounsbury: Wouldn’t it be fun to discover that JKB and Lounsbury were really the same person? The tell would be their mutual hatred of higher education and their inability to write a decent English sentence.
C’mon, guy, ‘fess up! We’ll only love you for it.
Has it ever been different, I wonder?
Like, has there ever been a period in time when people responded to a poll by saying “No, inflation/ unemployment/ crime is totally not a problem!”
I think the responses DK mentioned above, where people think their own finances are OK, and their own neighborhood is safe, is the more important one.
If I live in Los Angeles, the only time I hear news about Dallas or New York or Seattle is if a plane crashes or some shooting spree happens so of course I would think “Man, those cities sure are going to hellenahandbasket! Glad I live here in LA, two blocks from Skid Row where things are nice and peaceful and safe!”
As usual with polls on whether people are happy with current conditions, I suggest that checking out partisan affiliation and responses might be worthwhile.
Pretty much every poll on which this has been analyzed shows Republicans 95% against anything that might reflect well on Joe Biden and Democrats with a distribution that probably is more representative of the country.
So until we see that breakdown, it’s not worth trying to figure what “people” think of the economy, crime, or anything else.
This is where the wonks miss the forest for the trees.
The official inflation rate is an estimate based on CPI, which itself is an estimate of a basket of goods and services from sampled prices that are then weighted to match the hypothetical spending of a hypothetical average consumer. And without going into lots of detail, CPI doesn’t include a lot of things people spend money on for various reasons or has to make adjustments that simplify a lot of underlying spending complexity and variability.
In short, the official nationwide inflation number is an average based on exclusions and methodological choices that do a pretty good job of measuring average consumption expenditures, but it doesn’t capture all the economic pressures faced by consumers, all of their consumption spending, or the full scope of price changes in the economy.
That’s not to knock the statistic or methodology, but one needs to understand its limitations and where and how it can appropriately be applied. It’s a great tool for looking at apples-to-apples national trends over time, but it’s not a great tool for making conclusions about smaller demographic slices of America, to say nothing of individual households.
Because it’s a nationwide average that doesn’t capture everything, once you overlay actual real people and not a hypothetical average consumer on top of it, you’ll get a distribution. For some real-world consumers, their real-world inflation rate will be less than the CPI rate, for others, it’ll be more. The reasons for this should be obvious to anyone with a basic understanding of how averages work.
So if someone says that they think the inflation rate is higher, then it can certainly be true for their circumstances because an individual household’s spending habits can—and often will—be significantly different from the “average household” the CPI uses. So when pollsters talk to these people, they are going to – accurately – think that inflation is higher than the CPI because it actually is for them personally and their particular circumstances.
Additionally, even knowledgeable people don’t understand what the CPI excludes, how the averages work for things like housing costs and tuition, or that things like taxes aren’t included. When average people consider inflation, they consider it in terms of their own situation and all their spending.
Sneering at them, telling them they are wrong and stupid, and pointing to the averaged CPI number are actually innumerable things to do.
It’s the equivalent of telling someone they can’t possibly be seeing house prices or rents increasing in their area because the Case-Schiller index is holding steady.
Now, to retreat somewhat, I agree that there is a lot of economic ignorance out there, people are bad at estimating from limited data, and many people may not do what I do and track spending pretty closely to get a lot of fidelity on our household’s trends. Most people probably look at top-line amounts, like how much was spent on gas or at the grocery store in a month, in a more simple budgeting model. But I bet most of them get a pretty accurate sense of their month-to-month spending and how much is left each month, or how much isn’t, forcing them to make tradeoffs. So, while I think the “vibes” argument is a factor, it’s also really dumb just to insist that people are stupid, that an averaged and modeled national statistic is somehow the absolute truth, and that anyone who says their experience disagrees with that must wrong.
@Andy:
Sure I don’t disagree entirely, but when the partisan break down on the question is so comically divergent, you have to wonder why. But even 30 mins of sampling right wing media will tell you that all nuance is lost in their coverage in favor of “Everything is shit now and nothing was shit in the Trump era” style of coverage. I wish I could hear a nuanced discussion regarding the points you made on RW media but that is just a pipe dream.
Meanwhile thoughtful discussions are being had on the more liberal sources I consume and I have heard almost verbatim what you have discussed in you post. So no, I do not think this is a case of the Left wing media painting the economy in a overlay optimistic light. On the contrary, often they go to great pains to point out precisely what you have said. They do talk about how the US is doing much better then most other countries around the world.
One thing that Right Wing media never talks about is what exactly do they think Trump would do to try and lower prices. Everything thing Trump has proposed (like this crazy tariff plan), will do nothing to lower princes and will probably trigger a recession. Hell he managed to take an economy doing well in 2016 and make it worse in every year of his presidency until the pandemic hit. During that time the RW media touted those three years as wildly successful. It’s not just economic ignorance, it’s coupled with people being strait up lied to.
@Cheryl Rofer: 74% of respondents said inflation is moving in the wrong direction. The Republican-leaning portion of the population is, what, 35-40%?
@wr: It’s funny, but I don’t find @JKB and @Lounsbury all that similar. @Lounsbury stays with facts that are relevant and comments that are germane.
You’ll note that in the exchange above, @Lounsbury and I don’t agree on facts at all, just values. Let me tell you, in this day and age that’s a treasure.
For the record, I think @JKB is getting a lot better at doing that. I don’t have to agree with the sentiment of a comment to find it valuable, and he has from time to time brought interesting stuff to light.
@Jay L Gischer:
I don’t either.
@Jay L Gischer: it was self evidently a bloody policy error as the real economic inflation pain at working class level and political backlash has put you at risk of Trump II.
Investor class has done perfectly well, inflation spikes are generally not ar all problems for equity markets and asset holders, the contrary.
But they generally do cause extra pain to fixed incomes and pure wage earning labour.
It is rather sterile to continue the BoBo elite left hand waiving on the inflation front
The second stimulus was a clear but modest and understandable policy error causing overheat, inflation and political disadvantage, however understandable from a 2008 misreading there was enough digns at passage that it was at original spend targets over priming. You were lucky opposition pared it.
It is perfectly fine to make and then sdmit minor policy errors, inexact and late data often make inevitable. The key is to realise, admit snd sfjust (internally).
Biden Treasury vlearly did that and displayed admirable conpetence.
@wr: your childish whinging on about me is both boring and insipidly dull witted.
But for perfect clarity, the JKB troll who clumsily baits you engages in anti higher education baiting.
I have never made any such comment.
But I do make comment on the queer closemindedness of eggheadism and myopia of the Uni educated, whi rather tend to fall into reification of their abstractions.
That a somewhat pedestrians dim party political partisan incapable of bring challenged would read that as hostile to higher education is perhaps expected.
However, the comments are aimed not at higher education but a particular form of myopia of the Uni educated “Bohemian bourgeoisie left” as we call them in French, referring to the enarquist fraction and dimilar
You may in the future, to make your insipid comments less tediously boring exploit the fact that I personally hold three graduate degrees, so anything I say on eggheads you can have fun with there.
@Andy: your last paragraph is spot on and illustrative of precisely the Uni educated myopia in these areas. And failure to realise their own blinders. Eggheadism. Said by someone himself of such tendencies if not Left inflected.
@Lounsbury:
Hilariously wrong. If Biden had done what you, Larry Summers, and Jamie Dimon and wanted by embracing stagflation and sky-high unemployment to try to engineer lower retail pricing, Trump II would be a done deal — not just a risk. Middle and working class economic pain would have been much worse, plus there is no guarantee corporations would have completely stopped price gouging.
Some poor folks’ pain was a given no matter the course. The difference now is Biden, Pelosi, Schumer and Yellen made sure that this time the investor class weren’t the only ones benefitting from recovery and growth, as has been the recent norm.
It’s high comedy to believe Trump would be weaker politically, and Biden stronger, without 39 consecutive months of job growth + 3.4% GDP growth that outpaces Trump’s pre-COVID 2.6% — but with eggs and milk 50 cents cheaper. No way, no how. Joblessness is not a political winner. See Trump 2020.
@Lounsbury: @Jay L Gischer: it is a further point of clarification you seem to misapprehend my statement to be that a government stimulus period was a policy error.
For clarificatio, the statementis the 2nd stimuluswas an error , and even at that understandable. That is I am not call government stimulus an error or industriel support, but rather the volume was materially overshot to a negative effect, negative not for my own economic class, but fixed incomes and labour.
You should take from ” understandable error” not ideological opposition to such effort, but a technician’s modest critique that too much gas was added.
Very different from your Republicsns, my view
@wr:
No, that was Page 476, that’s a common mistake. Page 467 dealt with blue M&Ms and their pricing and the number per 8 Oz package.
@gVOR10:
Feels have not been causally connected to reality for some years now.
@DK: Amusing the recourse to “price gouging” although so very typical of Left innumeracy, albeit useful political posturing with wider population so ling as one does not fall for one’s own propaganda. It would without doubtvbe useless to point to the statistics…
The fact you ham handedly lump me with Summers, Dimon … well I suppose to be expected from partisan knee jerking although the paragraph there is economically incoherent, something of a word Salade in using terms in fairly non-sens mix.
The actual economic policy questions are sequential.
1) choice of Covid recovery policy, stimulus or not. (Certainly amongst proper macro-economists, the unambiguous consensus is yes, a proper action)
2) If yes how much and how long. Here then the consensus disapates. And certainly econometrically the answers less clear. However it can be fairly said that it was not unreasonable to have seen the 2021 stimuli, and broadly the first. But data certainly put warning flags for the second as too much additional in time and volume relative to capacity and already evident significant excess savings, rather différent than 2008 2009. The 2nd ended up being a modest, but very understandable, policy error and arguably worth making to avoid downside risk (although equally arguably enough data that it dhould have scaled, but political spending is of course not something technocratically refined in its very nature)
3) Once inflation manifested, what policy response for the avoidance of both economic pain (notably as contrary to the partisan special pleading hand waiving, inflation spikes everywhere penalise above all the lower incomes, not “investor class”)
Here luckily the US Fed – like all major central banks as like European Central Bank, took action and Ms Yellen worked with – and no attention in technical policy was paid to the foolish inflation denialism of the “Progressive” hard Left and the BoBo culty lefties denialism.
And it rather looks like barring an exogenous shock, the Soft Landing path has been achieved.
If you desire to associate me with names, it should be w Yellen, Powell & Fed Committee
The risk of inflation persustance and 2ndary feed through rebound remains but at least ongoing elevated price rises has been tamped giving a chance.
Now the counterfactual of inflation sans 2nd stimulus requires some real econometric modelling but it seems reasonable to assume a more modest inflationary acceleration given less supply chain stress. Still inflation but likely lower as less gas added to the proverbial fire.
Your befuddled reference to stagflation seems to be a confused reference to some statement by Summers, who I frankly don’t pat any attention to, but his comments warning of stagflation were aligned to the early risks of inaction on inflation, overdone probably- having only read him being attacked by US “Progressives” I shan’t try to characterise him. In any case no stimulus would not be a stagflation scenario (if your confused reference is read that way) but rather recession
@TheRyGuy:
The resilience of the Obama economy. 😀
@DrDaveT:..Feels have not been causally connected to reality for some years now.
I’m going to save this and every time someone posts:
I feel like yada yada yada… instead of: I think that yada yada yada…
I’ll reply to their comment with it.
Giving you full credit.
@Lounsbury: Cool, so after all that impenetrable word salad gobbeldeygook, Biden’s policy decisions are still proven wise by the fact of 39 consecutive months of job growth, the 5th-longest period of job expansion on record, 3.4% average GDP growth that outpaces Trump’s pre-COVID 2.6%, the developed world’s strongest recovery and lowest post-COVID inflation, the longest sub-4% unemployment streak in 50 years, and — since crime and poverty are correlated — one of the lowest violent crime rates of the last 50 years.
This reality will not be altered by desperate MAGA propaganda, nor by tortured prose from keyboard warrior blowhards who think they know monetary policy better than Biden’s economic team (they don’t), who think they have a magic prescription that would have outpaced those fantastic results while keeping inflation lower (they don’t), and who think they have a magic ball divining the effect this magical nonexistent better policy would have had on Biden’s and Trump’s political fortunes (they don’t).
You wasting your time on incoherent thousand word screeds won’t make you any less incorrect. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and the current reality proves President Biden and his advisors got it right.
You are wrong.
@Rick DeMent:
The RW media surely has some effect, but if you look at the viewership numbers, they are small compared to the total population. Not many Americans consume RW media, so it can’t be this decisive influence that so many people claim it is IMO.
Plus, as James notes to Cheryl, it’s 74% of respondents in swing states in this poll. Swings states are, by definition, about 50/50, so you can’t get to 74% in a swing state with only partisan Republicans.
@Lounsbury: ” fact that I personally hold three graduate degrees,”
Did any of them involve the use of the English language?
There is an amplification effect for media. Not that many people actually read the NYT but what they write gets amplified. Same on the right. Those small numbers get amplified by talk radio, social media, youtube and chat groups. Look, just ask someone on the right who should be economically literate and they will just tell you everything is bad, but they cant give you any numbers to substantiate that belief. But the emphasis on bad news doesnt occur only with RW media. Bad news sells so many on the left also buy into the doomsayers about the economy.
Still, numbers are numbers. It’s just not possible to have a significant majority of people doing well and the economy in general doing poorly. The observation that some people are doing worse than average is trite. Of course there are those people. An average means some people are doing better and some worse. It’s a combo of several things people have mentioned. It’s a combination of human nature wiring us so we notice and worry more about gains than losses so higher prices are more important than salary increases. It’s noticing the prices that are up and not the ones that are down. It’s the media. Its politics.
Steve
@DK: well of course the ideological partisan comes away with simplistic My Team Right My Team Right…. rather pathetically tribal bounded reasoning of White Hat My Team and anyone says any slightly contrary word is Enemy Black Hat.
What else can one expect one supposes.
Of course as I literally wrote, in my reply to the actual original comment to the actual MAGA, the Biden team did well and the right approach overall – my actual observation before being run through the simplistic My Team fun house mirror of the party political knee jerking – that there was a limited and understandable policy error in pushing too long too much a stimulus is generally c
(We can leave aside the simplistic economic innumeracy of Presidentialism explaining general macro-economics, which is boring political posturing and simply wrong generally, insofar as irrelevant really since it is reacting to a strawman or patheticly impoverished understanding of my comments as ‘Biden was wrong’ versus ‘Biden is very competent and handled well but there was a modest policy error, to which his administration responded well.’ – which in reality is a contrasting compliment to fundamental competency if one is able to extract oneself from pathetic partisanship get out of My Team Right cheerleading modes)
Now if may eventually cross some minds that a modest and bounded critique is different than a MAGA stagement.
Of course most of the Partisans here just really want to do Cheerleading.
@wr: No, none mate , andone of them not even in language of Shakespeare at all, terrible to wrap one’s mind around for Americans but not particularly odd in the wider world.
Really try better, your peevish little demarches are inspid, boring. They have no panache.
@Andy:
That does not follow. People who do not watch it are influenced by people who do – people who are energetic about sharing their beliefs – in person, on Fakebook etc.
Personally, I think voters care more about how they themselves are doing than about their perception of what things are like elsewhere or for others. So maybe thinking the economy is bad for other people but not themselves is not a big deal.
@Andy:
Yes, cable news skews ridiculously toward an older demographic, ancient more like it. But then that content gets sliced and diced and presented in bite-sized chunks on YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok. Then influencers get ahold of it and add their commentary to it. Editorials are written, column inches are dedicated and when the story gets through with all the ratings of the original source hardly has any bearing on the impact of the story. You are using 20th-century media analysis on 21st-century media ecosystems.
Sure there are moderates and even some liberals who get caught up with these messages. Not to mention obsessive both-sider types who strive to elevate nonsense to prove their objectivity bonified. The problem is that bad analysis is just that. The idea that this economy is horrible and will get even worse is nonsense. If Trump were in office right now Republicans, moderates, and both-siders would be touting this as the most amazing economy in the history of the world instead of tut tutting that it could be so much better.
@charontwo:
and
@Rick DeMent:
Well, we are talking about cause and effect here.
I keep hearing this claim over and over and over again that RW media is the fountain of bad vibes and various incorrect views across wide swaths of society.
And while I think that it certainly is for the hard-core partisans and some others who are probably already aligned in that direction, if one is going to claim it’s responsible for 74% of people believing that inflation has moved in the wrong direction in swing states (which are definitionally 50/50), then I think one needs to show the cause and effect because that is a really big stretch to pin all or even most of that on RW media.
I’d also note that partisan and media bias work both ways. There is also a LW media and LW partisans who have a strong interest in spinning in the other direction, so it’s not as if the RW media is playing alone and unopposed on the field here.
The partisan split for that poll is 26% liberal/very liberal, 37% conservative/very conservative, 31% moderate, and 6% don’t know/refused. Basically, you’d have to have all the conservatives, all the moderates, all the dk/refused to be on one side, and all the liberals to be on the side that inflation has moved in the right direction. I’m not going to be convinced that the RW media has that kind of massive influence without some significant evidence.
Going back to the poll, I want to reiterate the point that people’s individual circumstances are highly variable and those circumstances are probably the most influential thing for them. For example:
On the question of whether their personal financial situation is going in the right or wrong direction:
Right direction: 46%
Wrong direction: 49%
Don’t know/didn’t answer: 6%
On the question of right/wrong direction of your investments/retirement savings:
Right direction: 41%
Wrong direction: 47%
DK/Refused: 11%
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that those pretty closely match the split between Trump and Biden right in the survey – 47 Trump, 44 Biden.
So while lots of people (74%!) think inflation is still in the wrong direction, clearly, a significant chunk of them think they are doing better despite that.
@Lounsbury:
And of course the barely-literate windbag retreats to crying about partisanship and teams, attempting to distract from the reality that the facts prove that Biden was right.
Your utter wrongness on this isn’t that complicated: the numbers show our economy is doing well due in no small part to Democratic policy choices, both relative to prior US economies and relative to other advanced economies in the post-COVID era. You have no alternative path that could have replicated this success while also keeping inflation noticeably lower than it is now. Because it doesn’t exist. So your implied insistence that slower growth and more joblessness would have increased Biden’s political fortunes is illogical nonsense. Obviously.
Facts don’t care what team you’re on. The data proves you wrong. Because you are wrong. Irrelevant, dead-horse tantrums about partisanship will not change that.
@Andy:
And I addressed that in my comment which you are now conveniently handwaving away.