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.
‘Wrongly believe’ is the weakest attempt at gaslighting I’ve seen today.
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.
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.
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 can start by developing indicators that actually work, instead of indicators that make them look good.
While I’m not going to blame Biden for the economic situation right now since his policies look more like they’ve cushioned us against a much worse economic situation by pumping money into state-side manufacturing, I absolutely fucking HATE how out of touch economists are these days. They look at productivity (the value of which barely gets to workers), the stock market, or at spending that’s driven by debt and rich people, and say “everything looks fine. Oh, most of you can’t afford to eat, or get a job? Sounds like a personal problem.”
If the conclusions that economists come to are so consistently out of touch with the experience of the average person, maybe they should fix their fucking outlook criteria!!
I think it was another post on here that had a bunch of [good] economists write a paper stating that if the inflation formula had accounted for borrowing costs like they USED TO, the inflation numbers would match much more closely with public sentiment, after having topped out at 18 fucking percent at the height in 21/22.
And of course there’s how, at the height of the pandemic, they blantantly changed the criteria for what counts as a recession at all to say “no worries guys, everythings fine” when we were absolutely in a recession based on the old criteria.
Fuck economists
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
