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.
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