What History Tells Us About the Feel-Bad Economy

Glad to see the Times still churning out utterly tone-deaf columns about kitchen-table economics.

I don't care about what the statistics say about the economy; what matters is that all these available jobs are entry-level. The rate of inflation is largely irrelevant when I've been losing purchasing power since 2003 anyway. The real problem is that when I entered the job market, you had to have 15 years of experience to make middle-class wages in journalism, and 13 years into my career, everyone with experience had taken buyouts or been laid off, with those of us stupid enough to think editing wouldn't die being shipped off to centralized production facilities.

Now, I can't get a job paying a subsistence wage in any field. Either the algorithm finds me too old or data analysis and coding, which I understand to be in high demand, don't count if done in a newsroom. I'm still supposed to have more than 20 years of career left and had to move into a vehicle because all the hard work one was supposed to do in one's 20s for the later payout of a comfortable life with vacations and such just ... doesn't count.

I don't care what the Fed does or who's in the White House; I care about being able to afford more than bologna sandwiches for every meal having already given up housing. That much should not be difficult to understand.

Oh look, another article about how the plebs are whiny for no good reason. Haven't the masses heard? The numbers look good and Goldman Sachs said the hard part is over.

I started working in a grocery store about a year before the pandemic. I've seen prices of food double in some cases. My pay has only gone up $2 due to the minimum wage in my city increasing. $2 raise in almost 5 years. I can no longer afford to shop at the store I work at, it's insane. I have no idea how this article can pretend things are remotely ok for the common person. I'm sure higher ups/managers are just fine, but not the rest of us.

That's what's called gaming the statistics. Actual purchasing power has been declining at a significantly higher rate as wages increased the net result being you can buy less stuff for more money. Fluffy articles citing feel good statistics dont matter.

Unemployment is low because potential workers have either given up and stopped looking for work or are working literally anything because they will starve if they don't; neither option lends itself to satisfaction with the economy. Labor participation rates have only just barely gotten back to their pre-pandemic levels, but a lot of people burned any savings they had to keep their heads above water, so on the whole they're still further behind than they were 4 years ago, and they know it, but Krugman never cared to ask a real person, so he has no clue.

Low inflation is meaningless when economic mobility is lower than ever, with education and healthcare dropping in quality and availability while increasing in price much faster than the average. Most small businesses that went bankrupt due to pandemic half-measures have not reopened, because unlike billionaires, when regular people without an army of lawyers declare bankruptcy, they actually lose everything. In spite of all this, clueless clowns who barely know how to look at numbers on spreadsheets write articles wondering why regular people aren't satisfied with such a great economy, and concludes a better outcome was impossible.

His only mention of consumer prices is an aggregated consumer price index, which is a "mere" 19% increase over pre-pandemic levels, and from that he concludes people are dumb babies because wages rose by about the same amount. This take is particularly insulting because he has definitely seen this chart and the numbers it's based on:

If that's a great economy, I'm a firebreathing dragon.

🤖 I'm a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles: ::: spoiler Click here to see the summary The simple reality of the past year or so is that America has accomplished what many, perhaps most, economists considered impossible: a large fall in inflation without a recession or even a big rise in unemployment.

At this point, however, with a soft landing looking ever more plausible, it seems as if the council, while it underestimated the size and duration of the shock, got the basic story right.

Unfortunately, we don’t have consumer sentiment data for the 1940s, although some political scientists believe that the economy actually helped Harry Truman win his upset election victory in 1948.

Also, it seems worth noting that many voters have demonstrably false views about the current economy — believing, in particular, that unemployment, which is near a 50-year low, is actually near a 50-year high.

And everything we know from history suggests that trying to impose deflation — falling prices — on large parts of the economy would have had disastrous effects on employment and output, something like the quiet depression Britain inflicted on itself after World War I when it tried to go back to the prewar gold standard.

What I can say is that if you believe that Biden made huge, obvious economic policy mistakes and could easily have put himself in a much better position, you probably haven’t thought this thing through.

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