Because the idea that what people hear on the media outweighs what they experience in day to day life seems very unintuitive. Of course many unintuitive things are true, but more unintuitive things are false, so without strong evidence it seems reasonable to stick with intuition. - ThreadSky

dave12352432.bsky.social • 4 days ago

Because the idea that what people hear on the media outweighs what they experience in day to day life seems very unintuitive. Of course many unintuitive things are true, but more unintuitive things are false, so without strong evidence it seems reasonable to stick with intuition.

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wietse111.bsky.social•4 days ago

Without evidence I'd agree with you, but most evidence actually points towards most Americans getting richer! Americans are buying more stuff. The inflation corrected median wage is up. Etcetera.

dave12352432.bsky.social•3 days ago

Evidence that Americans are on average getting richer is very weak evidence that any unhappiness must therefore be due to the media. There are other explanations.

Eg. Inequality, removal of post covid safety net, greater awareness of oligarchy, poverty increasing, people living beyond their means.

wietse111.bsky.social•3 days ago

You're moving the conversation to unhappiness. My claim wasn't about that. I was just claiming that many Americans think that they are materially less well off, even though objectively most Americans aren't. (Social) Media is a pretty plausible explanation for that.

dave12352432.bsky.social•3 days ago

Fair comment. Change unhappiness to "feel worse off" in my comment and I stand by it.

wietse111.bsky.social•3 days ago

In that case: I think most facts show that most Americans are not doing significantly worse. The material reality is nowhere near as bad as lots of people seem to believe. That alone doesn't prove that (social) media is a causal factor here, but that seems like a very plausible theory to me.

wietse111.bsky.social•3 days ago

I can't definitively prove it, but I haven't really seen any other hypothesis that is even remotely close in likelihood. But again, I realize this is maybe not a particularly convincing argument 😉

dave12352432.bsky.social•4 days ago

Also the spm poverty rate rose in 2023 and was higher in 2023 than 2019 and significantly higher than in 2020.

wietse111.bsky.social•3 days ago

I also did a little research on the SPM poverty rate, and you're kinda cherrypicking two years here. There were some years with covid supplementals which skew things. Otherwise, there was a slight increase but it isn't even nearly historically bad

dave12352432.bsky.social•3 days ago

I chose 2019 as the post covid year since obviously covid had a large impact. I'm not claiming its historically bad but it got worse, people don't like their conditions getting worse even if they aren't at historical lows.

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