Whatever happened here probably elected Donald Trump, and it doesn’t make a single lick of sense to say “Oh it’s just that Democrats didn’t listen hard enough.”
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isn't 'what happened' that trump and his cronies spent a lot of their time yelling about how the economy sucked because of the price of eggs, leading the media to run 'economy looks good but eggs still expensive, so it's bad', ontologically causing people's perception to diverge from normal?
Or it could be that maybe the price of regular goods people buy literally every week going up is a bad thing that puts a massive strain on normal working people, and was a problem that they wanted addressed?
In other words they felt like the entire world had changed and they didn't understand how to process it...and social media + inflation doom spiraled them negative.
I don’t think the pandemic fried peoples brain as much as woke them up so they could see our entire economy is based on a stock market that is now a rigged casino for the ultra rich. You guys just can’t accept maybe you’re the one who’s wrong here
He ran on systemic change and racism. The racists obviously followed him. Unfortunately there’s a lot of people smart enough to understand our system is completely broken, but too dumb to understand his radical changes will make it worse.
We woke up and realized the measures of economic success are absolutely bull shit and completely detached from the reality of the working class. It’s really not complicated Billy
I mean, there are oft-observed inflection points where an increase in a quantitative variable leads to a change in qualitative result. Such variable in this case could be “time spent under a certain set of economic conditions”
My contention was and still is that concerted misinformation won the election. Half the country is paying attention to not necessarily the news...and not the Bill Maher type.
Maybe! I do have sympathy for the argument that Americans were so used to low inflation since the 1990s that high inflation, even just for a couple years, broke the connection between indicators... but by the same token, I think it's also possible that Biden just came across as weak.
Yeah, the truth is almost certainly a combination of factors, but what's connecting them is Biden. Biden failed to ascertain the risk in letting those programs expire, and he failed to communicate. He just wasn't built for the times.
And I think Biden got a lot right! He got IRA/Infrastructure/Chips through Congress. He got the first wave of COVID relief through. Aside from Gaza, he was solid on Foreign Policy... but he just didn't have the juice to pull in anything after 2022, he was washed.
Yes, but I’m saying, why did economic sentiment respond as predicted only by *half* as much? Because half of the country got its news from propaganda outlets that were saying it was fake, no big deal, etc
I could be convinced of that. Are you saying propaganda spiked in 2020? I feel like it was already high, we had many years of it escalating by then but it was a chaotic time so could be. Mental health issues from COVID damage is my first thought looking at it, higher baseline of anxiety etc...
Yeah, the politico piece that's going around fails to reckon with the fact that all the supposedly "bad" measures used to correlate with public opinion and now don't. So something else is broken.
And I'm for using better measures, but this is a separate issue than the nature vs nurture debate.
I stopped actively participating in local Democratic politics several years ago because of people like you. You criticize Trump followers for being impervious to reality, you are the same.
I’m not an economist but my thought is, big events like massive job losses create a window and opportunity for exploitation that can change the trajectory of predicted events/sentiments. And maybe job gains over time don’t shut that window or revert things back to the old trajectory.
GDP, employment numbers and average household income are up.
That was ignored by the Republicans because they were told all the numbers were "fake" and they believed it.
Elon Musk went from being worth 20 billion to almost 500 billion since the pandemic. You have to be a complete fucking idiot to not realize a system that allows that is completely broken and detrimental to the working class.
No. I did not. The majority of Americans have some sort of retirement account that invests in the stock market. That has no bearing on their current day to day lives
An extreme minority, nearing 25%, of working class Americans have real investments (ie - not workplace related retirement funds).
The stock market has jack shit to do with the financial wellbeing of the type of person who pays rent and barely scrapes by. It just means bougies get more cars.
It’s emotional and yes propaganda plays a role yet folks are emotion driven. They tend to blame the president whoever it is for whatever their hardships are regardless of the cause of them.
Ppl’s bank accounts would tell you differently. He did not mention Republican nor Democrat. Ppl vote based on their emotions, I’m not saying propaganda played no role, I’m saying their emotions played a bigger role.
They didn’t, ppl have always been emotional. Even those of us who do our best to ignore what our emotions are beeping at us and just go with the facts and evidence, human beings have always been this emotionally driven. They were just at home tuned in at that point.
so until 2020 people didn't understand their material situation enough to be driven by their emotions, such that only now have they decided that they don't like the economy?
the economy that is markedly better than 2019 when they were happy with the economy?
They didn’t like the economy with Bush in 2007, they also didn’t like the economy with Bush in 1992, thing is, Trump technically should have won in 2020 because for all Biden did to soften this, he was gonna get blamed for it all regardless of Trumps policies and actions that did it.
That strikes me as the most probable explanation, especially since inflation was baked in by sector effects (supply crunch, commodity costs) rather than labor market tightness, so easing off on fiscal stimulus wasn’t going to help inflation.
i also think part of it is people in industries not doing well are over representative among online culture generation ie academia/journalists/gamedev/art/sw/tech etc
Also, the people who did the worst wrt real wages were the upper middle class, the richest people that are still "authentic". The local news has neither college dropouts nor billionaires on to "talk about the state of the economy". They have small business owners and local professionals.
Weirdly the downstream effect from better pay seems to have been slightly better-off working people siding inordinately with employers and joining them in complaining about nonexistent service workers and the high cost of manual labor.
Worth noting that observed sentiment also never dips as low as predicted sentiment in 2020, which may have been the result of both the fiscal stimulus and the sense of coming together that existed early in the pandemic.
The lesson of this seems to be that you should never do emergency temp relief to stimulate the economy and stave off a depression. Which, damn. That fucking sucks. But ok.
We should have a more robust welfare state as a floor. We should also do temporary emergency relief during emergencies. But all the people complaining about inflation would really not like what would happen if we did emergency relief levels of welfare spending all the time no matter what.
The UI system is a great example of this. It’s a natural negative feedback loop because it pumps more money into the economy when people lose their jobs and less money in when people don’t lose their jobs. What you’re suggesting would be similar to giving everyone UI payments all the time.
That's not true housing shortage in 43 states according to Freddie Mac. Notably post pandemic it started really hitting the sun belt hard which wasn't so bad previously.
Rising interest rates made mortgages more expensive, inflation especially affected daily consumer purchases and was therefore constantly on their minds.
All of the stats and reports on real earnings are heavily skewed by a single month in April 2020 and people have actually been losing money for the most part, especially compared to just before the pandemic.
But the actual answer is that a lot of people who were not very online until the pandemic suddenly became very engrossed in social media without building defenses against trolls and grifters and liars.
The Democrats enabled the bail out of moral hazard again, and it broke the markets and people’s minds with greed to the point they were spending millions $ on ape gifs.
Pandemics are incredibly destructive to society. Some historians argue the MOST destructive of things. They break nations and empires and change world history. I would propose we're in the middle of such a break right now. Consumer sentiment is a lagging indicator. Death counts are leading.
Virtually every dem talking abt the Econ in 2024 would say something like “the economy is good but we know some ppl are still hurting.”
Meanwhile, Trump & the gop will take credit for projects funded by bills they opposed & say “best Econ ever” when they’re in power, regardless of the truth.
Maybe disgruntled online posters make prominent dems & their advisers feel like they have to qualify any comments abt the economy being good, but it’s also self-reinforcing if prominent dems do it every time they talk about the effects of dem policies.
The pandemic absolutely broke people’s brains. Looking for answers amidst the trauma, they ate up mountains of propaganda, conspiracy theories, snake oil and religious nonsense from the internet.
The timing is simply the election and inauguration - Republicans started answering the survey in an opposite way.
But that means the survey isn't measuring consumer sentiment and doesn't mean much.
You're overthinking. It's Covid. Covid broke the forecasting models. Numbers looked decent but actual humans knew there was a pandemic and uncertainty surrounding government response and subsequent Covid waves further separated forecasts from reality
I want to clarify that I don't know what the numbers where but the model ignored the huge blip and just followed the recent trend. This is very common for the type of time series models economists use (Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average)
The pandemic broke a LOT of people. They had too much time on their hands & spent too much of that time diving down rabbit holes dug by other idiots also stuck at home recording themselves making up whatever nonsense they wanted to. It’s dark AF.
The fact that consumer sentiment went down from early 2024 to mid to late 2024 should tell people it was heavily media-affected. Wages continued to beat inflation throughout the year but it was also campaign season where it made sense for conservatives to attack Biden or Harris' economy more.
on no. you are doing this again. like I told you on twitter during the campaign, housing has nearly doubled since 2020. even in the red states. its real, its hard on families and its not a phenomenon just imagined into existence on social media
& we in u.k got BREXIT thanks to more billionaire interference Zuckerberg Facebook & Mercer & Bannon & we as a country are poorer&sicker for it all we voted for economic sanctions on ourselves because of racists.
52% 48% & nobody still a new PM will reverse our misery we've had 5 yrs of it!
I think it's social media and legacy media. The punditry and news reporters atoned for being Toadies during the trump years by holding the new president to account.
All those commenting it’s social media, no it’s social media gripped by disinformation and the MAGA billionaire echo chamber. Delusions agreed upon through the isms of ignorance and fear.
This too: "#Republicans exhibit a political bias in sentiment that is 2.5x stronger than #Democrats, or as the authors write, 'Republicans cheer louder and boo harder.'"
Um, Will ... I'm willing to entertain a role for social media in the Big Disjunction between economic reality and consumer sentiment, but ... that graph clearly points to COVID as what broke people's brains
The break isn't when COVID hits. The relationship is still within ordinary variance until Biden is elected, at which point there is a sudden, jarring divergence on this graph.
What are you looking at that makes you think that? The break in trend is after Biden is elected and supply shock inflation starts setting in. If you mean that the dip doesn't go as low as the severe COVID recession did, that's because there was a massive safety net put in place almost immediately.
That is what is called in radicalization studies a 'cognitive opening', caused indeed by (perceived) grievances/trauma/injustices. But it was the disinformation system that hijacked those grievances and ran with them. That is the main driver, social media the tool or means.
Exactly. Right wing propaganda machines works to amp up their grievances and point the blame at 3 letter acronyms they associate with a long list of enemies.
Any elected Democrat who doesn't understand that and is doing everything they can to counteract the propaganda needs to step down.
depression, anxiety have been rising for many different reasons.
The core issues for those and trauma is emotional regulation- if you can’t manage your emotions it impacts your ability to manage all content. You are ripe for attack from disinformation.
True. I am not alleging anything different.Just that most of the disinformation is designed to exacerbate those fears and (perceived) feelings of injustice/grief. It catalyzes them and creates an information environment that becomes dissociated from reality. Which is what the first graph shows, imho
Social media didn't just come into existence in 2020.
You're pingponging around here trying to find something external to the DEMs to blame. Desprate not to learn a lesson about coalition building.
Democrats assembled a diverse coalition to get them supermajorities and the white house in 08. Spent the subsequent years telling that coalition their material conditions are meaningless and popular policies cannot be pursued out of fear of offending the mythical moderate republican
I think it's all the main different media subtypes having their own reasons for concentrating on negative economic news, reinforcing one another and creating a perfect storm of negativity. Social media is a major factor, but not all of that story.
Everyone has always wanted to "keep up with the Joneses". But the Joneses used to live across the street.
The problem is that people now walk around with a device that constantly shows them the lifestyles of the luckiest (or lyingest) Joneses on the planet.
Sentiment turned with the Afghanistan withdrawal turning so chaotic. Not enough people knew a fair amount of that was nearly unavoidable given moves Trump had made.
Arguable, in terms of impact on marginal voters. But we ought to remember that the overwhelming majority of Trump voters in 2024 voted for him for the third time — not counting primaries. Social media may have reinforced his personality cult, but without it marginal voters wouldn’t have mattered.
the chart from the article that made you Incredibly Fussy has all the answers in it but you have to actually read it and see what it says about the entire american economic project instead of asking if it says biden good or biden bad
it says a quarter of the working class can’t live off their wages
“line go down! sure there is a permanent 25% underclass that the rest of the economy rests on top of, but line go down means those working class people who *are* struggling shouldn’t have voted the incumbents out”
It also ignores Americans are in a fickle mood, aren't being honest about their finances, take the expectation of living within their means as an insult and are sometimes just idiots.
you realize this means that *you* were simply reverse propagandized by the maga guys in the lifted f150s saying they're poor into believing the actual people who actually struggle can't possibly be poor, they must also be driving lifted f150s
Except that chart shows that stat was above 25% going all the way back to 1995 except for a momentary dip in 2019 and then a more sustained dip throughout the Biden administration. The wild divergence in sentiment vs. indicator happens when things are improving.
see my other reply where i outline what the chart is showing. it's not about the trend going in any direction, or about the difference between the two lines. it is what the top line figure represents, and how it is baked into the functioning of the economy for us to immiserate 25% of the workforce
I get that you are trying to shoehorn some kind of class consciousness awakening into this story, but class-consciousness presumably wouldn’t set Elon Musk loose to turn the U.S. economy into an expendable first stage booster for his one-way trip off-planet. Only unfettered corporatism does that.
it's not a class consciousness thing, it's a pretty clear outline that 25% of the working class cannot afford to live on what they make from working. the working class cannot fix this problem on their own, because both political parties appear determined not to fix the problem.
the "divergence" is irrelevant. the entire bottom line is irrelevant to the message that 25% of the working class is chronically paid too little money to live off of
That doesn’t address the question at hand, though, that question being why did public sentiment correlate with these metrics for decades and then suddenly diverge around 2021. People have been underemployed for decades, but until recently they would have called what we have now a good economy.
that's not the question the article is even trying to address. but it does sort of have an answer - if 25% of the working class is constantly immiserated, that ~20% of the voting population has a pretty strong reason to continually vote against the incumbent party until their needs are met
General anti-incumbent sentiment is a compelling explanation for why Trump won in 2024, but its linkage to underemployment simply isn’t born out by two charts. We don’t see these divergences in sentiment and metrics before 2021 when underemployment was at even worse levels.
You should probably read this, it's much more rigorous and professional than the Politico article and seems to pretty thoroughly debunk your claims about Biden's miracle economy
The answer imo is that Trump and his lying ass broke the media environment. When Trump lost, he and the right wing were motivated to lie about the economic conditions in order to hurt Biden and Dems. Outlets like CNN dutily followed along and bought into the same framing.
it’s a confluence of effects that can be many things at the same time, and what doesn’t make sense is thinking we can isolate it to any one thing. it can be both.
Is it possible that Americans suspended judgment during the pandemic because they assumed the economic impact was temporary and their dissatisfaction later was them "discovering" inflation that had already happened? Flat prices are bad if you were expecting them to go back down
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Also interesting that you said anti-Israel and not anti-genocide.
People sat home and got conspiracy brain rot from social media.
People lost their minds because they haven't dealt with inflation since the 70s.
And that shite got spread and amplified on FB and Twitter.
Everyone was home with nothing else to do.
It's not like Trump ran against the stock market rich guys.
He ran against the immigrant hordes and DEI.
The Biden WH had already declared victory, govt was in the process of allowing relief to expire.
Inflation began to rise in fall 2021.
Millions were getting sick, losing direct federal relief, and paying more for necessities.
But also, Biden’s physical frailty and poor communication/inability to really use the bully pulpit were absolutely factors.
And I'm for using better measures, but this is a separate issue than the nature vs nurture debate.
https://www.cbpp.org/research/economy/tracking-the-recovery-from-the-pandemic-recession
That was ignored by the Republicans because they were told all the numbers were "fake" and they believed it.
The stock market has jack shit to do with the financial wellbeing of the type of person who pays rent and barely scrapes by. It just means bougies get more cars.
That isn't hardship, that is propaganda.
the economy that is markedly better than 2019 when they were happy with the economy?
real wages are up and unemployment down but enhanced UI during 2020 complicated it
and iirc the only ones that did better in 2021, 2022, *or* 2023 than 2020 was that same group and iirc 70-80%, 80-90%
A massive trauma from a pandemic
Don’t discount what trauma (unmanaged) does to the brains ability to think rationally.
We had issues before.. but this snapped us.
But the actual answer is that a lot of people who were not very online until the pandemic suddenly became very engrossed in social media without building defenses against trolls and grifters and liars.
And they cooked their brains.
I remember tweeting about how my friends had their rent doubled.
The moratorium on rent expired, and landlords raised rent so they would qualify for more loans to buy more properties.
Meanwhile, Trump & the gop will take credit for projects funded by bills they opposed & say “best Econ ever” when they’re in power, regardless of the truth.
But that means the survey isn't measuring consumer sentiment and doesn't mean much.
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-paradox-between-the-macroeconomy-and-household-sentiment/
52% 48% & nobody still a new PM will reverse our misery we've had 5 yrs of it!
Oh yeah. Because if you did, you couldnt maintain the same level of smug satisfaction youre exhibiting now
Good grief
It was a mass trauma event. And instead of the country coming together the maga party sought to rip us apart.
Social media doesn’t work as well on well functioning individuals- because they can manage it.
Any elected Democrat who doesn't understand that and is doing everything they can to counteract the propaganda needs to step down.
depression, anxiety have been rising for many different reasons.
The core issues for those and trauma is emotional regulation- if you can’t manage your emotions it impacts your ability to manage all content. You are ripe for attack from disinformation.
You're pingponging around here trying to find something external to the DEMs to blame. Desprate not to learn a lesson about coalition building.
If people are more unsatisfied with the economy, it's not tik tok posts saying "Biden made the price of eggs is too high".
It's just people seeing influencers living like royalty, raising expectations.
The problem is that people now walk around with a device that constantly shows them the lifestyles of the luckiest (or lyingest) Joneses on the planet.
it says a quarter of the working class can’t live off their wages
2) it says it has never been better in history
they can't pay their bills with a voucher saying they're the special few who have been left out of the thriving economy everyone else experiences
You should probably read this, it's much more rigorous and professional than the Politico article and seems to pretty thoroughly debunk your claims about Biden's miracle economy
Propaganda that says the economy is good doesn't do anything because no one can buy a house.
Idk what the Democrats should've done, but it wasn't what they did.