> The perception of the economy being bad is really pervasive as demonstrated by the last election, and perception matters, because selective numbers don’t tell the whole story.
Well saying "the economy is good" or "the economy is bad" out of context is simply moronic. Good for whom? Bad for whom? It's no secret our entire society is stacked to favor investors and owners rather than workers. The market certainly treats people extremely differently based on where they are in society. Much of the population never economically recovered from the 2008 crash at all—something that won't be reflected by GDP, stock performance, "jobs created", or how many people are collecting unemployment (which is, confusingly, a wildly different figure from counting people who want jobs but can't find one—as best I can tell, a metric not reported by the federal government at all, but appears to be about twice as large as the "unemployment" metric pimped: https://www.richmondfed.org/research/national_economy/non_em.... And this isn't even touching underemployment). The CPI is a little better, but only by a small amount.
And you'd have to be blind to not notice a minimum wage job is no longer sufficient to afford rent in most major metro areas.
- Headline unemployment _is_ "people who want jobs [enough to be looking for them] but can't find one". The metric you linked to is including people outside the labor force and then weighting in a fairly opaque way. Between labor force participation being at the same point as it was 2014-2016 and unemployment being lower, I don't think it's fair to say unemployment stats are misleading. The point about underemployment is still definitely valid though.
- I'm with you that minimum wage should likely be higher, but federal minimum wage has never been intended to be "comfortable wage in a major metro". Major cities have their own minimum wages -- e.g., NYCs is $16/hr. Making $32k a year in NYC would of course not be comfortable, but is doable (eg you can rent a room in an apartment for $1k/mo, live off of oats and rice, etc). It's not intended to be a "head of household" wage, but "the least amount you can ever pay anyone"
Other than these nits I'm with you that stats don't cover the lived experience of all Americans and there's more too it than simply vibes. However I also do think that some of the vibecession is due to increasingly effective media manipulation to squeeze money from consumers. I (coincidentally just now) wrote a blog post explanding on this hypothesis here -
https://medium.com/@digital-cygnet/manipulated-into-malaise-...
i've certainly never been counted towards that unemployment metric any time I've been unemployed. Am I not part of the labor force? The metric only counts people who actively apply for unemployment relief. So either I'm not part of the labor force—doubtful, as I'm employed—or "unemployment" doesn't mean "wants a job and doesn't have one".
Simply: the way the federal government employs the word "unemployment" is, at best, disingenuous; I suspect it is intentional, though, to obscure the intent to leave some part of the population without employment to keep the labor market weak.
In the USA, unemployment is based on a periodic, 60k household survey. You may not have ever been contacted but that's just the nature of sampling. It's true that some countries report unemployment as those who are actually registered as unemployed, but that's not best practice (and a good reason to be careful comparing country unemployment rates)
I agree it's a bad outcome that someone who gets so fed up with the labor market that they stop looking for work no longer counts as unemployed, but that's why we have labor force participation (and why imho that should be reported in headlines along with unemployment, after adjusting for age and education)
> And you'd have to be blind to not notice a minimum wage job is no longer sufficient to afford rent in most major metro areas.
Either blind, or detached enough that you think that it's a good thing, as long as the value of your home also goes up and you have access to relatively cheap service labor.
I also wonder how much the USD's role as the reserve currency plays into this. If I build a home for 1 MM USD today which used to cost 150k USD in 2008 - this looks like economic growth, despite the home largely being the same between the two periods.
Certain categories of the CPI have experienced extreme inflation over the last 16 years, this gets reflected in the wages of the economically mobile and in turn raises the GDP - however we don't really price housing into the CPI in a sensible manner, and due to USD dominated trade - imports and products which compete with imports don't inflate.
The discrepancy between PPP and nominal (USD) GDP seem to be telling a story.
Remember that the U.S. Dollar is one of many reserve currencies in the world. Other popular ones include the Japanese Yen, the British Pound, and the Euro. The dollar is just the one that is most dominant and for generally good reasons including sophisticated capital markets, rule of law, and the military might to force resolution of international disputes.
I think the main issue I see with your note about the difference in home prices is that you could stretch that out to say 1915 and 1950, and you’d be hard pressed to explain that economic growth was fake or don’t occur. Even in your example, the economy didn’t grow 6x, but how has resource utilization changed or supply and demand globally? I think a further analysis will show many factors going into that home price, and some of those very much are just simple economic growth and/or supply and demand of materials.
As always it’s also the location. Look at home prices in, idk, Toledo, Ohio. How have those fared in your same time period?
The real question then is why there are no paying jobs in Toledo, Ohio?
After all, it's really cheap estate and lots of reserve labor...
Ah right, and here we come to the critical issue which is horizontal integration. Even shipping to Toledo is going to be more expensive, not to mention availability of variety of things.
Then you get to deal with the interesting "small town culture" vibe, and lack of educational options.
Right, but the specific plight of Toledo in this context was just to illustrate that the argument about home prices increasing is dependent on economic factors. I think the dollar and its usage is of less importance to that original point.
Well saying "the economy is good" or "the economy is bad" out of context is simply moronic. Good for whom? Bad for whom? It's no secret our entire society is stacked to favor investors and owners rather than workers. The market certainly treats people extremely differently based on where they are in society. Much of the population never economically recovered from the 2008 crash at all—something that won't be reflected by GDP, stock performance, "jobs created", or how many people are collecting unemployment (which is, confusingly, a wildly different figure from counting people who want jobs but can't find one—as best I can tell, a metric not reported by the federal government at all, but appears to be about twice as large as the "unemployment" metric pimped: https://www.richmondfed.org/research/national_economy/non_em.... And this isn't even touching underemployment). The CPI is a little better, but only by a small amount.
And you'd have to be blind to not notice a minimum wage job is no longer sufficient to afford rent in most major metro areas.