I’m going to start this off with two of the dumbest Twitter Pundits
My opinion is that people want more now than they did before COVID so even though things might be improving they know it’s still shit and they’re right.
Also trump people will say economy is bad and then turn around and say it’s great 2 months into trumps term.
And I think people would say the economy is a lot better if there was actually a safety net in this country and healthcare without say wages changing that much. It’s one thing to be poor but if the worst happens you’re not totally fucked compared to USA #1
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My opinion is that it’s human nature (or maybe just American nature) to think things are getting worse if they’re not constantly improving. We don’t do status quo very well.
I grew up in a down economy from childhood to graduating from college, punctuated by one boom and crash in the mid-80s. I will never take for granted an economy where everyone who wants a job has one.
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We are lonelier and more isolated than ever. But we sublimate those feelings into material conditions because that’s what we’ve been trained to do. You need material excess to paper over the vast and aching ‘spiritual’ (for want of a better word) deficits we are running. Slight upticks don’t cut it when the other side is so down.
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Nate is just absolutely killing it in this discourse /s
https://x.com/NateSilver538/status/1735074175063302179?s=20
That’s not what this means! That’s not what any of this means!
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https://twitter.com/meiselasb/status/1735095829365739992
I’m not saying everything’s perfect now. But I do think the next time there’s a real downturn people will be like, “Remember back when unemployment was at an all time low and we were still pissed about the economy? Yeah I’d take that in a heartbeat now.”
The mortgage payment on the average house would have been $1686 in Jan 2020 (400k, 3%) and is now (540k, 7.5%) $3776 in Jan 2024
A 12 pack of coke was $3.99 in Jan 2020 and is now $7.50
I guess it depends on what basket of goods you are comparing real wages to?
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And people are once again going to be spouting off shit like “why are millenials so jaded and selfish and not participating” while ignorning that at 40 years old, millenials finally got the job they needed to afford the extemely modest first home they tried for all of the 2010s, but now need more than a 100% raise to afford it
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401ks are up though. That’s the measure of the economy. People who haven’t ever been able to afford significant contributions to 401k are just stupid and huffing propaganda.
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So home prices went up and that’s supposed to be a knock on the economy? If home prices tanked, would that be a cause of optimism? Is it only good if home prices stay flat?
I get the interest rate thing sucks. But it is nice to get 4% in a savings account now. I don’t know if we’re ever returning to the artificially-boosted economy combined with artificially-suppressed interest rates that we had from the financial crisis through covid stimulus. So the status quo going forward is likely never going to live up to that.
If your metric is to look at prices going up in a hot economy, then look at unemployment and stonks in a down economy, you’re always going to have something negative to tout.
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I get that it’s tough in some areas. But any millennials in my family and others I know in KC that want a house have one. My 27-year-old cousin is a massage therapist and her husband sells big rigs. They aren’t remotely rich, but they still had a baby and bought a house in the same year.
This is basically my overall point. If either of them lost their job (and I think my cousin did), they’d be able to find another fairly quickly. They wouldn’t be in crisis. Maybe they’re purchasing power sucks, but it’s still much better than being long-term unemployed.
When I graduated college in 1992, all we heard were horror stories of people sending off 100 resumes and getting no reply. The only people I knew who got legit jobs right out of college were accountants and electrical engineers. Everyone else I knew waited tables or something similar. I seriously wondered how I would ever get a real job.
Average Joe buys in to the 1/3 game on Friday night for his normal $300, by midnight he’s ran his stack up to $2500, it’s the most amount of money he’s ever made in < 1 day period in his entire life, all he’s thinking about right now is quitting his job and moving to Vegas. It’s now 5:30 in the morning and his stack has dwindled down to $500, do you think he’s going to be a) happy to be up $200? Or b) pretty irritated that’s he’s down $2k from his peak, asking the dealer to wash the cards and doing pretty much anything he can to change the situation?
Human psychology says the answer is almost always going to be b. If someone is better off now than they were in 2019, but worse off than they were in 2021, they are almost always going to remember the second part and not the first.
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It must feel really weird to be Jerome Powell.
- You’re just wrapping up the most incredible feat of macroeconomic management the world has ever seen.
- Everyone thinks Biden is the one responsible for it.
- And they’re all really mad for some reason.
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If they are rising faster than real wages, then yes? Especially for people who don’t yet own a home.
I agree that people should consider the benefit of low unemployment when judging the economy.
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While considering the various ways to measure it, and the several mitigating factors
This goes more to the question of what is the economy, and which people should care about it
Real wages may be up, but that’s before you take rising prices into account.
Just cleaned nearby grocery story out of $4 twelve packs. "Sale’’ price, tho
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https://x.com/seantrende/status/1735098330307289352?s=46&t=9xanL2tZoKj22erGoTuL4A
People are hurting out there.
It’s not about who benefits. Home prices going up means people have money to spend.
Rising home prices might make life harder for people just starting out, but it’s not a negative economic indicator, which is the context I was discussing.