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PaperclipPerfector  25d ago (text post)   29202 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 26, 2024

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Since I'm not American my only two options are to go with the official numbers or give some credence to other people's subjective reports. At the end of the day this is a purely intellectual exercise for me.

I think you're making a mistake by saying this is political. Haven't surveys been showing pretty handy majorities concerned about inflation?

What it amounts to is that we had some very shitty economic years, with year-over-year inflation hitting almost 9% in 2022. And an incomplete recovery. The economy isn't terrible now, it's merely mediocre, but people don't react only to the past year, particularly with inflation. And for unemployment, the trend is getting worse, which people also react to.

So the economy is not good now. Unemployment is getting worse; it's similar to the Trump years but trending the wrong direction. Inflation is higher than the Trump years, and price levels are enormously higher because of earlier high inflation. Real GDP growth seem OK, but real median wage growth (which is a lot closer to the individual) is lower than the Trump years. Sentiment is explainable by the numbers; you can slice and dice the numbers to make that look not true, but you have to know that's what you're doing.

https://www.reuters.com/graphics/USA-ECONOMY/SENTIMENT-POLITICS/gkvlgqjzxpb/

Consumer sentiment being politically motivated is, itself, at this point a well measured statistic. ((Sorry for the awful graph but I think you can figure it out))

Maybe I'm mentally Ill, but that graph looks perfectly readable to me.

Anyway you'll notice that even in these polarized times, and with a metric as nebulous as "sentiment" you still get something coherent. The election times flips notwithstanding, the for each party, and the independents, are moving in the same direction at the same time. You don't get Democrats saying everything is getting better over the years as Republicans are saying everything is getting worse, nor do you get each side maxing out their respective values.

Inflation is no different. Yes, fewer Democrats think it's a problem than Republicans, but that still leaves us with 52% Democrats thinking it's a "very big" problem. Maybe they got psy-opped by TikTok, maybe 3% is already a very big problem for a lot of people... Or maybe, just maybe, the 3% number is not representative of the increases hitting people each month.

Listen I'll be the first one in line to say the CPI is fake and gay, a government chimera imagining what the average American needs to buy every month while ignoring the actual experience of oneself or one's friends trying to buy things.

But this is an area where we have a very clear partisan valence to interpretations of economic data. And repeatedly I've had the experience on this very forum of people making loud proclamations of how bad inflation is, with prices listed, that are literally false. My interlocutor will claim eggs are $11/doz, that gas prices are higher, that chicken is $8/lb. I don’t know how else to interpret that experience.

You'll have to point me to where I denied this is biased along partisan lines. I'm saying that even taking the bias into account, you'll still get results implying a number quite a bit larger than 3%.

But what does "a number higher than 3%" mean exactly? What is the number you're talking about? Do you think the basket of goods is poorly constructed, or that the numbers for the basket are faked?

CPI is an artificial concept, but that's because there is no natural concept to stand in for it.

Wish I knew, my bet is on the (possibly deliberately) poor construction of the basket, but I have no way of telling. I don't know the precise number either.

Look, the whole conversation started with KnotGodel saying inflation is not a big issue, because it's only 3%. When people dispute that he goes on his "actually it's perfectly consistent with the official data you're disputing" spiel. Well, if it's perfectly consistent with the data, and the majority of Americans are saying that it is indeed a very big problem, then all that means that either the 3% number is wrong, or that number actually means inflation is a big problem.

You brought political bias into the question. Fair enough - it exists but is not big enough to dismiss the concern. KnotGodel's original argument is still wrong. Unless people psyopped themselves into believing the prices are higher than they are.

So, here is a link to a prior conversation on the forum on this topic. To summarize: Hlynka proudly proclaimed that he KNEW inflation was higher than claimed because...

It doesn't take rigorous analysis to notice out that the price of staples like gas, chicken, and lumber has been rising consistently for about 18 months now and are up 10 to 20% relative to what they were at the start of the year.

My receipts say that gas has gone from $3.50 / gal to $4.15, "cheap meat" IE Costco frozen pork and chicken has gone up from ~$5.00 per lb to $6.75 and the price of a hardwood 2"x4" has nearly doubled from $18.25 for 12 ft to $34.00.

And I audited his claims thus:

National Gas prices are $3.478 as of today, though I should note that my state has gas prices of about $3.70 by AAA numbers and I paid $3.29 at the grocery store this morning, so your mileage may vary.

Target Brand Boneless and Skinless Chicken Breast is $2.99 at my local Target; though I suppose price may vary somewhat by region so I checked and it is also $2.99 in Brooklyn. Here is frozen, which is a little pricier online at a little over $3 a pound, which surprises me as I normally figure frozen is cheaper per pound.

As for the "hardwood 2x4x12" I'm not quite sure what to price that at. What hardwood are we talking about exactly? I've never in my life bought a maple or cherry or oak 2x4 longer than 6ft, since I'd be using it for furniture or cabinets. Prime Fir 2x4x12, the typical item for framing and construction, is a whopping $7.07 at Lowes, less than half the price it was at its peak a couple years back. I will note that for rarer woods (I recently needed some Cedar for window sills), the problem isn't so much price as availability, I have to waste time calling around until I find someone who has something that maybe might work. And the quality at a lot of lumber yards has gone down, I'm rejecting more boards than I used to, and finding clear 1x6 is tougher than it used to be. But the price jumps have mostly come down to normal on commodity lumber that most people use for construction and home improvement.

And there was no counter argument, although he replied further down in the thread repeatedly pointing to stuff like rotisserie chickens getting smaller. ((I don't mean to pick on the departed, it's just a clear example of what I'm talking about))

And this is what frustrates me. People will offer examples of inflation, concretely, and then refuse to back up their claims with data. I realize I might have been unfair to you, personally, because I'm imputing a lot of that behavior to you even though you haven't personally demonstrated it. But a lot of these claims seem to follow the same pattern: someone says that inflation is really bad, and the statistics are fake, and then they'll make a claim like eggs are $11/doz and refuse to engage when I can literally link to eggs for less than half that.

There's a lot of problems with the structure of the CPI, but honestly a big part of what we need to talk about isn't inflation in the traditional sense, it's WeirdFlation. It's the feeling people get when a TV that used to cost $4,000 is $500, but a ranch house that used to cost $150k and sit on the market for weeks is priced at $450k and sells in a week with no inspection. When forklift operators are making more than court personnel or teachers. When the ratio of pounds of steak you could buy for the cost of a T shirt has changed radically. We attach status to consumption, so when the ordinal value of consumption changes it is confusing. Things that we perceived as our birthright are almost out of reach for the average worker, but things that were once out of reach are affordable for a few hours pay.

We're all going through our own version of Agatha Christie's statement that growing up, she never dreamed she would be rich enough to own a car, nor poor enough not to have servants.

Tell me, why am I supposed to relitigate a conversation Hlynka had?

As it turns out aquota and Nybbler provided an explanation that squares the circle. There were several years were inflation was pretty high, and conversations around it assume that wages will follow prices, so if the speed of the increase of prices drops to something manageable, the problem will solve itself. It turns out that this assumption is sometimes wrong, and people are now upset their wages never caught up, and prices never fell.

Or, you can keep telling me how the whole thing is somehow a partisan-bias-fueled psy-op, even though more than half of Democrats believe in it too.

The reason I brought up national surveys (which I could be strong about! It's just one of those factoids that got absorbed into my head somehow) is that it le's us get past the bias of this forum, or even right-wingers more broadly. I suppose it's entirely possible people are irrationally taking out their life's frustrations on the consumer price index, but I hope you'll understand why some might be taken aback, given the sheer magnitude of the phenomenon you're proposing.

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