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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   25227 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 30, 2023

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My dismay at the statistical illiteracy of the average person only continues to grow.

America is one of the few countries in the world that is doing well after COVID, sure prices are sticky and have coalesced at a higher level than they were pre-pandemic, but wages have grown too. The labor market is red hot.

Nothing blackpills me more than realizing it's not possible to simply educate people into seeing anything but what they're primed to do by others, and claiming the US is going downhill has become fashionable at the least.

but wages have grown too. The labor market is red hot

I'm honestly curious, where have wages grown to match the price increases over the past year? What labor markets are red hot? I don't see this in my industry, and I'm in an industry that generally has been at the forefront of all such changes for decades. That's not to say it always will be and has to be, but I'm surprised if it's not.

I think there’s the real world issue that people always see the economy in personal terms, as whether they themselves are better or worse off. And to the degree that an individual has higher costs without getting raises to match (keep in mind that raises aren’t evenly distributed and those in high-demand jobs are getting more raises than the rest of the people) they’re going to react to that. And they aren’t wrong. How the economy works for you is heavily dependent on where you live, what you do, and where you sit on the dominance hierarchy. So while they’re not right about the general United States economic health stats, they’re also not wrong about how that economy is working for them.

A thousand times this. It seems like every person I talk to who thinks the economy is doing well is because they're doing well, and every person who thinks it sucks is looking at moths fly out of their wallet, and hearing the economy makes them feel like they are losing their minds.

You're ironically demonstrating your own illiteracy. There's a word for what you're describing: innumeracy.

My apologies. Mea culpa.

Dude, if I ever get a second language on par with @self_made_human 's handling of English, I will be incredibly pleased with myself.

I'm chuffed at the high praise!

I will point out, that English is far and foremost my best language, while I'm fluent in my mother tongue and conversational in another, it's certainly not to this extent. My brain just turned out hyperoptimized/fixated on English over all else, and I speak and think in it so exclusively since I was old enough to remember my internal monologue that the usual connotations of first or second language seems suspect haha

I would rather @self_made_human not call you a pain-in-the-ass pedant, but you are being a pain-in-the-ass pedant for no evident purpose other than to insult him. You keep doing this.

@naraburns and I have both repeatedly told you to chill out, and that your accumulation of crappy comments (in which no one comment is really bad) paint a picture of someone uninterested in civil discourse and unable to refrain from low-effort shitting on people.

Banned for two weeks. Don't bother DMing me with griping and resentment like last time - you've been warned, multiple times, and frankly I'm pretty sure I'm just delaying the inevitable by not permabanning you this time.

For what it's worth he sincerely apologized to me via DM, and while I was modestly annoyed by his initial comment, I'd rather not see him banned for it. Then again, it's not like this one seems to be the only reason, given your statement about his pattern of behavior, but I personally won't hold a grudge against anyone who can acknowledge their error.

If you're going to be a pain-in-the-ass pedant, then please do me the courtesy of being right about perceived "errors":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_literacy

One of my personal betes noires is people confusing Inflation, a rate of change, with price levels, a numeric value. "The inflation that happened is still around." No, the price changes are still around, the Inflation is the rate of change in prices over time. Yes, after a period of inflation, prices will remain permanently elevated relative to their prior levels, unless we hit a period of sustained deflation (which will have all kinds of other, likely worse for most people, negative effects). It really grinds my gears.

Well when inflation is always positive and never negative, I don't blame anyone for confusing speed and location. When people complain about inflation, they're really complaining about price, so until we get deflation their complaints are never addressed.

As someone who wants to be paid in silver quarters, because that lays bare the debasement of our currency, this is missing the point. You need to address the ratchet that only allows prices to move in one direction.

complaints are never addressed.

And a good thing too that they never will be, deflation is bad.

One obvious problem is that no one can see a derivative function on the price at the grocery store. Everyone can easily remember that things were 20% cheaper a couple years ago, but seeing whether they're currently continuing to change is inherently more difficult. It would be nice if there was a way to sharpen people's thinking about this, but convincing someone that the rate of inflation is low isn't going to change their desire to punish whoever was in charge of causing the price change in the first place.

This doesn't really address the original arguments in the post. If this is the explanation, then why are ratings of 'am I personally doing well economically' high? The puzzling thing is the discrepancy, this explanation does not address.

I don't think it's puzzling, I think people think they're being lied to when American Pravda insists that the economy is doing great. They look at pricing of the goods that they have the most exposure to (food, energy, housing), they look at debt, they look at Covid policies, and they conclude that it's actually not great. If you ask them how they're doing, they say that they're basically fine at the moment, but they're nervous about the signals they see. The response amounts to, "I'm fine at the moment, but the whole thing seems pretty shaky".

"I'm fine at the moment, but the whole thing seems pretty shaky".

This is a ridiculous extrapolation to make beyond data which cannot be stretched that far. And the question's word was not 'fine' it was 'good'!

They look at pricing of the goods that they have the most exposure

Well good thing we don't need to operate on these general anecdotes and vibes, we can in fact look at statistics.

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