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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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If you are doing worse, then you seem to be in the minority. And see here

Perhaps your personal situation is not representative of the norm, and that the cited data, rather than being "statistical bullshit," more accurately describes the norm than does your anecdote.

  • -14

Your sources are a yougov poll which says that people are financially coping... slightly less well as they were at the the worst point of covid disruption, and a low effort piece of blogspam with no data.
The same writer also has a piece with the exact opposite sentiment, because in that one she was pushing "struggling women need another 16 billion in government funding" rather than "dumb republicans are blinded to how amazing the economy is doing"

It is ridiculously and deliberately obnoxious.

Your sources are a yougov poll which says that people are financially coping... slightly less well as they were at the the worst point of covid disruption,

OP was claiming that his personal finances are far worse than three years ago,. The poll indeed indicates that that is a minority view, as I said.

And, isn’t "slightly worse" exactly how you would expect people would feel if inflation were precisely what the govt says it is?

and a low effort piece of blogspam with no data.

There is a link to a press release by the pollster in the blog.

I take it you are earning more than you were three years ago?

I think perhaps you are missing the point.

  • -11

Why didn't you say "Yes, but I think perhaps you are missing the point."? Is it because you are not earning more than you were three years ago?

No, it is because the point is that one person's income is not valid evidence, be it him, me, you, or someone else. Like I said, you are missing the point. As it happens, I quit the full time job I had three years ago because it was boring, and I am now working freelance, with fewer hours but at a higher hourly rate. Do you see how it is difficult to draw inferences about the norm from my personal experience?

Perhaps I am not trying to draw inferences about the norm. Perhaps the only thing that interests me about this topic is how perception of the economy is affected by personal circumstances.

Great! But the comment I was referring to was specifically about the accuracy of the official statistics

Great! But now I am missing your point, because as long as I follow the rules and stay on topic - which I am, just a different angle - I am not required to only post within the confines of the op's argument, am I?

No, but you were specifically referring to my comment, right? Which was about the merits (ie, lack of merit) the use of personal anecdotes to attack the validity of statistics about the norm, right? Because OP wasn't talking about how personal experience colors subjective perceptions of the economy; he was claiming that his personal experience demonstrate an objective truth: that the economy as a whole is doing poorly, and that the data showing otherwise is fake.

So, if you are "not trying to draw inferences about the norm," why are you responding to my comment, which was literally and only about trying to draw inferences about the norm? Which is what OP was doing, There is an entire main thread on perceptions of the economy.

More comments

Perhaps. That's one option.

Another is that economics is staffed by the same sort of experts who run our health care systems, legal systems and educational systems. They went to the same schools, drank the same koolaid, attend the same parties and conferences, belong to the same socioeconomic strata. Maybe Gell-Mann Amnesia is creeping up on you.

Anecdote is small data, but it's the only data I can be sure isn't horseshit.

it's the only data I can be sure isn't horseshit

But the problem is that no one else can know that.

Yeah, it sucks when your sense-making institutions don't have any more credibility than Reddit randos. An appeal to authority would go down really well about now.

except people in JTarrou situation, which I assume is a bigger crowd than the one composed of economic experts.

?? Surely you don’t believe that the government income data is based on an analysis of the income of economic experts.

considering how they calculate the cost of shelter, it wouldn't surprise me.

"Hey Gates! How much would you say would you increase the rent in your mansion if you were to rent it out"

"Dunno, a three fiddly?"

A lens I've found extremely useful for understanding this conflict is the one John Michael Greer proposes in this article from 2016 https://www.resilience.org/stories/2016-01-21/donald-trump-and-the-politics-of-resentment/

Here’s a relevant example. It so happens that you can determine a huge amount about the economic and social prospects of people in America today by asking one remarkably simple question: how do they get most of their income? Broadly speaking—there are exceptions, which I’ll get to in a moment—it’s from one of four sources: returns on investment, a monthly salary, an hourly wage, or a government welfare check. People who get most of their income from one of those four things have a great many interests in common, so much so that it’s meaningful to speak of the American people as divided into an investment class, a salary class, a wage class, and a welfare class.

...

The answer, of course, is that three of the four have remained roughly where they were. The investment class has actually had a bit of a rough time, as many of the investment vehicles that used to provide it with stable incomes—certificates of deposit, government bonds, and so on—have seen interest rates drop through the floor. Still, alternative investments and frantic government manipulations of stock market prices have allowed most people in the investment class to keep up their accustomed lifestyles.

The salary class, similarly, has maintained its familiar privileges and perks through a half century of convulsive change. Outside of a few coastal urban areas currently in the grip of speculative bubbles, people whose income comes mostly from salaries can generally afford to own their homes, buy new cars every few years, leave town for annual vacations, and so on. On the other end of the spectrum, the welfare class has continued to scrape by pretty much as before, dealing with the same bleak realities of grinding poverty, intrusive government bureacracy, and a galaxy of direct and indirect barriers to full participation in the national life, as their equivalents did back in 1966.

And the wage class? Over the last half century, the wage class has been destroyed.

In 1966 an American family with one breadwinner working full time at an hourly wage could count on having a home, a car, three square meals a day, and the other ordinary necessities of life, with some left over for the occasional luxury. In 2016, an American family with one breadwinner working full time at an hourly wage is as likely as not to end up living on the street, and a vast number of people who would happily work full time even under those conditions can find only part-time or temporary work when they can find any jobs at all. The catastrophic impoverishment and immiseration of the American wage class is one of the most massive political facts of our time—and it’s also one of the most unmentionable. Next to nobody is willing to talk about it, or even admit that it happened.

This isn't true though. In 1966, the average person earned less than what is today minimum wage. You could support a family on that income today too, but you'd have to accept a big hit to your quality of life.

They went to the same schools, drank the same koolaid, attend the same parties and conferences, belong to the same socioeconomic strata.

And as such, are overwhelmingly to blame for the current situation in the first place.
Why anyone would trust their numbers, especially those that say "actually, we didn't fuck up, and you're just imagining it", is a mystery.

Because even small deviations of the official inflation or growth rates would become obvious over the long run, considering they are exponential. They would also show up in things like the exchange rate and interest rates. People who doubt the official statistics never sanity check themselves and consider what the world would look like if their skepticism was correct.

Because even small deviations of the official inflation or growth rates would become obvious over the long run, considering they are exponential.

Yeah, that happened. It's incredibly obvious, many people say it's incredibly obvious, and the experts just insist that's wrong anyway. People that say that they have personally experienced much sharper increases in prices than the official figures capture in the Covid Helicopter Money era are told that they just have to check the official figures to see that they're wrong. If you say it should be obvious if they're cooking the books, other people say that it is obvious, and you reply that this isn't what the books say, we're at an impasse.

Over the long run. They can hide the ball until someone they don't like can take the blame for it.

This is not only a non-falsifiable claim to dispute claims of skepticism with no limiting factors (it applies to all disputes over government claims if you do/cann not calculate alternatives), but it rests on the foundation being actualized- that the deviations between the official inflation or growth rate and reality is what is being claimed to be increasingly obvious by appearance.

Functionally, you've just said 'if they were lying, people would be noticing and saying something' to people who are saying 'I've noticed things that make me think they're lying.'

Functionally, you've just said 'if they were lying, people would be noticing and saying something' to people who are saying 'I've noticed things that make me think they're lying.'

Seconded and endorsed.

Furthermore, this is happening in the context of multiple instances where in the expert class has been caught lying or otherwise trying to manipulate the information flow for "the public good" regarding a great many things. Off the top of my head; Hilary's Emails, "Russian Collusion", Jeoffrey Epstein, all the shit during the pandemic about the effectiveness vs non-effectiveness of masks, Fauci's blatantly partisan flip-flopping on public gatherings, the lab leak theory, the effectiveness/non-effectiveness of covid vaccines vs natural immunity, Hunter Biden's Laptop, Musk's revelation of Twitter's incestuous relationship with the CIA and DHS, Transwomen in sports... you get the picture.

As I argued in a response to Scott's essay on "bounded distrust", I believe he's got the issue exactly backwards. The moral onus is not on the plebs/normies class to trust the experts. The moral onus is on the experts to be trustworthy, and what we are looking at is mounting evidence that most of them aren't.

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