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Notes -
Put aside all the arguments about statistics or how to calculate inflation or whatever.
When asked how they’re doing economically, the vast majority of people say they’re doing well.
Maybe you aren’t doing well.
One way that could happen is that everyone else is actually doing badly but they’re all lying about it and the official statistics are also made up.
Another way that could happen is that even though most people are doing well, not everybody is, and unfortunately maybe you or friends are among those who aren’t. Fortunately things are very cyclical and dynamic idiosyncratically so this is unlikely to last for long.
I certainly have a view about which one is more likely (my view doesn’t require a bunch of people to be lying) but it’s not likely something that can be resolved on this forum.
The original poster is absolutely right though. This double standard with which this place scoffs at most “lived experiences” arguments but seems so vulnerable to it when the argument is on the “other side,” so to speak, really speaks to a lack of what you might call intellectual empathy.
How well people perceive themselves is also not a direct answer to how they feel about the economy overall. I can be better off financially than I was and spend the exact same amount on groceries but feel like the economy is shit because I'm buying a carton of 4 eggs instead of a dozen. Is the economy how financially secure most people feel personally? Is it inflation? Is it the GDP? Whatever it actually is doesn't really matter if people don't use that as their own definition. Most people feel like the economy is bad if their rent goes up and eggs cost a hell of a lot more.
Also, I think it's quite an extraordinary claim to say that people scoff at "lived experiences". I don't recall that being the case here at all, in fact most people here tend to defer to them when there's no data and when the data is contradictory it's posted and nobody usually mentions or scoffs at the "lived experience." Unless you mean of people that aren't posting here which I think is entirely different but even then I'd say that number is really low. It's really only applies to "racism" where "lived experience" is used as a trump card. You'll notice that most of the people responding didn't say that his numbers were wrong but they disagreed with what they mean or that they're the wrong numbers to measure what they're trying to measure. This is not using a lived experience to trump someone's argument, it's fundamentally saying that they disagree with the foundation of the definition. They may be using anecdotes and not "rebutting" the data provided but that's not the same thing.
OP pretending like he is the master of knowing exactly what the economy means, especially to other people without even defining it, and then throwing shade over nearly anyone who disagrees is not only petty but exceedingly arrogant. He asked people to provide data but then apparently when half the posts do he cites them personally as being unacceptable because it wasn't acceptable data. Food cost apparently does not matter at all to him, and using that as a reason automatically means it's "lived experience" and most of those reasons he cited were culled down to a headline to make them look as bad as possible. This just not the way we should communicate here and reads as someone who has only empathy for people who agree with him.
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The way people feel about the economy is bullshit ne plus ultra par excellence je ne sais quois. It has always been bullshit. Quinnipiac has always been bullshit. Nobody here would care about this metric at all, except that, this time, it's phrased ready-made as a gotcha hypothetical. (Oh, you think it's bullshit now that it's inconvenient for you, but I bet you wouldn't have said that last year! - It was bullshit then too.)
Honest question---do you think your views about the state of the economy are falsifiable? What are some things you could see that would make you change your mind?
Here are some examples of things that if a few of them were happening at once would make me think the economy was bad:
BTW here's a list of things I think are not good in the economy, but these are all longer-to-medium term issues and I think my ability to forecast is not great. These things are themselves not directly bad but can cause bad things on the preceding list.
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