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Notes -
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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