[msandford]

I find this kind of article hilarious. "Numbers go up! You're not allowed to feel poor or think that there's a problem! Our number is bigger so you must be rich!"

I saw this 10-20 years ago when economists were telling people that inflation is low despite their feelings about inflation. "Our math is correct and you ignorant folks should be grateful for how this economy is managed."

Just because you can produce equations like physicists doesn't mean it's the same field. Ground truth in economics is just as much people as it is anything else.

[bryanlarsen]

In the 70's a middle class family had 1 car, a 1200 square foot house, ate out once a month, had less than a dozen sets of clothes per person (most of which were work clothes).

They felt well off, because they were doing fabulously well compared to the 30's which were still lived memory.

And because they felt secure. They did not feel in any danger of losing the essentials of housing, food, clothing and health care.

Now we have a lot more, but we've lost that feeling of security vis a vis housing & health care.

[spacemadness]

It’s always housing. We’re basically at economic war with each other. Home owners vs. non-home owners. Home owners get anxious when their house value doesn’t continue to rise past inflation. So they vote against policies that would help non home owners get into the market without drowning out of self interest.

[drivingmenuts]

Great line from Newsroom: we waged wars on poverty, not poor people …

Kind of sums things up. Likely, we’ll never see that again. Not in my lifetime, anyway.

[dragonwriter]

> They felt well off, because they were doing fabulously well compared to the 30's which were still lived memory.

Also because they were doing well, compared to past experience, relative to those higher on the income distribution.

That is, inequality narrowed throughout the post-war era until around 1980, when it turned around and shot up.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SIPOVGINIUSA

While the long stagnant periods in wages (Noah marks the one from the mid 1970s to mid 1990s, but ignores the one from 2001 through about 2012, perhaps because he realizes that marking most of the last 50 years, accurately, as periods of wage stagnation, rather than falsely claiming that that ended in the 1990s, would undermine the rosy picture he is painting) are a problem, the distributional dynamics are probably the thing most closely associated with the perception of a hollowed out middle class.

[alihm]

I think you nailed it, but in addition to that I also think social media boosts the lives of few wealthy people and as a result others feel they don't have enough.

[xtiansimon]

Don’t forget your job was probably giving you heath care and a pension. And if you had a job, you could be there for 10s of years, if not your whole working life.

[bryanlarsen]

I said "housing and health care" in my original post, so I agree with you on that part.

In the 70's, only a large minority of Americans had a pension. There were lots of very poor old people in the US, especially before 1972 when social security got indexed to inflation.

[wat10000]

That goes both ways, though. Just because you feel a certain way doesn't mean that's how it is. A lot of people's perceptions of economic performance are more connected to their opinion of the President than to any actual facts.

How people feel matters, of course, but that doesn't mean that the numbers are wrong if they don't match. People's feelings about inflation are not ground truth about inflation, just ground truth about feelings.

[CoastalCoder]

I'm not an economist, but it It sounds like you're maybe conflating (mathematical models of economics) with (economics statistics).

It's one thing for their models to suck at fitting historical data or making bad predictions.

But I think your real beef is that their empirical statistics are touted as characterizing the middle class' lived experience, but don't?

[ceejayoz]

Do you consider it impossible for propaganda to impact public perception?

[spacemadness]

How anyone can look at housing costs and say everything is fine look the other way is insane to me. How delusional and/or out of touch do you have to be? And if you enter the market it’s nothing but massive stress and chasing promotions to simply pay some exorbitant mortgage.

[owebmaster]

> I find this kind of article hilarious. "Numbers go up! You're not allowed to feel poor or think that there's a problem! Our number is bigger so you must be rich!"

When US americans got filthy rich, can the US americans that did not made it rich with the help of globalization complain that the world is taking advantage of them? Go fight your oligarchs, start a revolution.

[wormlord]

Yeah this completely ignores the fact that many people would rather work on making things with their hands that they can physically see, rather than pushing numbers around on a spreadsheet.

This article ignores alienation, cost of living, social atomization, enshittification, the police state, and many other factors that contribute to everyone feeling like shit. The liberal intelligentsia need to learn that voters don't care about their numbers and charts, education has been hollowed out and the populace is going to respond to material promises and aggression. Not "hmm well did you consult my graph??"

[watwut]

The people you talk about are consistently voting for more police state, for more social atomization and for higher cost of living. They see empathy, help to others and cooperation as negatives. Those are just facts.

As for working with hands rather then pushing numbers in spreadsheet, most people do not want to work as workers in factories - that is based on surveys. That includes tradesmen.

[wormlord]

Damn maybe if the democrats didn't kill any progressive or grassroots momentum, or ceded ground to conservatives on issues like the border (Kamala endorsing building the wall) they wouldn't have hollowed out their base of support and lost to fascists.

[mrguyorama]

>many people would rather work on making things with their hands that they can physically see, rather than pushing numbers around on a spreadsheet.

So why aren't they making bank in the trades? Why aren't they learning a craft? Why instead are they yelling that we should start digging coal again, an economically nonsensical thing to do? Nobody wants to buy coal, not even the people who happily buy oil and natural gas.

Welders make good money. Plumbers are essential workers who literally keep shit flowing. Parts of my family work in construction, forestry, trucking, general contracting, all classic machismo jobs that pay well for effort and experience. All essential industries. All in constant need of more workers.

The main problem seems to be that even the good "low education" jobs still require you to move to where people are. There are no jobs in dying towns because there is no economic activity in rural towns when the main income source is welfare.

[wormlord]

From what I have seen, personally, the younger guys that would follow in their dad's footsteps and enter trades do not because of a few reasons:

1. Their dads tell them to go to college because trades are hard on your body. 2. For whatever reason, their kids end up really lazy. Doing drugs and trying to live life the easy way, ending up in their late 20s still living at home with their parents and not having any skills. 3. They join the trades but their coworkers are extremely toxic. Either always starting fights, being racist, shitting on apprentices. One guy told me a story of how a disgruntled coworker got kicked off a job site only to come back with his AR. Needless to say that guy has been trying to pivot into civil engineering instead of concrete work.

It's a bit of a rabbit hole to go into, but I think that the reason is that the idea of "every generation having a better life than the last" is easier said than done. Parents in the trades who want their kid to be white collar workers end up sorely disappointed when they don't give their kid any of the advantages that white collar worker parents did-- early childhood education, summer camps, SAT prep, etc. Or when their geographical location doesn't have decent white collar jobs. The kid ends up not prepared for either type of work.

If a lot of these jobs were better unionized (I know many already are), there would be no need to view them as "stepping stones" to a better life. You could have several generations all working the same trade, making good livings.

[matheusmoreira]

Maybe they're just looking at the wrong numbers.

https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/