[andirk]

CNBC told me the economy is doing great. My neighbor is borrowing money from me. My friend is borrowing money from me. GoFundMe is becoming more for basic needs. Everything is becoming more expensive often for no reason. According to every metric BUT stonks, the economy is holding on by a thread.

[uniqueuid]

It is immensely frustrating to me that to this day, after a solid century of advances in sciences and mathematical literacy, we are still implicitly stuck in the mental model of averages.

Reality is fucking far away from averages and we know it. "The economy is doing great/terrible" is an almost worthless indicator unless the person you're talking about actually has business relations into every corner.

Yes, there are interdependencies, but they do not justify that we pretend numbers are so expensive we can only print two of them (mean, sd) at a time. Let's finally stop drinking information through a 2 mile straw and instead show high resolution 2d data at least.

[edit] this is of course not a criticism of parent or OP, it's a systemic problem that we all are guilty of.

[libraryofbabel]

I agree with all of this. Many is time I've had to tell developers I work with: "don't just look at the mean/median, look at a graph of the full distribution!... then slice your distribution a lot of different ways by all the tags/facets you have and look again at the slices." Often you find that a shift in the mean or median was driven by one particular class of data points that skewed the whole thing. (Looking at you, NVDA.) This is usually a little lecture I give in the context of performance engineering, where it's api response times or whatever, but it applies everywhere.

At the same time - and I think you agree with this and it's probably implicit in your comment - we have to beware of anecdata as well. "Two of my friends asked me for money" means very little, except that your friend group is having a rough time. The meso-scale, your "high resolution 2d data", is where to look if you want a textured picture of what's really going on while at the same time avoiding observer bias. Unfortunately, that kind of data is not always easy to get, or to interpret.

[concinds]

> Everything is becoming more expensive often for no reason.

- For food, this was caused by supply shocks. First COVID, then Ukraine, now tariffs and the trade war. And on top of that, excessive price-setting power in some highly concentrated sectors of the food industry.

- For housing, this was caused by a supply shortage, i.e. bad housing policy. A housing shortage gives property owners price-setting power, which allows them to keep raising the price. However, while we've made it very easy for owners to profit, we've made it harder for developers, feeding the shortage.

- For healthcare, we decided to let many middle-men profit. A decent portion of spending could be cut without harming pharmaceutical innovation or new drug development.

These problems all have causes, and the cause is bad policy that benefits a minority while harming the country. And "tax the rich and give to the poor" does not fix these; the government is gonna need to get involved in directly fixing these broken markets, not just giving money to the poor so they immediately hand it over to the existing rent-seekers.

[themgt]

The open not-secret has been, post-GFC and especially post-COVID, k-shaped recoveries and increasingly k-shaped economy. So it is both the best of times and the worst of times. Neither party has been remotely serious about trying to structurally fix this, which would be immensely painful to those with the most wealth and power and political influence.

We're also now fairly openly in a 21st century "Great Game" if not multipolar Thucydides Trap including ongoing proxy war, so deflationary impulses from the Eurasia to the west in energy, goods and labor have been partially choked off in various ways, leaving the working class with the double whammy of energy/goods/services inflation along with the preexisting asset price inflation.

[newsclues]

I wonder who will be blamed for the reckless spending that resulted in this inflation.

[ponector]

While your friends and neighbors are able to borrow more money the economy is doing great. When music stops then there is a problem.

[netsharc]

No reason? Was it Covid, or the Ukraine war? The pandemic ground the gears, there was government help but I wonder what after-effects the flood of liquidity had, did too many people end up in the Ponzi schemes (Gamespot, trading cards, Bitcoin et al)?

The war caused energy prices to go crazy, Europe needed gas and was willing to pay a premium, and the laws of supply and demand meant the price went up for everyone.

I used to live in a country where the government subsidized the price of oil (including petrol). When they needed to cut that subsidy, people knew the price of oil would go up, and that affected the price of everything else, my reasoning was because all the trucks transporting goods needed petrol, but it's probably because everything needs energy to accomplish..

[watwut]

I dont think Covid or Russian invasion into Ukraine can explain price movements last two years. Covid happened years ago and Russian invasion started years ago.

[FirmwareBurner]

>No reason? Was it Covid, or the Ukraine war?

Covid virus didn't make you poor, it was the government's response to it of shutting down large parts of the economy(and not others) plus printing endless money and dumping it on the market(mostly on rich people/businesses running on debt) distorting the market and creating hyper-inflation that wiped out your savings and wages.

Same with the war in Europe, they weren't forced to give up on cheap Russian gas that was the base of their economy, they voluntarily chose to do that to save Ukraine, with the obvious effect their prices would go up and standard of living would go down.

People need to start holding their elected governments accountable for their actions of putting too many thumbs, arms and legs on the economic scales that cause wealth transfer form the poor to the rich under the pretext of every crisis("never waste a good crisis"), and for the "let the peasants eat cake" response they get in return.

[izacus]

Just before elections the democrat/left US reporters were persuading me that US is doing fine on all metrics and that people's vibes are wrong.

It was utterly bizzare seeing the podcasters and media just gaslight everyone that disagreed with "US is doing great" narrative.

[pavlov]

All the metrics (except AI-related stock prices) are worse today than a year ago.

Does the media acknowledge that? The leading cable channel and broadcast TV stations are Republican-controlled, so now they pretend “US is doing great.”

[izacus]

I'm talking about couple of years ago, in the leadup to elections.

[pavlov]

The election was less than 12 months ago. I know, feels like a lifetime already.

[myvoiceismypass]

> I'm talking about couple of years ago, in the leadup to elections.

You mean November 2024? It has not even been a full single year, never mind "a couple"

[beardyw]

Yeah, that wrong makes this wrong right.

[paulryanrogers]

My recollection is the left leaning media was saying that inflation was finally slowing back down. And implicitly that we may have to accept that prices won't ever return to pre-COVID levels.

Oh and bird flu can do a number on egg prices.

[fabian2k]

Not going to defend the messaging here, they really didn't do a good job. But the US was doing better than most western countries and inflation was getting lower.

Problem is, the inflation that already happened was still there. And that part is what people notice immediately.

But right now, a part of what is happening is that Trump has been blowing up parts of the economy with his tarrifs and erratic actions. The effect of that is still happening and likely will get worse.

[throwaway48476]

Over the last 30 years the most inflated spending category is education and healthcare, which are arguably the least import dependent.

[ThunderSizzle]

And housing... which also isn't import dependent, necessarily.

[acdha]

Both depend heavily on immigrants, however, both for staffing and in the case of education for the students paying full-price tuition and effectively subsidizing everyone else.

[throwaway48476]

Immigration has only made it more expensive, as shown by the increase in both price and immigration.

[acdha]

That’s far from clear. For example, healthcare costs have risen sharply but you’d need to demonstrate that hiring foreign workers contributed to that rather than simply being a reaction to the unsustainable costs.

Similarly, in education if it was just a few prestige schools it’d be easy to believe that Harvard and Yale were hiking their base rates to exploit international students while finding credits for some of the others, but the trend is across the board even at less prestigious state schools and I’d want to see data that it’s not better explained by other factors like schools maximizing revenue from student aid.

[izacus]

Yes, that's exactly the gaslighting I'm talking about :)

[acdha]

> Just before elections the democrat/left US reporters were persuading me that US is doing fine on all metrics and that people's vibes are wrong.

This sounds like something you were told by right-wing social media. It certainly isn’t what you’d have thought from the extensive discussion of that in the mainstream media or during the campaign when the candidates were talking about real problems affecting millions of people.

The closest you’d come to being factual were the pieces correctly noting that the U.S. economy was doing better than many other countries at recovering from the pandemic but that’s another way of saying “less bad”.

[myvoiceismypass]

We were trending in a good direction then. We are trending in a very very bad direction now.