Wonder if they're the same professionals whose numbers keep getting quietly revised in a worse direction a few months after the initial rosy numbers are released.
This sentiment taps in a generic meme that has infected society of late.
Starting from the fact that many professionals made many mistakes over time, the meme trips you into concluding that if there were no people in that category of "professionals" , then these mistakes wouldn't be made and somehow society would just work "correctly" if it wasn't for those pesky "professionals".
This meme builds on a time-honored meme that comes in vary forms such as "a member of that other ethnic group committed this crime; if we only got rid of all members of that ethnic group then those crimes wouldn't happen"
It is as simple as a mismatch in situational awareness.
An expert considering the macro side of an economy with 330 million people in it cannot meaningfully tell any one individual that things are good/ok if that individual's situation is growing noticeably worse with the same earnings.
Or has the economy come to mean that most of stock market is going up... And as long as that continues everything is great and it really should be only goal of any policy...
and while tech was a growth industry nobody cared. For most blue collar workers “the economy is red hot” during the tech booms also sounded like bullshit.
The problem is a matter of point of view. What constitutes the economy "doing well" is subjective. If you are looking at a measure like GDP it includes a number of things such as wages and profits. If wages fall but businesses increase profits by more the economy is "doing well" on that metric.
There has been a recent example of that in the UK, where a number of politicians and professionals (central bankers, economists) have said an important objective is to reduce wage inflation. If you are someone who is paid wages (especially if you real terms wages have been reduced by price inflation) you are quite likely not think this is a desirable objective.
>There has been a recent example of that in the UK, where a number of politicians and professionals (central bankers, economists) have said an important objective is to reduce wage inflation.
The objective isn't to reduce wage inflation, it's to reduce general inflation. Restraining wages is one way of doing that.
Yes, but my point is that, even assuming agreement on the objective of reducing inflation, there will still be disagreement on whether whether reducing wage inflation is the right way to do it depending on what your other objectives are.
Kind of have to agree here. Useless professionals/administrators are a double dip on inflation - they collect large paychecks, contribute nothing but makework for others.
As an academic totally unrelated to economics this whole situation is just astounding. In my field we would say we failed and have the wrong metrics. In economics they say that people are delusional and the economy is actually good. Clearly economists are measuring the wrong things when they declare the economy is good.
Add to that one of the least affordable housing markets ever. Obscenely expensive childcare, far more expensive than it's ever been to the point where it's simply crushing for many.
The result is an economy where the basics: having a roof, kids, and food are a stretch for many. I don't know a single person who reports the economy is good. I talk to kids around the university all the time and it's normal now for them to have lost hope that they'll be able to afford a house and kids.
All of this is made worse by Biden et al. selling this as a victory and so offering zero help.
I'm in the job market. 2-3x local family income, median house price would put us at 60% of take home pay going to purely principal and interest payments.
It doesn't take social anxiety to see how unaffordable housing is.
Housing prices that have gone up dramatically, interest rates that have gone up dramatically, many others that matter to people and apparently not to economists.
The chart ends in 2021 and shows a nontrivial increase that year. Real wages are up since the pandemic, with significantly higher growth at the 25th percentile of household income. You can see the data for 2022 here: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/realer.nr0.htm.
The cost to purchase a house using a mortgage is indeed way up, but surely it is worse to focus on this specific metric rather than the general basket of goods.
Personal income after tax from 2019 to 2021 went up from $27,700 to $28,800 or about 4%. I won't call that trivial but I would hardly call that inline with the increase in costs we've seen. I don't see more direct data after that for salary but after tax household income was down in 2022:
I think the cost of housing is probably the most important thing to look at since, for most people, it is the highest monthly bill. I think all of the various cost increases that make existing harder are important to look at though.
They're not asking 2k people all in one place, but 2k people in different places. Which is plenty enough to get a rough national average within a few percentage points.
Does anyone know anyone who's really doing "well" right now? The highly paid tech workers in my circle are playing dodgeball with weekly layoffs, and on the other side, my friends doing blue-collar trade work say they are feeling the jobs dry up.
This is all happening while everything of course gets more expensive, especially staples like housing and food.
I’m doing “well” by most standards, and I won’t insult others by denying that. But it’s definitely more of a slog and it’s impacted our spending choices.
I simply can’t justify restaurant spending right now, for example. No way I’m buying a new car with 7% interest rates.
You’re not wrong to say we have to be careful about considering sources, but I think you’re being down-voted because this smacks of the “both sides are the same framing” which some people use to sound objective while ignoring the significant truth gradient between the two parties. The charts in that article are consistent with mainstream economic consensus and all cite authoritative sources so it doesn’t seem like this concern is relevant here.
"Doing well" is just a subjective feeling compared to the past and compared to others around you.
Everyone here and everyone I know is doing unimaginably well compared to the year 1350.
Yemen is in the news. Their GDP per capita is $618 USD a year. Everyone I know is doing unimaginably well compared to that.
By and large we are a society with the mentality of spoiled children after decades of huge economic growth and no inflation. We got very use to the price of goods and services staying the same while getting better year after year as if it would always be that way.
I just seen the other day how a movie ticket use to cost $5 in 1972. That is $37 in 2023 adjusted for inflation.
Our lives are so great it is just hard to be impressed by anything.
Homeowners. Second homeowners. Property Investors.
All the people in my tech friend circle are landlords post-pandemic. They've all extended their credit to max during free money covid bonanza. All of their proprieties have now appreciated between 30-50% . Even the supposed 15% "crash" would still put them in a nice green at 2% interest rate.
Even 5 years ago, friends that are physicians have been balking at their wages. Even as specialists, they’re very well compensated, but living in any decent sized city has left them feeling ripped off.
I mean, they’ll be fine. They’ll have lives above 95% of people, but they’re disappointed because their 300k salary (and some with a physician spouse,
So 600k) isn’t buying them what they thought they would get even in places like Dallas, Memphis, and Charlotte.
Absurd and not looking to garner empathy for these folks, but just to say no one’s feeling accomplished or stress free monetarily. Seems extremely fucked up, but maybe I don’t have the higher level context. Maybe highly paid physicians, tech workers, etc always felt poor in the 70s-80s-90s.
I used to think that inequality explained everything, but perhaps I've grown up a bit and now I think it just explains most things. I attended a lecture by Robert Sapolsky some years ago and he was quite big on studying stress responses in primates. One thing he said that stuck with me was that in highly unequal primate societies, they measured higher cortisol levels amongst all members; even those at the top. Certainly it seems that the pathologies of American society have only intensified along with wealth inequality, but obviously teasing out cause and effect is fiendishly difficult at such scale.
There’s a massive variation across sectors and a lot of it seems to be driven by the larger companies keeping profits high: if you buy a lot of processed food and beef, the supermarket prices are sky high. Costco seems to be largely insulated from that, presumably due to long-term contracts, and our farmers market pricing for things like eggs hasn’t changed much since the local producers weren’t buying huge amounts of feed or selling through the profit-taking middlemen.
Yes, but I think it’s more than that - like during the egg shortage their prices didn’t budge, which I bet is because their contracts are both large and long-term. I suspect the large companies whose profit margins have skyrocketed are willing to let them have less inflated prices since they’re (probably correctly) assuming that most buyers are just going to go to the local supermarket.
Costco also has market power to force better prices from its suppliers as well as decades of relationships with them and industry writ large. I’ve heard they’re employing someone to build lettuce growing capacity near certain logistics points. It was someones pet project to grow lettuce locally that costco picked up. If the free market is let to function, they should eventually be able to eat the lunch of the competition.
Oh, definitely. I just find it fascinating how much of a difference it makes - that upfront membership charge scares a lot of people away even though you can make it back with a single purchase on some individual items. The Econ 101 model wouldn’t have me thinking that big a gap would persist but it’s not exactly news that humans aren’t incredibly rational cost-minimizers.
Same here. I eat mostly salad and vegetables and fruit, some canned or dry beans. I haven't seen much of any change in prices. (Possibly it's just too small to notice, like from $1.09 to $1.29 or some such.)
The things I buy that have noticeably gone up in price are the occasional frozen item (breakfast sandwiches going from 4 dollars to nearly 7 for a four-pack) and protein bars. So the price inflation mostly does seem to be dependent on the industrial processing parts.
It might be illustrative if polls were required to post their survey and methods along their results or otherwise disregarded as biased and useless. They won’t do it because “proprietary.”
No, it's not grocery bills, it's that post pandemic:
1. Used cars go for 50% more than they did before.
2. New cars are selling at or above MSRP.
3. Housing prices went up 30% or more where people want to buy.
4. Interest rates for loans to buy those overpriced houses are now 2-4 times what they were when those prices went up.
5. Rents have gone up and availability has gone down.
6. And yes, on top of that prices for everything have gone up, including groceries.
And how have salaries kept up with this? That's right, they haven't. The median income in 2019 was 27.7K and in 2021 went up to... wait for it... 28.8k. No inflation adjustment in there.
This isn't rocket science, why is it that financial and economic reporters seem so out of touch with reality? I have read and listened to multiple interviews that have the same theme of "the percent gdp growth is good, people just think things are bad because they're having an emotional reaction". People think things are bad because the average person can't afford basic things.
That leaves $570 for car insurance, health insurance, food, etc.
The math doesn't add up for most people and it certainly doesn't add up to being able to afford a more expensive things like a home, a new car, a family. People are frustrated because they look at the future and see forever renting, leasing, working low paying jobs, and never being able to live that lives that most before them did.
In the US the congress has largely been stopped for a long time from doing any real checking on these things. Minimum wage could be increased. There’s investigations going into rental price fixing through industry wide software usage. Local, city, regional, up to national governments could but blockades up against corporate ownership of residential properties. But democracy has to work first.
As for cars, there is new manufacturing being added to the industry. Further, prices are slower to fall than to rise. In the real estate market it’s the slow trickle of homes selling due to factors forcing them to sell which will push prices down.
And grocery prices are possibly a combination of corporate power concentration (see above about democracy needing to work) and an invasion destroying one of the world’s most important breadbaskets (Ukraine).
The democracy / government needing to work to fix (or even just improve) things seems like a constraint at the moment, atleast in the USA. I hope things change for the better but it's hard to see a path towards that.
There are elections every year in the US. Even just going to local council meetings and voting out local electives has profound effects. Then there’s the more visible elections for House Representatives, Senators, and POTUS. But people have to do their civic duty first. Also writing your local representatives is a thing-which is also a civic duty. The more they hear the more likely it goes into their career calculations.
Generally these people are reachable via email so I don't want to hear “the work week wont allow it.” If you have time to post to HN or reddit or wherever about what’s pissing you off you can do some civic duty to effect change.
It’s also been a long time since the Trustbusting times of Theodore Roosevelt and the Great Depression reforms have largely been repealed. Congress absolutely could act if the political will was reflected at the ballot box.
Elsewhere it’s been noted these scores don’t line up with how much is actually being purchased by people. There’s something else going on than just economics.
Otherwise, I deeply suffered from the Great Recession. Couldn’t find meaningful work for many years. This despite being well educated and qualified. I think we can agree these days are not those days: RE was cheaper. Food was cheaper. There just wasn’t enough demand for labor to employ people and thus fund demand. Trillions in RE “value” had to be marked to market and lost value. Trillions in debt were no longer ever going to be realized. Huge companies were facing bankruptcy and filed bankruptcy. At least one automaker had a sitting POTUS as its CEO for a while.
Nowadays, people do seem to be employed but prices have risen. We also have an ever growing war in one of the most important breadbaskets of the world. We knew that was going to raise global food prices.
Living in a small town with one grocery store, we've seen grocery prices up at least 25% from the Before Times.
On a fixed income, this is a very big deal.
Some level of food demand is not elastic: you have to eat.
National macroeconomic policy rarely affects domestic grocery prices. It's hard to listen to political leaders who last shopped for groceries in the 20th century.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 548 ms ] threadThe so-called "professionals" are simply useless, and guess what...people are figuring that out too.
Just like the fact that I can go to grocery store and get dozens variations of food is because of “professionals”.
Financial services help build up farmers sustainability and help new companies build supply chains.
Lots of nice things we can enjoy in first world countries would not happen if there would not be people making sure that money can move around.
Starting from the fact that many professionals made many mistakes over time, the meme trips you into concluding that if there were no people in that category of "professionals" , then these mistakes wouldn't be made and somehow society would just work "correctly" if it wasn't for those pesky "professionals".
This meme builds on a time-honored meme that comes in vary forms such as "a member of that other ethnic group committed this crime; if we only got rid of all members of that ethnic group then those crimes wouldn't happen"
It is as simple as a mismatch in situational awareness.
An expert considering the macro side of an economy with 330 million people in it cannot meaningfully tell any one individual that things are good/ok if that individual's situation is growing noticeably worse with the same earnings.
No memes are required.
But that doesn't explain how people can think they can just trash all expertise and think the good parts of the world will keep working just fine.
https://gitnux.org/food-bank-statistics/
Because that's pretty much what it means in practice.
Echo chamber.
There has been a recent example of that in the UK, where a number of politicians and professionals (central bankers, economists) have said an important objective is to reduce wage inflation. If you are someone who is paid wages (especially if you real terms wages have been reduced by price inflation) you are quite likely not think this is a desirable objective.
The objective isn't to reduce wage inflation, it's to reduce general inflation. Restraining wages is one way of doing that.
Add to that one of the least affordable housing markets ever. Obscenely expensive childcare, far more expensive than it's ever been to the point where it's simply crushing for many.
The result is an economy where the basics: having a roof, kids, and food are a stretch for many. I don't know a single person who reports the economy is good. I talk to kids around the university all the time and it's normal now for them to have lost hope that they'll be able to afford a house and kids.
All of this is made worse by Biden et al. selling this as a victory and so offering zero help.
The students you mention talking to generally aren't even in the job market. It's all coming second hand.
Which isn't to say people have no idea what's going on, but it can be fairly disconnected from reality.
It doesn't take social anxiety to see how unaffordable housing is.
Since it is not going that direction we can all say economy is doing well.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bc/Median_p...
Housing prices that have gone up dramatically, interest rates that have gone up dramatically, many others that matter to people and apparently not to economists.
The cost to purchase a house using a mortgage is indeed way up, but surely it is worse to focus on this specific metric rather than the general basket of goods.
https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2023/09/median-househ...
I think the cost of housing is probably the most important thing to look at since, for most people, it is the highest monthly bill. I think all of the various cost increases that make existing harder are important to look at though.
2k are more than enough if your sample is chosen correctly.
This is all happening while everything of course gets more expensive, especially staples like housing and food.
The only people I know who are doing well are in crypto.
I simply can’t justify restaurant spending right now, for example. No way I’m buying a new car with 7% interest rates.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/cea/written-materials/2023/12/19/...
The economy sucks because of Biden—he’s only benefiting from what Trump built!
The economy is wonderful because of Biden — if Trump gets in it will go back to huge inflation and crap!
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/%5EGSPC?p=%5EGSPC
People with money in no-public investments are probably doing even better.
Not just a US phenomenon either.
Everyone here and everyone I know is doing unimaginably well compared to the year 1350.
Yemen is in the news. Their GDP per capita is $618 USD a year. Everyone I know is doing unimaginably well compared to that.
By and large we are a society with the mentality of spoiled children after decades of huge economic growth and no inflation. We got very use to the price of goods and services staying the same while getting better year after year as if it would always be that way.
I just seen the other day how a movie ticket use to cost $5 in 1972. That is $37 in 2023 adjusted for inflation.
Our lives are so great it is just hard to be impressed by anything.
> Our lives are so great
You are a homeowner with no children requiring childcare ?
> I just seen the other day how a movie ticket use to cost $5 in 1972.
I googled this. Looks like it was $1.69 in 1971 https://www.natoonline.org/data/ticket-price/
All the people in my tech friend circle are landlords post-pandemic. They've all extended their credit to max during free money covid bonanza. All of their proprieties have now appreciated between 30-50% . Even the supposed 15% "crash" would still put them in a nice green at 2% interest rate.
I mean, they’ll be fine. They’ll have lives above 95% of people, but they’re disappointed because their 300k salary (and some with a physician spouse, So 600k) isn’t buying them what they thought they would get even in places like Dallas, Memphis, and Charlotte.
Absurd and not looking to garner empathy for these folks, but just to say no one’s feeling accomplished or stress free monetarily. Seems extremely fucked up, but maybe I don’t have the higher level context. Maybe highly paid physicians, tech workers, etc always felt poor in the 70s-80s-90s.
I bet they did something similar with eggs.
The things I buy that have noticeably gone up in price are the occasional frozen item (breakfast sandwiches going from 4 dollars to nearly 7 for a four-pack) and protein bars. So the price inflation mostly does seem to be dependent on the industrial processing parts.
1. Used cars go for 50% more than they did before.
2. New cars are selling at or above MSRP.
3. Housing prices went up 30% or more where people want to buy.
4. Interest rates for loans to buy those overpriced houses are now 2-4 times what they were when those prices went up.
5. Rents have gone up and availability has gone down.
6. And yes, on top of that prices for everything have gone up, including groceries.
And how have salaries kept up with this? That's right, they haven't. The median income in 2019 was 27.7K and in 2021 went up to... wait for it... 28.8k. No inflation adjustment in there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_...
This isn't rocket science, why is it that financial and economic reporters seem so out of touch with reality? I have read and listened to multiple interviews that have the same theme of "the percent gdp growth is good, people just think things are bad because they're having an emotional reaction". People think things are bad because the average person can't afford basic things.
29K a year is roughly $2,400 a month.
Average rent in the USA is $1,300 https://www.forbes.com/advisor/mortgages/average-rent-by-sta...
Average car payment (on a used car) is $530 https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/loans/auto-loans/average-...
That leaves $570 for car insurance, health insurance, food, etc.
The math doesn't add up for most people and it certainly doesn't add up to being able to afford a more expensive things like a home, a new car, a family. People are frustrated because they look at the future and see forever renting, leasing, working low paying jobs, and never being able to live that lives that most before them did.
As for cars, there is new manufacturing being added to the industry. Further, prices are slower to fall than to rise. In the real estate market it’s the slow trickle of homes selling due to factors forcing them to sell which will push prices down.
And grocery prices are possibly a combination of corporate power concentration (see above about democracy needing to work) and an invasion destroying one of the world’s most important breadbaskets (Ukraine).
Generally these people are reachable via email so I don't want to hear “the work week wont allow it.” If you have time to post to HN or reddit or wherever about what’s pissing you off you can do some civic duty to effect change.
Elsewhere it’s been noted these scores don’t line up with how much is actually being purchased by people. There’s something else going on than just economics.
Otherwise, I deeply suffered from the Great Recession. Couldn’t find meaningful work for many years. This despite being well educated and qualified. I think we can agree these days are not those days: RE was cheaper. Food was cheaper. There just wasn’t enough demand for labor to employ people and thus fund demand. Trillions in RE “value” had to be marked to market and lost value. Trillions in debt were no longer ever going to be realized. Huge companies were facing bankruptcy and filed bankruptcy. At least one automaker had a sitting POTUS as its CEO for a while.
Nowadays, people do seem to be employed but prices have risen. We also have an ever growing war in one of the most important breadbaskets of the world. We knew that was going to raise global food prices.
Living in a small town with one grocery store, we've seen grocery prices up at least 25% from the Before Times.
On a fixed income, this is a very big deal.
Some level of food demand is not elastic: you have to eat.
National macroeconomic policy rarely affects domestic grocery prices. It's hard to listen to political leaders who last shopped for groceries in the 20th century.