Nearly three in five Americans wrongly believe the US is in an economic recession, and the majority blame the Biden administration, according to a Harris poll conducted exclusively for the Guardian. The survey found persistent pessimism about the economy as election day draws closer.
The poll highlighted many misconceptions people have about the economy, including:
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55% believe the economy is shrinking, and 56% think the US is experiencing a recession, though the broadest measure of the economy, gross domestic product (GDP), has been growing.
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49% believe the S&P 500 stock market index is down for the year, though the index went up about 24% in 2023 and is up more than 12% this year.
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49% believe that unemployment is at a 50-year high, though the unemployment rate has been under 4%, a near 50-year low.
Any working class person living in the elements of this economy will tell you it is not good; cherry-picked indicators in these reports be damned. When the people tell you they are hurting in numbers this large, leaders must listen, not ignore.
But how can they tell, if all the indicators are good? How can they even figure out a solution if all the indicators don’t point to a problem?
They could find better indicators.
What indicators do you think would be accurate? I can probably find them for almost any metric
Corporations showing record profits tells me that it’s harder for everyday people. Record profits means cut hours, stagnated wages, outsourced labor, more expensive goods, “shrinkflation”, cheaper components, dialed back safety standards, crunch, making salaried employees perma-lance so they don’t have to worry about benefits anymore, ghost job postings that are never intended on being filled because being understaffed is the new normal, etc. And then corporations use that record profit to bribe the government into keeping it just as shitty as it is or making it worse for us.
The system is working as intended to siphon as much money and labor as it can from workers and consumers so the metrics focus on that. Then they have the nerve to tell us that we’re being crazy for thinking that things are getting difficult.
As soon as something becomes a metric, it ceases to be a functional metric.
It’s a confidence game, so they can’t blab about the score.
They can start by developing indicators that actually work, instead of indicators that make them look good.