Lefties Get a Harsh Economic Lesson in Confirmation Bias
Photo by Deans Charbal, CC BY-SA 4.0
The debate over whether the economy is good or bad has been one of the defining public fights of this era. After the economy completely bottomed out in 2020 and America experienced Great Depression-levels of unemployment, it bounced back stronger than any of its Western peers. But does that mean it’s good? What does a “good” economy even mean in a world defined by the worst inequality in a century?
Simply pointing to GDP or other traditional macro measures like it does not tell the whole story. If there is anything we have learned in our new Gilded Age, it’s that American prosperity is reserved for the ultra-elite. I wrote last year how there are real economic weaknesses making people’s lives more difficult, namely that prices are still very elevated from 2019. You are not going crazy, basically everything is more expensive than it was before 2020, and the people saying that economic struggle is a figment of your imagination are some of the most out of touch folks in America.
But that doesn’t mean we need to do full Fox News-style trutherism on the economic statistics, which brings me to a dogshit piece in Politico by former U.S. Comptroller of the Currency, Eugene Ludwig, that has animated a lot of my fellow lefties who are sharing it wide and far. The article is titled “voters were right about the economy. The data was wrong,” and if it had just stopped at the first period, it would have had a point. Where it runs off the rails is everything after that sentence when Ludwig just redefines what words mean.
If you filter the statistic to include as unemployed people who can’t find anything but part-time work or who make a poverty wage (roughly $25,000), the percentage is actually 23.7 percent. In other words, nearly one of every four workers is functionally unemployed in America today — hardly something to celebrate.
Pretty shocking finding, right? A quarter of America is functionally unemployed??? That’s staggering, but only if you don’t know what the word unemployed means. Plus, according the to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the rate of people working part time is near all-time lows. The precariousness and unfairness of making $25,000 per year aside, if you are working you are not unemployed. The 23.7 percent figure is wholly made up. Actual fake news. If we can’t agree on what words mean, then we are well and truly fucked. Not to mention, as The American Prospect’s Ryan Cooper noted, simply just taking all people who make $25,000 per year and putting them in the same bucket is beyond dishonest framing that no self-respecting economist would ever do.
and the poverty thing is dishonest because the definition of poverty depends on household size. a single person making $25k has a *very* different life than a single mother with 2 kids. bad in 2 ways: you falsely include many 1-2 person households AND falsely exclude some large households