Okay, can someone explain THIS giant load of seeming bullshit to me?
In 2023, the U.S. economy vastly outperformed expectations. A widely predicted recession never happened. Many economists (though not me) argued that getting inflation down would require years of high unemployment; instead, we’ve experienced immaculate disinflation, rapidly falling inflation at no visible cost.
By every marker that matters to the POPULACE (costs of food, shelter, energy for shelter, cars, gas for cars, and medical insurance (required)) inflation has gone WAY THE HELL UP, shows no signs of abating, and jobs (in the tech sector at least) are taking a dive. Wages are not keeping pace with costs of living, and people I knew who were on the low end of “rich” are now starting to be as scared as the upper middle class.
Everyone keeps saying the economy is fricking awesome, but rent is astronomical, groceries are bonkers, gas prices are still at “I DID THIS” sticker stupidity levels, few people can get a home, used cars are going for 5 to 10 times what they’re worth, and everyone I know around the country is running a much tighter ship than they were during COVID LOCKDOWN.
All of these “new jobs” we keep hearing about are just a small percentage of positions vacated by layoffs. Companies let tons of people go in one fell swoop and hire new people for 1/10th to 1/5th of the positions at lower wages with worse “total compensation” packages.
The recruiters have COMPLETELY stopped hitting up myself and my employed friends. Not a single fricking “you look like a great blahblahblah” for almost a month when it was previously multiple hits a day.
As far as I can tell, we’re IN a recession, we’re just calling it a recovery for some reason.
The handwaving that typically occurs when people try to throw a layer of obfuscation into economic conversations is both disingenuous and counterproductive to actual fruitful discussion about the current state of things.
You might as well just say “money is wealth” or “what’s good for the goose”.
The reality is we’ve been chasing a short run fallacy for a really, really long time now and there’s more and more in the way of misrepresented statistics in order to keep everyone from examining all of the indirect consequences.
Okay, can someone explain THIS giant load of seeming bullshit to me?
By every marker that matters to the POPULACE (costs of food, shelter, energy for shelter, cars, gas for cars, and medical insurance (required)) inflation has gone WAY THE HELL UP, shows no signs of abating, and jobs (in the tech sector at least) are taking a dive. Wages are not keeping pace with costs of living, and people I knew who were on the low end of “rich” are now starting to be as scared as the upper middle class.
Everyone keeps saying the economy is fricking awesome, but rent is astronomical, groceries are bonkers, gas prices are still at “I DID THIS” sticker stupidity levels, few people can get a home, used cars are going for 5 to 10 times what they’re worth, and everyone I know around the country is running a much tighter ship than they were during COVID LOCKDOWN.
All of these “new jobs” we keep hearing about are just a small percentage of positions vacated by layoffs. Companies let tons of people go in one fell swoop and hire new people for 1/10th to 1/5th of the positions at lower wages with worse “total compensation” packages.
The recruiters have COMPLETELY stopped hitting up myself and my employed friends. Not a single fricking “you look like a great blahblahblah” for almost a month when it was previously multiple hits a day.
As far as I can tell, we’re IN a recession, we’re just calling it a recovery for some reason.
They are talking macroeconomics, you’re talking household economics.
Household economics are both micro AND macro.
The handwaving that typically occurs when people try to throw a layer of obfuscation into economic conversations is both disingenuous and counterproductive to actual fruitful discussion about the current state of things.
You might as well just say “money is wealth” or “what’s good for the goose”.
The reality is we’ve been chasing a short run fallacy for a really, really long time now and there’s more and more in the way of misrepresented statistics in order to keep everyone from examining all of the indirect consequences.
They literally change the calculation for inflation multiple times to remove these types of indicators that matter to real people