Are Americans' perceptions of the economy and crime broken?
niemanlab.org

・

39 points

・

bediger4000

・

a day ago

86 comments

ChuckMcM ・ 19 hours ago

Sigh. This is an important topic, probably not an HN topic but still it is important, and the topic isn't "perceptions of the economy and crime" is "ability to discern discourse from propaganda"

If you can make someone believe something, you can use that belief to get them to act against their own self interest. This isn't even a controversial thing for most people to understand. The canonical example that illustrates this was Jim Jones making his followers believe that their best choice was to kill themselves and their children by drinking cyanide laced Kool-aid.

This effect is weaponized through persuasive narratives being repeatedly presented. Once the belief is set, the narratives add in the action that is required next.

That the "media" is the primary tool of setting this narrative is, and always has been, the case. One of the reasons the very first amendment to the US constitution protected the right to a 'free press' was to explicitly allow the media to present narratives that were different than what the government wished to present. Further that they could do this without fear of reprisal.

The "media" has its own agendas and influences, we have a shortage of voices which are both independent and trusted. It is informative to watch the response by established media when such voices emerge.

  • llamaimperative ・ 19 hours ago

    IMO we have plenty of independent and trusted media, the issue is that they are independently, and increasingly monomaniacally, pursuing financial outcomes. Not an obviously terrible thing except when they each independently discovered that the best way to make $number go up is to produce outrage.

    For the most part, the less you understand a topic, the more easily you'll be outraged about it, and the more viewership ($$$) you'll drive to the people who give you outrage and withhold understanding.

    The most dangerous meme in existence is Friedman's extremist view of shareholder supremacy, which we saw drawn to its obvious conclusion the past few weeks in the Rotunda.

    • ChuckMcM ・ 17 hours ago

      I don't disagree, there is that Dutch saying that trust enters the town on foot and leaves on a horse. When the media's pursuit of financial incomes results in actions that actively destroy trust (the WaPo non-endorsement and unwillingness to present important points of view is the current poster child for this) then they simply become 'independent and untrusted' which is of not much use.

      For me, a more sobering example was that Twitter was gaining trust and it seems that in response Elon Musk bought and killed it. That felt a bit more like actively denying the emergence of new media. It was also an example completely counter to Friedman's view on shareholder value as, as an action, it destroyed shareholder value. Just as Bezo's actions have destroyed shareholder value in the Washington Post.

  • chneu ・ 17 hours ago

    Newt Gingrich literally said on TV that if he can make someone believe something then that's as real as fact.

    Him and a CNN anchor were talking about crime stats being down. Newt disagreed and said Americans feel like crime is up.

    • ChuckMcM ・ 16 hours ago

      There is an important difference between someone claiming on TV they can do something and seeing the effects of people believing something for which there is objective and easily obtained evidence that contradicts that belief.

  • grajaganDev ・ 19 hours ago

    Yes, if you can be made to believe absurdities, you can be made to commit atrocities.

    • dallasg3 ・ 19 hours ago

      I want people to believe in stop signs.

  • MathMonkeyMan ・ 18 hours ago

    > Jim Jones making his followers believe that their best choice was to kill themselves and their children by drinking cyanide laced Kool-aid

    Just a nit: my understanding is that anyone who didn't drink the poison was murdered.

    • generj ・ 17 hours ago

      Also it wasn’t Kool-Aid but Flavor Aid.

      Not that it matters for the overall point but it’s an example of a brand being the generic name for a product category backfiring.

djohnston ・ 19 hours ago

It seems wrong to mix crime and economic perceptions here.

With crime, there's a clearcut explanation of objective statistics going down and media focus giving the perception that things are more dangerous than they truly are. Fair enough. Although, I'm not sure the drug zombies are counted in these statistics and they've proliferated like rabbits in most major cities. Whether crime is down, the social fabric of these places has definitely been tarnished.

With the economy, the financialization of everything has completely disconnected macro-economic statistics (GDP) from the consumer experience. Inflation skyrocketed in 2022 - that's not debatable. The rate has come down, which just means things are getting more expensive but more slowly. Homes are out of reach for most young people - which did not used to be the case. GDP is up - who the hell cares?

  • bluescrn ・ 19 hours ago

    It's easy to make crime statistics go down. Much harder to make actual crime go down.

    • scarmig ・ 18 hours ago

      Homicides are generally considered pretty reliable for statistics, and those have gone down. Though it's possible for those to go down while lower level crimes go up.

    • djohnston ・ 19 hours ago

      Right, there are definitely perverse incentives afoot from a reporting standpoint on the part of police departments. Additionally, my allusion to the opiate issue is meant to convey that - while a horde of drug addicts at the train station may not actually commit a crime, they certainly make the place feel less safe, which is what people actually experience.

    • 0xcde4c3db ・ 18 hours ago

      It's easy for any one agency or police department to cook the books, but I don't think that scales to the kind of huge shift across multiple categories and data sources shown in the article.

    • Supermancho ・ 18 hours ago

      The BJS crime stats are suspect, at best. Instead of relying on actual reports, it's based on polling with a series of interviews. I'm sure that is really reliable in the poor and wealthy neighborhoods. - https://bjs.ojp.gov/data-collection/ncvs#1-0

  • PaulDavisThe1st ・ 18 hours ago

    > Inflation skyrocketed in 2022 - that's not debatable. The rate has come down, which just means things are getting more expensive but more slowly.

    Sadly, this is a perfect example (perhaps unintentional) of the sort of economic ignorance/elision that is at the heart of TFA.

    Things only cost more (or less) if the percentage of take-home income that they cost goes up (or down). So if wages go up by more than nominal inflation, things cost less even though their nominal price has increased. Conversely, if wages go up by less than inflation, things cost more, and by more than just amount suggested by inflation.

    But it gets worse ... measuring whether wages have gone up and by how much in a very diverse economy is very hard. Reducing the data to a single number ("Wages rose by X percent") inevitably misses a large amount of variance. Consequently, even if you were to write what you said here in a more accurate way, such as:

    >Inflation skyrocketed in 2022, but in the period 2019-2024 wages grew by more than the total amount of inflation, and so most products and services cost the same now as they did then

    ... it would still be missing out the actual experiences of many people for whom wages did not rise by that amount.

    • phil21 ・ 18 hours ago

      I think it's hard to get all the data captured in a broad economy as you state. So I simply go by what people are saying vs. what they are doing. Revealed preference, if may be slightly misusing the term.

      The 2008 crash? Absolutely was a horrible local economy where I lived. Shops closed up left and right due to lack of customers, restaurants were basically empty, crazy deals to be had on tools on craigslist, people moving in with family, etc. The actions of the people absolutely matched the broader economic readings and it was trivial to see simply driving around for a day in the commercial/retail areas of town.

      Now? I hear more complaints than I did in 2008 at the local bar, but it's jam packed and you are lucky to get a table on a Tuesday night at a mediocre middle class restaurant. Everyone seems to be talking about how expensive new(ish) cars are and how high inflation is over their $8 beer and $20 appetizers.

      I understand my local perception is not 100% accurate, but it's really hard to square the "local chatter" with "local actions" at the moment. If you didn't talk to folks and only looked around at economic activity you'd think things were going pretty okay, if not great. But then you talk to folks and you get an entirely different story.

      I think we're seeing a bifurcation of society, but not just at the "top 1%" like it was before. The top 20-30% seem to be doing just fine, but complaining on behalf of the bottom 50%. Everyone "feels" like they are doing poorly while engaging in economic activity I could only dream of growing up. It's really jarring to me, and I'm still trying to fully understand it. There is also the increasing asset prices (housing the primary but not only example) that may be hitting tipping point levels for people to finally notice.

      Edit: A good one to talk to someone about is grocery prices. They will swear they are paying double or more than they were pre-pandemic. Absolute belief in this to the point of actively angering someone if you challenge them on it.

      Then I check my actual history from those days and now? I see them more or less match the official USDA statistics of about 25%. Mine are actually around 18%. I can't square this either. It's like folks want to have inflation be far more exaggerated than it really is, and they truly believe this - regardless of political party in my case.

      • xnx ・ 11 hours ago

        Yes. Something I read recently was a long the lines "if people think this is a bad economy, what would a good economy even look like?"

      • AnimalMuppet ・ 16 hours ago

        About inflation: We had basically zero inflation for a decade. That's long enough for people to get used to it. When inflation hit, it felt like "that's really high", because we were comparing it to zero, and it was really high by comparison. But that meant that the emotional impact was higher than the real impact. (I'm not minimizing the real impact! But the emotional impact was out of proportion, and higher.)

  • joe_the_user ・ 18 hours ago

    Yeah, the thing about inflation in the 1970s was that a significant number of workers had cost of living adjustments so they could survive with inflation at a higher level than now. Moreover, many people had a cushion for survival.

    When you have no wage increases and no cushion, as common now, all it takes is little inflation to screw you considerably. That situation isn't considered in statistic about how the economy is doing.

    And the thing with crime is that when people's own situation isn't good and they're told X-that-they-can't-directly-measure is bad, they tend to believe it. And indeed, the visibility of the homeless can look like crime.

  • eli_gottlieb ・ 19 hours ago

    > Homes are out of reach for most young people - which did not used to be the case.

    That's been the case for most of my adult life, after the recovery from the Global Financial Crisis concentrated people into cities where it's against the law to build more housing.

    • thfuran ・ 18 hours ago

      >after the recovery from the Global Financial Crisis

      Depending what exactly you mean, that's less than ten years. It wasn't until 2016 that median home sale prices exceeded 2008's.

      • eli_gottlieb ・ 18 hours ago
        ・ 2 more

        I was thinking more 2010, for 15 years.

        • bradlys ・ 18 hours ago

          Prices in 2010 were certainly far more achievable than they are now. I was in college and had made a lot of career plans based on typical incomes an engineer could achieve and what a decent home cost in several cities at the time. It was feasible even on a single income for an engineer. Unless I hit senior staff+ at faang, a home is out of reach in several regions. It was never cheap but it was plausible.

          Homes in Santa Clara weren’t always 2.5m.

  • marssaxman ・ 18 hours ago

    It always jars me when people conflate public drug use, which is fundamentally an aesthetic issue and not a matter of public safety, with crime - as though people getting dysfunctionally high on opioids pose a danger to anyone but themselves. It suggests a very foreign moral system, which is hard for me to understand.

    • scarmig ・ 18 hours ago

      Well, legally, many of those things are crime, and so people call it crime.

      But public safety is more than worries about being violently attacked. If you have someone passed out on a narrow sidewalk, you then have to walk into the street to get past them: that's unsafe, and even worse for people with mobility issues. If someone relieves themself in a public space or throws away needles on the street, that's a matter of hygiene and disease.

      And although opioid users aren't going to be violent, there are other drugs. Am I allowed to be concerned for my own safety when someone is smoking meth on the bus?

      • marssaxman ・ 16 hours ago

        > Well, legally, many of those things are crime

        I suppose that not everyone has abandoned the old drug-warrior mindset yet, absurd and useless as that philosophy has proved to be.

        > Am I allowed to be concerned for my own safety when someone is smoking meth on the bus?

        That certainly is a different situation, and I would feel concerned about that too: but meth has been a problem for decades, while the phrase "drug zombies" has only come into use during the fentanyl era, when you now see people tipping over and passing out and otherwise shambling around unable to fully control their bodies. Those people are out of it, unable to do much of anything but breathe (usually). The fear is really unwarranted.

    • okdood64 ・ 18 hours ago

      Where would you want a young female (for their own safety) to walk through at 9pm at night, given the choice:

      A block of drug zombies, or a block doesn't have any of that?

      • marssaxman ・ 16 hours ago

        Calling suffering people "zombies" is kind of offensive; it seems pretty obvious that people who are too high to stand up or keep their eyes open pose less of a threat than people who are fully alert and in control of their faculties would.

    • djohnston ・ 17 hours ago

      I agree - the desire to not step in feces and other bodily fluids while walking in SF does seem like a foreign moral system when I'm there.

rqtwteye ・ 19 hours ago

American perceptions of a lot of things seem to be based on whether "their" party is in power or not. When democrats are in power, republicans feel inflation is bad, democrats don't see a problem. As soon as a republican gets in power, republicans don't worry about inflation anymore but democrats do. Same for many other things.

It's a really bad state to be in. Real data doesn't matter anymore. It's all about what they are being fed by their favorite super biased media (Fox News or MSNBC and CNN come to mind).

  • PaulDavisThe1st ・ 18 hours ago

    Thanks to Media Matters for America, I'm very aware of actual data on how Fox coverage of inflation changes depending on the party in power (e.g. a massive drop in coverage after a Republican wins an election).

    Do you have any links to actual data that suggests that MSNBC or CNN do the same thing?

karaterobot ・ 19 hours ago

> But there also seems to be something more fundamental happening. Before the covid pandemic, consumer sentiment was relatively predictable based on economic fundamentals. The hard data and the survey responses tended to move up and down in something like unison. But since 2020, they’ve become disconnected, with a wide and pessimistic gap opening up between them. It’s hard to look at that phenomenon and see the impact of a changed media environment.

I don't understand that last sentence. I suspect I'm reading it wrong, but am having trouble parsing it in a way that doesn't mean: this data cannot be explained by a changing media environment since 2020. It's very easy for me to look at the disconnect between survey responses and economic data and see that how people receive and process news is largely responsible for it. The disconnect between facts and opinions has been widely observed, and while the pandemic didn't start it, it seems to have been an accelerator for it.

  • planetpluta ・ 19 hours ago

    Anecdotally, I completely agree that consumption of media has shifted since the pandemic and could reasonable explain this gap

aliasxneo ・ 19 hours ago

> I think part of the challenge is that, when we talk about crime, what do you mean by crime?

As I was processing the article, I was subconsciously asking this in my head. My first thought on whether I believe crime was going up was yes, but for me, it related more to the increase in public overdoses in my town. Naturally, I would assume if I see more overdoses, then more illicit drugs must be getting sold, and therefore crime must be going up. But this raises a lot of questions:

Are the same overdoses increasingly spilling out into the public? Are the illicit drugs getting stronger and thus causing more overdoses?

Answering yes to either of these may mean the actual crime rate hasn't changed. Anyway, it was just a rabbit hole I went down in my head that I think speaks to what is being said here.

9283409232 ・ 18 hours ago

> Americans believed the economy was in the tank, despite loads of evidence showing the opposite.

The evidence they use is in the form of the financial markets. Blue collar workers don't care about the market. Nurses don't care about the market, construction workers don't care about the market. They care about can they afford food, can they afford a home, and can they afford healthcare. The answer is more and more becoming no.

jparishy ・ 19 hours ago

More and more I think these types of problems come down to (a) smaller attention spans, married with (b) dimensionality reduction, and (c) advertising optimization techniques.

Meaning that as the content we consume becomes shorter, the motivation for its existence and the message it's trying to communicate has to get compressed. You have to reduce the contextual load, and rely on a set of unspecified assumptions. When I talk to you, the economy is X. When I talk to the mayor, the economy is Y. When I talk to a CEO, the economy is Z.

This gets deeply corrupted by advertising, imo. Since content is mostly made to sell stuff, there is a really strong pressure for that to be the main CTA you get from what you're watching: buy the thing/experience/status.

So, messaging gets shorter and shorter, and the people seeing the ads are all getting hyper targeted feeds. The main message is to buy something, but that's not what the ad actually says. It says whatever is short and sweet and releases pleasant brain chemicals. So now we have some proxy "vibes" which is what people are actually feeling, but have lost the ability to communicate due to this compression.

Seems natural to me that we will become unable to see things in a larger context. I could spend an entire day talking through the economy and how it works, but in the news all you will see is a question like: "is the economy in good or bad shape?".

This isn't enough detail to answer the question. But we also won't dedicate enough combined attention to have the larger conversation, so everyone is just annoyed that no one is hearing the same thing even when we all use the same words.

There's a lot of parallels to how AI works and this whole misaligned-on-purpose-to-make-advertisers-money system, but I haven't gotten the words yet. Maybe ChatGPT can help.

planetpluta ・ 19 hours ago

In a sense, the macro trend is irrelevant and mainly used as a talking point by the media.

Individuals experience the world from an individual level — it is easy to go along with any trend that fits your desired narrative because until it is at odds with your individual experience, it doesn’t really matter.

(I’m being a bit reductive and haven’t fully fleshed out this thought, but think the sentiment is accurate)

  • analog31 ・ 18 hours ago

    In my view, macro trends are important if you're trying to formulate policy or debate about it.

adminu ・ 5 hours ago

@dang why is this flagged? Can we unflag it?

crackercrews ・ 18 hours ago

Do any of these sources adjust for the fact that people are not reporting crime in many places? When prosecutors don't enforce, police don't investigate, and people don't report crimes.

pylua ・ 19 hours ago

I feel like Americans perceptions of the economy are accurate. It comes across as very disingenuous to state that how people are feeling aren’t aligned with the facts.

Maybe the data doesn’t tell the whole story or is being carefully curated. We probably shouldn’t try to piece together micro trends with coarse macro level statistics, as there is no guarantee that the macro effect is happening at the micro level.

  • Retric ・ 19 hours ago

    Americans have noticed how little the overall economy correlates with their lives. That doesn’t mean they are making accurate statements about the economy, but rather that the economy isn’t something that matters to them.

    Many things are done that are hypothetically good for the economy, and bad for most Americans. That’s objectively true but runs into ideological issues and the pocketbooks of those who do benefit.

    On the flip side you have things that are bad for the economy and benefit millions of Americans like farm subsidies which are rarely attacked on economic grounds. It’s used more as a political talking point than an actual rational stance.

    • SirMaster ・ 19 hours ago

      I think it's just a terminology or definition problem then. I think when the average person talks about if the economy is doing good or bad they are mostly thinking about their own wallet and what they can buy etc and how much things cost compared to previously.

      If things keep getting more expensive and they don't feel like they can afford as much as before, they might think that the economy must be doing bad if all these companies need to raise their prices so much just to survive or make a profit.

      I think most people would associate things being cheap and plentiful as a good economy, and things being expensive and hard to get (out of stock, long lead times, etc) as a bad economy.

    • happytoexplain ・ 19 hours ago

      Yes, but this starts to get into semantics. If a person complains about the economy (as in the relative-to-the-past QoL of common citizens), and an economist says the economy is great, they're talking past each other by using the word economy differently (colloquial vs formal).

      • scarmig ・ 18 hours ago
        ・ 10 more

        In this situation, though, it's economists who are using an out-of-the-norm term and upset when people don't immediately abandon existing usages. Economy literally means "home management," after all.

        That confusion is born of ideology: there's an abstraction, which economists think should capture the usual meaning in a more rigorous way, and when it doesn't, it's upsetting. So it's the people who must be wrong.

        • PaulDavisThe1st ・ 18 hours ago

          The primary definition of the word "economy" in the Oxford is:

          > the wealth and resources of a country or region, especially in terms of the production and consumption of goods and services.

          so, yes, it does have other meanings too, but it does not "literally mean home management".

        • Retric ・ 18 hours ago

          The sense of "wealth and resources of a country" (short for political economy) is attested from 1650s That’s long before economists became a thing.

          Kings looked about the economy in terms of tax revenue, so it’s not just some arbitrary abstraction.

        • dragonwriter ・ 18 hours ago
          ・ 7 more

          > Economy literally means "home management,"

          No, it doesn't.

          "Etymologically derives from an older term that meant" is not the same as "literally means", though for some reason the confusion of etymology and meaning is common on HN.

          • scarmig ・ 18 hours ago
            ・ 6 more

            You're wrong, here. Words are defined by how people use them, and the way people actually use the term "economy" is much closer to the original etymological meaning than how economists use it.

            Economists are free to take a term and redefine it for their own purposes, but the public meaning is every bit as valid. They don't have a trump card that invalidates every other meaning because they want to use it to designate a particular abstraction.

            • Retric ・ 18 hours ago
              ・ 4 more

              There’s two definitions of the same word both of which predate economics, but the slightly older one mostly died out.

              “Home economics” was used in the 1950’s to distinguish it from the more common use of the term back then, while economics classes don’t need that clarification. Today few people are aware of the older definition.

              • scarmig ・ 18 hours ago
                ・ 3 more

                When do you think it died out? People have used economical to mean things like affordable or thrifty for a long time.

                • dragonwriter ・ 8 hours ago

                  "economical" is a different word than "economy", and also "affordable" or "thrifty", while a related concept to either the original sense of "economy" in English from the 15th C or the even older Greek root (the two are different) is not either off those simply transformed from a noun to an adjective without other shift of meaning.

                • Retric ・ 17 hours ago

                  By died out I meant the household aspect is gone, the original meaning included things like paying a carpenter to fix your roof which just seems like an alien use of the term. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oeconomicus Outside any transaction playing a role in the overall economy.

                  I suspect it shifted with the rise of companies and machinery. So I agree people talk about a ships fuel economy they are referring to efficiency, but the non efficiency aspects of the original definition is absent. Meaning people talking about the economy being good because they got a raise isn’t referring to household budgets but the wider economic system.

    • pylua ・ 19 hours ago

      I don’t think it’s that. I think it’s the coarse, high level statistics provided by the article aren’t in line with what the majority of Americans are experiencing.

      For instance, crime may be decreasing, but it could be increasing where there are more people, meaning more people think crime is increasing. I’m not sure if that is true or not, but I feel like it is with perceptions of the economy.

      • Retric ・ 19 hours ago
        ・ 4 more

        Crimes way down in populated areas. EX: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_New_York_City#/media/... Note that’s absolute numbers not rates.

        I know people who have noticed the massive reduction in crime inside cities, and still think it’s up overall. Part of the issue is news stories harp on bad news when rates are slightly higher than last year, but not when they drop so random noise ends up looking like a steady increase.

        • pylua ・ 19 hours ago
          ・ 3 more

          I don’t understand the crime one personally. Just a guess:

          1) people who migrate to larger cities are exposed to more crime

          2) not many people from the 1950s around that can really compare accurately

          • phil21 ・ 17 hours ago

            In my city I could very much believe overall crime is down, but due to recent social events crime is far more spread out. Areas that used to experience very little crime are now seeing far more. Areas that saw crazy levels of crime leveled off some.

            Crimes that were basically unheard of in my neighborhood 5 years ago (carjackings and armed muggings, for example) are now a weekly common occurrence. This will absolutely create the impression for residents in my neighborhood that crime is up. It went from something you barely thought about, to something you now plan your night around to not be walking home alone in the dark.

            Reporting is also a problem. I know of two people who were violently mugged to the point of one being hospitalized who did not report it to the police since they knew it was utterly pointless to do so.

          • Retric ・ 19 hours ago

            NYC crime only really fell in the 90’s, that’s in living memory for a large chunk of the population and there where noticeable improvements up until COVID.

            Though you could be right with how many young people moved to cities after things improved.

  • PaulDavisThe1st ・ 18 hours ago

    If GDP keeps increasing, but the percentage of GDP that flows to labor keeps decreasing, then both of these things are true:

    * the economy has grown

    * people are worse off

    People's feelings about the economy can be both accurate ("we are worse off") and inaccurate ("the economy is worse").

    The lesson here is that we need to clear about what the metrics we are using (e.g. GDP or disposable income after housing/health/food/transportation is accounted for) are actually good for.

    Rising GDP really does indicate a larger and/or more productive economy. But because of the way wealth is distributed and controlled in the US, a larger and/or more productive economy does not have any direct relationship to individual people's economic situation.

  • tonyedgecombe ・ 19 hours ago

    > I feel like Americans perceptions of the economy are accurate.

    I think most of the rest of the world would disagree.

    • pylua ・ 18 hours ago

      How so?

      • tonyedgecombe ・ 6 hours ago

        They think Americans are a bunch of cry babies because they think they are poor when it is obvious that even the poorest among them are wealthier than the majority of the people outside America.

  • hedora ・ 19 hours ago

    The simpler explanation is that the (well documented) right wing propaganda outlets in the US convinced people that the economy was bad.

    The poll asked people for their personal experiences at the micro level, and the respondents said things were great. The macro statistics were also great.

    The only negative was people’s perception of the economy.

    • djohnston ・ 19 hours ago

      Also the cost of food, the impossibility of affording a home, etc. Not really just "perception" is it?

    • pylua ・ 19 hours ago

      Peoples financial situation has increased overall, just like mine has. Even though it’s increased and I’m content with the increase I also see that there is less opportunity than there was a few years ago.

      • WarOnPrivacy ・ 18 hours ago

        > Peoples financial situation has increased overall,

        Some people's. Since 2020 our housing doubled. So did our auto insurance. We're housed because my children became adults and added 3 incomes to the household.

        With 4 typical incomes we make basic bills + afford knock-on expenses like repair and medical bills. We also make just enough money to pay less for many expenses.

        Something that changed all over: Couples generally can't afford living expenses on 2 typical wages.

    • bluescrn ・ 19 hours ago

      If you're earning 6-figure salaries in tech, of course everything seems OK, even if food prices double and the cost of housing gets further out of control.

      A lot of people had a very different experience when the post-covid inflation hit hard.

      • rad_gruchalski ・ 18 hours ago

        The post-covid inflation hit hard everywhere on the planet. It’s not the fault of Democrats.

    • aliasxneo ・ 19 hours ago

      Ironic to bring in partisan politics when the article was explicitly talking about how deluded things become when you go down that path.

    • readthenotes1 ・ 19 hours ago

      Or perhaps the well-documented left wing propaganda outlets have you convinced that the economy is good for everyone?

righthand ・ 19 hours ago

Very much so, most people have bought into the idea that education is lame and therefor do not apply themselves and let go of their abilities to do things like mathematics, even simple math in their head. Let a lone being able to discern statistical data.

Finances are kept in poor places, such as banks and bitcoin, the stock market instead of better investment strategies like Bonds and ETFs. This allows the rich to eat the poor. As financial knowledge decisions get branded as wall-street-only information, people do not bother to read the details. Even though many brokerage accounts have a $0 minimum with low risk of failure.

There has also been a big fall in literacy rates, again ensuring people cannot read the details.

Now we are stuck with pearl grippers and hysterics preaching absolute nonsense. Personally it has caused a rift between myself and my parents because they chose to hop on the bandwagon and spread lies. While I believe they are entitled to spread lies, I cannot back the incentive to do so.

I can however enable more like minded people who may be uneducated on topics to learn more about brokerage accounts for example, and help alleviate the stigma.

  • djohnston ・ 19 hours ago

    "Hey, I know your granddad bought the family home with his job at the local grocer, and you need to saddle 100K in student debt just to have a shot of buying a home by the time you're 35, but don't be sad, SP500 is at an all-time high!"

    • righthand ・ 19 hours ago

      Not what I’m suggesting at all. This last December I was talking to a store clerk in Colorado. The store clerk mentioned needing to switch banks because their current bank wasn’t great. I advised instead they look into a Cash Management account at a financial service firm which would give you 5% investment on your money instead of letting it sit in a checking account. Explained that the 5% return was important to helping inflation proof your money on average inflation years. And that you can use it like a checking account, in-fact it was backed by one. You can always move your money back to the bank if dissatisfied.

      There are obviously more nuanced things to understand such as “cash equivilent bonds/etfs” but that is what they should figure out.

      It’s about undoing the stigmas not solving the housing crisis.

      We keep people in the dark with this belief that financial strategies aren’t to be talked about publicly.

      • djohnston ・ 19 hours ago

        Ah, well that I totally agree with. I think it's a cultural issue in a lot of the West tbh. It is considered impolite or improper to discuss financials with friends, neighbours, even family sometimes. You also see that aversion in Westerners discomfort with bargaining in marketplaces. Like with most of our ills, I blame the British.

      • foldr ・ 18 hours ago
        ・ 7 more

        Most Americans don't have enough money in reserve for 5% interest on their bank balance to make much of a difference†. If you're living paycheck to paycheck then you spend all of your money before it has a chance to accumulate any interest. I obviously don't know the financial situation of the store clerk you were talking to. But if you are trying to get typical American retail workers excited about 5% interest, you are probably a bit disconnected from the financial reality of their lives.

        †https://www.cnbc.com/2024/01/24/how-much-money-americans-hav...

        • righthand ・ 18 hours ago
          ・ 6 more

          I’ve lived paycheck to paycheck and I definitely still had a few dollars to get the ball rolling after each paycheck. Claiming that you can’t is exactly the defeatist attitude that will keep you financially disabled.

          People with less than $500 can still start gaining that 5% yield, and it is better than the bank taking that 5% and eating it. If you don’t get that 5%, the bank will. Furthermore most people can easily calculate 5% and make the decision themselves if you don’t actively discourage them as your reply suggests.

          From the article you linked:

          > This leaves them vulnerable to unexpected expenses, underscoring the importance of having an emergency fund, if they’re able to build one.

          The rest of the article goes on how to vet yourself to start building an emergency fund. A great emergency fund would be a very liquid, low tax, investment option. Like cash equivalent Bonds and ETFs.

          If someone has a bank account with $1 it would still be better in a Fidelity Cash Management account gaining a yield than it would be in a bank not gaining at all.

          • WarOnPrivacy ・ 17 hours ago
            ・ 4 more

            > I’ve lived paycheck to paycheck and I definitely still had a few dollars to get the ball rolling after each paycheck. Claiming that you can’t is exactly the defeatist attitude that will keep you financially disabled.

            2010s were a decade of paycheck to paycheck years for me+kids. We frequently ate plain white rice (only) because there wasn't enough money for a can of beans. Or 1 onion. Sometimes I couldn't swing a bag of rice. The kids had a couple of regular meals when school was in session.

            I suggest your circumstances aren't as universal as they may seem to you.

            • righthand ・ 17 hours ago
              ・ 3 more

              And you didn’t have a bank account with money in it? Did you cash your paychecks at a check cashing service (giving them a cut?) and spend all the cash? What were your expenses during that time that ate all your paycheck? Surely not just rice.

              That comment was directed at the previous poster’s remark than since 60% of Americans have $500 or less in their bank account that must mean all 60% have no money to save and that my advice was bad. That is the defeatist attitude. I’m definitely not insisting that some portion aren’t entirely living paycheck to paycheck.

              The point of my comments is to acknowledge that people should seek out return for their money instead of keeping it in a bank. Not to squabble over who is worse off.

              • WarOnPrivacy ・ 17 hours ago
                ・ 2 more

                > And you didn’t have a bank account with money in it?

                I had a bank account. Each month it eventually came to have the exact amount of the rent in it. Most months, anyway.

                > Did you cash your paychecks at a check cashing service...

                On a few occasions where utilities would be cut off in less than a day, I used a check cashing service. Specifically Ace as their fee was lowest.

                > (giving them a cut?) and spend all the cash?

                On those occasions I blew it on water or power.

                > What were your expenses during that time that ate all your paycheck. Surely not just rice.

                Not just rice, true. My expenses were rent, water, power, fuel and minimal auto insurance (until the van was stolen anyway). Water and power outweighed food because disconnected utilities were CPS threat vectors.

                > The point of my comments is to acknowledge that people should seek out return for their money instead of keeping it in a bank.

                For those that make more than 100% of their minimal bills sure. For the millions of us who had to live otherwise, keeping non-existent money in a bank seems unrealistic.

                • righthand ・ 16 hours ago

                  Sure that is a much larger issue about wage stagnation than it is about ability to save then. It sounds like you were trying to do more than the minimum when it came to keeping money.

          • foldr ・ 15 hours ago

            If you maintain a $1000 average bank balance (which is at the higher end of ‘paycheck to paycheck’) then 5% interest is $50/year. It’s worth having, but people aren’t going to put time and effort into getting it when they have bigger problems to worry about.

  • AnimalMuppet ・ 16 hours ago

    > Finances are kept in poor places, such as banks and bitcoin, the stock market instead of better investment strategies like Bonds and ETFs.

    Why do you list stocks in the "poor" places and bonds in the good ones? Why do you see bonds as a better investment than stocks? (Certainly that has not been true historically...)