this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2023
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The problem is people are talking past each other. People prioritize different metrics and they don't all move the same direction or for the same reasons.
GDP is increasing, unemployment is low, child poverty is back up after a temporary decrease, homelessness is increasing, people reporting as "paycheck to paycheck" is down since 2019 but clearly OP thinks the overall level is still too high. Those are all reasonable things to look at, but they have to be looked at in totality. You can't just cherry pick some factoids and indignantly declare "don't TELL me you disagree with me"
Some measures are a lot better than others.
GDP is only designed to measure the size of an economy, but how well it's serving the people who participate in it. Unemployment tells you only how many people have a "job", but it tells you nothing about whether thirst jobs pay a liveable wage or how many people are working multiple jobs to get by.
Other measures, like homelessness and child poverty, are direct measures of his of how many people are getting completely fucked by the economy.
When combining measures, I think it makes most sense to just completely ignore metrics like GDP in favor of direct measures of well-being. No matter how high the GDP is, homeless people's lives suck. No matter how low unemployment is, poor kids are still being set up for failure later in life. People living paycheck to paycheck can't use a soaring S&P 500 to pay for a medical emergency.
Understandable for GDP, but unemployment should be a factor you consider in measures of well-being. Employment is one of the most important factors in a person's life path. Unemployed people run into more financial difficulties, is associated with health problems, and results in society wide effect like increased crime.
As the person above mentioned, the employeement rate means absolutely nothing if those jobs don't pay enough. It's why employment is a useless metric, sure unemployment is low but how are people doing? Well, the amount of people living paycheck to paycheck and kids going hungry has skyrocketed. Shit, I'd bet half the reason jobs fill quickly is because many people are working more than one. If you need the equivalent of 3-4 working people to maintain a one bedroom apartment for two people then the economy is dog shit. People shouldn't have to double their work just to get by but that's what's happening to damn near the entire generation of the most highly educated workforce of all time.
I'd say unemployment is a semi-useless metric: if it's high, things are definitely bad, but if it's low, things aren't necessarily good.
This- you can't claim unemployment when you lost one job but still have another, if you need both to get by you're just fucked.
GDP is increasing due to inflation and speculation.
Unemployment is low because you aren't counting the anyone who is unemployed. The workforce participation rate is hovering around the same numbers as we had in the early 1970s when women entered the workforce in large numbers. Adding this with the gig jobs and the real numbers would be even worse.
Meanwhile housing, education, medical, insurance, food, consumer goods, and any service you can name has increased in a rate above inflation since 2020. The ratio of CEO-to-worker pay has increased as well. Everyone but the tinest fraction of the population has seen a significant hit in their quality-of-life. All the while dealing with the fallout from the virus. Plus all forms of debt have gone up.
The only good numbers are those of the stock market. Which really means very little. With interest rates so high and everyone shut out of smaller investments (you aren't going to invest in a starter home when it is costs 900k USD) of course share prices will go up. Now who benefits from this? The dividends are basically the same, the risk is basically the same, the only thing that went up is the share price. Funneling money to the people who had more money in the past. Present money taken out of the middle class to fund old money.
So there it is. The steaming garbage heap of our economy looked in total just as you requested.
Yeah the situation is pretty bad, but it seems like it’d definitely be a lot worse without Biden’s economic policy.
How so? Just curious.
Basically we’ve been on a pretty bad track since reaganomics and this has been a major investment by the government into our economy. We were expecting a recession and supply chain crashes. Instead we’ve gotten turbulence. And I still think it’s insufficient. Though the anti trust lawsuits are giving me additional hope.
Which are?
Massive investments in green infrastructure and beginning trust busting