> When people deign to respond, partisanship clouds their answers. This is a particular problem in America. Just before the presidential election 42% of Democrats believed that the economy was getting better, whereas just 6% of Republicans did. Today 6% of Democrats and 53% of Republicans respond in the same manner. Surveys find that Americans’ expectations of inflation are rising. The trend is worrying, but how meaningful is it? After all, Democrats’ expectations are soaring well above those of Republicans.
That one is a complex thing, partially because realities and expectations are in a mismatch. Republican and far-right allied media have been consistently pushing the narrative of Biden being incompetent and dragging the economy down, and now push that the economy is gonna skyrocket Just Next Day thanks to Trump's tariffs.
A second part is that "is the economy good or bad" is a very broad question. Democrats under Biden/Harris pushed for months that "the economy is good" and backed that by unemployment numbers, stock index charts and godknowswhat - all while millions of people faced the awful reality of exploding rents and, in the end, exploding egg prices as well, and the Democrats never cared to address this mismatch of realities: both statements were true, but only from a dedicated point of view. No wonder people were fed up with what they deemed to be outright lies when their reality completely crashed with the reported reality.
And it's just the same here in Europe, most importantly in Germany. On paper, our companies are still making billions of dollars in profit... but laying off people by the thousands. On paper, we're one of the richest economies in the entire world... but our housing markets are virtually dead with barely anyone able to afford to move, our infrastructure is literally collapsing (just in the last few months, a bridge in Dresden outright collapsed, and another bridge in Berlin was caught to be on the verge of immediate destruction). And again, the far-right populists are the only ones profiting politically.
> all while millions of people faced the awful reality of exploding rents
Because most people are homeowners, and the way rent prices are reported in CPI counts homeowners as renting to themselves, when this goes up it actually means people are making money.
This is especially true because everyone bought homes in 2021 right before interest rates went up.
Was the economy good under Biden? Yes for me, because I happened to have money invested in it; but no for me because the cost of groceries spiked. Even for just myself I can't give a straight answer because it's so heavily dependent on social context. The problem with all these statistics is that they're averages.
Economists have an ideological desire to not talk about "distributional effects". Talk about the size of the pie, not the size of your slice, and things like that. Look deeper at the distribution and you'll find that most countries are actually two:
- An indispensable elite of well-connected firms, their talent-level employees, contractors, and anyone else economically dependent upon them, and,
- An expendable periphery of... everyone else not on that list.
Because the elites are indispensable, they get the lion's share of profit from new economic activity. They can negotiate away everyone else's margin, they can lobby for favorable regulation, and will make sure as much money as possible stays in the hands of the elite. The periphery is thus slowly marginalized into worse and worse conditions until they either revolt or die.
We see this pattern everywhere. The UK has London's financial sector, and everyone else. South Korea has the chaebols, and everyone else. America has Big Tech, and everyone else. We no longer live in rich countries, we live in countries with rich people.
Liberal politicians can't do anything to stop this because they all bought into neo-"liberalism"[0]. Their job is to make the numbers go up, and the easiest way to make sure the nation has a good day is to make sure the elites have a good day. This results in profound corruption almost immediately. I mean, why bother spending money fixing bridges in Dresden when that money isn't going to make the Mercedes-Benz group richer?
But neoliberals also have to still pretend to be liberal, so they'll pursue policies that virtue signal well while still finding ways to screw over the periphery. Neoliberalism runs on predatory inclusion - i.e. breaking the US labor movement by giving Mexicans all the shitty jobs Americans are striking over. Far-right populists are profiting because far-right populism is more efficient at sucking money out of the periphery. Even when the far-right talks about getting rid of the elites, they're still serving the interests of the elite. They just want to thin their ranks and assume direct control. And the periphery voting for them have been lied to; they are being told that they can't eat their freedom, but they can eat their privilege.
That one is a complex thing, partially because realities and expectations are in a mismatch. Republican and far-right allied media have been consistently pushing the narrative of Biden being incompetent and dragging the economy down, and now push that the economy is gonna skyrocket Just Next Day thanks to Trump's tariffs.
A second part is that "is the economy good or bad" is a very broad question. Democrats under Biden/Harris pushed for months that "the economy is good" and backed that by unemployment numbers, stock index charts and godknowswhat - all while millions of people faced the awful reality of exploding rents and, in the end, exploding egg prices as well, and the Democrats never cared to address this mismatch of realities: both statements were true, but only from a dedicated point of view. No wonder people were fed up with what they deemed to be outright lies when their reality completely crashed with the reported reality.
And it's just the same here in Europe, most importantly in Germany. On paper, our companies are still making billions of dollars in profit... but laying off people by the thousands. On paper, we're one of the richest economies in the entire world... but our housing markets are virtually dead with barely anyone able to afford to move, our infrastructure is literally collapsing (just in the last few months, a bridge in Dresden outright collapsed, and another bridge in Berlin was caught to be on the verge of immediate destruction). And again, the far-right populists are the only ones profiting politically.