This election cycle showed that our evaluations of external reality are increasingly partisan. Can the media bridge the gap?
A responsible news media has a lot of jobs, but here’s one of the most important: giving audiences an accurate image of the state of the world around them. How’s the country doing, overall? Is the economy booming or busting? Is crime climbing or dropping?
Anyone can, of course, reach their own conclusions on those questions, independent of the news they consume. But their views will necessarily be influenced by their own individual circumstances. Did they just get a promotion — or laid off? Do they feel safe sleeping with their front door unlocked — or did they just get mugged? Their own personal data points might align with a larger trend — or they might not. And news stories have traditionally been a big part of how people figured out which was which.
But we’ve just concluded an election cycle that suggests something important has broken in that feedback loop. How people perceive the economy and crime are major factors in whether they reward or punish incumbents with their vote. And decades-old patterns in that process seem to have gone a little haywire.
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The economy literally is a mess. It’s not ‘vibes’, it’s the resources available to the average working American versus the costs they’re facing.
The reason there’s a disconnect is that the economic measures are all designed by and geared toward the owning class. Wages are still stagnating, rent is still skyrocketing, and food still costs an arm and a leg. Energy bills are still ridiculous and increasingly hot summers means more air conditioning. Chasing after quarterly profits means a constant diminishment of value for consumers. We can’t even get 24 hour egg mcmuffins anymore.
Maybe boomer retirees are confusing the math more than it would be otherwise? But what’s broken here isn’t people’s perception of an economy that’s good actually, it’s the measures of an economy that involves extreme (and growing) wealth inequality.
Except the same surveys that show that people think that the economy as a whole is doing terrible also show that the same people report they themselves are doing great economically, their friends are doing good, and their state is doing ok. If everyone thinks that themselves and their friends are doing well but the economy as a whole is doing terrible, that is a large disconnect between people’s perceptions of the economy vs the actual economy as a whole.
While a lot of things are going to depend on area and experience, for instance real energy costs have gone down since 2020 for me and wages in the lower quarter of workers have at the very least kept pace with inflation if not grown beyond it, that does not explain why this perception of the economy doing horrible even when you and your friends are going well did not exist five years ago despite everything you suggested as being new having been the case then too, often to an even larger extent.
Similarly, the cost of rent and food literally is the primary economic measure of inflation, and demonstrably has recovered from the supply chain shocks of Covid. It’s indeed the principle measure that where people’s perception of it no longer has any correlation with measured reality.
Is it. That assumes people who are doing well themselves. Do not see the truth about people not considered friends or colleagues.
Modern Society rarely gives people the opportunity to interact with different classes as friends. But most can see the numbers and recognise how many people around them are working for much lower wages. While realising how close their own income is the survival. It really does not take huge empathy to recognise the national data does not match the witnessed world.
So why do you think this empathy not exist before the last few years? Why are people now so worried about the people who themselves say they are doing well when they weren’t before?
Because costs are higher. More people who are copping will be noting higher energy food and rent etc compared to their own incomes.
So even those coping will recognise how much harder it will be for people on much lower incomes. And recognising your own situation is only just above water. Tends to mean most people notice how many around them are in worse situations.
My guess is this will be happening way way more in cities where these interactions tend to be more common. And often higher earners are also renting and moving more often than in rural areas. Leading to them noticing an increase in housing costs every few years. Or more.
But the basic truth is humanity is a social based tribe. And when forced into close living we tend to recognise a little more how much our life depends on others around us.
This is in part why left of centre politics is more common in more urban areas.
So you think after decades of wage stagnation, the 2008 financial crash, and multiple recessions demonstrably didn’t have this effect, a short spike in inflation where the poorest workers actually saw the first real wage gains in decades was all it took to suddenly develop a new form of previously nonexistent class consciousness?
I guess Amaricans really do hate moderate inflation more than high levels of unemployment.
Likely: with gains on the low end, people saw themselves closer to the low end suddenly, and that’s a problem I guess.