Things are getting better yet sentiment is falling. Does that mean things aren’t getting better or does it mean expectations are rising? Only the second of those two is brought up in this brief article.
This causes issues, since any mild gradual improvements to the world get drowned out. The amount of actual yearly improvement needed to give the impression that things are improving ends up being dramatically more than the small incremental improvements which are normally seen.
The paper discusses this and the ft article quotes it:
> particularly if one adheres to the view that traditional media fulfills a watchdog/surveillance function. Although this argument could explain the average level of negativity in news reporting, it does not address its increasingly downward trend. … Fighting the media negativity bias, the local Russian newspaper City Reporter decided in 2014 to report only positive news for a day and lost two-thirds of its readers.
Have they? By what measures?
Real wages have stagnated or fallen. Workforce participation is at a low. We can't compete on costs with much of the world. Population is mostly stagnate. It's hard to see how a system built on consumerism is not in trouble when our products must be subsidized to compete on exports (ag), the population is mostly stagnate, and a large portion of the population is either not working or is making just enough to survive. Looks pretty bleak to me. I suppose it looks better if you wrap assets in multiple layers of derivatives.
> https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/09/opinion/economy-survey-re...
i'm not sure the two can actually be decoupled. why do people work? as a means to fulfill their needs and desires. how do you measure if a person's needs and desires are being fulfilled?
you can try to ground economic measurements in something like Maslow's hierarchy, but you can't escape that a person's sentiment is real. give a person shelter, but in such a way that they feel it could be taken away from them at any moment (e.g. "living paycheck-to-paycheck"), and you've only sort of fulfilled their base needs. give a person the exact same shelter but in such a way that they feel secure in it, and it's hard to argue that's not meaningfully better.
so whatever macro measurements you're using, if your goal is for them to reflect anything real to the individual, they ought to have some correlation to sentiment. "household savings" and "job openings" often do proxy the difference between being secure v.s. insecure in your housing. but, speaking to the article, worries you'll see captured and reinforced by the news such as "the other half of the country wants to take away my healthcare" or "the other half of the country wants to obsolete my coal/oil/manufacturing job" proxy these same feelings of in/security, but are likely not captured by any formal measurement... except "sentiment". so if these sentiments aren't proxied by your "things are getting better" measurement, then yes, it would mean that things aren't getting as better as your measurement claims.
But is this actually true, or just something that declining economic sentiment in the newspapers has led us to believe? People are consuming more food, more education, more square feet of house, more travel. My sense is that is surprisingly hard to find a quantitative signal that purchasing power has collapsed.
Maybe it is just that positional goods (access to the best neighborhood in the best city) get harder to obtain as the population grows?
There is no evidence for this in the USA except among the poorest, for whom support is being withdrawn by the federal and many state governments.
Pay packets are rising faster than costs have been (and costs are dropping). Now those are statistical measures, but the actual data show that consumers are spending as if the are doing better.
It is true that a secular increase in pricing is quite visible — I suffer from this myself even though I can afford it: a bag of groceries simply costs 30% more than it did a few years ago and that bugs me at the check out. It costs me a smaller percentage of my paycheck, but that feels more abstract.
This is like the perennial crime issue: “Crime is out of control — not where I live, but in all those other places.” Today’s NYT interviewed a bunch of caucus voters for whom they support and why. One guy literally said, “the economy is a disaster. I’m doing fine, but I understand it’s actually terrible.”
50 years ago was 1974. Wasn’t USA just coming out of the Vietnam fiasco at the time? Were economic things really that good? I think there was an oil crisis and people at least in Yugoslavia (where my parents were kids at the time) could only fuel up at gas stations on alternative days based on license plate.
Oh and if I’m not mistaken that was when Japanese cars started flooding the US market and US car manufacturing began its downward spiral into oblivion. The beginning of the end for places like Detroit.
Over the long term, though, the percentage of wealth going to the top 1% has dramatically increased, which is a root issue that is not improving. (The vast majority of us would be far-better off if there were higher taxes on the richest Americans.)
Doesn't that depend on what you look at? E.g. if you look at gdp then things are getting better but if you look at growth rate then things are getting worse?
(If you look at growth as the ratio between years, instead of as a difference, then yes, growth has slowed down.)
It's one thing for a person to buy a newspaper and get his chain yanked every morning, then go about their day, typically either ignoring the stories or discussing them with other live people in person.
It's another to have the rage-farming TV source continually pumping moving video and sound into every space they enter (home, lobbies, bus/train/airport stations, etc.), and programs deliberately designed and tuned to coerce viewers' attention, and they can keep interacting with the story every day with only the announcers.
The same thing at different scale is different.
The US used to have laws that would have made the current situation illegal. They didn't make much sense for internet news, but they did for radio, television and newspapers.
They were repealed, and each time a law was repealed there was a direct financial tie between the politicians that repealed the laws and the networks that stood to gain. Post consolidation, the networks started running propaganda for the party that enabled the merger.
I don't have a great solution for the current firehose of foreign propaganda, but restoring market ownership rules (no TV, radio or local newspaper owner can have more than, say 25% of the viewership/readership of a given city with over N million people) would definitely help.
They could apply this to the internet by restricting editorial control to the editors of each publication. This would immediately force Twitter, Facebook, Google and Apple to change how they aggregate news content.
Concretely, Apple News could be made OK with minor changes: Apple would need to eliminate algorithmic ranking of articles, and replace it with algorithmic ranking of periodicals. Facebook could recommend you follow newspapers and magazines, but would not be allowed to intermingle the feeds. I'm sure the platforms would argue that this is unworkable, but we already have an existence proof. Podcasts work this way, and most people (here) would argue that they're a much healthier ecosystem than written internet news.
For one thing, there's no such thing as clickbait with podcasts. For another, you can cut off an editor with one click if you notice ragebait or sloppy journalism. None of the internet news aggregators allow you to do either of those things.
As for HN (assuming its readership is above some threshold), it would end up turning into a collection of blogs and syndicated tech columnists. I'd have mixed feelings about that, but I suspect having a collaboratively edited RSS feed with independently curated (by Dang and friends) comment sections on each article would be fantastic.
My take is that modern communications mechanisms have changed journalism just like they changed music discovery and distribution: tons of content suddenly available at a low cost or free with ads.
Or, put differently: "49 state landslide, 520 electoral votes, and a year later half the country genuinely believed he had to break into an office building to win" [1].
[0] https://theamericansun.com/2019/11/10/impeachment-unified-th...
[1] https://twitter.com/realchrisrufo/status/1710010371464122508
Fighting the media negativity bias, the local Russian newspaper City Reporter decided in 2014 to report only positive news for a day and lost two-thirds of its readers.
[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/11/productivity-workforc...
I strongly disagree with the idea that the government is a magic God-like wizard, who can bend objective reality and achieve any economic or social outcome by twisting the right knobs here or there. Other countries rose economically to compete with the West and that's not something that the government can magically outlaw, any more than it can pass a law against the tide coming in tomorrow
Agreed. See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38838608 on a similar topic recently.
You might like my sibling comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38953586
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/ef265420-45e8-497b-b308-c951baa68...
https://news.gallup.com/poll/404048/record-high-perceive-loc...
The graph uses different counts of inflation adjustment for the two lines. It introduces more unnecessary complications. That's how you lie with statistics.
Instead: just look at the labour share of GDP; that is the sum of all nominal wages divided by nominal GDP. Available for the US at eg https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LABSHPUSA156NRUG
Because we are looking at a ratio of nominal values, we don't need to adjust for inflation: the influence of the price level naturally cancels.
For the US the labour share of GDP has stayed between 60 - 65% in the last 70 years.
For that ratio to stay so constant, productivity growth and wage increases must have approximately kept pace with each other.
What are the two different adjustments being uses? You're making some bold hand-wavey claims without showing your work.
"Because we are looking at a ratio of nominal values, we don't need to adjust for inflation: the influence of the price level naturally cancels."
Again you're missing distribution! There's a reason they use a standard basket of goods. You're also completely ignoring imports and exports.
"Because we are looking at a ratio of nominal values, we don't need to adjust for inflation: the influence of the price level naturally cancels."
"For that ratio to stay so constant, productivity growth and wage increases must have approximately kept pace with each other."
Only on the aggregate. You can very easily find that executive and other high earner pay has consistently increased at a higher rate than the median workers. So if that ratio remained the same and the increases mostly went to the upper class, then there is less for the middle and lower class.
Real wages have stagnated or declined. Barriers to entry for good careers have increases. Entire industries have been outsourced, mainly effecting lower skilled workers. Workforce participation is extremely low. Multiple financial crises. A system built on consumerism that is dependent on almost free money not to crumble.
If the system doesn't look like a house of cards, then I don't know what does...
Wages as a proportion of GDP, ie the so called 'labour share' has been relatively steady. If you believe that real GDP has increased, then real wages have increased.
> Workforce participation is extremely low.
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/labor-force-parti... says it's about 62.5%.
Distribution is important. The high earners are the ones eating up the GDP increase. The middle class and lower class are mostly flat or negative.
https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/
"says it's about 62.5%."
Which is relatively low over the past 20 years, and somewhat low compared to other countries with strong economies.
Your 62.5% labor force participation rate only aligns with the past if you completely discount women's unpaid and unaccounted work in the home and elsewhere. The male labor force participation rate has declined from around 90% to around 68%.
Thanks to our glorious new economy instead of basically everyone getting a house, spouse, and kid, now many will rent, work and die.
1. Profit-seeking news orgs: it's no secret that negative and controversial news sells significantly more. With all the destruction of locally run papers in favor of the national consolidation of news by a lot of private equity investors, there are increased expectations to make a profit and therefore increase the amount of negative-sentiment news over the recent years.
2. 24-7 news cycle: people are also much more aware of all the bad news around them with smartphones and social networks. Readers' sentiment will just bleed into the papers over time. Ignorance is bliss.
3. Sampling bias: which kind of papers did they measure sentiment for back then versus now? There could be a divergence in the sources they use and different sources could have different sentiment tendencies. (I don't have access to the actual paper)
4. Rising expectations: humans are many orders of magnitude more powerful than our ancestors. We live like gods compared to them. Yet there are so many people who still aren't happy. Why? It's because our expectations also rise endlessly. Things may be better than before, but maybe it's not better relative to our expectations.
Point is, this isn't necessarily indicative of life becoming worse. There could be other plausible explanations.
It probably isn't indicative of life becoming worse. These articles are about economics, and the nice thing about macroeconomics is that its reasonably well measured. We can just look at the numbers to see in aggregate what the conditions are like.
To choose just the most dramatic example from the graph: sentiment was generally been more negative from 1975-2020 than it was during the great depression in the 1930s. Things aren't perfect, but no one would claim that economic conditions in the US have been worse than the great depression for the last 50 years.
I suspect that this trend holds outside of economics as well, but of course I have no data to back this up. Specifically, I suspect news-based sentiment of the world conditions have been declining while conditions in the world have not been declining.
can something that happens over a 50 years span be correctly described as a "collapse"?
go figure