I’m not wrong about tech or truck drivers either. They were good in 2020-2021 but since then it’s all taken a turn for the decidedly more apocalyptic. If your dataset stops in 2022 it’s out of date on those two. The market for truck drivers started getting relatively shitty summer 2022 fyi. There have been absolutely no raises, a lot of layoffs, and a lot of outright paycuts taken since then almost across the board everywhere except some isolated corporate fleets maybe. There are 750k fewer semi’s registered on the road today than there were at the previous peak and this will have been the longest down market my brokerage has ever seen in the middle of april. The 08-09 one was deeper so it’s not really comparable but in terms of duration this thing is about to set a record. All of this affects the people at the trucking companies and the people who aren’t established on the arrangement side where I am pretty substantially.
Nurse pay nationwide was flat or declined in 2022-2023 once the travel contracts for a zillion bucks dried up. Look up what nurses make in Austin working in the hospitals, compare it to the cost of living, and gasp audibly yourself. Then do the same for any major non CA metro in the US. CA has state mandated patient ratios that keep the demand pressure on.
And for nurses it’s not just the pay it’s the patient ratios. Getting paid 10% more to do 50% more work is not a great deal. We’re talking about an occupation that has fully half of graduates leave the bedside within the first two years. All is not well there in any way shape or form. They’re bearing the brunt of the private equity assault on healthcare basically.
Bottom line is don’t tell nurses that their lives got better since before COVID. It didn’t and if the economic stats say otherwise the problem is the economic stat being broken in some way and that’s cause for further investigation into how it’s reading the room so wrong.
I picked truck drivers, nurses, tech workers, and teachers because I know a lot about the working conditions in those jobs over the last few years and didn’t feel like defending my post on unfamiliar ground. I’m not wrong about any of those.
Every pink collar job is a medical waste dumpster fire right now. The responsibilities/requirements and the pay aren’t even vaguely in communication with each other.
These occupations pay was set by the fact that their workforce couldn’t go and do anything else. That is very much not true anymore and now they are being compared to having an equivalent level of responsibility working in corporate and it isn’t even close.
Good teachers can make twice as much money for 70% as much work by switching to literally any traditionally male dominated industry. Logistics, HR, Sales, Operations, almost any area where soft skills are a major requirement they’re very strong candidates. Once teachers realize they’d be making the same money for way less bullshit being an associate at costco it’s gg. And that’s where we are.
I’m sorry but the look at a few sectors of the economy and getting scared of pushing the idea the economy is good is dumb, and that’s beyond the fact that as a whole the economy is good.
How Americans view the economy is not based on facts, it’s based on narrative. As democracy relies on democrats winning, they should be pushing a narrative that they are good. Letting what you think is the truth make it so you cede that ground is moronic. It’s a losing mentality when you’re the mostly incumbent party
on the one hand yes you’re going to have dipshits who are completely disconnected from reality going on CNN and crying about how they’re spending $400/week on milk or whatever but on the other hand you also have the 0.01% capturing more and more of the surplus. So while “the economy” in the aggregate may be booming AND we might even see people at the very bottom doing disproportionately well that doesn’t mean the middle isn’t getting hollowed out
I didn’t arrive at 30-90% by accident. That’s the group that’s mostly doing worse. Although there has been a lot of loss in tech lately that definitely hit the top 10% people I don’t think that made up for the fact that the entire economy generally funnels opportunities and cash to the people already doing well.
This not any sort of personal attack but your pointing to numbers but that is not the only thing that determines your view on this and it’s impossible to subtract out your own personal lived experience which just by sheer chance includes massive phase of life financial change right at the crucial time period in question.
Folks who were in more plateau phases of career are looking around like wtf happened to my spending power.
But you weren’t when a portion of the massive inflation happened. You got a massive life altering raise partway into all this which is going to always influence your unconscious views on the time period.
I’m certainly not claiming economy is terrible and obviously is currently doing well on lot of metrics. But if major inflation happened X years ago, just going back to zero now isnt going to improve a lot of people lived experience especially given it seems the salary gains are oddly distributed.
I got my big life altering pay bump before inflation went nuts tyvm. Hell I signed in 2019, got my bonus and started in July 2020. I missed out on buying a house with near zero interest rates by a few months.
None of this is relevant to anything either. While I’m willing to grant that everyone has their own opinion on what makes a ‘good’ economy and what standard you use for ‘good’ is an opinion, none of that has to do with my personal situation.
Honestly what I see as the disconnect here more than anything is that I’m describing the economy as ‘good’ based on comparisons to previous American economies while other people are pushing against that based on what they want the economy to be. Those are different things imo, and, most importantly, selling that things are good now is critical for the changes that bs and cw want to see.
It really does, it takes years to adjust to a new standard of living and as far as your life is concerned this last few years since Covid has probably surpassed your entire lifetime earnings, so you would have to be some sort of icy emotionless cyborg not to have a positive emotional response to economy during that time.
I’m the same way, personally I feel like economy has been awesome the last while and a superficial glance at numbers reinforces that so when I see tons of people I respect both in real life and online telling me maybe it’s not as true as seems it has caught my attention that maybe my own experience coloring my interpretation of what it means for the economy to be good.
I missed this first time. I agree with you on most this, we have historically called certain numbers being in certain ranges “good” and now there a lot of question if that good translates into good for people.
You’re plateauing, but I’m guessing at 4-6x median household income and that’s just your salary. It’s all relative. I played poker recently with a guy who thinks a ~$2M real estate purchase is below the average real estate purchase. I played with another guy who thinks giving each of his 5-6 grandkids (youngest around six) $10,000 a year is “just silly playing around money.” His “actual gifts” for them are a lot more.
I don’t know if they’d think you’re a peasant or think you can afford a $2M real estate purchase anytime you want, or think a gallon of milk is $100, or what. But I know their perception of the economy is very different from almost everyone else’s. The gap between you and “normal” is nowhere near the gap between them and normal, but the concept still applies.
If you color your takes on the economy with your lived personal experience the last few years, you’re coloring your takes towards the top 1-5%. Congrats on your success, but don’t assume that everyone else is having an easy time and doing better than before. Many of us aren’t.
The slice of the pie now for most people isn’t just smaller than we want it to be, it’s smaller than it used to be.
Yeah billionaires sequestering increasingly comical percent of the nations wealth at some point going to have obviously visible ramifications and seems we close to breaking point
It’s not, at least by measurements easily available. While you and bs have offered plenty of criticism as to how various stats are imperfect, no comprehensive other data set has ever been presented by you two.
As for the other stuff, I’m aware I make a lot. Thanks, it’s irrelevant and doesn’t make your argument better.
My perception of the economy is based on data, imperfect or not. As presented so far, the thing most likely to predict how you view the economy is what political party you belong to. Appealing to how I view differently than a group largely made of Trump cultists isn’t exactly meaningful to me. How people perceive the economy is largely vibes based and completely fucking wrong.
Huh? The percent of wealth owned buy top 1% or .1% is significantly higher now than the 80s. I think you’re trying to zoom in way too much on months or something. People don’t care that inflation is 0% this year, they care that in combination it was a total of X% in 5 years
Feels like once your household income is that low it’s kinda irrelevant though as you’re already subsisting on government entitlements for housing/medical care/food stamp/relatives social security/etc so the actual earned income increasing a little doesn’t massively impact standard of living because so much of the overall “total compensation” is not from earned income.
Think the actual disconnect is just hand waving away the real gains of the bottom 30% because their “life still sucks.” I mean that is kind of true but also overly reductive.
Billionaires shouldn’t exist but also things the 30-90% loved that relied on dirt cheap labor like $5 footlongs and $10 Uber rides across town shouldn’t exist.