- manipulated / brainwashed - entitled / spoiled - outliers (the few who have it bad are too loud). - the problems can’t be fixed anyway - don’t realise how much worse it was in the past ?
I disagree that the sentiment of the general population is not a useful indicator of how good things are going for the general population. I think it is the best indicator, but people in power (and I would count most on this forum among then) don’t want to see anything that threatens their status quo.
What I'm trying to say is that there is an explanation for why this sentiment exists despite measures of material wealth and economic success being positive.
The fact that there is an explanation doesn't magically make people feel better.
I think it all boils down to the attitude one has towards seeking explaination.
One is a scientific approach where one aims at understanding the dynamics of a phenomenon in a way that is detached from it as much as possible.
The other approach is moral one where one seeks an explanation in order to convince oneself (and others) how one should feel about it. "You shouldn't complain, you have indoor plumbing your grandparents had to pump water from a well; shut up".
I'm not making the latter, moral, argument. I'm trying to make the scientific one
Are they? GDP is a measure of national economic success not of personal economic success.
The latter is measured by metrics such as: value of a home relative to wages, value of rent relative to average wage, disposable income relative to the prices, food prices relative to wages.
These are the numbers you don't often hear about in the media, you only tend to hear about GDP and the time derivative of prices, neither of which have much relevance to ordinary people.
Another example is constant controversy over Elite College Admissions, ignoring the 99% of perfectly good but not as reputable State Colleges with high admissions rates.
I have no clue why you would think this. Basically ever poor person I know (and I know a lot of poor people) has simply given up on ever experiencing home ownership. None of them can afford to live by themselves. High density or low density, zoning laws, etc, don't even enter the picture because not one of those will actually bring housing into any kind of affordable range. It's just that politicians refuse to campaign on anything but "what type of housing supply should we hope developers build—low or high density" that there's any confusion here.
I think that there's a factual case that general sentiment is no longer a useful indicator of how "how good things are going for the general population".
Sources:
https://www.newsweek.com/economy-strength-politics-yougov-da...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jun/09/is-e...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-03-21/consumer-...
People are shockingly easy to manipulate, even to commit atrocities (to the point that Myanmar's military intelligence was able to instigate a genocide via Facebook posts.) Charisma will always beat reason for most people.
So yeah, I think the sentiment of the general population is relevant only in the cases where it leads to self-fulfilling prophecies; otherwise, irrelevant.
Forgive my lack of humbleness, but.. here on HN, most of us are intelligent (users are probably in the top decile, with a large fraction in the top percentile.) Most of us work and socialize with similarly intelligent peers, maybe even since high school - and it's easy to lose sight of that.
The average person is not us or our peers. If we think something is wrong, we are confident enough in our intelligence to trust our own analysis. I would not, however, trust the sentiment of the average person.
A battery of competing measures compared against historical trends are almost certainly the best gauge of how things are.
An example being "cast offs". In my early 20s, I moved from a poorer rural area, to a well to do city suburb.
Walking to various places, I noticed things cast aside that would never, ever be thrown away in the area I grew up in.
Examples being:
* an expensive propane bbq, with damage to one of the hoses. A $10 repair and I had a bbq worth hundreds.
(Even looked brand new)
* A set of cutlery, and plates. One of 8 plates had a crack. The cutlery was missing one fork out of a set of 8.
(For a young man eating off of one plate, this was a big bonus)
* a coat rack, mild discolouration
(10 cents in paint out of a spray can to fix)
Anyhow, you get the point. Very usable items cast off, and I would never have found this treasure trove in a poor neighbourhood.
Just being surrounded by a society of greater wealth, means better access generally.
One day I was walking past a high-end apartment complex where I knew a lot of sorority girls lived. There was one of those expensive chrome-plated Kirby vacuums in a trash dumpster. I took a closer look and it appeared to be brand new.
I pulled it out of the dumpster and carried it down the street to my much more modest apartment complex and plugged it in out on the terrace. Turns out the only thing wrong was the dust bag was full. I had some extra bags, so it didn't cost me anything to get one of the best vacuums money can buy almost brand new.
I couldn't believe someone had pitched it in the bin just because the bag was full. But apparently wealthy people do stuff like that all the time.
We moved from a dangerous inner city suburb where that was the case, to the edges of an affluent enclave as a kid, and my grades improving and extra curricular activities like getting good at computers and getting a holiday job which kickstarted my tech career, all followed that move.
Numbers are even easier to manipulate.
A similar thing happens with fiddling with the axis on graphs, e.g. not starting a graph at zero or using the wrong scale.
Averages are often misleading.
If one person is a billionaire, and 999 have nothing, the average person is a millionaire. That average is of little comfort to the 999 however.
This highlights how any statistic can be used to support a narrative.
For instance, while the national average for homeownership rates remains relatively stable, it now comes with the reality that people are working harder and longer to achieve it. On the flip side, homes today are often larger and more feature-rich than in the past, which some might argue offsets the challenge.
The real question is: which of these factors—delayed homeownership or improved home quality—has a greater impact on how people perceive their economic well-being?
What you have is a bimodal distribution of people who almost never will own a house and those who will. And a bunch of rich people who have whole fleets of houses.
This is why nobody should ever use averages and rates alone without a supporting histogram.
People get used to things and give for granted things that used to be luxuries a few generations back (see "hedonic treadmill")
Combine that with active participants who control the media landscape and have a vested interest in painting a bleak picture so they can be the ones fixing it.
And then of course there is the fact that things are of course objectively hard for many people because not everybody can be the average person.
So in a sense it's correct to say that these numbers don't capture reality while being technically correct. And that's because reality is much more complex than the things those numbers measure.
The question is: are those indicators useful? Provided you understand what they actually measure, can that be used as a control signal to help make choices that will go in the right direction and improve quality of life for everybody?
Perhaps the improvement will be marginal and not everybody's problems will be fixed, but is it unreasonable to think that problems cannot be fixed by a quick single intervention and that instead they will compound over time?
Look at the progress humanity has made in so many fronts. Ask anybody to pick a time in history where they would like to travel back and have a better life. The most frequent answer is either now or a few years ago when they were young and everything was better (likely because of nostalgia for youth or childhood).
Very few people would really want to be the average person in an era with poor sanitation, corporeal punishment, no education, illiteracy, expensive and faint artificial lighting, widespread diseases, non-existent dental care, low life expectancy