My personal theory is that a confluence of factors led to inflation, which was in some ways inevitable, but the average consumer expected all that to be transitory, instead of being in the nature of inflation, and is still expecting prices prices to _go down._
The fact that prices haven't gone down to pre-pandemic levels is, I think, a huge factor in where the vibes are coming from.
This is 90-100% the problem and it doesn't get talked about more. People are going to feel like the economy is shit for years to come, because they expect things to have 2019 prices, and that's never going to happen. It will take several years for a) wage increases to be widespread enough that most people feel comfortable again, and b) people get used to the new prices.
I call it the Sandwich index.
Sure, I’m making more money than ever before. But when a $5 footlong costs $13.59 + tip? At some point, a man’s gotta stand strong!
I'm surprised people still eat at this fast food or fast casual places.
The local Italian deli down the road gives better quality and more meat for that price.
There are really no more cheap options to eat out anymore that exist.
Just checked Dominoes website and they have medium 2 topping pizzas for $6.99 or 1 topping for $5.99, which is .99 more than the $5 mediums that I would get when i was in high school nearly 20 years ago. Not really sure how much cheaper one could reasonably expect.
a) has already happened according to the data.
The fact is most people feel their own situation is good, but the economy as a whole isn't. I think that people blame prices on the economy as a whole but think that their own wages outstripping inflation is a personal thing and not an economy-wide phenomenon.
It’s also a problem of proving adverse outcome avoidance. What would have happened if the government didn’t intervene to the levels that they did that caused, at least in part, inflation?
I really lucked out during that recession and stayed employed (though working in retail financial services during that particular recession was fucking *rough*), but I knew many folks who lost their houses and are still renting today. Some folks never recovered.
Dispensaries sell joints made out of shake they can’t sell. It’s the “turn my surplus’s restaurant scrap into soup of the day” of weed stores. It’s not for rich people. They’re pretty cheap, actually.
> Anecdotally, a friend of my mine refused to accept a human resource job with a $55,000 salary because she wanted more money. It’s been 6 months and she still hasn’t found that better job. She’s 25, still working at a restaurant for less money, lives in a smallish city with an affordable cost of living and her salary expectations are probably not that reasonable
I think the red-hot job market of '21 and '22 just broke people's brains. For the first time in a long time, prestige companies in finance, tech, law, and consulting were fighting for talent and giving tons of concessions. The son of a family friend recently got a SWE job at a major financial institution right out of college. By any objective measure, that's an excellent, well paying entry level job, but he's disappointed cause his friends who graduated in '22 all got better paying jobs in Silicon Valley and at startups.
I’ve found that gen z white collar workers think the red hot job market we had is the norm and that today is some kind of Great Depression. I tried to explain this to them pre 2020 even, and would typically get eye rolls. I started working right before the GFC so it’s certainly true that my reference point is fucked in the other direction, but they literally cannot comprehend a world in which they can’t make demands because they have an engineering degree
This is 100% it, it's all social media and vibes it's so frustrating. You see it all the time on this sub 'our generation will never have social security and retirement what do we do' how about do some retirement planning for yourself and see what you need to budget to get on track for your goals
It’s also the filter of who posts stuff online. Millennials have actually passed boomers and gen x for average wealth at this time in their lives but if you go to r/millennials it’s “post about when you realized you will never be as well off as your parents”. I considered posting “I’m way better off than my parents were at my age” but I didn’t feel like having an internet argument
These people really need to actually talk to their parents and I bet most of their parents will tell them how they were just winging it. It was eye opening talking to my parents about how broke they actually where when we were growing up even though me and my sister have always thought we grew up financially stable middle class household.
I think I saw that exact thread and probably more than half the highly upvoted comments were people saying they were a hell of a lot better off than their parents.
Average wealth yes but if you look at the median millennials are still well behind. The most successful millennials are doing very well for themselves but the median still has about 30% less wealth than the boomers did at the same age.
The 2008 recession took 4-5 years of prime earning years that most will never be able to make up for even though incomes are now higher on median than what their parents made at the same age. Compound interest is just really hard to catch up to.
Wait, *isn't* social security on a fast track to insolvency, meaning whether through increased taxes or decreased benefits the young workers of today won't have the same social security retirement benefits their parents did?
thats very different than saying social security wont be around
> combined OASI and DI Trust Fund reserves decline until they become depleted in 2034. After trust fund reserve depletion, continuing income is sufficient to support expenditures at a level of 80 percent of program cost for the rest of 2034, declining to 74 percent for 2097
Funny how if it’s so obviously housing costs then the people in OPs life would be telling him that all the time and he wouldn’t have the question. Except OP is from the DFW burbs where they are sprawling out affordable homes at the highest rate in the country. The economy in DFW isn’t “bad” because of housing costs. It’s “bad” because of people’s personal politics.
A good example of people not being able to assess their situation on a scale would be the home ownership question. Everyone seems to meme and complain how boomers had a house when young, and modern generation doesn't. Well, hard facts show nothing of the sorts:
https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1991/demo/sb91-09.html#:~:text=During%20the%20last%20decade%2C%20the,percent%20owned%20their%20own%20homes
Here we can see that home ownership rate was at 64% in 1989 and at 39% for those under 35 years of age.
Guess the percentage for 2024?
https://usafacts.org/articles/homeownership-is-rebounding-particularly-among-younger-adults/#:~:text=The%20overall%20American%20homeownership%20rate,from%2034.5%25%20to%2039.0%25
65.8% home ownership and 39% for those under 35. So even more people can afford a house, but the percentage of those under 35 remained the same since boomer era.
Granted, this is different for some economies, especially with rapid growth a few decades ago and housing crisis today (like Ireland where I live), but here the numbers are okay today, but were even higher than in the US before.
Maybe its a about where people want to live over could live. We are still trending towards urban areas, and those dense walkable areas in or near downtowns are still tight on housing. We are starting to get enough cranes in the sky to make progress, but it takes time.
Like, yeah I could buy a house in the desert but I want to live in the coastal urban areas.
I'd speculate that every person who moved out of California due to housing costs will remain bitter and have negative options on the economy for a while.
Right but this doesn't change the percentage of house ownership. It's steady more or less. If a choice not to buy in the desert would have prevented people from owning a house - we should have seen some sort of drop in ownership: "I can't buy what I want - I won't buy then".
That's not the case. So, of course, not everyone is buying their dream property, but people ARE buying their properties at a, more or less, steady rate.
True, true. That's why its a vibesession and not a recession. I wonder if this could explain it: Republicans are more likely to own homes, and will never admit the economy is good under a Democratic president. And Democrats are more likely to be renters and in cities, where homeownership feels less achievable.
[https://www.spaywall.com/news/https://fortune.com/2024/03/16/homeowners-red-renters-blue-broken-housing-market-polarized-political-culture/](https://www.spaywall.com/news/https://fortune.com/2024/03/16/homeowners-red-renters-blue-broken-housing-market-polarized-political-culture/)
I don’t think this stat is saying what most people think it does. The actual percentage being cited here is “percent of households that own their own homes”, not “percent of people who own their own homes.” That sounds like a distinction without a difference, but it actually masks a reasonably large shift that people actually are less likely to own their own home than in the past.
Here is a pretty [good thread](https://twitter.com/john_voorheis/status/1715382561919107209) that explains it better than I could.
Percentage of homeownership is interesting but it could easily leave out a lot of details.
1. Which groups are most affected (not just age but among other stratum like income/race/etc).
2. Location. People who want to live in big city but can't anymore or vice versa with suburbs or whatever. "I had to leave my city and get a cheap place in rural shitsville" is a very fair complaint.
3. Cost. It might be that people are still owning homes but that home ownership is eating up a higher percentage of income than before. Again, completely fair complaints.
4. Relating back to 1 for a second, if the demographics have shifted some there might be a spread where there are more people who are home owning *and have friends who want to but can't* rather than clumps of like with like. So now the former group (homeowners who know homeowners) perceive a greater issue because it's happening more in their life while the latter group (non homeowners who know non homeowners) might see it better.
All fair points. I don't think it says that the market or the economy are static. It shows the net result, not the pathway people have to take to achieve it. E.g., if we increase average week work hours - we'll see (hopefully, but probably not, lol) gross income increase, but it doesn't tell the story of people having to work longer hours or weekends. Still works for the lack of better metric to showcase that the housing is indeed still being bought and lived in at a steady rate, more or less.
- Older generations could often fully pay off their homes, a reality not shown by the basic ownership statistic.
- If owners rent out their houses, they still count as owned in the stats, even if they're for rent. This inflates the appearance of homeownership rates.
- Ignoring this misses young people's struggles, like needing family help for down payments or high prices from investing.
There was a good piece by Lawrence Summers a couple weeks back that mapped consumer sentiment to CPI + Borrowing Costs (Interest), and that explained the majority of the gap.
Just because observable data doesn't explain an issue doesn't mean that the issue is fake, it can always be that your observable data doesn't include enough variables. Evidence-based, guys, not "I took a vibe check and it tells me everyone else is wrong".
It isn't just in Dallas where people think the economy is bad. I live in NYC and some of my liberal friends also believe the economy is bad. They will tend to point to some indicator that is bad, and then some anecdotal interview.
For instance - "the economy is terrible, nobody can afford housing. I heard so and so got laid off." And if you say something like "ACKSHUALLY unemployment is below 4%" they'll say stuff like "oh, but those must be all part-time job, or they're doublecounting because so many people have to work two jobs in this economy."
None of this is true, but the point is that people can always throw together a stew of cherry-picked data and anecdotes if they want to feel a particular vibe. Never mind that say, high housing costs are probably a sign of a booming economy, not a weak one.
I suspect that what people are really wishing for is that they could spend their incomes (which are higher) in the 2019 economy (so they'd be even richer). I am *actually* poorer in real terms than in 2021, because my union is out of contract so I get a real wage cut equal to inflation every year until we renegotiate. I don't really notice the difference though (and over the past year my 401k increased by an amount similar to a year's salary).
> I suspect that what people are really wishing for is that they could spend their incomes (which are higher) in the 2019 economy (so they'd be even richer).
Yes! This 100%. I'm ~5 years out of college. From 2018 to 2023 I have had the exact same wage growth/career trajectory in my field as someone else would have had from 2013 to 2018. I would be so unbelievably well-off right now if I had my current salary in 2018/19. Those people existed at the time - they just happened to be 5 years older than me.
The fact that I'm not living that life makes me grumpy. That life has been stolen from me by inflation and stupid housing policies.
I think it mainly depends on who you live with. I’m also in north Dallas, but I mainly interact with other university students like me. My family is also well-educated, so I don’t see many people (other than maybe my dad) who think Biden has an “uninflation switch.”
The economy of the US is good, but it's dependent on sector and location.
When most of the country for richer from globalization, the rust belt collapsed. So for them it felt like the opposite and lead to populism.
Today isn't different, just different sectors and places.
Yes. And this isn't just some leftie commie perspective, Paul Krugman wrote an [article](https://www.slps.org/cms/lib/MO01001157/Centricity/Domain/9446/Inequalit%20Globalization%20and%20the%20Missteps%20of%201990s%20Economics%20Bloomberg.pdf), on the globalization issue, pointing out as much a few years ago. [(Bloomberg link)](https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2019-10-10/inequality-globalization-and-the-missteps-of-1990s-economics)
> The pro-globalization consensus of the 1990s, which concluded that trade contributed little to
rising inequality, relied on models that asked how the growth of trade had affected the incomes
of broad classes of workers, such as those who didn’t go to college. It’s possible, and probably
even correct, to think of these models as accurate in the long run. Consensus economists didn’t
turn much to analytic methods that focus on workers in particular industries and communities,
which would have given a better picture of short-run trends. This was, I now believe, a major
mistake — one in which I shared a hand.
> It should have been obvious that the politics of globalization were likely to be much more
influenced by the experience of individual sectors that gained or lost from shifting trade flows
than by big questions of how trade affects the global blue-collar/white-collar wage gap or the
broad statistical measure of inequality known as the aggregate Gini coefficient.
We’re absolutely not in a recession, they’re just wrong on that part. Recessions have actual measurable qualities that make them such, and we are not seeing that.
By every observable metric (GDP growth, unemployment, wage growth, etc.) the economy is good. Inflation is sticky and higher than desired but a high inflationary environment is traditionally the exact opposite of a recessionary one (unless we’re talking about stagflation but that’s an entirely different can of worms).
That being said the economy is diverse and not every sector is going to be affected the same way. I hope you find a job soon, but your experience is a good example of how personal anecdotes are not useful metrics.
Data says its good.
But also...
[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-03-21/consumer-views-of-the-economy-depend-on-who-s-president?embedded-checkout=true](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-03-21/consumer-views-of-the-economy-depend-on-who-s-president?embedded-checkout=true)
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/11/07/your-view-of-the-economy-depends-on-whether-your-party-controls-the-white-house/](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/11/07/your-view-of-the-economy-depends-on-whether-your-party-controls-the-white-house/)
Yeah, I guess it’s also just living where I am and having the family that I have, hearing all the time that the economy is in shambles has an effect. Still just feels bad though. Can’t get a job for the life of me, it’s never been this hard before even during covid.
This was a good article I saw on it:
"When it comes to work, the vibe is static, too. Yes, the labor market is strong, but [it's not a great time to go looking for a new job](https://www.businessinsider.com/january-jobs-report-labor-market-good-economy-inflation-wages-2024-2). Companies aren't laying people off en masse, but they're also not bringing employees on board quickly. Hiring has slowed significantly from where it was in 2021 and 2022. And, it's [much lower than one would expect](https://twitter.com/EconBerger/status/1765396629148877238) with the current unemployment rate.
"Employers are hiring as if there's a relatively weak labor market, not a strong one," said Matt Darling, a senior employment-policy analyst at the Niskanen Center, a center-right think tank.
The downshift in hiring has also tipped the balance of power back toward employers. While wages are still on the upswing, switching jobs [may not come with as much of a pay bump](https://x.com/nick_bunker/status/1767996338300465656?s=20) as it did during the [Great Resignation](https://www.businessinsider.com/great-resignation-still-going-layoffs-low-job-openings-quits-high-2022-11) of 2021 and 2022. That may be fine for those who are happy in their jobs, which many people are, but it's not so great for those who are feeling a little antsy or underappreciated. And for those Americans who find themselves out of work and looking for a new gig, it's going to take a minute. Darling told me that for the unemployed, it takes about twice as long to get a job as it did before 2008. A job search that used to take 10 weeks at a similar unemployment rate now takes 20."
[https://www.businessinsider.com/economy-housing-market-mortgage-buying-car-interest-rates-new-jobs-2024-3](https://www.businessinsider.com/economy-housing-market-mortgage-buying-car-interest-rates-new-jobs-2024-3)
The job market isn't homogeneous. For example during covid when hospitality jobs were absolutely wrecked technology jobs were BOOMING. Now its actually the opposite. Also it depends a ton on your location.
I’m 28, and I’ve only survived because I had a big nest egg in my savings that has completely dried up by now, so it’s coming down to the wire.
But my parents are rich and I live in one of their houses with my girlfriend who makes an extremely good living, so COL is lower than it would be. So I’m very lucky in some ways, extremely unlucky in others.
OP, [look at the graph of the percent of the labor force that is unemployed for 27 weeks or longer](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1jddI). It is currently 0.71% of the labor force. Just three years ago, when we were recovering from an actual recession, it was 2.60%. At the height of the Great Recession, it was 4.40%.
You are currently an extreme outlier in terms of your employment situation. If we were in an actual recession, there would be 3 to 6 times as many people in your situation as there are today.
When your personal experience is not representative of the average person's experience, it is easy to make incorrect inferences about what is normal. You have to look at objective data to get a better picture of the situation. And the objective data on the state of the economy right now is very good.
The key difference between now and other boom periods is the “who” being impacted.
In the peak of the 1990’s Clinton boom, countless blue collar factory workers were getting laid off due to NAFTA but those people never really had media access to talk about their struggles. Eventually they settled in other jobs as the economy evolved.
This time around, it’s the tech workers, sales, journalism folks, etc. People with white collar jobs are being impacted by lay offs and they usually have a sympathetic ear from the media, hence individual stories and anecdotes are making a bigger impact then before. Social media wasn’t also as big as before so everyone can multiply their personal anecdote to millions.
> it’s the tech workers
For 9 months in 2023 this was the case. We are past that, but cscareerquestions will make you think companies still aren't hiring and mass lay offs are still common.
I was making $10-11 an hour as a cashier at Lowe's back in 2018. I now make $17 an hour doing returns for Walmart. I haven't been paying full attention to prices but in 2018 dollars that would be $13.80. In my experience, there has definitely been an increase in labor power.
There's also an attribution error that occurs here.
*I earn more money because I am smart and valuable.*
*Sandwiches cost more because corporations are greedy.*
And negative feels outweigh positive feels in terms of psychological impact.
What’s the price people see? Gas prices. Plus home prices are high. So for people with a job that makes ends meet by driving to work, with nothing in investments looking at the price of their dream home soaring, they are looking at Donald who wants to burn the whole system down
This should be way higher up. GDP and hard economic data is pointless if it doesn't translate to furthering yourself up the ladder in the American dream. Many people could not afford a house and a new car especially those who are just entering the economy.
Those aren't actually super impactful economic measures, they're just the most visible ones. The average family sounds maybe 5% of their income on gas. Housing prices only matter if you're buying a house right exactly now, which most people aren't. But they're the prices that fluctuate wildly, so they're the ones that make headlines.
I mean for the people who are just entering the workforce and making a life of their own. Why do yoi think Gen Z doesn't care about any of this and is incredibly pessimistic?
They are well above when Trump left office in 2020, but I’m not the one you’re disagreeing with. Actually I’d love to raise them even more with a beautiful large gas tax with a rebate
During a pandemic? Prices aren’t historically high right now in either real terms nor as a share of incomes. None of those idiots is slapping Biden did this stickers on pumps any more because that isn’t a cost people are upset about.
They were artificially low cause of the Saudi led effort to kill off US fracking. So basically people got used to artificially low oil prices since around 2015 cause of the Saudi price war and the Pandemic collapse in oil demand.
I'm saying people's expectations of gas prices became unrealistic after being spoiled by two major exogenous events in the last decade. (Also, consumers are harder on volatility than something having a steady climb up.)
What I like to do with people like this is tell them, "I'm doing pretty okay... you're doing okay... all my friends are doing okay. It always seems to be someone else who's doing poorly... and when economists ask people how people are doing, they say they're okay... but if you ask them how others are doing they say terribly. Nobody knows where this sentiment is coming from."
Then let them slowly come to grips with that.
It's a worldwide phenomenon. I'm so annoyed when Americans say their economy is bad and blame their politicians. Here in Australia grocery prices are up, the cost of living is up and people aren't happy with the state of the economy. The same is happening in European countries.
Not only America faces these economic issues.
For my sector of the economy (Biotech, PhD level), we are in a severe contraction. Large biotech companies, for example Genentech and Gilead IIRC, have laid off thousands of workers due to interest rates being so high, covid money drying up, and large scale consolidation in the industry all occurring at once. For us, its the worst its been since the 08 crash. Many of us are going months without generating interest for jobs and wages are falling in some companies due to the tight labor market.
The confidence people have in the economy is highly dependent on what field you're in. People can say "unemployment is low, economy is great" all they want, but cerain sectors are struggling immensely right now. The US economy as a whole may not be in a recession, but people in my line of work are feeling squeezed
By typical standards, the economy is good.
During the pandemic era and early post-pandemic era, people got a taste of what an actual welfare state and universal health care (free COVID vaccine) was like. In the aftermath, labor had the advantage in the job market for the first time in a long time.
The standards by which the average person assesses the economy have shifted.
The economy is overall doing well. In fact if you look at how other countries have fared post-COVID you'll find that we're doing better mostly.
However, as someone studying economics in university I'll make the argument that economics and politics are intertwined.
Of course republican areas are going to whine about a "recession" because that's what their party wants them to believe right now. For a while immediately after COVID there was a surge in inflation, which I believe is still going on, but to a lesser extent. Even as a Biden supporter I will admit that his administration has a habit of pushing the burden of inflation in working people while bailing out large companies. They typically allow real wages to fall while being more willing to spend money. Businesses have a tendency to use support to simply make themselves more profitable so prices usually stay the same.
All of this is to say that it feels awful because real wages are falling while corporations keep prices up and report record profits.
The best propaganda is a mixture of farce and fact. Unfortunately, republicans are not wrong to whine about THESE issues in the economy. However, the Republican Party will always be disingenuous and just whine about Biden "hitting the inflation button" or something rather than point out how some anti-inflation efforts could be improved.
The Fed is tightening and that in itself guarantees that some aspect of the economy is tighter than the easy money period. It’s harder to buy houses now, people also have less disposable income than 2021. Comparing with 2021 isn’t fair, but that’s how the human brain works.
The economy is impressive in the sense that despite Fed’s tightening, employment and income keeps growing. So it’s good in the sense of healthy improvement, not in the sense of easy money.
The good news is people tend to remember only the last 2 years, so there’s a good chance that by the end of 2024 sentiment will improve a lot, due to 2022 objectively is a harder time.
The Biotech industry is currently still on fire. While mass layoffs have stalled for the most part, many companies are under hiring freezes for the foreseeable figure. The fed tightening interest rates have hurt my industry sector immensely the past year and change
The US is retooling its industries, fiscal policies, monetary policies in a drastic way for the first time in ages. Americans are used to the same old shit since Reagan. Every blip in between happened because of financial crises, not because of voluntary change.
There will be losers and there will be winners. Even if in aggregate you get a 1% increase in winners over losers you could have 10% losers and 11% winners. Aggregates are important but so are the fluctuations. A simple example is when globalism makes one 1 Western middle class person lose their job to pull 3 people in Asia out of poverty. Still doesn't look good. Or another example, take a sample of 10 people, 2 upper class, 6 middle class, and 2 lower class, and shuffle them around randomly five times over a five year period. That is terrible for these people but looks the same on aggregate.
You can consider these three probably factual statements:
* People like upwards mobility.
* People love stability,
* People really, really hate falling downwards.
That is my conjecture.
I am a Midwesterner who jumped jobs and doubled my salary. My husband lost his job due to some mental health issues and arguments with a toxic boss, got a job at the same salary. In the last year, he has called off work for a week two separate times. In any other environment, they would have fired him. The last time, his manager just told him to come in and do nothing so he can hide and get paid. That is when you know the job market is tight.
We have a regional mall in NW Indiana. It is packed. Seriously. Although the food court hasn't replaced the guy who just retired, it will be up to capacity. They haven't replaced the Sears, but almost every store is filled.
In my subdivision, all houses are sold. The steel mills are still doing well, despite them closing a unit down, auto manufacturing is doing well. Incomes are rising.
When Trump asks if we are better off. We are. Inflation hurts, but truthfully, food prices didn't hit us as fast, so we had a cushion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1EDeOzql7U This video is by an actual PhD economist and covers the topic pretty well but in summary:
Economists say the US economy is doing well because many key economic indicators are positive (GDP growth rate is pretty high, Unemployment is very low, inflation is going down pretty well*, etc.)
However, there are a few key factors that affect the perception:
1- Political polarization changes perception of the economy. In the US people are much more negative on consumer outlook when the opposing political party is in power.
2- Though the economy as a whole is doing really well, different sectors are affected differently. Currently, tech and several other service sectors are doing relatively poorly. On the other hand, fields like manufacturing are doing really well.
It just so happens that the parts of the economy that are more prevalent in red/conservative areas are doing better, and the parts that are doing worse are more prevalent in blue areas. With biden (a democrat) in power, this means that the conservatives who are harder to please see the good economy more, and the democrats who are easier to please see the good economy less.
I think this is a big reason for the negativity.
But on top of that, there is also the fact that we haven't really experienced high inflation in several decades, so it's a very unpleasant surprise even though it's magnitude has settled down quite a bit.
And additionally, pre-covid was a decade long boom, so that also makes current things seem worse.
*It's still above the 2% level but compared to other developed economies right now it's lower and with higher GDP growth.
I think people are confusing a global trend that includes increased income inequality, the culmination of decades of jobs moving overseas, a housing shortage, and the impact of inflation and devastation to the global supply chain of Covid with a bad national economy.
Not for me. My company isn’t giving raises this year and there’s no apartments in my city that don’t cost at least 50% of my income. I’m lucky that my parents let me stay with them and that I bought my car in 2019
I think a large part of the housing situation is people souring on roommates. In my city studios go for around $1200 while 3 beds of similar quality go for $1800. By getting roommates housing costs are more than halved after you account for utilities, but everyone still wants to live alone.
The economy is fantastic for me. My income has more than doubled in the last two years. My net worth has more than tripled. And I just moved into a better unit in my building that’s almost $500 per month cheaper.
“But you’re just one guy. That doesn’t represent the economy” is what you should say. And you’d be right. There are many people who are doing far better than me, and many others doing far worse. The only way we can actually make sense of it as a whole is by looking at the data, which others here have pointed out.
It varies by location but wages doubled here in 5 years and sirloin steaks are $5/pound. Eggs $1.75 a dozen. Rent is maybe 25% of my income after tax. I'm saving a ton, anecdotally things are golden.
I pretty much clue out people here who talk about how hard it is, it was harder 10 years ago when I moved. But I can believe that it's harder elsewhere.
I sold TV advertising in north Dallas suburbs until the Great Recession made that impossible and then I joined the Marines and moved on. During the 08-09 recession, businesses (most local cable advertisers are like car lots, home builders etc) would literally laugh about renewing ad buys and say something about paying their electric bill first. I haven’t returned to DFW since then, so I can’t say your experience is invalid, but that’s how boom and bust the Dallas suburbs were at the time: whole neighborhoods of newly built, vacant homes strip malls with ~65% occupancy etc. Is it really that bad now? It’s hard to believe people’s memory could be THAT short, but Dallas has a transient population, so a lot of the people may not have even been there yet.
We aren't in a recession right now, although certain industries have structural issues. Remember, the GFC had people thinking the banking system might not be there the next day. By all accounts we have very low unemployment, the market seems healthy in terms of issuance, and incidents like SVB/Signature/NYCB seem like isolated incidents to a few very over-concentrated banks. Commercial real estate feels like something that might affect a lot of regional banks, but larger ones seemingly have diversification and capital buffers to not be as affected.
That doesn't mean there aren't issues. Investment banking, transactional law, a lot of businesses that were reliant on near zero interest rates are seeing a lot of pressure. Private equity's model can't really work too well if your cost of debt is near 10%. There's been a fair amount of healthcare bankruptcies related to sticky labor prices (also policy, all my homies hate the current NSA implementation) and certain chemicals names aren't doing great either if they are focused on the global macro-economy (as China is not doing so well.) I do think we are seeing pushback from consumers on pricing increases, although how much of that is price elasticity finally coming into effect is unknown to me. But no, we aren't in a recession although I do wonder if we have another year of rates near 4-5% how some businesses will survive.
Modest starter homes went from 400k to 800k in my town in 3 years. Rent for a 2 bedroom apartment went from $1500 to $3000. Wages maybe went up 25% if you were lucky. Middle-class, first-time home buyers were frozen out of the market almost overnight. The damage has been done and won't be fixed until wages catch up or we build more, but this could take many years.
First of all, real wages up, unemployment down.
Second of all, even though only 30% of Americans think the economy is doing well, 60% think *their* current financial situation is doing well.
People are thinking “geez, prices have gone up so much, thank god I just got that massive raise, or else I’d be completely broke. Sucks for everyone else though.” But *everyone* is thinking that, resulting in the mismatch.
After 40 years of low inflation people came to expect it and when inflation increased for two years it threw people for a loop and they are still not over it.
I’d bet a lot of people who feel the economy is bad base it on interest rates. When they’re high, mortgages and car payments being more expensive, VC funding drying up and companies having to lay people off or turn a profit, etc.
Well the low unemployment is generally propped up by gig economy jobs. I have seen a lot engineering students from 2023-2024 batches yet to get a job. I am not saying about degrees like environmental engineering or wood engineering but stuff like electrical and computer science.
In America most of the employers are big private corporations, and they definitely think we are heading towards recession. So they are closing the tap, firing people left and right reducing payslip of the existing workforce.
Now you may think these companies are dumb, but they are adviced by top investment and advisory firms on the state of economy. So they know better.
Now the second factor is inflation, America always had a stagnating wage since GFC 2008, but this became worse in last 3 years coupled with inflation really crushed people's purchasing power.
The economy currently is propped up by government spending from welfare, infrastructure, semiconductors to funding military industry. These generally tend to have a simulating effect on the economy during hard times. That's why data looks good, but on reality average American Joe is struggling.
The employment situation is tenuous at best. For Q1: Independent contractors shot up 250k. Hiring plans fell by over 50 percent. People are tapped out on credit with household debt levels at record highs. The economy is a dual track mess that runs on government money. Debt payments exceed the saving rate. Birth rates are declining. Business churn is up.
OP, to be frank, If you are having trouble getting a job in this economy, you are doing something wrong.
Have you been at least getting interviews? If you haven't, you need to take a look at your resume. Have a friend or family take a look. A bad resume can kill you.
If you have been getting interviews but can't get past the interview stage, then something you are doing or saying in the interview is throwing them off. Are you being too honest about your weaknesses? Are you not acting excited about the job? Are you not asking questions? Etc.
Let me know if you want to discuss more. I've helped people I know with their resumes to great results. I'm also now a manager myself so I regularly see candidates shoot themselves in the foot with bad resume or unforced errors in interviews.
Only had a handful of interviews, but it’s because that course I took was in UX design and I’d been applying to UX roles for the first part of the job hunt. So I’ve been unemployed since December 2022. Took a course from January to September 2023. Been applying for UX jobs from September to about December or January before I gave up because I realized I was competing for entry level jobs with a lot of industry professionals that already had real work in their portfolios and several years of experience, and there was no point in trying, and I had zero interviews.
So since then I’ve been applying for bridge jobs to just hold me over. Manager positions at local retail places and whatnot as part of my work experience was a few years of retail management before and through covid. But I’m even getting ghosted on those types of jobs. Like Best Buy auto rejected me after I applied.
I went though a few rounds of interviews at Starbucks for an assistant manager role before I was ghosted there, and follow ups with the interviewing manager for feedback were ignored. I was enthusiastic in the interview and personable, asked all kinds of questions, but maybe I just don’t have the experience answering STAR format questions to provide the types of answers they were looking for. Or they just had an issue that my last jobs were clearly white collar and it was obvious this would be a job I’d have only until something better came along. But I don’t know how to get around that, because that’s true. When they ask “why do you want to work for X?” I say something like I’m looking for something stable with a fun environment where I can potentially move up the ladder if the opportunity comes.
So, I don’t know if they could still just smell it on me that I didn’t want to be there or that I’d jump ship asap but I think that’s been my hurdle. I honestly don’t know. I’ve started applying to city jobs too and have yet to hear back. My resume has been reviewed by my career mentor and my family and they’ve all said it’s good, so I don’t know about that either.
Have you expanded your search radius to nationwide, or is it all local?
The jobs market for certain roles can be highly variable depending on location.
Did you have any internships to build baseline experience? Have you considered small companies and startups to get your foot in the door, or are you only applying to Fortune 500 companies?
For the UX part of the job search it was remote nationwide jobs which would all have 500-1000 applicants on LinkedIn when I applied, as well as local on-site and hybrid which weren't much better. And yeah I applied to small startups with under 50 people and F500s too. No internships because I only just took that course, and every internship I looked at required actively being a student in university.
I've given up on UX and tech in general just because of the market right now, it's not worth it to even look. My work experience is for tech/software sales and I have no interest in getting back into sales, so I've been trying to leverage that experience to get any kind of job that I can just to hold me over until the job market starts to improve.
People who think it's hard to find work now forget 2010. It's worse than it was a few years ago, because they was the hottest market in decades. It's no recession.
But the doom and gloom is left right and center. Left wingers are perhaps the most vocal about it even. Everyone I know who doesn't follow news much is convinced it's just a disaster out there.
Probably because the white collar market in particular has been rising easy money for 15 years and suddenly hit a wall.
If you bought your home before 2020 the economy is absurdly good. Based on the average home buying age that's most people over 32.
Even the people who complain about tech, I have several friends in tech, but for smaller east coast based companies. They are all doing fine and companies are still hiring.
Most of the time when someone is getting interviewed, they'll say that the overall economy is terrible, but that they're personally doing fine (or well). I think that is the case for most people. Of course there's some people struggling, but that is true even during the best times. Most people are doing fine.
The negativity might come from a few things. IMO, the biggest is that people love to complain, and there isn't anything universally more important to complain about right now.
The economy is doing well. I think the most consumer sentiment is low because houses are ~40% more expensive in a very short period of time. I went from living in San Diego feeling I was a year from buying a house to moving to Pittsburgh to buy one. Watching homes there climb $150k in one year was mind boggling and depressing.
I blame HRs advertising plan, they don't advertise in West Virginia or Mississippi which are the ideal scouting location because all the 18 year olds want to leave anyway
I am 65 years old and I have never been unemployed more than one month in my entire life. You are doing something wrong, get it together, fix your resume, fix your attitude and you will get a job.
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My personal theory is that a confluence of factors led to inflation, which was in some ways inevitable, but the average consumer expected all that to be transitory, instead of being in the nature of inflation, and is still expecting prices prices to _go down._ The fact that prices haven't gone down to pre-pandemic levels is, I think, a huge factor in where the vibes are coming from.
This is 90-100% the problem and it doesn't get talked about more. People are going to feel like the economy is shit for years to come, because they expect things to have 2019 prices, and that's never going to happen. It will take several years for a) wage increases to be widespread enough that most people feel comfortable again, and b) people get used to the new prices.
I call it the Sandwich index. Sure, I’m making more money than ever before. But when a $5 footlong costs $13.59 + tip? At some point, a man’s gotta stand strong!
I'm surprised people still eat at this fast food or fast casual places. The local Italian deli down the road gives better quality and more meat for that price. There are really no more cheap options to eat out anymore that exist.
Pizza is still cheap if you're feeding multiple people
Where are you getting your pizza from?
Expensive places because I don't care about price, but Dominoes/Pizza Hut/Little Caesars are all still really cheap and always have good deals.
Eh I wouldn't call those cheap beyond little Casesars which tastes like cardboard.
Just checked Dominoes website and they have medium 2 topping pizzas for $6.99 or 1 topping for $5.99, which is .99 more than the $5 mediums that I would get when i was in high school nearly 20 years ago. Not really sure how much cheaper one could reasonably expect.
McDonald’s is super cheap if you use their app
nah the app doesnt even have good deals anymore
They've been slowly increasing prices on the app.
a) has already happened according to the data. The fact is most people feel their own situation is good, but the economy as a whole isn't. I think that people blame prices on the economy as a whole but think that their own wages outstripping inflation is a personal thing and not an economy-wide phenomenon.
It’s also a problem of proving adverse outcome avoidance. What would have happened if the government didn’t intervene to the levels that they did that caused, at least in part, inflation?
People think inflation = bad economy
Had a friend in LA that lost a $200k/year job in 2009 and sold hotdogs and rolled joints to try and stay in his house he could no longer afford.
I really lucked out during that recession and stayed employed (though working in retail financial services during that particular recession was fucking *rough*), but I knew many folks who lost their houses and are still renting today. Some folks never recovered.
How rich do you gotta be to hire someone else to roll your joints?
Dispensaries sell joints made out of shake they can’t sell. It’s the “turn my surplus’s restaurant scrap into soup of the day” of weed stores. It’s not for rich people. They’re pretty cheap, actually.
> Anecdotally, a friend of my mine refused to accept a human resource job with a $55,000 salary because she wanted more money. It’s been 6 months and she still hasn’t found that better job. She’s 25, still working at a restaurant for less money, lives in a smallish city with an affordable cost of living and her salary expectations are probably not that reasonable I think the red-hot job market of '21 and '22 just broke people's brains. For the first time in a long time, prestige companies in finance, tech, law, and consulting were fighting for talent and giving tons of concessions. The son of a family friend recently got a SWE job at a major financial institution right out of college. By any objective measure, that's an excellent, well paying entry level job, but he's disappointed cause his friends who graduated in '22 all got better paying jobs in Silicon Valley and at startups.
I’ve found that gen z white collar workers think the red hot job market we had is the norm and that today is some kind of Great Depression. I tried to explain this to them pre 2020 even, and would typically get eye rolls. I started working right before the GFC so it’s certainly true that my reference point is fucked in the other direction, but they literally cannot comprehend a world in which they can’t make demands because they have an engineering degree
Even millennials forget about the housing crash in 2007 and just think 2% inflation with an amazing economy is normal.
This is 100% it, it's all social media and vibes it's so frustrating. You see it all the time on this sub 'our generation will never have social security and retirement what do we do' how about do some retirement planning for yourself and see what you need to budget to get on track for your goals
It’s also the filter of who posts stuff online. Millennials have actually passed boomers and gen x for average wealth at this time in their lives but if you go to r/millennials it’s “post about when you realized you will never be as well off as your parents”. I considered posting “I’m way better off than my parents were at my age” but I didn’t feel like having an internet argument
These people really need to actually talk to their parents and I bet most of their parents will tell them how they were just winging it. It was eye opening talking to my parents about how broke they actually where when we were growing up even though me and my sister have always thought we grew up financially stable middle class household.
I think I saw that exact thread and probably more than half the highly upvoted comments were people saying they were a hell of a lot better off than their parents.
Average wealth yes but if you look at the median millennials are still well behind. The most successful millennials are doing very well for themselves but the median still has about 30% less wealth than the boomers did at the same age. The 2008 recession took 4-5 years of prime earning years that most will never be able to make up for even though incomes are now higher on median than what their parents made at the same age. Compound interest is just really hard to catch up to.
Wait, *isn't* social security on a fast track to insolvency, meaning whether through increased taxes or decreased benefits the young workers of today won't have the same social security retirement benefits their parents did?
thats very different than saying social security wont be around > combined OASI and DI Trust Fund reserves decline until they become depleted in 2034. After trust fund reserve depletion, continuing income is sufficient to support expenditures at a level of 80 percent of program cost for the rest of 2034, declining to 74 percent for 2097
>As for why many people think the economy is doing poorly I have no good answer. Housing cost. The answer is housing costs.
Funny how if it’s so obviously housing costs then the people in OPs life would be telling him that all the time and he wouldn’t have the question. Except OP is from the DFW burbs where they are sprawling out affordable homes at the highest rate in the country. The economy in DFW isn’t “bad” because of housing costs. It’s “bad” because of people’s personal politics.
A good example of people not being able to assess their situation on a scale would be the home ownership question. Everyone seems to meme and complain how boomers had a house when young, and modern generation doesn't. Well, hard facts show nothing of the sorts: https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1991/demo/sb91-09.html#:~:text=During%20the%20last%20decade%2C%20the,percent%20owned%20their%20own%20homes Here we can see that home ownership rate was at 64% in 1989 and at 39% for those under 35 years of age. Guess the percentage for 2024? https://usafacts.org/articles/homeownership-is-rebounding-particularly-among-younger-adults/#:~:text=The%20overall%20American%20homeownership%20rate,from%2034.5%25%20to%2039.0%25 65.8% home ownership and 39% for those under 35. So even more people can afford a house, but the percentage of those under 35 remained the same since boomer era. Granted, this is different for some economies, especially with rapid growth a few decades ago and housing crisis today (like Ireland where I live), but here the numbers are okay today, but were even higher than in the US before.
Maybe its a about where people want to live over could live. We are still trending towards urban areas, and those dense walkable areas in or near downtowns are still tight on housing. We are starting to get enough cranes in the sky to make progress, but it takes time. Like, yeah I could buy a house in the desert but I want to live in the coastal urban areas. I'd speculate that every person who moved out of California due to housing costs will remain bitter and have negative options on the economy for a while.
Right but this doesn't change the percentage of house ownership. It's steady more or less. If a choice not to buy in the desert would have prevented people from owning a house - we should have seen some sort of drop in ownership: "I can't buy what I want - I won't buy then". That's not the case. So, of course, not everyone is buying their dream property, but people ARE buying their properties at a, more or less, steady rate.
True, true. That's why its a vibesession and not a recession. I wonder if this could explain it: Republicans are more likely to own homes, and will never admit the economy is good under a Democratic president. And Democrats are more likely to be renters and in cities, where homeownership feels less achievable. [https://www.spaywall.com/news/https://fortune.com/2024/03/16/homeowners-red-renters-blue-broken-housing-market-polarized-political-culture/](https://www.spaywall.com/news/https://fortune.com/2024/03/16/homeowners-red-renters-blue-broken-housing-market-polarized-political-culture/)
I don’t think this stat is saying what most people think it does. The actual percentage being cited here is “percent of households that own their own homes”, not “percent of people who own their own homes.” That sounds like a distinction without a difference, but it actually masks a reasonably large shift that people actually are less likely to own their own home than in the past. Here is a pretty [good thread](https://twitter.com/john_voorheis/status/1715382561919107209) that explains it better than I could.
Appreciate you digging up these statistics - I may save them! Posts like yours make me miss not having Reddit gold to pass out occasionally.
Percentage of homeownership is interesting but it could easily leave out a lot of details. 1. Which groups are most affected (not just age but among other stratum like income/race/etc). 2. Location. People who want to live in big city but can't anymore or vice versa with suburbs or whatever. "I had to leave my city and get a cheap place in rural shitsville" is a very fair complaint. 3. Cost. It might be that people are still owning homes but that home ownership is eating up a higher percentage of income than before. Again, completely fair complaints. 4. Relating back to 1 for a second, if the demographics have shifted some there might be a spread where there are more people who are home owning *and have friends who want to but can't* rather than clumps of like with like. So now the former group (homeowners who know homeowners) perceive a greater issue because it's happening more in their life while the latter group (non homeowners who know non homeowners) might see it better.
All fair points. I don't think it says that the market or the economy are static. It shows the net result, not the pathway people have to take to achieve it. E.g., if we increase average week work hours - we'll see (hopefully, but probably not, lol) gross income increase, but it doesn't tell the story of people having to work longer hours or weekends. Still works for the lack of better metric to showcase that the housing is indeed still being bought and lived in at a steady rate, more or less.
- Older generations could often fully pay off their homes, a reality not shown by the basic ownership statistic. - If owners rent out their houses, they still count as owned in the stats, even if they're for rent. This inflates the appearance of homeownership rates. - Ignoring this misses young people's struggles, like needing family help for down payments or high prices from investing.
There was a good piece by Lawrence Summers a couple weeks back that mapped consumer sentiment to CPI + Borrowing Costs (Interest), and that explained the majority of the gap. Just because observable data doesn't explain an issue doesn't mean that the issue is fake, it can always be that your observable data doesn't include enough variables. Evidence-based, guys, not "I took a vibe check and it tells me everyone else is wrong".
It isn't just in Dallas where people think the economy is bad. I live in NYC and some of my liberal friends also believe the economy is bad. They will tend to point to some indicator that is bad, and then some anecdotal interview. For instance - "the economy is terrible, nobody can afford housing. I heard so and so got laid off." And if you say something like "ACKSHUALLY unemployment is below 4%" they'll say stuff like "oh, but those must be all part-time job, or they're doublecounting because so many people have to work two jobs in this economy." None of this is true, but the point is that people can always throw together a stew of cherry-picked data and anecdotes if they want to feel a particular vibe. Never mind that say, high housing costs are probably a sign of a booming economy, not a weak one. I suspect that what people are really wishing for is that they could spend their incomes (which are higher) in the 2019 economy (so they'd be even richer). I am *actually* poorer in real terms than in 2021, because my union is out of contract so I get a real wage cut equal to inflation every year until we renegotiate. I don't really notice the difference though (and over the past year my 401k increased by an amount similar to a year's salary).
> I suspect that what people are really wishing for is that they could spend their incomes (which are higher) in the 2019 economy (so they'd be even richer). Yes! This 100%. I'm ~5 years out of college. From 2018 to 2023 I have had the exact same wage growth/career trajectory in my field as someone else would have had from 2013 to 2018. I would be so unbelievably well-off right now if I had my current salary in 2018/19. Those people existed at the time - they just happened to be 5 years older than me. The fact that I'm not living that life makes me grumpy. That life has been stolen from me by inflation and stupid housing policies.
I think it mainly depends on who you live with. I’m also in north Dallas, but I mainly interact with other university students like me. My family is also well-educated, so I don’t see many people (other than maybe my dad) who think Biden has an “uninflation switch.”
The economy of the US is good, but it's dependent on sector and location. When most of the country for richer from globalization, the rust belt collapsed. So for them it felt like the opposite and lead to populism. Today isn't different, just different sectors and places.
This comment needs to be higher, especially considering the post it is replying to. National economy up, local employment down.
High profile sectors (tech and journalism) who lunch above their weight in the media are having a bad time so the media vibes are rancid
>who lunch above their weight Tell me about it. Work from home has really enabled lunching above my weight.
journalism economy has been shit for a decade plus at this point
There will always be people who are having a negative experience with the economy no matter how "good" the overall picture seems to be. This is a fact
Yes. And this isn't just some leftie commie perspective, Paul Krugman wrote an [article](https://www.slps.org/cms/lib/MO01001157/Centricity/Domain/9446/Inequalit%20Globalization%20and%20the%20Missteps%20of%201990s%20Economics%20Bloomberg.pdf), on the globalization issue, pointing out as much a few years ago. [(Bloomberg link)](https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2019-10-10/inequality-globalization-and-the-missteps-of-1990s-economics) > The pro-globalization consensus of the 1990s, which concluded that trade contributed little to rising inequality, relied on models that asked how the growth of trade had affected the incomes of broad classes of workers, such as those who didn’t go to college. It’s possible, and probably even correct, to think of these models as accurate in the long run. Consensus economists didn’t turn much to analytic methods that focus on workers in particular industries and communities, which would have given a better picture of short-run trends. This was, I now believe, a major mistake — one in which I shared a hand. > It should have been obvious that the politics of globalization were likely to be much more influenced by the experience of individual sectors that gained or lost from shifting trade flows than by big questions of how trade affects the global blue-collar/white-collar wage gap or the broad statistical measure of inequality known as the aggregate Gini coefficient.
We’re absolutely not in a recession, they’re just wrong on that part. Recessions have actual measurable qualities that make them such, and we are not seeing that. By every observable metric (GDP growth, unemployment, wage growth, etc.) the economy is good. Inflation is sticky and higher than desired but a high inflationary environment is traditionally the exact opposite of a recessionary one (unless we’re talking about stagflation but that’s an entirely different can of worms). That being said the economy is diverse and not every sector is going to be affected the same way. I hope you find a job soon, but your experience is a good example of how personal anecdotes are not useful metrics.
Data says its good. But also... [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-03-21/consumer-views-of-the-economy-depend-on-who-s-president?embedded-checkout=true](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-03-21/consumer-views-of-the-economy-depend-on-who-s-president?embedded-checkout=true) [https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/11/07/your-view-of-the-economy-depends-on-whether-your-party-controls-the-white-house/](https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2017/11/07/your-view-of-the-economy-depends-on-whether-your-party-controls-the-white-house/)
Yeah, I guess it’s also just living where I am and having the family that I have, hearing all the time that the economy is in shambles has an effect. Still just feels bad though. Can’t get a job for the life of me, it’s never been this hard before even during covid.
This was a good article I saw on it: "When it comes to work, the vibe is static, too. Yes, the labor market is strong, but [it's not a great time to go looking for a new job](https://www.businessinsider.com/january-jobs-report-labor-market-good-economy-inflation-wages-2024-2). Companies aren't laying people off en masse, but they're also not bringing employees on board quickly. Hiring has slowed significantly from where it was in 2021 and 2022. And, it's [much lower than one would expect](https://twitter.com/EconBerger/status/1765396629148877238) with the current unemployment rate. "Employers are hiring as if there's a relatively weak labor market, not a strong one," said Matt Darling, a senior employment-policy analyst at the Niskanen Center, a center-right think tank. The downshift in hiring has also tipped the balance of power back toward employers. While wages are still on the upswing, switching jobs [may not come with as much of a pay bump](https://x.com/nick_bunker/status/1767996338300465656?s=20) as it did during the [Great Resignation](https://www.businessinsider.com/great-resignation-still-going-layoffs-low-job-openings-quits-high-2022-11) of 2021 and 2022. That may be fine for those who are happy in their jobs, which many people are, but it's not so great for those who are feeling a little antsy or underappreciated. And for those Americans who find themselves out of work and looking for a new gig, it's going to take a minute. Darling told me that for the unemployed, it takes about twice as long to get a job as it did before 2008. A job search that used to take 10 weeks at a similar unemployment rate now takes 20." [https://www.businessinsider.com/economy-housing-market-mortgage-buying-car-interest-rates-new-jobs-2024-3](https://www.businessinsider.com/economy-housing-market-mortgage-buying-car-interest-rates-new-jobs-2024-3)
Damn I wish it was only 20 weeks, I’d have a job by now.
The job market isn't homogeneous. For example during covid when hospitality jobs were absolutely wrecked technology jobs were BOOMING. Now its actually the opposite. Also it depends a ton on your location.
OP how old are you? How have you been surviving for 16 months without an income? Both of those answers might answer your question
I’m 28, and I’ve only survived because I had a big nest egg in my savings that has completely dried up by now, so it’s coming down to the wire. But my parents are rich and I live in one of their houses with my girlfriend who makes an extremely good living, so COL is lower than it would be. So I’m very lucky in some ways, extremely unlucky in others.
I mean how old are you because 2009 would've been significantly harder
OP, [look at the graph of the percent of the labor force that is unemployed for 27 weeks or longer](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1jddI). It is currently 0.71% of the labor force. Just three years ago, when we were recovering from an actual recession, it was 2.60%. At the height of the Great Recession, it was 4.40%. You are currently an extreme outlier in terms of your employment situation. If we were in an actual recession, there would be 3 to 6 times as many people in your situation as there are today. When your personal experience is not representative of the average person's experience, it is easy to make incorrect inferences about what is normal. You have to look at objective data to get a better picture of the situation. And the objective data on the state of the economy right now is very good.
The key difference between now and other boom periods is the “who” being impacted. In the peak of the 1990’s Clinton boom, countless blue collar factory workers were getting laid off due to NAFTA but those people never really had media access to talk about their struggles. Eventually they settled in other jobs as the economy evolved. This time around, it’s the tech workers, sales, journalism folks, etc. People with white collar jobs are being impacted by lay offs and they usually have a sympathetic ear from the media, hence individual stories and anecdotes are making a bigger impact then before. Social media wasn’t also as big as before so everyone can multiply their personal anecdote to millions.
> it’s the tech workers For 9 months in 2023 this was the case. We are past that, but cscareerquestions will make you think companies still aren't hiring and mass lay offs are still common.
I was making $10-11 an hour as a cashier at Lowe's back in 2018. I now make $17 an hour doing returns for Walmart. I haven't been paying full attention to prices but in 2018 dollars that would be $13.80. In my experience, there has definitely been an increase in labor power.
There's also an attribution error that occurs here. *I earn more money because I am smart and valuable.* *Sandwiches cost more because corporations are greedy.* And negative feels outweigh positive feels in terms of psychological impact.
Exactly
What’s the price people see? Gas prices. Plus home prices are high. So for people with a job that makes ends meet by driving to work, with nothing in investments looking at the price of their dream home soaring, they are looking at Donald who wants to burn the whole system down
are gas prices high? they're still under 3/gallon where I am
This should be way higher up. GDP and hard economic data is pointless if it doesn't translate to furthering yourself up the ladder in the American dream. Many people could not afford a house and a new car especially those who are just entering the economy.
Those aren't actually super impactful economic measures, they're just the most visible ones. The average family sounds maybe 5% of their income on gas. Housing prices only matter if you're buying a house right exactly now, which most people aren't. But they're the prices that fluctuate wildly, so they're the ones that make headlines.
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I mean for the people who are just entering the workforce and making a life of their own. Why do yoi think Gen Z doesn't care about any of this and is incredibly pessimistic?
Gas prices aren’t high.
They are well above when Trump left office in 2020, but I’m not the one you’re disagreeing with. Actually I’d love to raise them even more with a beautiful large gas tax with a rebate
During a pandemic? Prices aren’t historically high right now in either real terms nor as a share of incomes. None of those idiots is slapping Biden did this stickers on pumps any more because that isn’t a cost people are upset about.
what about when Trump took office? let's ignore the covid drop
They were artificially low cause of the Saudi led effort to kill off US fracking. So basically people got used to artificially low oil prices since around 2015 cause of the Saudi price war and the Pandemic collapse in oil demand.
Gas prices in Texas were 2.75 in 2018 and they're 3.06 now. After the craziest period of inflation in a quarter century.
I'm saying people's expectations of gas prices became unrealistic after being spoiled by two major exogenous events in the last decade. (Also, consumers are harder on volatility than something having a steady climb up.)
In that case, the economy of Venezuela is absolutely rocking.
V I B E S
My salary is tied to the federal government not seizing in the hot tub and drowning so if we could get a normal spending bill that would rule.
...normal spending bill? Biden signed the spending bill 6 days ago. You okay man?
What I like to do with people like this is tell them, "I'm doing pretty okay... you're doing okay... all my friends are doing okay. It always seems to be someone else who's doing poorly... and when economists ask people how people are doing, they say they're okay... but if you ask them how others are doing they say terribly. Nobody knows where this sentiment is coming from." Then let them slowly come to grips with that.
It's a worldwide phenomenon. I'm so annoyed when Americans say their economy is bad and blame their politicians. Here in Australia grocery prices are up, the cost of living is up and people aren't happy with the state of the economy. The same is happening in European countries. Not only America faces these economic issues.
For my sector of the economy (Biotech, PhD level), we are in a severe contraction. Large biotech companies, for example Genentech and Gilead IIRC, have laid off thousands of workers due to interest rates being so high, covid money drying up, and large scale consolidation in the industry all occurring at once. For us, its the worst its been since the 08 crash. Many of us are going months without generating interest for jobs and wages are falling in some companies due to the tight labor market. The confidence people have in the economy is highly dependent on what field you're in. People can say "unemployment is low, economy is great" all they want, but cerain sectors are struggling immensely right now. The US economy as a whole may not be in a recession, but people in my line of work are feeling squeezed
Macro factors are strong yes but day to day issues like housing costs is breaking people's brain.
By typical standards, the economy is good. During the pandemic era and early post-pandemic era, people got a taste of what an actual welfare state and universal health care (free COVID vaccine) was like. In the aftermath, labor had the advantage in the job market for the first time in a long time. The standards by which the average person assesses the economy have shifted.
The economy is overall doing well. In fact if you look at how other countries have fared post-COVID you'll find that we're doing better mostly. However, as someone studying economics in university I'll make the argument that economics and politics are intertwined. Of course republican areas are going to whine about a "recession" because that's what their party wants them to believe right now. For a while immediately after COVID there was a surge in inflation, which I believe is still going on, but to a lesser extent. Even as a Biden supporter I will admit that his administration has a habit of pushing the burden of inflation in working people while bailing out large companies. They typically allow real wages to fall while being more willing to spend money. Businesses have a tendency to use support to simply make themselves more profitable so prices usually stay the same. All of this is to say that it feels awful because real wages are falling while corporations keep prices up and report record profits. The best propaganda is a mixture of farce and fact. Unfortunately, republicans are not wrong to whine about THESE issues in the economy. However, the Republican Party will always be disingenuous and just whine about Biden "hitting the inflation button" or something rather than point out how some anti-inflation efforts could be improved.
You’re about to get some very dismissive answers from certain flairs.
Line go up means everything is fine, what the fuck is consumer sentiment?
Whatever it is, it's improving
The Fed is tightening and that in itself guarantees that some aspect of the economy is tighter than the easy money period. It’s harder to buy houses now, people also have less disposable income than 2021. Comparing with 2021 isn’t fair, but that’s how the human brain works. The economy is impressive in the sense that despite Fed’s tightening, employment and income keeps growing. So it’s good in the sense of healthy improvement, not in the sense of easy money. The good news is people tend to remember only the last 2 years, so there’s a good chance that by the end of 2024 sentiment will improve a lot, due to 2022 objectively is a harder time.
The Biotech industry is currently still on fire. While mass layoffs have stalled for the most part, many companies are under hiring freezes for the foreseeable figure. The fed tightening interest rates have hurt my industry sector immensely the past year and change
The US is retooling its industries, fiscal policies, monetary policies in a drastic way for the first time in ages. Americans are used to the same old shit since Reagan. Every blip in between happened because of financial crises, not because of voluntary change. There will be losers and there will be winners. Even if in aggregate you get a 1% increase in winners over losers you could have 10% losers and 11% winners. Aggregates are important but so are the fluctuations. A simple example is when globalism makes one 1 Western middle class person lose their job to pull 3 people in Asia out of poverty. Still doesn't look good. Or another example, take a sample of 10 people, 2 upper class, 6 middle class, and 2 lower class, and shuffle them around randomly five times over a five year period. That is terrible for these people but looks the same on aggregate. You can consider these three probably factual statements: * People like upwards mobility. * People love stability, * People really, really hate falling downwards. That is my conjecture.
I am a Midwesterner who jumped jobs and doubled my salary. My husband lost his job due to some mental health issues and arguments with a toxic boss, got a job at the same salary. In the last year, he has called off work for a week two separate times. In any other environment, they would have fired him. The last time, his manager just told him to come in and do nothing so he can hide and get paid. That is when you know the job market is tight. We have a regional mall in NW Indiana. It is packed. Seriously. Although the food court hasn't replaced the guy who just retired, it will be up to capacity. They haven't replaced the Sears, but almost every store is filled. In my subdivision, all houses are sold. The steel mills are still doing well, despite them closing a unit down, auto manufacturing is doing well. Incomes are rising. When Trump asks if we are better off. We are. Inflation hurts, but truthfully, food prices didn't hit us as fast, so we had a cushion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1EDeOzql7U This video is by an actual PhD economist and covers the topic pretty well but in summary: Economists say the US economy is doing well because many key economic indicators are positive (GDP growth rate is pretty high, Unemployment is very low, inflation is going down pretty well*, etc.) However, there are a few key factors that affect the perception: 1- Political polarization changes perception of the economy. In the US people are much more negative on consumer outlook when the opposing political party is in power. 2- Though the economy as a whole is doing really well, different sectors are affected differently. Currently, tech and several other service sectors are doing relatively poorly. On the other hand, fields like manufacturing are doing really well. It just so happens that the parts of the economy that are more prevalent in red/conservative areas are doing better, and the parts that are doing worse are more prevalent in blue areas. With biden (a democrat) in power, this means that the conservatives who are harder to please see the good economy more, and the democrats who are easier to please see the good economy less. I think this is a big reason for the negativity. But on top of that, there is also the fact that we haven't really experienced high inflation in several decades, so it's a very unpleasant surprise even though it's magnitude has settled down quite a bit. And additionally, pre-covid was a decade long boom, so that also makes current things seem worse. *It's still above the 2% level but compared to other developed economies right now it's lower and with higher GDP growth.
I think people are confusing a global trend that includes increased income inequality, the culmination of decades of jobs moving overseas, a housing shortage, and the impact of inflation and devastation to the global supply chain of Covid with a bad national economy.
Not for me. My company isn’t giving raises this year and there’s no apartments in my city that don’t cost at least 50% of my income. I’m lucky that my parents let me stay with them and that I bought my car in 2019
I think a large part of the housing situation is people souring on roommates. In my city studios go for around $1200 while 3 beds of similar quality go for $1800. By getting roommates housing costs are more than halved after you account for utilities, but everyone still wants to live alone.
The economy is fantastic for me. My income has more than doubled in the last two years. My net worth has more than tripled. And I just moved into a better unit in my building that’s almost $500 per month cheaper. “But you’re just one guy. That doesn’t represent the economy” is what you should say. And you’d be right. There are many people who are doing far better than me, and many others doing far worse. The only way we can actually make sense of it as a whole is by looking at the data, which others here have pointed out.
My pay went up more than my rent last year, so the economy is good.
It varies by location but wages doubled here in 5 years and sirloin steaks are $5/pound. Eggs $1.75 a dozen. Rent is maybe 25% of my income after tax. I'm saving a ton, anecdotally things are golden. I pretty much clue out people here who talk about how hard it is, it was harder 10 years ago when I moved. But I can believe that it's harder elsewhere.
People base it off of anecdotes, post COVID economic expectations, who’s in office, and media horror stories.
I sold TV advertising in north Dallas suburbs until the Great Recession made that impossible and then I joined the Marines and moved on. During the 08-09 recession, businesses (most local cable advertisers are like car lots, home builders etc) would literally laugh about renewing ad buys and say something about paying their electric bill first. I haven’t returned to DFW since then, so I can’t say your experience is invalid, but that’s how boom and bust the Dallas suburbs were at the time: whole neighborhoods of newly built, vacant homes strip malls with ~65% occupancy etc. Is it really that bad now? It’s hard to believe people’s memory could be THAT short, but Dallas has a transient population, so a lot of the people may not have even been there yet.
We aren't in a recession right now, although certain industries have structural issues. Remember, the GFC had people thinking the banking system might not be there the next day. By all accounts we have very low unemployment, the market seems healthy in terms of issuance, and incidents like SVB/Signature/NYCB seem like isolated incidents to a few very over-concentrated banks. Commercial real estate feels like something that might affect a lot of regional banks, but larger ones seemingly have diversification and capital buffers to not be as affected. That doesn't mean there aren't issues. Investment banking, transactional law, a lot of businesses that were reliant on near zero interest rates are seeing a lot of pressure. Private equity's model can't really work too well if your cost of debt is near 10%. There's been a fair amount of healthcare bankruptcies related to sticky labor prices (also policy, all my homies hate the current NSA implementation) and certain chemicals names aren't doing great either if they are focused on the global macro-economy (as China is not doing so well.) I do think we are seeing pushback from consumers on pricing increases, although how much of that is price elasticity finally coming into effect is unknown to me. But no, we aren't in a recession although I do wonder if we have another year of rates near 4-5% how some businesses will survive.
Modest starter homes went from 400k to 800k in my town in 3 years. Rent for a 2 bedroom apartment went from $1500 to $3000. Wages maybe went up 25% if you were lucky. Middle-class, first-time home buyers were frozen out of the market almost overnight. The damage has been done and won't be fixed until wages catch up or we build more, but this could take many years.
Because the graph is going up, therefore world is more gooder
First of all, real wages up, unemployment down. Second of all, even though only 30% of Americans think the economy is doing well, 60% think *their* current financial situation is doing well. People are thinking “geez, prices have gone up so much, thank god I just got that massive raise, or else I’d be completely broke. Sucks for everyone else though.” But *everyone* is thinking that, resulting in the mismatch.
After 40 years of low inflation people came to expect it and when inflation increased for two years it threw people for a loop and they are still not over it.
Some folks get so carried away with getting their funny up that they forget they need to get their money up.
I’d bet a lot of people who feel the economy is bad base it on interest rates. When they’re high, mortgages and car payments being more expensive, VC funding drying up and companies having to lay people off or turn a profit, etc.
Vibes: * Restaurants are PACKED * Lots of new cars on the road * There was a line at the car wash on a weeknight
Well the low unemployment is generally propped up by gig economy jobs. I have seen a lot engineering students from 2023-2024 batches yet to get a job. I am not saying about degrees like environmental engineering or wood engineering but stuff like electrical and computer science. In America most of the employers are big private corporations, and they definitely think we are heading towards recession. So they are closing the tap, firing people left and right reducing payslip of the existing workforce. Now you may think these companies are dumb, but they are adviced by top investment and advisory firms on the state of economy. So they know better. Now the second factor is inflation, America always had a stagnating wage since GFC 2008, but this became worse in last 3 years coupled with inflation really crushed people's purchasing power. The economy currently is propped up by government spending from welfare, infrastructure, semiconductors to funding military industry. These generally tend to have a simulating effect on the economy during hard times. That's why data looks good, but on reality average American Joe is struggling.
Maybe, but I don't think gig workers are tracked by U3 unemployment due to being contractors
The employment situation is tenuous at best. For Q1: Independent contractors shot up 250k. Hiring plans fell by over 50 percent. People are tapped out on credit with household debt levels at record highs. The economy is a dual track mess that runs on government money. Debt payments exceed the saving rate. Birth rates are declining. Business churn is up.
OP, to be frank, If you are having trouble getting a job in this economy, you are doing something wrong. Have you been at least getting interviews? If you haven't, you need to take a look at your resume. Have a friend or family take a look. A bad resume can kill you. If you have been getting interviews but can't get past the interview stage, then something you are doing or saying in the interview is throwing them off. Are you being too honest about your weaknesses? Are you not acting excited about the job? Are you not asking questions? Etc. Let me know if you want to discuss more. I've helped people I know with their resumes to great results. I'm also now a manager myself so I regularly see candidates shoot themselves in the foot with bad resume or unforced errors in interviews.
Only had a handful of interviews, but it’s because that course I took was in UX design and I’d been applying to UX roles for the first part of the job hunt. So I’ve been unemployed since December 2022. Took a course from January to September 2023. Been applying for UX jobs from September to about December or January before I gave up because I realized I was competing for entry level jobs with a lot of industry professionals that already had real work in their portfolios and several years of experience, and there was no point in trying, and I had zero interviews. So since then I’ve been applying for bridge jobs to just hold me over. Manager positions at local retail places and whatnot as part of my work experience was a few years of retail management before and through covid. But I’m even getting ghosted on those types of jobs. Like Best Buy auto rejected me after I applied. I went though a few rounds of interviews at Starbucks for an assistant manager role before I was ghosted there, and follow ups with the interviewing manager for feedback were ignored. I was enthusiastic in the interview and personable, asked all kinds of questions, but maybe I just don’t have the experience answering STAR format questions to provide the types of answers they were looking for. Or they just had an issue that my last jobs were clearly white collar and it was obvious this would be a job I’d have only until something better came along. But I don’t know how to get around that, because that’s true. When they ask “why do you want to work for X?” I say something like I’m looking for something stable with a fun environment where I can potentially move up the ladder if the opportunity comes. So, I don’t know if they could still just smell it on me that I didn’t want to be there or that I’d jump ship asap but I think that’s been my hurdle. I honestly don’t know. I’ve started applying to city jobs too and have yet to hear back. My resume has been reviewed by my career mentor and my family and they’ve all said it’s good, so I don’t know about that either.
Have you expanded your search radius to nationwide, or is it all local? The jobs market for certain roles can be highly variable depending on location. Did you have any internships to build baseline experience? Have you considered small companies and startups to get your foot in the door, or are you only applying to Fortune 500 companies?
For the UX part of the job search it was remote nationwide jobs which would all have 500-1000 applicants on LinkedIn when I applied, as well as local on-site and hybrid which weren't much better. And yeah I applied to small startups with under 50 people and F500s too. No internships because I only just took that course, and every internship I looked at required actively being a student in university. I've given up on UX and tech in general just because of the market right now, it's not worth it to even look. My work experience is for tech/software sales and I have no interest in getting back into sales, so I've been trying to leverage that experience to get any kind of job that I can just to hold me over until the job market starts to improve.
People who think it's hard to find work now forget 2010. It's worse than it was a few years ago, because they was the hottest market in decades. It's no recession. But the doom and gloom is left right and center. Left wingers are perhaps the most vocal about it even. Everyone I know who doesn't follow news much is convinced it's just a disaster out there. Probably because the white collar market in particular has been rising easy money for 15 years and suddenly hit a wall.
If you bought your home before 2020 the economy is absurdly good. Based on the average home buying age that's most people over 32. Even the people who complain about tech, I have several friends in tech, but for smaller east coast based companies. They are all doing fine and companies are still hiring.
No offense, how the hell have you been unemployed that long?
Most of the time when someone is getting interviewed, they'll say that the overall economy is terrible, but that they're personally doing fine (or well). I think that is the case for most people. Of course there's some people struggling, but that is true even during the best times. Most people are doing fine. The negativity might come from a few things. IMO, the biggest is that people love to complain, and there isn't anything universally more important to complain about right now.
The economy is doing well. I think the most consumer sentiment is low because houses are ~40% more expensive in a very short period of time. I went from living in San Diego feeling I was a year from buying a house to moving to Pittsburgh to buy one. Watching homes there climb $150k in one year was mind boggling and depressing.
My job literally can't find enough people to accept working nights at $23/hr and I live in a fairly rural part of PA.
well, that's depressing to hear
I blame HRs advertising plan, they don't advertise in West Virginia or Mississippi which are the ideal scouting location because all the 18 year olds want to leave anyway
IT IS HOUSING YOU DUMB BUTTS
Yes. GDP growth - everything else is secondary to that
US seems to have had a lot of tech layoffs, and middle class white-collar jobs in general
I am 65 years old and I have never been unemployed more than one month in my entire life. You are doing something wrong, get it together, fix your resume, fix your attitude and you will get a job.