Nearly three in five Americans wrongly believe the US is in an economic recession, and the majority blame the Biden administration, according to a Harris poll conducted exclusively for the Guardian. The survey found persistent pessimism about the economy as election day draws closer.
The poll highlighted many misconceptions people have about the economy, including:
-
55% believe the economy is shrinking, and 56% think the US is experiencing a recession, though the broadest measure of the economy, gross domestic product (GDP), has been growing.
-
49% believe the S&P 500 stock market index is down for the year, though the index went up about 24% in 2023 and is up more than 12% this year.
-
49% believe that unemployment is at a 50-year high, though the unemployment rate has been under 4%, a near 50-year low.
As a millennial in the middle class it feels like we’ve been in a recession since 2008.
IIRC, wages have been flat to down since the 1970s, so it’s likely this cuts across many generations, from the “greatest generation” on, and soon including generation alpha.
It hasn’t been felt until the millennials, for sure. That’s when the rifts really started to widen. Around the early 2000’s
Eh, that’s not my experience. I saw what corporate downsizing and Ronnie Raygunism did to the boomers and some of their parents’ generation during the 80s. Many of us Gen Xers were very cynical about corporations as a result of early 90s recession (though some may have later forgot those lessons) and the growing corporate rule and the rise of things like Manpower and temp work - many of us chuckled when we saw the usual suspects rebranding this as the “gig economy” as if this was a good thing for workers.
Of course, many of our generation got burned, and burned hard, by the boom/bust cycles like the dot-com bubble and the real-estate speculation that came after. But then, so did older and younger generations.
When the poor and middle class suffers, it’s not like just one set of people that happened to be born between certain years and are lumped into one group (mostly for marketing purposes, by the way) are the only ones affected.
As someone else points out here, though, for the first time in a long time, though, real wages have gone up in the very recent past. If that is a trend, it would be a reversal of literally decades of it not going up. I suspect it is not, being the cynic I am, and eyeing things like AI and the automation it is/will be enabling. I also think the uptick is partly a result of Covid and the powers that be seek to reverse any gains ASAP.
Lots of bad news from media milking outrage for views and clicks, in the name of News
Nah. More like employers/companies making it sound like their CEO is almost outside on the sidewalk begging for money for the company when it’s time for a end of year salary review or when negociating salaries when applying for a job.
I did like to see that Jon Stewart countered a recent author about how Gen Z has it the worst of any generation, ever, even if ever so gently. However, that author (John Della Volpe) was definitely old enough to know better - I think he is a boomer or Gen X - and I’m glad Jon didn’t just let him blow smoke the entire interview. Jon came back with some boomer trauma that they went through; I often reflect on the kind of trauma those that can remember the Great Depression or WWII might have had.
The point is that every generation has trauma and the clickbait type of stuff about how this or that generation is somehow magically different or some inflection point is just kind of silly in the broader context.