What Would IT Take to Convince Americans That the Economy Is Fine?

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/04/consumer-sentiment-economy-inflation/677440/

by paulpauper • 2 years ago

2 3 2 years ago

From my understanding, over 50% of inflation is due to corporations increasing prices to make more profits. https://www.epi.org/blog/corporate-profits-have-contributed-...

I think that is something that needs to be talked about much more. I'm not an economist so not sure how things like that are addressed. Anti-trust enforcement? I honestly don't know but I'm sure there are more informed readers in HN that can comment.

JojoFatsani• 2 years ago

A shitload of money was printed by the government during the pandemic (current and previous administrations). We will be paying that down for a while.

elmerfud• 2 years ago

The problem with that article is they're taking a 40 year average and comparing it to a year. That's not in any way realistic way to compare data. If you're going to make that comparison say the average was x over 40 years and also post the min/max/STD deviation as well to give it context.

It doesn't take an economist to know that companies don't always raise prices when they're backend costs go up. It's very obviously a yoyo effect because consumers what some price stability. So taking a year where "greedy profits are made" doesn't account for the years when prices remained stable but backend costs went up. One example that's obvious to anyone is the years and years dollar tree sold things for a dollar, even as their costs fluctuated. When prices stay at $1 for 5 years then go to $1.25 on year 6 people are OMG price gouging and that's more than inflation blah blah blah... And you can write a article like you cite... But did it really go up more than inflation across a 6 year period?

A year over year graph would be far more meaningful than what they have. Lies, damn lies and statistics.

What Would IT Take to Convince Americans That the Economy Is Fine?

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