Why data on the economy doesn't match our feelings

https://www.marketplace.org/2025/03/10/economic-data-feelings-disconnect/

by toomuchtodo • 1 year ago

41 20 1 year ago

  So unemployment — as we’d like to say it: “functional unemployment” — it’s really in the 20s, which is horrifying. And for people of color, it’s much worse.

If you look at the linked “functional unemployment” chart (https://www.lisep.org/tru) the numbers in the past three years are the lowest on record. It has been on a consistent downward trajectory, minus 2008 crash plus COVID, so that does not seem worth highlighting. The basket of goods argument (the representative purchases for a household is unrepresentative) is more compelling.

gruez2• 1 year ago

If you look at the linked “functional unemployment” chart (https://www.lisep.org/tru) the numbers in the past three years are the lowest on record. It has been on a consistent downward trajectory, minus 2008 crash plus COVID, so that does not seem worth highlighting.

Agreed. It's dishonest to take one headline metric (ie. U3 unemployment), redefine it to mean something entirely different (ie. U6 unemployment or whatever), and then conclude things are much worse than initially thought because the redefined metric is much worse than the original

Suppose that there was a "sickness" metric that measured how many people are in hospital. Then someone comes along and claims the country is much sicker than people thought, citing a "functional sickness" metric that measured anyone who called in sick, and that's "horrifying". They'd be laughed out of the room.

jdsully• 1 year ago

Thats basically 99% of political discourse at this point. Not a lot of laughing these days.

gruez2• 1 year ago

And if you look at the basic things that they can afford to buy, they have inflated over the last 20 years more rapidly than the CPI. So they’re worse off.

This is an unsatisfying explanation. By his own admission these factors has been happening for the past two decades, but the divergence between consumer expectations and "fundamentals" only really happened post pandemic:

https://archive.is/ry4YC

https://archive.is/yiT52

Leary• 1 year ago

Maybe because real estate prices are not captured by CPI, only rental prices. People are taking longer and longer to save up for a house[1].

https://www.crews.bank/blog/real-estate-prices-vs.-income

toomuchtodo• 1 year ago

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/10/25/a-look-at...

One commonly used (though also criticized) benchmark for housing affordability is that no more than 30% of household income should go toward housing costs. Households that spend more than that are considered “cost burdened” by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
By that standard, 31.3% of American households were cost burdened in 2023, including 27.1% of households with a mortgage and 49.7% of households that rent, according to 1-year estimates from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS). (Many more people own than rent: In the second quarter of 2024, 65.6% of occupied housing units were owned while 34.4% were rented, according to the most recent estimates from the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey/Housing Vacancy Survey.)

chickenpotpie4• 1 year ago

Only looking at home prices compared to salary is very misleading because it doesn't account for changes in interest rates. Mortgages were almost 20% interest in the 80s. Cheaper doesn't mean much if you still can't afford the monthly payment.

Also looking at average price doesn't account for the rising quality of housing. In the 1980s the average home was around 1,700 square feet. Today, it is nearly 2,700.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MORTGAGE30US

https://www.newser.com/story/225645/average-size-of-us-homes...

bluefirebrand• 1 year ago

Forget comparing old builds to new builds

If you look at the pricing trend of a single house, it tells quite a story

In my city, A house that would have been 80k in the 80s is listed between 500-600k today, depending on the neighborhood and how updated it is

In the 80s you could get a 15-20 year mortgage at 20%

Now you get a 30 year mortgage at 5%

If your monthly payment today is less than it would be at 20%, it is only because you are expected to be paying for it at least an extra 10 years compared to the past

There is absolutely no question that houses are less affordable today than they used to be

And that's before even thinking about how salaries haven't grown anywhere near as quickly as real estate prices

chickenpotpie4• 1 year ago

Honestly, this is a completely bogus interview that is at best, misleading, and at worst, outright lies.

Well, all that is absolutely true, but sadly it’s even worse than that. What it doesn’t account for is people who have a piece of a job — they work an hour or two here and there, but they want a full-time job. It doesn’t account for that.

The BLS does track that as part of the U-6 unemployment rate which is near a 20 year low. The U-6 unemployment rate counts people that work less than 35 hours per week, but want to work more hours, as unemployed.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/U6RATE

everybodyknows• 1 year ago

That quote is not in the context of U-6. From the preceding paragraph:

... we do the monthly unemployment rate. It is a crucial piece of data, but the headline one does not account for ...

FRED explains:

U-3 is the traditionally reported unemployment rate ...

https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2015/05/the-many-flavors-of-...

chickenpotpie4• 1 year ago

Correct but theyre saying the headlines are wrong because the statistic that they use is not accounting for people that are reluctantly part time, but they're not mentioning that there is a statistic that does track that and that statistic also reports that unemployment is low.

It is a lie by omission.

This interview was about how the data and our feelings about the economy don't match. The crux of their argument is that we're looking at the wrong data and the right data shows the true state of the economy, but the true data exists and doesn't align with our feelings either.

borgdefenser• 1 year ago

In my adult life, the only time I can ever remember the consensus that the economy was good was Christmas 1999.

The internet gave people hope about the future in 1999 but now with the internet our desires can never match the reality that follows.

Instead people live in either a post-bubble crash that is about to crash further or if things are going well that just means we are in a super bubble that will have a historic crash. Repeat.

kittikitti• 1 year ago

When I was laid off, HR strategically did it so it wouldn't be reflected in the unemployment numbers. I don't trust any of these macro economic numbers.

triceratops• 1 year ago

How did they do that? And why does HR at your former company care about unemployment numbers? Were they committing employment insurance fraud?

pcthrowaway• 1 year ago

I don't know where GP is, but in Canada there are certain corporate obligations that come with doing a layoff which companies try to skirt around by staggering their layoffs over some period of time rather than letting everyone go at once.

dumbledoren• 1 year ago

Because modern 'economy' is just holistic economics jargon to rationalize the system of inequality that extracts economic value from the bottom and gives it to the top...

Why data on the economy doesn't match our feelings

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