Forgive my ignorance here, but isn't it simply better for the economy to have low rather than high unemployment? And since a recession is basically "the economy is doing bad" doesn't that mean that the unemployment argument is: "it may be doing bad, but not /that/ bad". And then the discussion is if the economy is doing bad enough to call it a recession, people point to low unemployment and say: no.
There is a lot going on in this question, so I apologize if my answer doesn't address.
It really comes down to what you mean by "better for the economy". When most people care about the economy, what they really care about is how much "stuff" they or the average person can buy.
To one extreme, many people would still be unhappy if the GDP and "economy" doubled, but only 10% of people were working. Either 90% of people would be going without, or they would be on some sort of welfare taxed from the 10%.
To the other extreme, many people would be unhappy if there were 100% employment, but all you could buy with it is a loaf of bread.
The ideal is to have high labor demand (usually associated with high employment) and growing GDP.
This means that people who want to work can easily get a job, and the amount of "stuff" they can get from working keeps going up.
The unemployment rate is a good proxy for a person's ability to get a better job, and that is an undeniable good. Restaurants are having trouble hiring people because most of those jobs are awful. Employers who treat their employees well aren't having retention problems.
Exactly this, hit the nail on the head. If anyone thinks this isn't all happening because US mid-terms are coming up, they are delusional or lying to themselves.
I had an insight last night about inflation, and why it's not what we're experiencing today. Prices on convenience and entertainment have roughly doubled since the pandemic where I live. A cocktail was $7 in 2019, today it's more like $13. Milk at the gas station was as low as $3.50 but is now $5. Food delivery charges are ridiculous and unsustainable, but hey at least the services exist.
High prices open the door to competition. Anyone can mix a cocktail for less than $13. Anyone can come up with a better way to deliver food or start a food truck.
So the price gouging "inflation" we see today from corporations and established businesses leaves them vulnerable. If the economy really tanks and commercial real estate becomes worthless as projected, there's going to be so much entrepreneurship, just like in the early 2010s after the Housing Bubble popped. Not only that, but people are hyper-aware of stuff like rent seeking now, so may even buy out their landlords, form co-ops, avoid having an employer or standard work hours, basically do all of the things that should have probably happened 20 years ago after the Dot Bomb. But we got distracted by the War on Terror, which is transitioning to the War on Authoritarianism as people wake up.
If Wall Street tanks, that will be better for Main Street. Having spent my entire adult working life barely surviving, I just don't care if established players go bust. This is a B.S. economy where maybe 3-10% of the population does any real work (like growing food) and everyone else takes whatever menial service job they can get or skims money off their employees. It's a joke. Anyone could do a better job managing the economy if we would ever do the most obvious things like tax the rich.
> If the economy really tanks and commercial real estate becomes worthless as projected, there's going to be so much entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurship always ramps up during the hard times. People lose their jobs and are forced to get scrappy.
> High prices open the door to competition. Anyone can mix a cocktail for less than $13.
Consumers became desensitized to price increases during the pandemic supply shortages. Right now, there's strong evidence to suggest that many businesses are simply raising prices because they can get away with it. If you're running a business, you have a once in a lifetime opportunity to jack up prices without harming your brand - you can just shrug and blame the abstract specter of "inflation" and your customer base directs their frustration toward some political entity instead of you.
In the short-term it's a no-brainer; especially when everyone around you is doing it. But in the medium-to-long-term, you're 100% correct that it leave you vulnerable to being undercut by new entrants to the market.
The current go-to arguments for not being in a recession are low unemployment and high inflation, however those have historically been lagging indicators that start moving somewhere in the middle of a recession.
So I'd say if we're not in a recession right now, we're on the edge of one. There have been so many economic shocks all at once I don't see how we pull out into positive growth without some serious retooling, and it'll take a recession to provide the necessary motivation/political cover to kickstart said retooling.
> There's never been any "I think" in all the recessions I've experienced. Everyone knew.
The Great Recession even being a recession was debated from before it was later declared to have started until it was officially declared a year after the point it was declared to have begun (which was actually before the revisions to GDP figures which would qualify the starting point as a recession under the 2-down-quarter rule that some people are now pretending is Holy Writ.)
So, either your memory is flawed or your experience is quite limited.
2001 was a short and mild recession (and was widely debated up until shortly after 9/11, and then often blamed on 9/11 even though it started six months earlier.)
It felt worse and later because lots of people suffered from the poor distributional features of the following expansion more than the recession itself.
Kind of begs the question of the current state being a recession. If it turns out to be, probably this will be worse, but I don't think it will turn out to be. (That is, I think not a recession is the most likely current state, but I think recession that turns out to be more severe than 2001 is still more likely than recession that turns out to be less severe than 2001.)
But the whole economic context is fairly unusual, and I wouldn't make any predictions with high confidence.
Well surely at the start it was I think before developing into I know. Right? Plus plenty of folks are already at I know right now while some are at I think or I know were not.
The Fed was basically announcing that they're going to cause a recession that everyone will agree on in order to get inflation down.
They've largely shut up talking in the press which has allowed the markets to rebound a bit (which will allow the rich to unwind some positions).
But the problem with inflation that we're seeing right now is that it goes beyond just an increase in oil prices, the leveling off of oil prices will not be enough to get it under control, and the Fed's stated goal of 2% inflation targets will require rising unemployment. And the Fed basically told everyone that this is what needed to happen when they were talking about focusing on core CPI instead of just oil, and talking about holding interest rates above the natural rate for some time, along with their statements that the labor market remains historically strong.
I can't quite predict when that will happen, but we're certainly not there yet.
We should also see the entire rest of the real economy get stress tested, and you can easily bet that since the last time it was tested was 2008 we'll see detonations in something else. My bet is commercial real estate goes off first due to the combined effects of the pandemic, remote work, and the recession.
There's still a lot of "work" left to be done to get into a recession. The yield curve needs to invert for a sustained amount of time, unemployment should spike and I expect it hits around 8%[*], the Fed will realize they've gone too far and start slashing rates again. We'll be talking about bailing out rich people again.
Whatever you think about how bad this is, the actual recession is going to be 10 times worse, and most of the arguments about how horrible the current economic conditions are I think can be summed up as "tell me you were too young to really remember how bad 2008 was without telling me". And this time could very well be worse than 2008. We've had even longer to build up problems in the economy (and we did basically fuck-all about regulating the banks last time) along with the fact that if the Republicans take the House they'll likely be happy to ruin the economy to hang it on Biden (probably up until the Billionaire class starts to actually hurt and yells at enough of them to knock it off).
Right now it looks like we're heading for a second half recovery in sentiment though and I don't really expect any of this to unfold until next year after higher interest rates have had time to take effect. Although towards the end of this year Wall St may start to realize that core CPI isn't coming down even though oil levels off and that interest rates will still go up, and they'll start to more accurately predict how much pain we're in for. Right now it seems like the prevailing sentiment is that the Fed has largely done their job, rates won't go up much longer and that inflation is tamed because oil leveled off, so we just had the weakest recession possible which tamed all our inflation and its back to boom times--I am extraordinarily skeptical of that take.
For me, the argument about the technicalities of what makes a recession bothers me much, much less than the smugness of a general group of the intelligentsia who once conveniently anointed themselves "fact-checkers" that are trying to handwave away the idea of a recession in spite of historical definitions that we've never strayed away from.
We really ought to resist bulls*t like this. One can simultaneously believe that people should get vaccinated, that Trump is an embarrassment of a person and leader, that news has stopped being news for at least 15 years, and that the "but actually it's not a recession because.." elite of this country don't care about truth but, instead, power.
This is published on a Japanese newspaper but it was written by a Harvard prof:
> Robert J. Barro, professor of economics at Harvard University, is a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research [NBER].
What's kind of weird is that he points out that NBER (the group that, turns out, he works at) needs to be the one to officially "pronounce" it a recession.
So he went public to say this despite the public group he works for not (yet) agreeing?
Is he saying this in an official capacity as an NBER research associate or this is just his unrelated personal opinion?
I think is just providing some basic information and providing his opinion. For example, he clarifies that the NBER waits on average 7 months to declare a recession,and is essentially a retrospective assessment. However, it has never failed to declare a recession after two quarters GDP loss since WWII
Politics aside, as a non-native speaker this makes me think of the word "likely". If you use it, just how likely is the event that you apply it to? Is it equivalent to "probably", or to "possibly"? In German we have "wahrscheinlich", which is the same as "probably" (and "Wahrscheinlichkeit", "probability" and "likelihood" are synonyms), so that would mean "likely" is the same as "probably"?
There is another possibility: stating something as a fact could have legal implications (especially if it isn't "true"), but stating an opinion is often fine. So, I would read this as "Our opinion is the U.S. economy is in a recession (not a fact)", despite the article trying to convince you. It even finishes off with
> "we can be highly confident that the U.S. economy entered a recession early in 2022."
which is stronger than "likely", but still shy of saying that it is so.
In this title I feel like the word "likely" is a bit inappropriate and "probably" would make more sense. "Likely" implies a bit more.. probabilistic reasoning, whereas gauging a recession is more a question of how you define it. But here, I guess, it's just being used as a slightly more professional way to say "probably", and should be taken to mean exactly the same thing in this case.
Yes, this usage is basically "wahrscheinlich". Here it is a rhetorical device to soften the author's conclusion:
> The bottom line is that, with the announcement on July 28 of a two-quarter GDP decline, we can be highly confident that the U.S. economy entered a recession early in 2022.
This will usually be the case. When something is likely X it is probably X, not possibly X.
We have an oil-based economy. It is impossible to raise the price of gas & diesel for an extended period of time without triggering a recession. I don't know why we focus so much on interest rates and politicians when it's oil prices that actually have much more of an effect on the economy, not interest rates, political slogans, or anything else.
We have a money-based economy. Not in the same sense as oil-based, but a lot of economic activity takes place because someone borrows money, uses it to buy something big, and then repays the lender over time. This is true of homes and renovations. This is true of college degrees. This is true of many automobiles and major appliances. This is true of major government infrastructure projects. This is not directly true of factories and shipping companies and and startups, but even these compete for their funding with everything else that seeks funding.
Inflation predated the oil crunch, but certainly the oil crunch exacerbated the problem. In general, economists probably understand the economy better than we do, so it's probably foolish to write them off in favor of some simplistic understanding of the economy.
Something to keep in mind is that many of the folks who read hn are in tech. You're less likely to feel the immediate effects of a recession (job loss, inflation) than folks who are in other, lower demand and job security, fields.
It doesnt FEEL like a recession to me but neither did 2008. That was a problem other people were having.
Recession has always had a very specific and widely accepted definition in the financial academia - referenced in literally hundreds of academic papers. In my 25 years in finance, I've never even heard anyone debate the definition of recession. Even today, in finance and despite all the Twitter drama, no one I know in the field debates that we're in a recession.
The only debate is on social media with some spillover into low quality media.
I listen to the experts when it comes to climate change, vaccines, evolution, the curvature of the Earth... but somehow when it comes to finance, no one on social media wants to listen to the experts in the field.
Nobel prizes, lifetimes of academia, respected leaders in the field - they all must be liars because some Twitter personality and a Wikipedia mob tell me different.
Or more accurately: we should blame the global pandemic and subsequent economic insanity, which isn't "the other guy" and also probably explains it better than anything else.
Many companies retrench/layoff. Margins are zero and that is consider good. Many going negative and have to do creative financial engineering to eke out some profits. I guess we just have to wait something big collapse come this Nov in the same way as 2008. By the way, winter is coming. Not sure how green EU can be keeping those coal plants running under capacity.
The market peaked at 480, it's at 410 now and rising. 410 seems like a fair price to me--some silly tech valuations got wiped out but many companies are still forecasting strong demand in H2. It's certainly not the cataclysm many people were expecting a few months ago.
Suppose we could determine the "true" value of every company in the market. If the price at peak was greater than the true value, and the price now is the true value, then do you still call it a "recovery?"
When you account for inflation, the price of stocks hasn't gone up all that much since 2020. I think most casual observers forget this analysis.
The list of members of the NBER Business Cycle Dating Committee is publicly available. The chair has been on the committee since 1978, so even if Krugman joined he would not be the leader (and frankly the board would be insane to follow him rather than Christina Romer even if the older members dropped out).
If the proverbial groundhog sees its shadow and Joe Biden agrees that we're in a recession, and then the press wing of the party starts agreeing that we're in a recession: who cares?
Won't they just say it was the previous administrations fault anyway, and that we need to do things like pass the "inflation reduction act" to stop it?
> Won't they just say it was the previous administrations fault anyway
Given the timescale for large economic changes (excluding something like a covid shock), it's almost always the prior admins fault - both good and bad.
Or in many cases, it's well outside of the control of an administration. A clairvoyant federal reserve could have lowered interest rates sooner which would have been helpful, but they couldn't do much to prevent COVID and the war in Ukraine from reducing supply.
It's more like debating whether the house meets the definition of a "blaze" or not. We all see the fire, we all have access to the relevant economic indicators.
With regard to the "people want the president to do something about it" interpretation, no they don't. Anything Biden uses from fiscal toolbox would draw even more complaints. The people complaining don't even have suggestions.
Nope, that is a non sequitur. I'm saying that any intervention applied by this administration would be met with criticism by these aforementioned people.
>If Biden could wave a magic wand and make everyone rich with no ill effects, you think people would say no?
That isn't how this works at all. They wouldn't say no, they would instead reject your premise that Biden could achieve it. If Biden intervened today and they got rich tomorrow or next year, they could still deny that it was his administration's doing and exclaim that (for example) it was the former administration's policies finally taking effect.
On a technical level yes. Recessions are almost always at least the previous admins fault, often times the last two or three admins fault. (Or sometimes it’s the fault of no administration at all. You can argue that Covid+Russian war were just outside factors to the US that would have left us in a recession even with ideal handleing)
Politically it matters because, generaly speaking, people will blame the current admin anyway and vote against them for us being in a recession.
It also matters because even if the causes of recession are baked into the pie, what is done in the current day determines how the country will respond or recover from that recession.
There is a lot more to the world than allocating blame. For example identifying problems and solutions for those problems.
You think political/economic debates always have to be productive? :)
Yeah it's a rather academic point. I guess some people like to actively rotate their portfolios as if their concerns about recession aren't already priced in. Otherwise you can make broad assumptions about what kind of job opportunities may exist over the next two years, how your company might do in a recession, etc and position yourself a little better. Perhaps it's not the right time to go for a risky consumer-facing startup, stuff like that.
For my part seeing all the supply shocks, and the fact that the Fed might pivot to combat a serious recession, caused me to a sign a two year lease to lock-in a lower rate, as I believe we're not done with inflation yet.
It does have an impact on tax and budget policy - something the president is directly involved in.
If deficit spending is driving up the cost of living for most Americans, is now a good time to do it. If Most Americans are having more trouble paying their bills, should we increase government spending.
It was a pretty blatant example of the privileges afforded to important, well-connected individuals. Ask anyone with a clearance what would happen to them if they repeatedly emailed TS information on an unaccredited system, and stored it on an unsecured personal server. People regularly go to jail for this, and anyone with a clearance is repeatedly briefed on the responsibilities that come with access to classified information.
It was complete bullshit, because once the other party got into power, they did the same, and much more, with nary a peep from the folks yelling their heads off about Clinton.
Who's they? You clearly don't work in a sector that requires clearance. By nature those fields tend to be more quiet publicly, but the cold rage against those who break security protocols knows no party. And it wasn't even like Snowden, who at least had a cause you could debate as Patriotic, it was just pure laziness and elitism on the part of those who are supposed to be our leaders
"They" likely being "the other party" that got into power during that election.
> You clearly don't work in a sector that requires clearance. By nature those fields tend to be more quiet publicly, but the cold rage against those who break security protocols knows no party.
Does the POTUS count as working in a sector that requires clearance?
Especially with 1/100th the time and energy spent on most of the next administration using personal email / signal / other self-deleting apps to run the government. Utterly bizarre how "her emails" dominated the coverage for a cycle.
Or, to take it a step further, when you understand the financial implications.
I'm not saying the clinton foundation and an email server with SAPs was a clever way to sell state secrets while maintaining plausible deniability...but the clinton foundation and an email server with SAPs was a clever way to sell state secrets while maintaining plausible deniability.
> I guess I’ll take it over “her emails” and “his latest tweet”
It’s not as cringe inducing but considerably worse in other respects. Wikipedia didn’t take sides in the definition of email or tweeting to benefit one party in those previous elections.
The United States of America has become a place where 60% of people are actively rooting for their country to do worse whenever their guy is not in charge. (40% of people are too busy making ends meet to even think about voting, or whether they identify with tribe A or B.)
You can't really build anything with that kind of attitude. A democracy can't work if you start imagining half your compatriots are enemies, and you'd rather blow up the entire place than let them decide anything.
> 60% of people are actively rooting for their country to do worse whenever their guy is not in charge.
What are you basing this statement on? No way is it 60%, more like 6% of the population, but perhaps 0.6%! Whatever it is the voices you hear are a tiny slither of the population skewed to the most disagreeable and combative end of the personality spectrum. So, unless you’ve done some world class polling to determine the answer to that then I’d suggest gaining more perspective.
The number was clearly just rhetoric. The point is that a very large number of people view data like this as "good news" for their team. So rather than have reasonable discussions about e.g. why this is likely just an echo of the covid response/recovery combined with geopolitical disruption to supply chains... we have a bunch of doomsayers in every thread yelling about how this is clearly not transient and how we're entering a new era of stagflation, etc... It's just tiresome.
Continued inflation. But absent that I'm going to stick with the obvious hypothesis that the external forcing from slightly overgenerous pandemic relief, late-pandemic shutdown of Shanghai and most of Chinese output for two months, (edit: also automotive/heavy industry production shortfalls due to "chip shortage") and the removal of one of the biggest petroleum and gas exporters from the world market did what you'd expect those things to do. You can go farther and look at what sectors are seeing inflation and what aren't and see more evidence for this, FWIW.
But yeah, if we come back in another 18 months and are still at 8% YoY inflation, then that hypothesis will have been wrong. Wanna take that bet?
No, I think it will likely be over by then, because the era of easy money is ending:
> If [St. Louis Federal Reserve President James] Bullard has his way, the rate will continue rising to a range of 3.75%-4% by the end of the year. After starting 2022 near zero, the rate has now come up to a range of 2.25%-2.5%.[1]
While at the same time, fiscal policy is tightening. The "slightly" overgenerous Covid aid is over and the President is likely to get only a fraction of his $3.5 trillion dollar dream program.
And eventually OPEC will probably increase oil production, as Biden asked them to [2]; or Biden will change his stance on increasing US production. (BTW, Russia hasn't been removed from the market. Their exports have only fallen about 15% since the invasion [3], which is easily compensated for. The fact that producers haven't increased production has a lot to do with Biden.)
But a return to sound fiscal policy and practical oil policy won't reverse the damage of two years of inflation and slow or negative growth.
So... you agree it's transitory? Why jump in to argue the opposite then? This sounds a little like a strawman, where you pretend that the "other side" meant "transitory" in the sense of weeks instead of a year or two. And no one did.
> won't reverse the damage of two years of inflation
And this is a misconception. Inflation isn't "damage", it's just a change in units. By definition (!), inflation numbers represent no change in total value of assets as a percent of macro numbers like GDP.[1] Your argument seems like it's deliberately trying to conflate the idea of inflation with "recession", when that's simply not correct.
[1] It's true that there is some disruption and relative movement of assets, though. If you're a bank who's written a bunch of dollar-denominated loans, inflation is very bad for you. If you're a credit card user carrying a balance, it's good. On the whole inflation represents a net transfer of wealth from loaners to borrowers, and in the modern US that's actually not entirely a bad thing.
No, transitory implies that it would go away on its own, without action by the government. I think it's going to end because the policies that I think caused it have ended. If the policies that were in place when it was first called transitory were still in place, then I would take the bet.
> Inflation isn't "damage"
I was referring to the decline in real wages, sky high house prices pricing out the working class, things like that. Not inflation per se.
You might not watch something because you hate the thing they put in (and that could be a minority), but you might not watch something also because "you don't give a shit" about the thing they put in - and want more of what you do like.
I think the Ghostbusters remake is an example where people not hating woke ideologically, still dislike the movie, because they don't give a shit about the things the writers found so important...
I've heard someone said "i usually care when the communication departement goes way too political: it usually mean that that the story is bad . In this case it was about video games, but i feel like it can be extended to TV shows and movies.
There is a lot of good rather feminist TV shows who don't get touted as feminist (mostly YA and fantasy tbh). The one who tries to sold themselves on that though, are all bad.
But i think this is transitory. In the 60s, when "La nouvelle vague" started to include different, new stereotypes (of women mostly, but of men too), there wasn't a lot of really good success in the beginning (to my eyes at least, the stereotypes were too much). They also had less money and couldn't afford to go wrong that many time, and eventually Truffaut got it right imho. Hollywood il bust, probably a lot, lot more than La nouvelle vague, but will start to get it right. Hopefully.
OK, take Captain Marvel, which is part run-of-the-mill Marvel movie, part lecture. A lot of people tune out because of that.
Whereas they don't have any issue with a strong, feminist female lead like Ripley (were men are usually the laughing stock, and all die in the hands of the xenomorph due to incompetence).
Your point is that "stuff <10% of people will like" doesn't make up for a mediocre film, and studios are trying to capitalise on that rather than working on better stories.
No, your point is that unless I completely agree with you about some specific voting demographics that happens to be a pet theory of yours, then I'm wrong about something completely unrelated. Seems like you're knee deep in this shit and projecting your views in an entire country.
> Corporations “went Woke” because they misperceived that as having popular support while only 8-10% of people supported it — and the rest hate it.
> That misperception has lost hundreds of billions in shareholder value, adding up just Disney, Warner, and Netflix.
How so? Do any of those companies have competitors who didn't "go woke," and are now profiting off their missteps? Those companies may have lost a ton of value, but I don't think it's because of that cause.
> Democrat politicians seem to have similarly misperceived — and now are facing widespread public backlash to their policy.
But that may not matter. They're also cultivating a backlash against Republicans, hoping that will counter any backlash against them. IMHO, in our political moment, the major parties don't even try to make the middle happy; they try to make the middle mad at the other guys, so they can coddle their respective activist bases.
This is why "democracy all the things" is kind of a shitty system. Primaries push the adults out of the room and give extremists too much say, which then requires toxic behavior to salvage an overall victory.
> This is why "democracy all the things" is kind of a shitty system. Primaries push the adults out of the room and give extremists too much say, which then requires toxic behavior to salvage an overall victory.
I'd say this has a deeper root cause - first past the post voting. Since merging your votes is a winning strategy, it just naturally tends towards a two party system. And once you have only two serious contenders on the ballot, you have to choose them somehow... And having that decided by a central committee, of which you have two, sounds like an even more slippery slope than primaries.
The most annoying bit is the two parties. You either religiously belong to a blue tribe or a red tribe, or you're resigned to picking which of your values to sacrifice to have representation aligned with the others.
STV seems to make things much better. Look at the current composition of Dáil Éireann - three large parties capturing a bit above 20% seats each, then almost as many independents, then a bunch of smaller parties. And every voter can truthfully say that their vote contributed to the elected candidate they liked most, not against a candidate they hated.
This seems like a good point. Also, did these companies lose value relative to the last couple of years when we were all hunkering down binge-watching TV or did they lose value relative to their pre-pandemic years. In the latter case, I would guess it has something to do with the absolutely abysmal quality of 99.9% of content on those platforms ("woke" being just one of many kinds of lazy, low quality content).
I was with you until the very end. Democracy as a whole is a poor system for doing just about anything. For example, free & open source software is not a democracy and it would never work if it was. We got here today explicitly via hierarchies, and with some participants being a lot more productive and "correct," than others. That's not an issue of economics or even politics; democracy as defined & even practiced today goes against the way human beings make progress.
The problem with the primary system is that it imposes significant guardrails upon intellectual debate, by making the partisans who coddle large vocal minorities appear to be the furthest you can go while still being successful. In fact, we have needed to think well outside even those boxes for many decades.
We need the citizenry to hold more radical political views. Radical politics indicates an understanding of political concepts, things which today very few people with a voice actually have. I don't care if you want to be a communist, a libertarian, or even a fascist authoritarian. As long as we stop having dull, ridiculous conversations comfortably within the tiny ring of globalist technocracy. That is what's literally killing the civilized world.
> Radical politics indicates an understanding of political concepts...
It can. Or it can indicate a very distorted understanding, based on badly flawed assumptions. Within that distorted worldview, the most bizarre proposals can seem perfectly reasonable, even "scientific".
There are radicals of several different flavors. They can't all have a (working) understanding of political concepts.
It's easier to talk somebody down from an insane point of view that is meaningless, than one that fits within the index card of allowable opinion yet is nonetheless very dangerous.
My point is, everybody's got a point of view where their position is within their index card of allowable options. (And maybe one where the sane viewpoints are not on it...)
Yes — imported and independent media have done well over that same period.
They’re literally setting records.
You can also compare within a single studio, such as Prime Video: why did Reacher and Terminal List succeed where Wheel of Time and Rings of Power did not?
Edit:
> IMHO, in our political moment, the major parties don't event try to make the middle happy; they try to make the middle mad at the other guys, so they can coddle their activist bases.
"Why did two military thriller TV series succeed when two fantasy TV series (one of which isn't even out yet) did not?". Seems like a lot of competing factors here chief!
Just wanted to point out that Wheel of Time is one of Amazon’s most popular shows ever and Rings of Power isn’t out yet. Struck me as an odd comparison.
> has lost hundreds of billions in shareholder value
Who gives a shit about useless thieves with no ability to actually produce or do anything worthwhile??! Fuck the 'shareholders value'. We need to do more for and pay the PEOPLE better, who get things done. Ya know, the actual workers. All that a 'shareholder' does is extract money/value from other peoples hard work.
My in-law told us they were boycotting Disney for political reasons. A few months later we wanted to respect their choices so we asked her what our nephew would like for his birthday and she told us he's into The Mandalorian and Marvel.
Disney lost value because it's mismanaged by a horrible CEO, and hasn't produced anything meaningful outside of Marvel and Star Wars since forever. Add to that a struggling parks business in general, combined with epic mismanagement around "maybe we should just target people who want $5K hotel rooms and $2K drinks", and... here we are.
Netflix, similarly, suffers from self-inflicted wounds. Their struggling attempts to monetize account sharing are a much too late financial attempt to paper over the fact that their auth system is... not so good. Mildly put. Their content content has taken a deep turn towards "reality" schlock after they so brilliantly ousted Cindy Holland (who was responsible for bringing good content) while elevating Bela Bajaria (the king of garbage shows). Those shows play well on social media, but they do shit all for the bottom line.
It's not "went woke", it's "leaned into incompetence".
The same holds true on the political side. A large chunk of the recession rests firmly on politicians who completely and utterly fucked up the handling of the pandemic. Republicans and Democrats both. Different flavors of incompetence, but... it was a shit show either way.
Yes and the parent comment’s point, as I interpret it, was that not even the brand power of Marvel and Star Wars could save the company from itself as it moved to the Woke Side with its content generally
Sure, you can draw a line from the point five years ago to the point right now, and the line is slightly down, but... that doesn't mean a thing. For one, the graph makes it rather blatantly clear it's not a continuous decline.
For two, even if it were consistently down over five years - what bearing has this on the discussion?
Even if each Marvel movie had yields like Dr. Strange - it's not enough to justify a $200B market cap. Disney has a P/E of 74 right now. That'd be on extremely high end for pure tech plays during the tech boom heydays, and it's completely unsustainable for a media company.
Reminder, Netflix, which is also considered "in trouble" has a P/E of 20.
You cannot sustain on the backs of those two alone. (But also: Given that they're the most profitable franchises of all time, maybe the woke scolding is misplaced. Clearly, people still love the fare. There just isn't enough)
Which is why they're not doing as well as they should be, rather than literally crashing and burning. At their size having two great franchises isn't good enough if everything else is absolute shit (not that I'm saying it is all shit, just that those two alone can't carry the stock market's expectation of more than just those two succeeding).
>> 60% of people are actively rooting for their country to do worse whenever their guy is not in charge.
> What are you basing this statement on? No way is it 60%, more like 6% of the population, but perhaps 0.6%!
I think what he probably meant was 30% at any given time, and in my rough estimation, he actually might be right. It's the difference between feeling that way, and being loud about it on Twitter.
I mean, can you imagine a committed liberal wanting the country to do better under a conservative politician with conservative policies? No, of course not, they want liberal policies. So they want the conservative to fail, and the country to do worse as a result, so the electorate will be unhappy and vote for a liberal next time. Then they can get their preferred liberal policies.
Social media partisanship, when juiced by foreign influence campaigns, not only alter the online conversation - they make it impossible to know the "real" sentiment in the country.
Too many news media outlets start their daily reporting from "what's trending on twitter", not appreciating the degree to which those trends are being pushed by malicious parties (both foreign and domestic), and in no way represent the real dialogue Americans are having.
The FBI has published numerous reports on explicit online influence campaigns carried out by foreign organizations attempting to polarize US domestic online dialogues. ...and they do this be radicalizing the conversations on both sides.
I always want the country to do better, but it depends on what you mean by "better". Your local school's funding was cut in half, but the average family owes $2,000 less in taxes in an area with already low incomes. Is that "better"?
Gas goes down to $2 a gallon. You probably pay less to commute to work or pull your boat. But your kids (and these days, you) might face crippling droughts and heat waves as an indirect consequence. Is that "better"?
It's not just imaginary, though. There are very different visions of how the country should work that can't exist simultaneously. If the culture wars were just a fabrication of the media, that would be easier to solve than what's happening now.
I don't think you're wrong per se, but I don't think GP is arguing that american "culture wars" are a media fabrication, just that it's meaningless, except for some wackos.
The problem is how the media (including social media) amplifies it.
I don't think it's true that they're meaningless, though; non-wacko people do have deeply-held values and get upset when public policy runs counter to them. The nihilistic viewpoint is more a symptom of getting used to politicians who pay lip-service to those values but break their promises.
There's a difference between rooting for the country to do worse and acknowledging that it is doing worse, and we shouldn't shy away from the latter out of frustration with the former.
And real wages fell 3% in six months [1] (i.e. over the first half of this year, wages fell at a 6% annual rate), so I think it's time to acknowledge that the nation is doing worse, at least for the working class.
> The United States of America has become a place where 60% of people are actively rooting for their country to do worse whenever their guy is not in charge.
If so, I blame the media for constantly selling their narratives and inciting hatred. Any disagreement is labeled as far this and far that. If a politician makes a move that does not fit a side's narrative, the media will attack the politician's motives and assume the worst. When the SCOTUS make a ruling that the media disagrees with, it must be that the SCOTUS are the worst human beings in the world and they have the most sinister motives. The list can go on.
I'd also blame the education system of the US. We are supposed to educate kids to take different views, to seek information instead of merely opinions, to be aware of logical fallacies, especially the damaging ones like attacking one's motive. Yet someone we get generations of angrier and angrier kids.
60 v 40? Nah. It's closer to 5% v 5% with the 90% in between the extremes just looking to live a semi-happy and uneventful life (i.e., they can pay their bills, love their family, etc.)
The politicians and the media (i.e., the 10%) continue to live in a bubble. They have a very biased and incestuous lens. It's groupthink taken to an extreme.
Just look at the news yesterday. Pelosi crossed a line in the sand and visits Taiwan. Given all the other things on our collective plate, how was adding more to that pile (of sh*t?) a good use of her time and energy? And taxpayer resources? Who in the 90% wants more on the pile? And who in the 10% is willing to say, "Nancy! You're only showing how out of touch you are with the 90%."
I'm not suggesting Taiwan be cut loose. Not at all. Only that the sense of priorities is dumbfounding. But perhaps, rather than talk about the economy (and the 90%'s perceptions and fears) it makes better political and media sense to have news of Nancy in Taiwan?
Put another way, it's not the 90% putting the screws to the stability of the democracy. We don't have enough power in hand to do that.
Fair point- but how much of that is due to media do you think? Media has spent last 5 years creating false narratives just because they don’t like the orange guy is that it has built up pretty much disdain in half of the country. I still remember NYT calling for recession when Trump got elected. I think the root cause of this problem is not those 60% or whatever then number is on the other side, it’s lack of objective and trustworthy institutions like media.
If you're going to blame it on the media rather than the people who consume and reward this type of media, then you should remember that the harbinger and main producer of this type of narrative is still Fox News. They've been doing it for decades and remain the top-rated cable network in America.
They're the very image and foundation of "lamestream media" as Republicans imagine it, but it's not easy to notice the beam in one's own TV-watching eye, I guess.
you cannot blame people. Do you blame Russians/Soviets and Chinese when their media are state organs that set agendas and promulgate state positions?
Yes, blame the media --all of them they all have abandoned principles of neutrality in favor of ideology and partisanship. It wasn't so during Clinton or Bush's time (not that any of the two were any good).
> you cannot blame people. Do you blame Russians/Soviets and Chinese when their media are state organs that set agendas and promulgate state positions?
> Yes, blame the media --all of them they all have abandoned principles of neutrality in favor of ideology and partisanship. It wasn't so during Clinton or Bush's time (not that any of the two were any good).
I'm not sure if the comparison holds. I think a big difference between the US and China, is that in China there's much less of a positive feedback loop between people's attitudes and media coverage. If the people want and would eat up, say, liberal criticism of the Communist government, they're not going to get it from the Chinese media.
So in the US you probably can lay some of the blame on the people: if they start to favor more "ideology and partisanship" over "neutrality," that could cause the media to give them what they want, which then could cause them to want even more "ideology and partisanship." That positive feedback loop then gets you to where we are today, and it's both "the people" and "the media" who are responsible.
I do agree there is a feedback loop with some economic but also political alignment. However, while I agree that the media to some degree is giving people "what they want", the media can stop it (including social media and journalistic media) --they have that power. As you noted in China, the media do restrain themselves from amplifying things they want to suppress and feed their audience the political line of the day. It's not people setting the tone of journalism and media in China, it's the media that is doing that.
> It's not people setting the tone of journalism and media in China, it's the media that is doing that.
Except in China it's not the media itself setting the tone, it's the authorities who give it commands that it has no choice but to obey.
Who gives the American media its commands? Its customers, the people. But it's different because the media also has the choice not to obey, which spreads the responsibility for the outcome between both groups, instead of concentrating it in one or the other.
> Do you blame Russians/Soviets and Chinese when their media are state organs that set agendas and promulgate state positions?
In general I don't blame Russians for what Putin is doing, but I will definitely blame a Russian that unapologetically supports the invasion of Ukraine, despite having the means to know otherwise.
If I tried to give them another perspective and they tell me to go fuck myself, or if they were actively trying to push an agenda (like it's common in USA political discussions), I would definitely blame them.
I don't know. It's like releasing some endangered species into the wild and then their natural predators come in and have them for dinner. The wolverines or lions or wolves, etc., will do that they do. We cannot blame them for eating the protected species.
When media are indoctrinating people and not providing perspectives how do you blame people, even if they have agency and can be considered responsible --just like the wolverine is ultimately responsible but free of blame.
But the media in general is showing other perspectives. Be it on other channels, be it by showing people what "that despicable other side is saying". And there's always neutral media too where others can check.
Sure, media is a huge problem. But people behaving like animals, having no empathy, taking no taking time to reflect upon what they say and taking no time to check other perspectives is what's doing the real damage here.
> Media has spent last 5 years creating false narratives just because they don’t like the orange guy
Nevermind the 8 years before that with the black guy.
> the root cause of this problem is not those 60% or whatever then number is on the other side, it’s lack of objective and trustworthy institutions like media.
I agree. It takes 2 to tango; it's still important to apply accountability proportionally.
That didn’t start with our last president. The other half spent a good part of 8 years spreading racially-tinged false narratives around the previous president. Be careful about partisan blindness.
This means, assuming a roughly even split, only 30% of the country is actively rooting for their country to do worse at any given time. If a 30% negative outlook "prevents you from building anything" maybe your system is bad.
> then 20% are "democrats" who want the US to have the basic things that Europe has, like social healthcare and so on.
Here’s the 2020 Democratic party platform [1]. Social healthcare is not on that list—the party supports a public insurance option. I don’t see anything else on the list that “Europe” has—maybe immigration/criminal justice reform?
You mean I just imagined all those years post 2016 of democrats asserting “Russians stole the election” while wearing “not my president” tshirts? It seems like both parties are just as bad on that front.
Yeah, partisan politics are everything that is wrong with our country. It's just a big race to the bottom. "How dare you suggest my party needs to improve instead of fixating solely on The Other Party which is at least 1% worse than us (if you squint)". Too many people putting their party over their country; too much hatred between compatriots.
And then theres this faux-centrist meta hatred of strong opinions, and a general malaise of false equivalence. The Democrats and the Republicans are not the same.
There is demonstrably one party that pushes a heavily moderate corporatist populist agenda and one party that pushes radical christian nationalist policies which a majority of the population is not in favor of, from a heavily gerrymandered and structurally unfair (the Dakotas have the same number of Senators as NY and CA, f.x.) political position carefully engineered since the advent of the Southern Strategy.
Now, im not making a statement of 'correctness' vis a vis one side or the other, but if youre a woman or a person of color or queer in this country, The GOP policy platform is inherently hostile to your continued free existence.
The hatred is flowing mostly from the right, and being enacted into law.
Yes, we have a conservative party and a criminal party. We don't have a true progressive party. We are in the period of the cycle where political parties shift. As the Democratic-Republican party, Federalist party, Whig, Copperheads, Bull Moose, Know-Nothing, and others all got relegated to the dust bin of history, it is time for the political grounds to shift again.
> And then theres this faux-centrist meta hatred of strong opinions
I suspect you're conflating "hatred of strong opinions" with "hatred of people who prioritize their own radical ideology over the good of their country". I don't think many people hate strong opinions.
> and a general malaise of false equivalence. The Democrats and the Republicans are not the same.
No, but partisans are the same in that they both are willing to sacrifice the good of the country to see the other side lose on some token issue or another (pronouns, trans bathroom policies, etc).
> pushes radical christian nationalist policies which a majority of the population
No parties are pushing "Christian nationalist" policies. Whatever your position on abortion, banning it isn't "Christian nationalism". It's not an unreasonable position that human life (and thus human rights) begins before birth. There are some more extreme positions that are unpopular and hard to defend which the right pushes for (prohibiting abortions even when pregnancies are unviable or threaten the life of the mother) but there are also positions that are unpopular and hard to defend that the left pushes for (elective late term abortions).
> from a heavily gerrymandered and structurally unfair (the Dakotas have the same number of Senators as NY and CA, f.x.)
I think this is eminently fair, and without this the Dakotas would be steamrolled by the likes of NY and CA. Policies that make sense in NYC (restrictions on single family housing, car transportation, gun ownership, etc) would be forced on the rural states because they would be too irrelevant to worry about (why take the time to make sure policies work for the Dakotas when they are politically irrelevant?).
> Now, im not making a statement of 'correctness' vis a vis one side or the other, but if youre a woman or a person of color or queer in this country, The GOP policy platform is inherently hostile to your continued free existence.
I think this is patently absurd--I'm not a Republican nor have I ever voted for a Republican. However, it's not "hostile to people of color" for the GOP to stand with 80% of black Americans in opposition to de-policing policies which have driven the last decade's violent crime surge (which has disproportionately impacted black communities). Similarly, it's not "hostile to queer people" to pass a law which prohibits teaching sexuality ideology (whether left-wing gender ideology or "christian nationalist" ideology).
This is precisely the problem with partisan politics--any attempt to improve the country that falls outside of your narrow ideology is defined in the worst terms ("if you don't support police abolition you're a genocidal white supremacist!", "if you support enforcing immigration policies, you're literally Hitler!", "if you think late term abortions should be illegal, you're a 'Christian nationalist' that hates women"). This is precisely the kind of extremist hatred that is swelling the ranks of the right.
That's a ridiculous re-writing of history. Russia has documented interference in the election [1]. Also, most Democrats protesting not my president and stolen elections do so because Trump was elected while losing the popular vote. Republicans just made up lies and then tried a coup on democracy, that was just barely prevented by republicans with a backbone. It's crazy how close we came to dictatorship, helped enormously by people like you love to be contrarian and say "both sides"
There was at least one "Not My President's Day" rally in NYC (10k-13k people in attendance), but I definitely don't know what the tone was or whether the slogan was common beyond that event. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_My_Presidents_Day#New_York
Oh, yeah. I guess just don't really notice people wearing this stuff. Maybe a Bernie shirt here and there. I don't go to most rallies or protests. Most of us understood that Trump was indeed the president.
Both the 2016 and 2020 elections were widely disputed by Democrats and Republicans respectively. Recall that the Democrats broadly alleged that the 2016 election was a Russian conspiracy, and "not my president" was a Democratic slogan that endured throughout Trump's presidency.
Kind of hard to believe when the same people are muttering about Russian collusion. Same deal when Republicans were saying "not my president" in 2020 while also muttering about election fraud.
For context, when Clinton said this in 2020 it was known that:
- The FBI was investigating Trump at the same time they were investigating Clinton, but kept silent about it while making her investigation widely known. Trump later committed criminal obstruction of justice into that investigation and was let off the hook due to his immunity as President.
- Trump's campaign manager was handing internal campaign data to Russian operatives, the very same ones who hacked her campaign, and lied about it.
- Trump committed criminal campaign finance violations in the run up to the 2016 election for which his attorney was convicted and sentenced to 3 years in prison, but for which Trump himself wasn't due to his immunity as President.
So yeah, maybe she has a right to say "There was a widespread understanding that this election [in 2016] was not on the level".
The original claim was that only one party has issues accepting election results, thus arguing about Hillary versus Trump's individual behavior is moving the goalposts. Moreover, while Hillary conceded the election officially, she still occasionally claims the election "was stolen from her". "But Hillary's election denial is better than Trump's!" <- I quite agree, but the original claim was that one party accepts election results and the other doesn't which is clearly not true.
I don't think it's moving the goalposts to look at the direct leadership of the political parties and their actions. Hillary and Trump aren't just random individuals.
> But Hillary's election denial is better than Trump's!
But Hillary isn't engaging in election denial, or really any denial. It's a verified fact that Russia leaked hacked material in order to hurt Hillary's campaign and portions of the Trump campaign colluded with that Russian effort.
You can call it bad behavior to bring up old complaints (due to effects on partisanship, etc), but Hillary isn't engaging in any denial.
IMHO the real people who are in denial about 2016 are the ones who still don't think Russia worked to sink Hillary with hacked material even after the criminal convictions and bipartisan Senate report.
> I don't think it's moving the goalposts to look at the direct leadership of the political parties and their actions. Hillary and Trump aren't just random individuals.
They aren't random individuals, but just because Hillary conceded the election on one occasion doesn't refute the many documented instances in which she and others in her party (at all levels of leadership) alleged or heavily implied the election was stolen.
> But Hillary isn't engaging in election denial, or really any denial. It's a verified fact that Russia leaked hacked material in order to hurt Hillary's campaign and portions of the Trump campaign colluded with that Russian effort.
It absolutely is election denial to allege or imply that the election was stolen, as Hillary has done many times over the intervening years, even if you believe there is good reason to deny the election results. Specifically, the original claim was that one party accepts election results and the other party does not--if you agree that some significant number of Democrats believed in Russian collusion even if there was collusion and that some significant number of Republicans believe the 2020 election was stolen even if it was stolen then you necessarily agree that the original claim (that one party accepts election results and the other does not) is false. You perhaps agree that the Democrats' election denial is better than the Republicans', but there is no room for disagreement that neither party accepts election results.
I think there's a big difference between grumbling about the results of an election being unfair due to your opponent engaging with a foreign government that hacked your campaign, and unprecedented moves from the FBI days before the election; and working earnestly to actually overturn the results of an election by knowingly lying about the existence of fraud, using multiple levers of government including DOJ and state legislatures to advance that lie, and to top it all off directing an armed mob to literally violently assault a joint session of Congress. If you call both of these things "election denial" that's the false equivalence others were referencing elsewhere in the conversation.
They are both election denial, and it’s not a false equivalence because recognizing that both are under the rubric of “election denial” doesn’t imply an equivalence.
When you compare two things that are significantly different in scale and scope without recognizing or addressing those important differences, yet proceed to call them the same without any qualification regardless, that’s exactly a false equivalence.
Let me be clear about what the difference is: the way that Democrats and Clinton behaved in 2016 was legal and constitutionally within their rights. The way Republicans and Trump behaved in 2020 was not only illegal, it was seditious bordering on treasonous. Putting those two reactions into the same bucket in any capacity is an act of historical whitewashing and indeed, false equivalence.
I wasn’t the one who made the original comparison bruv, and I have only been explicit about saying I thought Trump’s behavior was worse. I very clearly made no equivalences whatsoever.
> there is no room for disagreement that neither party accepts election results.
Seems to me like you’re very clearly making an equivalence right there.
One party responded within the bounds of the law and exercised their rights, whereas the other broke the law and tried to overthrow democracy, yet you equate these two responses as “not accepting results”. This is very clearly a false equivalence. If these two responses are equivalent in your mind under the umbrella of election denial, it would seem to mean that no American has ever accepted an election, because one side is always sore about the outcome. You’ve effectively rendered the term election denial meaningless (which is the reason false equivalence is a logical fallacy), so what exactly is your point then?
Amen. Now we just need to take the next logical step into balkanization and we can start making real progress. I have no right voting for federal candidates in my midwest region that can influence legislation that impacts new york, and vice versa.
Regionality > Nationality
tl;dr america is geographically too big and it's really starting to show.
>Now we just need to take the next logical step into balkanization
That was the original design with much power belonging to the states. The federal government has gained a lot of power over the last century or so. We're seeing the effects of centralized power over a large and diverse population. Also, many people want the government to solve problems at the federal level, having little to no understanding that other people in other states live their lives very differently and have different priorities.
I'd love to see a change where the federal government was no longer allowed to tax individual citizens (or companies?). Taxation should be done by their State of residence/employment, and the Federal government can tax the State.
I'm not sure what else could be abstracted this way so that the citizen wouldn't interact so directly with the federal government. Things like the DoE, and HUD, could probably be eliminated while things like the FDA and EPA really should have federal reach to execute their missions properly (not that they're really doing that).
Aye- plus I don't know how we'd handle the military and keep established national boarders. It's mostly a pipe dream of mine.
Realistically we'll just continue to limp along, a zombiefied husk of what our country was meant to be, until the banks and tech elite have bled us dry.
Then we'll likely just implode. Tis the fate of many an empire.
Thanks for that. It also doesn't matter how rich a state is if all the wealth is concentrated in a small few while everyone else struggles. This is also compounded by the fact that the wealth in a state controls government spending to a large degree. The antebellum south is a good example of this historically.
Your statistics are a decade old - in the meantime California continued to climb, there's updated numbers. The fact that a state that huge is competitive in GDP per capita with extremely tiny flyover states, is extremely telling.
California also has a massive homeless population and one of the worse police states in the country, and that's saying something. But hey, a small percentage are really rich!
So what you're saying is - money from the coasts provides money to flyover states. Thus, my point - with further balkanization, less economic benefits for the whole country.
This thing doesn't work as a "European Union." we're all tied together, for better or worse.
Fine by me- my state grows its own food (both meat and vegetables), exports plenty, and is sparsely populated. I reckon we'd be fine.
True to the OP's point: I don't really care what happens to the east/west coasts. These people have been trying to legislate my rights away for decades now, so I am very apathetic to their plights.
I understand the sentiment and I hear your statement but all of us trade with those "other" places (the "east/west coasts") and most of us have friends in those places, too. You know too that, in your heart of hearts, your very humanity would pull you to help were something catastrophic to happen to those places.
We're all in the same boat and we have learned the value of rowing together versus throwing others overboard. If that means sometimes you eat crow and other times you serve it up, so be it. I too wish there were more on the menu than crow, but that's why we have scientists: perhaps our grandchildren can eat lobster.
I fail to see how we couldn't continue to trade with the overreach of the federal government eliminated- why couldn't the midwest region still sell beef to the coastal regions?
We've all been duped into believing we need a federal government to maintain what we have, and I very strongly believe we do not.
Shit, I would wager that whatever 'economic' distress balkanization would cause could quickly be recouped by the simple fact that we no longer have the feds taking 15-30% of our paychecks and then sending it over seas to eastern europe or israel.
You seem to believe that if the federal government disappears then no other entity will take it's place. This is incorrect.
Even balkanized countries have levels of governments. In the scenario you envision, the role of the federal government would pass to some other new entity and you'd still be paying taxes or worse.
Reason is, if you don't have some government then you cannot protect your property and yourself simultaneously. A local warlord or landowner or one from an adjacent state might take your land. A neighboring state might invade your state. Who would protect you? What rights would you have? What court system would you use to gain redress?
Without that federal government, most of the black folks in the US might still be slaves. We probably shouldn’t forget all the history that got us to where we are today.
The "uniparty" at work. Am I really supposed to believe that the NBER is non-partisan? If Trump were still president every news outlet would be screaming recession by now, and if you denied it you'd be ridiculed for "disagreeing with experts". We are completely surrounded by political propagandists disguised as impartial institutions. Dislike Trump all you want, but you can still call a spade a spade.
If you denied it you'd have a banner in your post explaining that there is in fact a recession, and you'd be stripped of your ability to speak with your friends on {{ .platform }} until you removed your opinion.
Although unemployment[0] is back to the pre-pandemic low, the employment-population ratio[1] is still below pre-pandemic levels. People just don't want to work. Probably partially due to the same factors that gave way to /r/antiwork's and /r/workreform's explosions of popularity. I'm sure other factors like people moving in with their parents/friends during the lockdown and the stimulus checks are also contributing.
"Another argument, offered by U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen, is that the strong U.S. labor market precludes the NBER from designating the current downturn as a recession. But while it is true that employment is one of the data series that the NBER consults, there is no reason to think that this variable — even if it remains strong — will single-handedly determine the ultimate call of a recession. Although employment usually falls during a recession, there have been several cases when payroll employment grew or remained roughly stable well after the start of an NBER-designated recession: from December 2007 to March 2008; January to April 1980; November 1973 to October 1974; and December 1969 to April 1970."
Low wages, high inflation, general financialization of everything resulting in more people working or working multiple jobs to keep their heads above water.
Much less expendable income means economic contraction.
Just working more to afford necessities isn't the same thing as putting money back into the economy. Less disposable income across society means lower economic activity.
I don't mind changing a definition for a better one. But the WH did not do this. They just unilaterally claimed that "this two quarters of negative growth is not the definition" to shut all other questions about the economy slowing down.
>"In the end, the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—what then?"
> All of the past 12 recessions identified by the National Bureau of Economic Research have seen at least two quarters of negative GDP growth, and, conversely, each instance of at least two quarters of negative GDP growth has later been declared a recession.
Is this untrue? Perhaps, because some other sites list 14 recessions not 12… Then there’s also this;
> Over the past 75 years, there’s been a U.S. recession every time real GDP has fallen for two consecutive quarters (in Q2 1947 and Q3 1947, real GDP did decline without a recession).
> Over those 75 years there have also been two recessions without back-to-back declines in real GDP, namely the 1960-61 and 2001 recessions.
NBER has actually determined 35 recessions, most of them retroactively (as far back as they had reasonable data into 1854).
They started the current committee in 1978, so it has only been around for six “business cycle contractions.”
NBER has existed since 1920, but didn’t start doing business cycle work until 1929 (pretty easy to call that one as a recession). That’s 15 recessions, perhaps the source claiming 14 was during/before the Feb 2020 recession?
Right it’s a pretty good shortcut / shorthand for recessions, but no substitute for experts making a judgment call on multiple factors.
The 2020 recession declared at the start of the COVID pandemic didn’t even last one quarter.
Per your source, 2001 wasn’t consecutive quarterly drops in GDP but NBER prefers monthly stats over quarterly anyways.
This means of the four recessions in my lifetime (1990,2001,2007) 2 out of 4 (2021 and 2001) don’t align with the shorthand of two quarters of consecutive negative growth.
That's not true. Economists have given definitions and the one considered the de facto standard was two quarters of negative growth, which was a very good predictor of recessions in our lifetime:
https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/knowledge/ec...
> Recession is a term used to signify a slowdown in general economic activity. In macroeconomics, recessions are officially recognized after two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth rates. In the U.S., they are declared by a committee of experts at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER).
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/investing/what-is-a-recession...
> In 1974, economist Julius Shiskin came up with a few rules of thumb to define a recession: The most popular was two consecutive quarters of declining GDP. A healthy economy expands over time, so two quarters in a row of contracting output suggests there are serious underlying problems, according to Shiskin. This definition of a recession became a common standard over the years.
> For decades the definition has always been “whatever NBER says.”
They actually have their own definition, but it's more lose and more inclusive:
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/investing/what-is-a-recession...
> NBER has its own definition of what constitutes a recession, namely “a significant decline in economic activity spread across the economy, lasting more than a few months, normally visible in real GDP, real income, employment, industrial production, and wholesale-retail sales.”
And from the NBER itself:
https://www.nber.org/business-cycle-dating-procedure-frequen...
> Most of the recessions identified by our procedures do consist of two or more consecutive quarters of declining real GDP, but not all of them. In 2001, for example, the recession did not include two consecutive quarters of decline in real GDP. In the recession from the peak in December 2007 to the trough in June 2009, real GDP declined in the first, third, and fourth quarters of 2008 and in the first and second quarters of 2009. Real GDI declined for the final three quarters of 2001 and for five of the six quarters in the 2007–2009 recession.
This is where the WH's manipulation comes in. They say it's not the actual definition, but what they don't say is that the other definitions are more likely to identify 2022 as the beginning of a recession.
> Several recent recessions don’t match the two quarters of negative growth rule.
How many times there was two or more quarters of negative growth that wasn't a recession?
It's not the definition. If you have 2 quarters of negative growth, but everything else is good... what's the point of even calling it a recession? It loses it's value as a word.
2008 was clearly a recession, people felt it. Everybody seems to be doing fine right now as a collective. Very few people have lost jobs so far, as seen in the unemployment numbers. Just some overpaid tech
If you have 2 quarters of negative growth, that means that the economy is producing less stuff for at least 6 months, and increasingly less. That means that there's less for people to buy/consume/use. That's likely to mean that "everything else is not good".
Well, maybe, but I don't see how. I mean, people could be happier or something, but recession is an economic thing rather than a psychological one. If there's less stuff, then I don't see how there isn't "other things that are less good". Employment, inflation (people bidding for less stuff with the same amount of money), shortages... it's got to show up somewhere... doesn't it?
Because it's not the definition. In university long ago, we were told that 2 quarters of decreased growth was not a sufficient criterion for recession in the US. So when I keep seeing people complain about Biden's administration "changing the definition", I can conclude that they either have no clue what they're talking about, or they're just lying. In most cases, it's probably the former.
The definition of recession that invloves more than two quarters of reduced growth has been around for a long time. The idea that it hasn't is what was really made up for political purposes.
No, it's obvious we're not in a recession. The fact that an election is coming up totally disproves the idea to any sane person whose beliefs are grounded in reality.
Pretty much. See also Republicans blaming Biden for every gas price increase and Democrats taking credit for every price decrease, whether they had anything to do with it or not.
Typically an administration that's in charge during a recession doesn't do well in elections, so they deny it as long as possible.
This is like saying sure you can't buy as much bread, but at least you are working longer.
The fact that more people are working to produce less than before describes an economy in decline.
Working more or longer isn't a good thing in its own right. In fact, it is bad it you are working more for less purchasing power.
Employment growth has historically been associated with increased purchasing power, but the current situation is a deviation from this norm.
Talking about employment growth ignoring this fact is a bit of a bait and switch playing on this incorrect association.