The bottom several deciles of income are doing very poorly, and unemployment is up.
I think the "visibility" problem actually mostly goes one way though. As one of the people WFH with simply reduced expenses, all I ever hear on the news are about the people who have been adversely affected, other than obvious winners like Zoom. Of course, "average savings rate is up" may not even be newsworthy, but I had no idea until recently this was the case.
Also having talked to a few people adversely affected by the pandemic, I think a lot of people don't understand how not everybody is hurting. Everybody lives in their own bubble.
Contrary to the author, I don't think the internet really demonstrates the vast swathes of white collar careers (nor blue collar, really) in a remotely representative way. So to a server, with lots of other young friends in the service industry, this is Armageddon itself, except for random ecelebs on instagram. To a tech worker, friends with mostly other techies or graduates of "good" colleges, this is a great opportunity to Work From Hawaii for everybody except the guy at the grocery store. Mai Tais anyone?
"It's a recession when your neighbor loses their job. It's a depression when you lose yours."
I think this is just availability bias. Ordinary people - the ones who aren't glued to CNBC or the WSJ - tend to measure the strength of the economy by the job market for their friends and neighbors. The job market, right now, is pretty strong for ordinary people. Hence it "feels" like boom times, and that all the chicken littles are nuts.
Here in Silicon Valley, working for a FAANG, it's definitely recession time. And interestingly, it seems like the higher you get up the corporate ladder, the more you're worried. The ordinary employees basically just do their jobs and gripe about how bonuses are smaller this year, holiday parties are wimpier, and travel budgets have been cut. Managers complain about how we have to stack-rank employees and fret about whether we'll eventually have to execute a layoff. Directors worry about how their headcount and budgets have been cut. Our CEO seems visibly anxious.
I've learned that it's a bad sign when the people with the most information are the most worried. My cue to stock up on toilet paper pre-COVID was when I heard a leak that the CDC had told all their own employees to make sure they had at least a 3 month stock of everything. I realized the Ukraine war was serious when Biden snapped "We're trying to avoid WW3 here" while the official party line was that this was a regional conflict that would be over in a couple weeks. I'm a bit worried about this Bay Area storm going on right now because the meteorologists seem more freaked out than the general public. Similarly, it's worrying when CEOs are more anxious than their employees about economic conditions.
The popular narrative is that these are just a bunch of bloated tech companies laying off surplus employees that don't do anything useful. I don't buy that. I think the American populace has no idea what's about to hit them, and the economy's going to go straight off a cliff in 2023H1.
I understand this perspective, but I think it fails to take into account the bigger issues here. While programmers and other knowledge economy workers can work remotely and keep getting paid in relative comfort and safety, millions of people have jobs that cannot be remote and have no savings or stocks to fall back on. My point is that the article is out of touch with the meaning of the crisis for 90% of the population, and the issue with the wealthy being the only ones able to come out ahead in times of crisis is troubling.
> (6) There's a massive record-high unemployment due to people who have lost their jobs from the pandemic!
That also means that there is less cash around to go to (incredibly expensive) takeout compared to cooking rice & beans at home (where people are now for much longer, without a commute).
It was more of an observation about what is happening to people in my environment than a projection.
People are being laid off in droves (talented as wel as not so talented as well as those who were lucky to have a job) and it hurts them and their families for real.
Not everybody can move to chase the jobs and not everybody has a list of instantly monetizable pet projects on the shelf.
Nor do they have nest eggs. The fat cat bankers that caused this crisis are in a better position than they are and that is sad.
The articles suggestion is very misleading, see above (no point repeating my point in yet another comment) for a more realistic approach to getting out of this mess in one piece.
Yep. A lot of people are significantly more miserable than they’ve ever been. The mass layoffs were traumatic.
> The vast majority of respondents, 72%, indicated they think inflation is increasing. In reality, the rate of inflation has fallen sharply from its post-Covid peak of 9.1% and has been fluctuating between 3% and 4% a year.
Inflation is increasing the depreciation of the dollar at a rate between 3% and 4% per year. Silly public having no idea that inflation is actually the first derivative of that.
Personally, I don't buy this argument. Economics doesn't care about your feelings or your dreams. If you need money to pay your bills and the only way to get that money is to work a shit job, you will work the shit job.
Three things changed during the pandemic: 1) the government paid a huge amount of money to people to not work for a long time, 2) people got used to living much more cheaply than they had before due everything being closed, and 3) the immigration and trade market shifted significantly. So suddenly you have a large number of people who, at least temporarily, have options that they didn't have before and who probably aren't competing with the same size labor pool that they did before.
The whole narrative that Americans are suddenly waking up and realizing that they should all be entrepreneurs and follow their dreams is at best a feel-good second-order effect. It's a nice story, but the only reason new business starts are so high right now is because there were so many business closures last year. I'd love to be proven wrong on this, but I just haven't seen the data or economic theory to support this video's position.
I think, just like some comments below mention, it's hard to grasp this when you are not affected by this. Most of the people here have savings or work in fields that are still ok, but there is more to the world than this. I work in a company which now had its best quarter ever, thanks to this situation, as we're focused on things that became all of the sudden very important. I have colleagues that are working remotely, because they just decided that it's a better financial option for them to go back to their home countries, instead of working in a more expensive one, where we are based. They think that everything is fine, were joking that they don't care, while in the same time telling stories how in their home town (Eastern European legacy) the only 2 factories that employed most of the active population are closed and people have a very low income now for over 2 months and it appears that the social impact and the pressure of this might not have good results, so now all of the sudden, when crime rates go up and people are becoming more and more desperate, it's starting to creep on them.
> It feels like everything is noticeably more expensive now than in 2019
Yup. The BLS suggests about a 20-25% increase on food between 2019 and 2022, and that's backed up by independent estimates. That said, we've seen much larger spikes in the past; in the 1970s you can see spikes in that ballpark in one year. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgraph.png?g=1hsGr
> Finding a job seems way tougher now, too, even though they're claiming a 3.7% unemployment rate.
Maybe in tech (chiefly on the more junior or on the more support-ish side, from what I can tell), but that doesn't mean that "they" are describing something incorrectly--just that perhaps you're on the wrong side of an average.
I mostly run in circles that are of not-tech-people, and while the jobs may suck, I get the feeling that finding them is not the hard part right now.
I don't know what the author of the article is drinking. Me and most of my relatives are in a significantly worse financial position since 2020. Wage growth has hardly matched the wild pace of inflation. Saving money is much harder. Decent jobs are hard to come by. It feels like an erosion of the middle class.
The economic doomerism is basically chattering class bullshit
White collar jobs like tech have been negatively impacted, but most other industries have seen significant wage gains [0]
All this "woe is I" layoff bullshit when millions of non-Techies might have been left on the streets when Covid hit, while we were happily working remotely and purchasing stocks or property.
Everything is great except for the 30M unemployed.
People aren’t paying rent and entire industries are truly and completely fucked. The conjecture here is baffling for a website that supposedly is rich in common sense.
A lot of people exist in bubbles and don't seem to know what is it like for the average worker in the US. There's a ton of shit like this going on that the average high and middle income earner has no idea about.
i only need my personal exeprience to demonstrate (not prove) that everybody isn't the same, which is exactly what you're saying
The parent comment paints the picture that everyone is experiencing financial hardship owing to worldwide cost of living surge (when did that happen?) and that people look for a new job as soon at cost of living increases as if that is how career decisions are often made (solely to keep up with inflation)
I wonder if this ties into the quiet quitting and anti-work sentiment we're seeing post COVID too.
People are stressed, wages lower than we deserve and no sign of changing, competition is now global with benefits going to a fraction of society, economic news which just gets darker.
I don't blame people for regressing and "lying flat".
My escape is watching people fishing and diving on deserted Indonesian islands on YT.
Then I remember I have to cover my kid's £100 per day nursery and private school fees..... I need a heavy blanket.
If you were a recent graduate looking for work at that time, you might view those figures a little differently. We're also on the downward (rather than recovering) side of that particular data slope, with worse to come.
Looking at the tech-sector alone, those in most (all?) industrialized nations have slid from a world of "Yay! We can live on page views and happy thoughts!" to "How can I scrape together enough to either eat or pay rent?" in just a few months.
That many economies have suddenly seized up in a halt is not a typical thing. As historical data goes, the current situation is remarkably bad.
"This isn't new, but I do wonder if the net is amplifying it."
I don't know about amplifying it, but it's certainly revealing that there are much better opportunities out there. Working in the midwest and reading about the coasts is depressing as hell.
Your experiences are too similar to what I've seen. I don't think the public preconception has yet to realize this is what reality if looking like for many people rather than the headlines about no-recession, jobs everywhere, low unemployment.
I was going to link my other comment, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37112093, but you already read and commented on that. Just try to hold out, it's just absolutely terrible right now, perhaps dotcom/2008 bad, but those were both before my mind so I can't necessarily give a good account for the experience during those two periods.
This is deliciously tone deaf on the part of NYT. People are dying all over the place, the meager wealth and incomes of working class people are being destroyed, even unemployment benefits are completely dysfunctional in many states. Maybe it's not the best time to talk about how great it is to be able to maintain your income without even having to leave bed.
Some average (mean) economic indicators are up.
The bottom several deciles of income are doing very poorly, and unemployment is up.
I think the "visibility" problem actually mostly goes one way though. As one of the people WFH with simply reduced expenses, all I ever hear on the news are about the people who have been adversely affected, other than obvious winners like Zoom. Of course, "average savings rate is up" may not even be newsworthy, but I had no idea until recently this was the case.
Also having talked to a few people adversely affected by the pandemic, I think a lot of people don't understand how not everybody is hurting. Everybody lives in their own bubble.
Contrary to the author, I don't think the internet really demonstrates the vast swathes of white collar careers (nor blue collar, really) in a remotely representative way. So to a server, with lots of other young friends in the service industry, this is Armageddon itself, except for random ecelebs on instagram. To a tech worker, friends with mostly other techies or graduates of "good" colleges, this is a great opportunity to Work From Hawaii for everybody except the guy at the grocery store. Mai Tais anyone?
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