Is there any reason someone might "feel" the economy is bad other than ignorance?

 Someone on reddit asked:

Liberals, at least on Reddit, often malign people saying they "feel" the economy is bad, saying that it conflicts with data that says the economy is strong. Often, these people are labelled as simply uninformed. The question is, is it possible the economy might actually be bad for them? Like if you break the economy down by class, region, job sector, etc... is it possible their feelings actually do align with the data as pertains to them?

 I just wanted to give my answer here, as it makes a nice blog article encapsulating my views on the subject and the larger political context we find ourselves in:

Well, certain liberals, typically upper class ones who care a lot about metrics, malign people for thinking the economy is bad. This is really only a centrist/conservative liberal argument. If you're on the left side of liberalism, or the hard left, or the populist right (which MAGA is), you're likely there because youre suffering. Something isnt working for you. In 2016, it was jobs and wages and healthcare. many people didnt feel like they ever recovered from the recession. I sure didn't. My area is poor AF, there are no decent jobs, it's all minimum wage servitude you cant live on, and a lot of people didn't really feel it.

Nowadays, it's inflation. The metrics say everything is good, but in reality people feel stressed out about money and how expensive things are. The economy is good by the metrics. But the problem is, the metrics are flawed. But for some reason that particular class of liberal has this weird mentality of just throwing "the metrics" in peoples' faces and telling them they're stupid if they don't think the economy is good. To be fair, in MAGA's case, they mght have a point. Most of those guys will attack the economy when a democrat is in office then act like Trump fixed everything and blah blah blah. It really is just feels and vibes for them. And rank partisanship.

BUT, let's have a more serious conversation about this. There's a lot we can say about this phenomenon in general. And as someone on the "the economy sucks no matter what the metrics are" train, I have strong opinions about this.

But first, let's look at the divide here ideologically. What is making the economy so divisive for people these days? Why, it's neoliberalism. It's globalism, the tide that raises all boats mentality, GDP growth good, etc. For the last 40 years, while the economy looks good on paper, people have been suffering. They lost their good union manufacturing jobs with benefits and now they work at walmart for $10 an hour. Those jobs have gone overseas. They've been automated. Some might say immigrants are taking them. And that's where you get the origins of MAGA. "Make America Great Again", ie, bring back the jobs, kick out the immigrants. I dont agree with their pitch and their solutions, but I understand how they got to where they are.

Those of us on the left have a host of different ideologies and solutions. Bernie Sanders in 2016 ran on the idea that it's the millionaires and billionaires screwing everyone and how he wanted to bring back unions, raise the minimum wage, give people universal healthcare, free education, and student loan forgiveness. I tended to align more with this at the time. My analysis is a little different than Bernie's, as I'll get to, but yeah. Can't blame him for his platform either. Part of the problem is corporate greed. The rich getting richer while exploiting cheap labor in the 2016 situation, or greedflation in the post COVID era. The left is getting warm here.

But, my own analysis is different still. You see, I consider myself a human centered capitalist similar to Andrew Yang. As I see it, there have been major trends in certain areas of the country, like the Rust Belt, where the jobs have just been disappearing. Again, a lot of it is outsourcing, but automation is a big one. And the jobs that replace the jobs that used to exist are considered inferior in quality for most. They pay less, they have inconsistent hours, they have no benefits, you gotta work multiple to survive when you used to be able to feed a family on one income. And people aren't happy. And it's not gonna get any better. Not without widespread systemic change.

Andrew Yang, and myself, think the long term answer to these problems is a universal basic income. With Yang, it's more "automation is destroying jobs and we need to do this since many won't have jobs left" mentality, which just gets sneers from the same liberals who crap on the trumpers, as they'll go on about how the economy will just create more jobs and things will be fine and blah blah blah. But I go a bit further than Yang.

I ask...should we be spending all of this time working anyway? As I see it, if automation can do all of this work for us, why should we continue working? Why should we keep trying to create jobs in the first place? Is work really that great in the first place? As such, I push for significant economic reform, and a variation of Yang's human centered capitalism.

Now, when Yang pushed the idea, he kinda was going in the right direction, he cited that the economy should be centered around people, not for profit. He believes human well beiing should be the primary measurement for the economic success, and that we should move away from GDP and toward this "American Scorecard", which is a battery of measurements to try to measure well being.

My ideas are fundamentally similar, but are iterated a little differently, taking a stronger stance against work itself. I believe that the economy exists for humans, not humans for the economy, jobs are a means to an end, not an end in itself, and that we should move away from measures like productivity and GDP toward some measure of work life balance, actively seeking to destroy the concept of the modern job so that we can all work less and live better. I believe work itself isn't working, and that the answer to the problems with the economy are to move away from the concept of our standard of living being decided entirely by work.

As such, to me, the problem with the economy IS a mismatch between the metrics and actual human well being. These snooty upper class liberals who live in what yang would call "the bubble", the areas of the country where the economy works, like big cities and suburbs, where people have access to high paying high prestege jobs, LOVE to just look down their noses at us, and they're the ones telling us to adapt to the new economy. "JuSt MoVe" or "LeArN tO cOdE" are common mantras of these people. And it's obnoxious.

So yeah, there is a divide even among liberals over this stuff, and yeah, the ones that run the democratic party tend to be the snooty upper class types with good jobs who tend to look down at the rust of us and lecture us about how the economy is good and if we're not succeeding it's our problem. In another era, these guys would be republicans. Heck many of them probably voted for McCain and Romney, but now since Trump is in charge of the GOP they are trying to come over to our side and ruin our party and push it to the right economically so that it tends to reflect their upper class meritocratic values. But those values dont work for us any more. In the previous pre trump, pre sanders, pre yang era, republicans tended to be all on the same page on economics. And the MAGA people would look down on everyone else and call them lazy too. And they would often be racist while doing it. Now, they're kinda pissed off at the economy and going in their direction, while the left is going in its own, and as an anti establishment leftie who doesnt get along with the so called "brahmin left" very well, I feel politically homeless a lot of the time. Because im basically a progressive. I like people like Andrew Yang and Bernie Sanders. I dislike Hillary Clinton types. Biden is okay. Harris is okay, but let's face it, I think the economy needs a significant transformation not seen since the new deal to actually fix it, and that means changing the goalposts of success. Or maybe even rethinking the idea of success altogether. Because if anything, the more I look at capitalism, the more I realize that it just seems to be set up to enslave us to rich business owners who maximize their profits. I know that sounds kinda Marxist. I wouldnt consider myself a Marxist as my analysis is more in the left/social libertarian camp as la UBI oriented scholars like Karl Widerquist or Phillipe Van Parijs, but yeah I kinda think that as long as capitalism puts profits over people, and expect us to conform to its harshness rather than working for us, that it's a bad system, and it doesnt matter what the metrics say. Screw the metrics, the metrics suck. We need to overhaul this entire system.

And yeah, that's my opinion on this.