[OC]Sollten wir den Daten vertrauen oder wie wir uns fühlen, wenn es um die Wirtschaft geht? Ist dein Leben tatsächlich besser geworden?

Look at how the share of wealth has evolved over the last 50 years and you’ll see why people are unhappy.

If only Republicans would stop self sabotaging we might actually make some progress.

Last election, two candidates, ran on two agenda platforms, and the wealth potential delta between both candidates campaign platforms was $1.4 million dollars of wealth potential difference over the next 20 years. Picking one candidate versus the other meant you were going to be/retire over a million dollars richer or poorer versus voting for the other. The majority voted to be poorer. Republicans voted to be poorer, by choice.

In no sane world does this choice get made. And these people are rational people. They just have bad information…by design. And that bad information guides them, rationally, to bad decisions, like giving up $1.4 million dollars of wealth…willingly.

I don’t know how you fix that without fixing media, and I don’t see that ever happening without both booting out a political party that will fight tooth and nail against it and also having a large volume of candidates and a president who want this action as a primary task for their term. You have to sanctify information, especially mass distribution. If your company has such sufficient reach to misinform 80 million people to vote against their own interests, you need to be held accountable to a code of ethics and professionalism, and bake in a licensure to broadcast around that code. You either adhere to the code, or you have no media company, period. Until that happens, the nation is fucked. The nation is royally and properly fucked.

Time context is very important here.

There is going to be some bias of people saying “Things are awesome/awful because the party I voted for/against is in office” so I’d be curious when people were polled.

Also, more of a preference, but monochrome isn’t great for displaying ordinal groups. It kinda looks like another scale instead of a distinction.

Data is important, but not an end all be all. Data is more important for things like helping leaders make objective decisions, making personal investment decisions, helping people plan for the future based on trends, etc. But overly relying on data to make conclusions about the economy and its effects on people is dangerous because people then assume if the data is good, it means everything is good.

Look at the Biden era. For much of it after 2022 (due to post pandemic inflation the whole word faced, not just the US) by the data things were often great aside from inflation, but none of us felt it. The Biden administration constantly touted the great numbers and they weren’t wrong. But it blinded them completely to reality that though the economic data was good, the benefits were not being felt by all groups. It heavily benefitted the upper middle class and above as their businesses thrived on high consumer spending via debt/stimulus by lower classes, housing prices soared while owning multiple properties, stocks soared, etc. The average person doesn’t care that the stock market keeps hitting new all time highs, how many jobs were added each month, corporate earnings doing amazing, and more, as long as they are not seeing it in their salary increases, their housing/rent prices, groceries, etc. And all those riches the upper classes were making didn’t trickle down to lower class pay, 0 effort to improve the housing situation, and those day to day goods like grocery prices that continually rose quickly were less and less affordable and they couldn’t eat increases like the upper classes. That is where Neoliberalism failed America. It generally did do a good job fixing and running things by the data, but it failed to ensure all the good things it did was applied more equitably to the various classes and thus America swung much heavier right in response.

Republicans are making the same mistakes currently. Focused on telling us how good things are instead of actually making them good. Housing is still out of control, inflation is rising again and household goods thus are still becoming less and less affordable, the job market is even worse than when Dems lost power, salaries are still garbage compared to costs, and so much. We will likely swing back to Dems in time if things don’t improve soon not because they are good, but people tend to think if one thing is bad why not try the other again and tend to have short term memory. And until we elect people who actually will help the majority, continue to enjoy elites screwing the majority regardless of which party it is or why. They are both out of touch at the high level and only help themselves.