If you’re relying on a secondhand summary and someone says it’s misleading, why not just track down what she actually said? Why just “hope it’s wrong?”

I definitely see/feel nostalgia for the singular media of that era: Burnham’s Inside, Folklore/Evermore, Staged, even Ted Lasso really blowing up.

I mostly hate subtitles when I can understand the language, but I do prefer the single word-ish ones because it prevents me from immediately reading ahead and then annoyingly waiting for them to say the words.

This is just an absolutely embarrassing amount of goalpost moving. You’re the one that cited CPI in the first place! You’re posting stats about 2% slices of the workforce!

Muting and moving on with my day.

Sure but you just made up “3% raises”. The typical person was getting bigger wage increases than that during the last decade. And those on the lower end of the income scale were seeing the biggest increases in the post-COVID era.

Sure? Not sure what this is addressing. The median covers literally every worker, whether they switch jobs or not. My point about switching is just that there can be multiple ways that someone’s wage increases, not just “got a raise”.

Yes, the wealthier actually saw less income gain than the poorer. But none of that makes “the raises from a standard job is not going to have kept your wages up with costs” true, which is what you originally said.

If you want good info you need to look beyond just where you work though. Lots of people did get those bumps. Lots of people saw pay increases from switching jobs.

All in all, the typical wage went up 50%.

Median wage went up by 50% in that interval: fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/fredgr...

If those five years included all of Covid? Seems like that’s way better than anyone could have expected.

And it’s still positive — people were better off in 2024 than 2019 (and also trending the right direction), even if it’s just a bit.

Yet sentiment was wildly different.

Lots of questions about how this scales; I’ve just used it for small personal projects. But for those sorts of things it’s pretty transformational.

I don’t know if I’d call it “joy” but I admit I’m a little giddy at the whiz-bang futurism of cleanly and clearly laying out what I want (a nontrivial skill!) and then seeing it built right before my eyes.

When I can describe a bit of software that’s utterly custom to me and my desires, and have it build that in a matter of minutes and then spend a few hours back-and-forth expanding and tweaking it to be exactly what want, it’s pretty awesome and exciting.

This doesn’t make any sense — you complain that their services can’t keep up with demand and the experience is degrading, then complain that they’re trying to increase capacity.

Also “Millions of people went out of poverty in 2020 and 2021 and they were back by 2024” is a pretty wild statement to make when discussing this graph.

Not to mention thinking of 20/21 as good times that people were enjoying and now look back on fondly.

Actual higher education prices have been dropping for like a decade though.

That’s why the BLS does cross referencing and adjustment and, contra your original assertion, it’s not all based on “vibes”.

You’re the one insinuating that the calculation is under-reported and not capturing housing expense correctly; onus is on you to explain why.

Is there a reason why you think people would under-report the rental value of their houses (rather than the opposite) and why the BLS doing rent-matching wouldn’t catch that?

That’s not what’s happening here, no one is making a value judgement about how much is acceptable.

We want to accurately understand the world; we shouldn’t claim something is common or typical when it’s not. Asking for that it’s not uncaring.

How CPI account for them is detailed; if you can’t even articulate how they might possibly be wrong then your allegations seem pretty weak, and I’m not sure what you expect Stancil to reply to.

“How many people are actually doing X” is a perfectly reasonable follow-up question to someone saying people are broadly doing X, though?

The big one is that if we want to change people’s perception of how the economy is doing, we should not look to change those fundamentals and expect people to notice (ie deliverism isn’t a good political strategy).

Shelter and healthcare are very substantial (40%+) portions of CPI.

Trump 2024 is to a substantial degree a product of a relentless campaign, coming from both sides of the political spectrum, to assert how bad the Biden economy was.

I dunno I feel like relentless negativity and assertions that thing are worse than before, no matter the reality of the situation, is more likely to result in reactionary, fascist leaders.

Yeah, LLMs seem vastly less sycophantic than social media; if anything they’re like a moderating force (even, mostly, grok!)

There have not been decades of material decline is the obvious one

To be clear, I think this supports EAII's point in that "earns mostly wages" does not constitute a coherent class.

IIRC there was some research recently that indicated that the borrow-against-assets thing is really rare. It's mostly wages and selling things like stock grants that are basically just wages in another form, even among the top portion of the 1%.

This is a bad analogy, though. The GOP isn't the opposing team -- they're calling plays for everyone! We're running the GOP's plays!