Fascinating little window
- Almost 60% of respondents wrongly believe that the country is in a recession (it hasn’t been since 2020)
- 55% believe the economy is shrinking (it is growing)
- 49% say unemployment is at a 50-year high (it’s close to a 50-year low)
- 58% said the reason the economy is worsening is due to Biden’s mismanagement
Worth adding that “unemployment” in this context just means people who are claiming unemployment benefits, a things that runs out, and when they run out, they no longer are counted by it.
Also difficult to claim unemployment if you lose a gig economy job. So many people who lost their “job” doing something like uber eats are not represented.
A better metric is workforce participation rate which is at an all time low. There are a lot of factors to that, including a higher rate of retirement, but that alone does not account for the record low number.
This is the opposite of true - it’s not at a historic high, either, but it’s climbing. And, it’s notable that it blipped back up to as if Covid hadn’t happened, which most countries haven’t been able to do. (Also worth noting that all this is taking place within a tiny range of 4% on the full size graph; even the “big” Covid dip was only a drop of 3%.)
Unemployment as it’s defined on the charts is actually sort of a bad metric, yes. For whatever reason the story picked a bunch of not really all that good metrics (economic expansion, stock market) and then asked people about them. I do think it would have been a much better story if they’d asked about wages instead of these corporate-friendly metrics.
✋ This is where I’ve been for the past year and a half.