If the Economy is So Good, Why is Everybody Pissed?

Facts, Perception, and Reality

Dec 15, 2023

Going to a restaurant with my family of four adults is an expensive activity. After ordering four entrees that start at $20 for a burger, four or five beverages ($15 for the cheapest glass of wine), maybe some nachos for an appetizer, our bill will approximate $200 with tip and other fees. I’m talking about a meal at the standard sports bar in New Jersey, not a four-star restaurant in Manhattan.

A few years back, we went out to a mid-range restaurants two or three times a week - a privilege, I know. Socializing at restaurants is a major form of recreation in Jersey, particularly for families like mine that are still caring for a disabled adult-child. Dinner at a restaurant is a way to get out of the house and laugh with friends. With everybody working and driving Ian to his after-school therapy, sometime a restaurant is a necessity, too.

With 200 bucks per meal, three outings per week would cost $31,000 per year. At the same time, our salaries are constant, and other expenses are rising. So, we have cut back on restaurants. We also have been more careful about spending on groceries and vacations.

Pundits are asking: why do people feel like the economy is getting worse, when all the statistics show that jobs and wages are up. Some say these negative feelings are irrational. However, if I’m cutting back on dinners of burgers and cheap wine, then I don’t really care what your economic charts have upward lines. My reality is telling me something different.

Megan McArdle says she recently spent $50 at a supermarket for some bread and the ingredients to make chicken soup. I rarely walk out of a supermarket without spending $150. Between the supermarket and restaurants, food is easily our biggest expense outside our mortgage and taxes, so inflation in this area is seriously painful.

Inflation hit us on other big expenses this year: college tuition, bathroom renovation, air travel. We feel poorer for sure.

If Steve and I feel poorer, then others must be seriously struggling. A bag of potatoes costs the same if you are rich or poor. A burger costs the same. A gallon of milk, same. Food costs are actually a regressive expense, because those costs use up a larger chunk of the poor person’s paycheck than a rich person.

We’ve made alterations in our spending (fewer restaurants, more meals at home) to compensate for inflation. While we’re still staying without our budget, those alterations make people (me) grumpy. It’s more lonely and more time consuming to cook at home rather than go out for wings and cheap cabernet.

Bad feelings about economy - rational or not — are dangerous because there’s a presidential election coming up. Even though presidents don’t actually have a huge impact on the economy, the economy will be a major motivating factor in the next election. With the wars abroad and the hot culture war politics, 2024 is going to be very interesting.

LINKS: Free Speech and Higher Education

The tsunami of rage that followed the Congressional testimony of the presidents from MIT, Penn, and Harvard has not abated. Just today, I read another dozen hot takes on free speech and higher education:

Help! Editor needed in Aisle Three. James Bennett at the Economist writes a super long piece on the work culture at the New York Times. He says that the New York Times lost its way, and that America’s media should do more to equip readers to think for themselves. "The Times’s problem has metastasised from liberal bias to illiberal bias, from an inclination to favour one side of the national debate to an impulse to shut debate down altogether."
Lots on the on-going response to the presidents, including positions on doxxing President Gay; Stefanik is milking her 15 minutes; Rutgers’ the student group, Students for Justice for Palestine is suspended;
On The Daily, A reporter at the NYT says that the showdown in Congress between Stefanik and the presidents of MIT, Penn, & Harvard was really about vengeance by Stefanik for personal griefs with Harvard and a way for conservatives to hide their own anti-semiticism.
The Hechinger Report’s Higher Education gives some of the response by the college students newspapers.
Drezner sympathizes with the plight of the university presidents. He says,”Why are these horrible, no-win positions? Because the primary job of any college dean or university president is to deal with the most spoiled, entitled, pig-headed interest groups imaginable.”
Every newspaper has a ton of op-eds on the topic. In the WSJ: University Presidents Flunk Out , Indoctrination and Free Expression on the College Campus, and more
From Andrew Sullivan: The Day The Empress' Clothes Fell Off

Questions: Are we moving towards more speech restrictions on the college campus? Actually expanding speech restrictions to more groups? Will we have quotas of conservatives on the college campus? Does anybody think that this would be a good thing? Will this episode further erode trust in higher education?

LINKS

Motherhood on the Bus, The Atlantic, “I didn’t care which bus or where it was going. Dazed from lack of sleep, I would walk out of my building with the baby snug against me. If there was a bus at the corner, I would get on it. If not, I would walk to the next corner and catch whichever one happened to stop. The bus itself became my destination. A place to sit, a window to look through as the world streamed by, offering itself without demanding anything. I didn’t know it then, but I was relearning how to test my boundaries in this strange new world of parenting.”

Two articles on our our “news deserts”: Could the local news crisis get any worse? Look at Scranton. News outlets slash nearly 2,700 jobs this year — most since 2020 — contributing to alarming news deserts.

I’m actually a 100% in favor of removing tax exempt status from private colleges that have massive endowments.