News

Assuming they can read anything that isn't boiled down slop from OAN, Fox, or Breitbart.

In all fairness:

• The tendency to credit or blame the current President for short-term economic conditions, regardless of the actual cause, has been around for a long time.

• The Trump campaign actively worked to help promote the prior impression, that Biden in particular was adopting inflationary policy. It's not as if voters entirely came to that conclusion on their lonesome.

The first Trump administration had also adopted inflationary policy, and in general, inflation was considered to be desirable by economists in that it would avoid recession.

Voters, on the other hand, are extremely hostile to inflation. I posted a study with a poll a while back of Americans, Germans, and Brazillians showing that in general, the public would rather have a recession than inflation, even though economists will point out that a country is generally worse-off seeing a recession.

And this tendency to attribute short-term economic effects to the sitting President affects both sides of the aisle. The Clinton campaign benefited from the fact that Bush Senior had had a small recession during his term. This wasn't in particular because he'd done something objectionable -- the policy that he had adopted that contributed to it was probably a good idea, like reducing government defense spending at the end of the Cold War. But...voters, as a whole, don't have a really sophisticated picture of what's going on here. And the Clinton campaign aimed to exacerbate that against Bush; in that case, a Democratic candidate benefited:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_the_economy,_stupid

"The economy, stupid" is a phrase that was coined by James Carville in 1992. It is often quoted from a televised quip by Carville as "It’s the economy, stupid." Carville was a strategist in Bill Clinton's successful campaign in the 1992 U.S. presidential election against incumbent George H. W. Bush. His phrase was directed at the campaign's workers and intended as one of three messages for them to focus on. The others were "Change vs. more of the same" and "Don't forget health care."

Clinton's campaign advantageously used the then-prevailing recession in the United States as one of the campaign's means to successfully unseat George H. W. Bush. In March 1991, days after the ground war in Kuwait, 90% of polled Americans approved of President Bush's job performance.[1] During the following year, Americans' opinions turned sharply; 64% of polled Americans disapproved of Bush's job performance in August 1992.[1]

Prior to that, Reagan's campaign sought to exacerbate that same short-term attribution tendency against Carter; there, a Republican candidate benefited again:

In the final week of the 1980 presidential campaign between Democratic President Jimmy Carter and Republican nominee Ronald Reagan, the two candidates held their only debate. Going into the Oct. 28 event, Carter had managed to turn a dismal summer into a close race for a second term. And then, during the debate, Reagan posed what has become one of the most important campaign questions of all time: “Are you better off today than you were four years ago?” Carter’s answer was a resounding “NO,” and in the final, crucial days of the campaign, his numbers tanked. On Election Day, Reagan won a huge popular vote and electoral victory. The “better off” question has been with us ever since.

https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/1980-ronald-reagan-and-jimmy-carter-presidential-debate

Governor Reagan: Yes, I would like to add my words of thanks, too, to the ladies of the League of Women Voters for making these debates possible. I'm sorry that we couldn't persuade the bringing in of the third candidate, so that he could have been seen also in these debates. But still, it's good that at least once, all three of us were heard by the people of this country.

Next Tuesday is election day. Next Tuesday all of you will go to the polls; you'll stand there in the polling place and make a decision. I think when you make that decision, it might be well if you would ask yourself, are you better off than you were 4 years ago? Is it easier for you to go and buy things in the stores than it was 4 years ago? Is there more or less unemployment in the country than there was 4 years ago?

Unless and until administrations figure out how to effectively communicate that they haven't done something wrong just because there is some characteristic of the economy that is negative -- and do so even when their opposition has a strong incentive to communicate that they have -- they are probably going to be vulnerable to this.

While it's unfortunate that voters do this, it's a hard problem to solve. You're not going to go out and provide everyone in the US with an understanding of the economics behind everything that happens in the US. Much as I would love everyone out there to have a deep store of knowledge in many areas, some of how society has made gains is to accept that societies are not going to be made up of a bunch of generalists, but rather to have specialization of labor. If we have to expend time to teach every person economics, it's time that they can't be learning other things, and if they don't use economics in most of their life -- even if, gosh darn it, it would be nice if they do around elections -- then it's taking away from a skillset that may be more-critical. And, more-broadly, the general public certainly cannot come up to speed on every policy that the US government deals with -- the scope is far too large.

We're working on trying to get the general population able to understand graphs; the US isn't even particularly strong here among countries with a similar level of economic development:

kagis

https://3iap.com/numeracy-and-data-literacy-in-the-united-states-7b1w9J_wRjqyzqo3WDLTdA/

Numeracy rates in the United States are middling compared to other countries surveyed, and much lower than numeracy leaders like Japan, Finland, and the Netherlands (“Benchmark Countries” above, per src). For 2012–2014 results, a typical US Adult’s score was 257 (src), putting them solidly in the Level 2 range (226–276 points, src, pg 71). Just 39% of US adults tested as proficient (level 3 or higher), compared to 61% for the benchmark countries (src).

So if just four in ten US adults perform above Level 3, then six in ten struggle to “recognize and work with mathematical relationships, patterns, and proportions expressed in verbal or numerical form; and can interpret and perform basic analyses of data and statistics in texts, tables and graphs.”

“These results are another signal that many Americans struggle with the most basic of math skills,” says NCES Associate Commissioner Peggy Carr (src).

Trying to convey the issues if you don't have the skillset necessary to even read some of the basic visualizations that one might use is not easy.

And this isn't an area where you can go and say "well, we'll just go use some of our people who do have that expertise", the way we might for many tasks. Voters are everyone. So if what you want is an understanding of the issues behind policy, then it's going to have to go to everyone.

My guess is that any sort of successful solution is going to involve finding some kind of entity who is both able to gain the trust of American voters as being objective, who they will choose to listen to rather than someone who is maybe saying what they want to hear on other matters and giving them a conflicting take on economic matters. One party is probably going to probably have an interest in trying to get them to not listen to such an entity. To quote Michael Gove, who was trying to get the UK to Leave in the Brexit fight, despite (most, outside of one notable but small group) economists recommending against it:

Michael Gove touched a populist nerve. Leading up to Britain’s referendum on membership of the European Union, he delivered a soundbite that gained wide currency.

Gove, then Lord Chancellor, declared: “I think the people of this country have had enough of experts with organisations with acronyms saying that they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong

If you can't do that, then either you are facing just putting up with (1) voters making electoral judgement calls that probably aren't fantastic based on the economic state of affairs, or (2) actually doing what they want -- which is often not a good idea, like tamping down on inflation at the expense of producing a recession -- or (3) doing what Trump's done during his first term in office and which I expect he's likely to do again, which is giving them political theater to give the impression that the policy they want (e.g. on protectionist trade policy for manufacturing) is being adopted while not actually doing so.

The problem with the political theater route is that it means that the public isn't acting to keep the administration on a sane policy route any more -- it means that the public wants to go make policy that is not a great idea and now the administration is helping encourage those same views, which may increase political pressure and have negative impacts on actual policy down the line. And creating a false perception means one of (1) suppression of the press (think, oh, China or Cold War Soviet Union or something), (2) getting people to self-segregate into a limited number of echo chambers willing to put out controlled messages (hard to do with social media, which has democratized mass media, where anyone with a social media account can inconveniently point out to many that the administration ain't doing what it's trying to give the perception that it's doing), or (3) trying to flood the press with other messages to keep some people from seeing discussion that the administration isn't doing what supporters are wanting it to do (think Trump administration). Not very appealing.

So covid was a hoax but bird flu and measles are real. I'm not quite following.

Yup

Technically the eclipse which you aren't supposed to look at. Because you risk going blind.

Fucking idiot.