dajafi wrote:I don't know how you change perceptions about the economy. I do think that the long-term phenomenon of wage stagnation for the bottom 80-90 percent of the income distribution is probably a bigger driver of public opinion than the employment numbers.

Economic growth is/will be mediocre. Employment growth will be worse (labor force participation is not improving). Wage growth will be even worse. This is the new normal.

My disagreement with your statement is where you seem to be suggesting that it's a problem of perception or messaging. It's not just perception... low-skilled labor is not recovering, independent of what the official unemployment rate is.

dajafi wrote:I don't know how you change perceptions about the economy. I do think that the long-term phenomenon of wage stagnation for the bottom 80-90 percent of the income distribution is probably a bigger driver of public opinion than the employment numbers.

Censor Fox News and most of the right-wing media. If people are told over and over again that the economy is horrific/awful/terrible and that our country is being destroyed by socialists and wealth redistribution, that's all they'll believe. Nevermind that bankruptcy filings are down across the board, we have seen consistent job creation numbers for several years now, stock markets are up, etc. Especially when, as you point out, that perception is reinforced by wage stagnation and pockets of drastic unemployment (mostly because those areas are too heavily reliant on one employer or outdated industries).

At least that problem will be somewhat alleviated by the Republican Congress. They'll have less incentive to trash the economy at every turn, even though the problems will still be entirely Obama's fault.

(Preemptive response to Jerseyhoya: I'm not saying that the economy is amazing or that negative opinions about it are entirely due to the conservative media, so don't try to twist my post. I'm just saying it's not in the tank... it's just mediocre.)

edit: response to Werthless post above

I'm not saying that perception/public opinion is "wrong." (I'm actually not sure that's possible, if you take my meaning; as the kids say, it is what it is.) I was just trying to respond to what seemed like bemusement that the "good" economy hasn't translated to political goodwill for the president.

Which isn't to say that electing (or maybe "not coming out to vote against") the people happiest with an economy in which only those at the top enjoy wage gains, and who have done their utmost to keep things that way, is a rational course of action.

Perhaps not surprisingly, I don't agree with your bleak take on an inevitable "new normal." We could make investments today--particularly in infrastructure and human capital--that likely would pay off big-time in ten or twenty years. We won't, because (reasons), but we could.

pacino wrote:John McCain will never let it go. Everyone is wrong and he is right.

kind of interesting that the article mentions a couple of newly elected McCain-sympathetic congresspersons, but not Tom Cotton.

Joni Ernst is sufficiently nuts, but I'm wagering Cotton blossoms into McCain on crack-laced steriods

OK, I get it. There were a string of posts about the wonderful unemployment figures, and then your post about perceptions, so I wanted to take issue with the characterization that the economy is doing particularly well (and the implication that voters just weren't paying attention). The economy is pretty good for those with high levels of education who are not looking for government jobs, but pretty mediocre for most people.

Yup, and I could have been clearer.

Come to think of it, maybe the whole concept of a shared economy is becoming obsolete. Everyone did pretty well in the late '90s, and there was probably a moment in late 2008 when everyone perceived real downside risk (not that any of us here cared, at that time…), but otherwise the state you're describing has pretty much persisted whatever the aggregate economic circumstances.

Werthless wrote:OK, I get it. There were a string of posts about the wonderful unemployment figures, and then your post about perceptions, so I wanted to take issue with the characterization that the economy is doing particularly well (and the implication that voters just weren't paying attention). The economy is pretty good for those with high levels of education who are not looking for government jobs, but pretty mediocre for most people.

so it's you, me, and Piketty

I like our odds

Well, this year blows hard for Dems, but I love what the landscape in 2016 looks like now.

This congress is going to be exceptionally bad. should help Hillary or O'Malley or whoever being able to run against that.

dajafi wrote:I don't know how you change perceptions about the economy. I do think that the long-term phenomenon of wage stagnation for the bottom 80-90 percent of the income distribution is probably a bigger driver of public opinion than the employment numbers.

I've thought a lot about this over the last two days. Income stagnation is a pretty big deal, and there's no reason to think the Democrats are doing anything about it. There's no reason really to think anything could be done about it, except maybe reinvigorate unions or something but the Democrats aren't delivering that message.

But I think even more significant is the real fear that what happened to manufacturing in the the 70s-90s is happening with white collar and professional jobs. It's happened with the law, it will happen with accounting (you're nuts if you think most people working in accounting won't be automated and outsourced out of jobs in the next decade) and other fields as well, particularly on the entry level side of things. First, they came for the travel agents, and I did nothing because I wasn't a travel agent. Then they came for the stock brokers....

Even the advice "go learn a trade" isn't realistic. First, if the trade is relatively easy to learn (say like truck driving which will probably be soon automated as well) then there's no reason why wages won't go down there as well as tons of people enter those fields. If the field requires a high degree of training and years of experience (say like becoming a master plumber) then there is a real limit as to how many people can be trained for that field, and even then, the jobs in plumbing aren't limitless.

No one has a good answer for all of this. Maybe I'll run on the platform of basing our economy on everyone giving each other massages all day long.

Our view of the economy would be a lot brighter if we looked beyond our own backyards. The world is becoming a much richer place. It does seem to come at the expense of modestly skilled and unskilled Americans. We should not lament the great leaps in standards of living in under-developed nations. Nor should we ignore what is happening here - but we ought to be realistic about any fix. A focus on wealth gaps may get your blood boiling, but you could confiscate the full earnings and the full wealth of the top 1% and it would do little to salve the wounds of America's working class. You could close off the borders and make everyone poorer. But instead we should look at less glamorous, less instant solutions. Some are simple and old-fashioned, like education. We allow teacher's unions and the self-interests of school administrators to overrule the needs of the community. People need to be sufficiently skilled that their labor provides value, and the kind of value needed in a contemporary economy.

TenuredVulture wrote:I've thought a lot about this over the last two days. Income stagnation is a pretty big deal....
No one has a good answer for all of this....

as the balance of your post suggests, TV, income stagnation is a symptom of the larger and very real structural challenge.

Everyone's aware that 150 years ago most Americans were occupied in agriculture, and now just 0.03% do (ok, I'm exaggerating). Now understand that that's what's happening to every occupation

So basically all we need is someone to invent replicators and we can all sit around all day in our one piece space suits trying to better ourselves.

I'm pretty consistent an R on scope of government issues and business issues, etc. But I think I have come around on the notion that the minimum wage ought to be raised from the 7.25 it currently is to the 10ish range.

TomatoPie wrote:A focus on wealth gaps may get your blood boiling, but you could confiscate the full earnings and the full wealth of the top 1% and it would do little to salve the wounds of America's working class.

Any effective fix will not be about "confiscation". It will be in some part about redefinition of what it means to "own".

instead we should look at less glamorous, less instant solutions. Some are simple and old-fashioned, like education

Neither simple nor old-fashioned reconfigurations or reconceptions of what we need do regarding education will suffice.

At all.

Stop imagining that what's needed is to peer sentimentally at what engendered mid-20th century American success for responses to what we need to do for the balance of this century.

Let your grandma do that.

I don't really even think education does the job, no matter how great we make our schools, unless we change what we mean by educated. Indeed, it seems to me that most of the things people talk about as far as education goes are the exact opposite of what we need to do. We DON'T need more computers and technology in classrooms, we don't need to (in terms of specific skills) make our students career ready. We need to somehow teach students to be adaptable to rapid changes in the economy. The skills that are in high demand today may not be in high demand in 10 years, so people need to be able to constantly learn to retrain themselves. What they really need is a pretty solid grounding in how the world works--not just technology, but its politics, science, and economy. They need to learn to think strategically and tactically and to learn which rules are changing and which ones are constant.

Stu Rothenberg, long time election forecaster from the GUT/scouting side of things, just retweeted a Sam Wang, election forecaster from the modeling/stats side of things, tweet from two months ago.

Sam Wang @SamWangPhD
@QuiteColdNight Stu Rothenberg thinks GOP will pick up >7 Senate seats? That is so wrong it does not even deserve the word "wrong"

Wang spent much of the summer and early fall holding the fort on the "things won't be so bad for Democrats" storyline. 538 and the other modelers were buying into the likelihood of the big GOP year out of the gate, and Wang bravely stepped up to the plate to fill the gap in left friendly Science.

I didn't know Stu knew how to use a computer, but that's a good pull.

TenuredVulture wrote:I don't really even think education does the job, no matter how great we make our schools, unless we change what we mean by educated. Indeed, it seems to me that most of the things people talk about as far as education goes are the exact opposite of what we need to do. We DON'T need more computers and technology in classrooms, we don't need to (in terms of specific skills) make our students career ready. We need to somehow teach students to be adaptable to rapid changes in the economy. The skills that are in high demand today may not be in high demand in 10 years, so people need to be able to constantly learn to retrain themselves. What they really need is a pretty solid grounding in how the world works--not just technology, but its politics, science, and economy. They need to learn to think strategically and tactically and to learn which rules are changing and which ones are constant.

basically this theory

http://www.amazon.com/How-Children-Succ ... +4%2C+2012

really good episode of TAL on the theory too if you care to be educated on the matter

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-a ... -to-school

TenuredVulture wrote:We need to somehow teach students to be adaptable to rapid changes in the economy.

We can teach people to be more flexible in the face of changes in what their work is; to acclimate to lifelong learning, or something of that kind.

Adaptability to rapid changes in the economy requires social support of a more material kind. We've known this since at least TR's time.