The News: Don't Bring an Economist To a Culture Fight

Wednesday's Child Is Full of Woe

Paul Krugman this week looks into persistent reports that a large proportion of the American public think that the economy is in bad shape. And he’s shocked! shocked! to find that this is in fact not true.

Actually, yeah, he agrees that most Americans “have a negative view of the economy”. But that doesn’t matter, see, because they think their own personal finances are fine, that when they are asked about their personal finances, they think they’re better off today personally than they were five years ago. In Michigan, 52% say they’re better off, 38% say worse.

And that’s what matters, because “people don’t directly experience the economy”, only their “own financial circumstances”. The economy, he says, is “what they think is happening to other people”.

Why are they answering polls about what is happening to other people that way? Partisanship and bad reporting in the media. You know, fake news, more or less. So good news, everyone: the Democrats don’t have to overcome a bad economy (which is actually good), they just have to remind everybody that when they say their finances are better, they are actually saying that the economy for them is good.

Krugman acknowledges that he’s not a political strategist and that maybe trying to tell people that their perceptions are skewed “would come across as condescending”. Hey, he’s being modest: that’s some prime-grade political strategizing there. Not that it stopped him from writing the column, but he must figure that just as We the People don’t experience the economy, they don’t experience Paul Krugman either, so he can safely whisper this advice via an obscure publication called the New York Times exclusively to political strategists for the Democrats, who will know what to do with it.

This is not Krugman’s first rodeo when it comes to complaining that people just don’t understand how great the economy is—he’s been making this point in various plaintive ways for a while now. Nor is he alone in making the point—some of those Democratic strategists keep saying it too, it turns out, apparently even with the risk of sounding condescending.

Leaders, consultants and pundits who are loosely tied to the Democrats in one sense or the other, or who otherwise identify as mainstream liberals or progressives, are continuously falling into temptation when it comes to understanding what important segments of the public think or feel. The temptation they surrender to is to regard public sentiment as a simple by-product of political manipulation or news coverage, as not being based in anything deep or real in the lives of their voting base or among possible swing voters. They don’t have to investigate how people feel in a way that might affect the policies that Democrats advocate, or press existing institutions to make changes. It’s all either framing language a la George Lakoff, where you just have to discover what the magic alternative framing words are shift to those in order to defeat malicious partisans and the news media—it’s your personal finances, it’s not the economy, stupid. If the People are being especially stubborn due to some kind of deep-seated human nature thing, then find ways to nudge and incentivize them towards proper thinking and action. Always, always, it is about getting the people to accept the guidance of their betters, to conform to what the experts know about the world, to avoid the inconvenience of having to press the flesh and canvas the streets. Don’t perturb the paradigms that have been so carefully assembled within think tanks and policy circles. Full speed dead ahead, and trust me, that’s not an iceberg.

Let me count the ways that the ship is already taking on water.

First, if people are factually wrong about the economy when they answer polls that tempt them to think it’s in bad shape, then why can’t they be factually wrong about their own finances? Has real median income risen for most people for the last four years, factually? How about purchasing power, considering inflation? If you’re going to fact check one kind of poll answer, then shouldn’t you do that generally? Isn’t there a Lake Wobegon effect generally when people are asked about their own lives and prospects, a homeostatic reversion to “I’m kind of ok/kind of happy” regardless of actual circumstances?

Second, of course Krugman is right that in polling, the questions you’re asking shape the answers you get. Live by that sword, die by that sword, because there are questions you can ask—in polls or in conversations—that are relevant to personal financial circumstances which might reveal that in fact not everything is getting better. Ask me if I’m making more money this year than I was in 2019 and I’ll say yes. Ask me for the specifics and the answer gets more complicated. On one side, there was a salary freeze in the height of the pandemic and then a very small raise later and I (and my colleagues) are still behind where we would have been otherwise, especially because of inflation. On the other side, I’m done paying tuition for a child who has graduated college.

Ask me if I think I’m doing well (or better) and that starts to be not just personal by its very nature. Am I going to complain, relative to other people in my profession? No goddamn way: I’m really lucky. Am I going to complain, relative to the wider economy? No, I am not. But, gripes Krugman, that involves other people and the economy and it is not the question about my personal finances that should be asked with complete surgical separation from all that other people shit. If I have to answer the question in an entirely personal way, entirely within the bubble of my own household, entirely without referencing anything else? Eh, I’m better. But not that much.

And purely personally, if I’m asked not just about this year, and not just this year but about four years ago, or even this year and the thirty years I’ve been working where I work, things are better. But ask me about next year, which, you know, might be important to explaining my possible voting behavior, and the answer shifts. Not just for me, I think, but all those other people in the economy that Krugman wants to kick out of thinking about voting and politicking. Do I expect next year to be better? I shouldn’t have to tell an economist that the answer to that question is very important for shaping my economic behavior right now, for shaping my feelings about my finances.

I have the most secure job you can have, more or less, and even I’m not feeling that great about next year. I worry about the general economic impact of Trump if he should win the election. I worry about what Trump might do to higher education, and even if he should lose, I worry about the cumulative impact of red-state insanity on higher education. I’m getting older, so I worry all the time about our increasingly bad healthcare system. I worry about negative changes in my employer’s general attitude towards our faculty and whether that will affect my overall compensation. I worry about known unknowns about my possible future costs in retirement. I worry about dying too soon and I worry about living too long. I worry that a global economy controlled by a small handful of largely unregulated hedge fund billionaires who have the emotional stability of a five-year old might be vulnerable to a catastrophic crash of some kind, like, you know, the one that happened less than twenty years ago. I worry that climate change might continue to accelerate and seriously impinge on my working life and my economic situation.

Factually, I am personally worrying too much. But are Americans overall wrong if they worry about the stability and security of their personal finances? No, they’re right to worry, and it is astonishing that Krugman can’t see that even within domains where he has some degree of expertise. That if you ask them, “and how do you think your personal finances will be in the next four years?” that many people will be pessimistic for good reason.

This is all just within the space of Krugman’s stated concerns. The deeper problem is that if you are interested in how people think, in what they believe, and how that might influence their political choices, then polls are only scratching the surface of what you need to know, even if the polls are asking the right questions. Whether people think they have enough money to live the way they want to live, whether their job is a good one or not, whether they think life is getting better or worse, are extraordinarily difficult things to determine whether you’re investigating individuals or communities. Most people can hold contradictory answers to those questions all at once. They can have answers they won’t share with researchers, with family and friends, or even admit to themselves. They can be more uncertain about the answers than a poll or survey might indicate. They may have other ways of thinking about these issues that don’t map to the expected lines or contours.

What we think—and what we might do because of what we think—is never an isolated, personal matter. We always think in culture, in community, in relation to one another, and our thoughts are changed in shifting and unpredictable ways by those relations. What we think catalyzes what we do both in a continuous flow and in sharp moments of contingent and specific decisions. Both the flow and the discrete action relate to thoughts we know we have and thoughts we’re scarcely aware of.

If you really need to know what people think—and how they might act—you’ve got no choice but come down into the scrum. You can’t stay at a distance through economic data, through statistics, through polls and surveys. All of those bodies of evidence and information do yield knowledge about how people think and how thought and action connect, but they’re not sufficient.

Like Krugman, I am not a paid political strategist. So I also am aware that merely knowing what people think, in all its complexity, may yield very little insight into how to change their thinking, or how to connect their thinking to action. In fact, unlike Krugman, I think it is entirely possible that you might understand a great deal about the complicated forces determining how people generally think about many topics and in that understanding discover that there is nothing deliberate that you can do to change or affect that thought towards a predictable end.

As a starting bid, however, let me observe that the worst point that Krugman makes with regard to political strategy for the Democrats is that we should primarily focus on how people feel about their personal finances and not how they feel about the economy, which is other people. Why is that the worst strategic insight imaginable? Because the basic brand of the Democratic Party is that Democratic voters care about other people. They care about immigration policy not because they are undocumented immigrants but because they want a policy that controls the borders without hurting people, without racist demonizing of immigrants. They care about reproductive rights even if they’re not women who might get pregnant because they care about women who might get pregnant.

The proposition that Democratic Party will fare better strategically if they can get their potential voters to stop thinking about other people and to start thinking only about whether they’re better off in their personal finances makes no sense. It’s perfectly possible that people can think about both things at the same time, but you don’t want to campaign on a premise that makes your established brand irrelevant and disregards a lot of evidence about how often your likely and possible voters think and care about other people. Perhaps if Democratic voters worry that the economy isn’t doing well, they are very precisely indicating that they believe (perhaps for good reason) that other people aren’t as well off as they themselves are—and they are signaling that they want that to change.