A person gets cancer. There is a therapy that has a good shot at keeping her alive, but it’s expensive. After fighting with insurance, she does get the therapy, but months have passed. The cancer has advanced and it’s too late. She dies. 1/

She might still have died had she received the therapy promptly. Or not. No one knows, but her odds would objectively have been much better. 2/

In medical consumption terms, she’s profoundly richer than a doppelgänger in her situation 20 years ago. The therapy didn’t exist then, no amount of money could have bought it. Present-day she did eventually consume a profoundly expensive good, which sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars. 3/

But in welfare terms, was she better or worse off than her 20-years ago-prior doppelgänger? 4/

Ex post, no, she struggled more and still died. But even ex ante. She had some probability of being saved that her predecessor would not have had. But the ex ante probability of failing to receive the treatment, or of receiving it only with ruinous delay, would be high for many patients like her. 5/

Ex ante, the expected expenditure, and therefore her expected consumption level, would be much higher, but it’s not at all clear that her expected welfare is improved given high probability, welfare negative outcomes. 6/

When systems are misarranged, people can both be wealthier in real terms in the ways that we would measure that, and also worse off in welfare terms despite all that. /fin

i think people are genuinely immiserated by the contemporary economy, despite by certain measures their being “richer than ever”. 1/

i agree there are interesting puzzles with respect to timing, a sudden break of sentiment data from prior relationships, but to me it was an avalanche waiting to happen, whichever last snowflake triggered it. 2/

others have very different views, do not think the contemporary economy is immiserating in comparison to prior periods, so have more puzzles to unwind, not just the timing but the fact of apparent discontent when, by their understanding, people ought to be reasonably content. /fin

(to respond more directly to your question, i think some of the data used to claim the -cession is all vibes is a kind of polling bias, i think there’s a genuine welfare recession in ways that some common data sources, including various surveys, are ill prepared to capture!)

the broad dispute this conversation is a part of is about what the whole constellation of data is telling us though. we disagree about that, so we’re likely to disagree about how and to what degree the picture painted by this Fed survey meshes or fails to mesh with other sources of information.

note that during broadly acknowledged cycles, the psychological case for an optimism bias diminishes: it’s okay to fail when everyone is failing, that doesn’t mean make one a loser. 1/

it’s when there’s not a crisis on which one can blame one’s struggles, when plausibly other people are doing fine, even better than fine, that (perhaps ironically) it makes psychological sense to claim others are struggling rather than oneself. /fin

oh, the tiktok video was terrible, at least to my aesthetics. 1/

but i think this particular statistic, polls saying i’m doing fine but my neighbors and my country are struggling, are at least as likely to mean “things are tough but i’ve a stiff upper lip” as “i have false consciousness that everyone else but me is really suffering.” /fin

lots of self-selected negativity extroverts! but the fraction of the public that likes socially describing themselves in ways that might be interpreted, or they themselves might interpret, as “loser” may be very small. 1/

the people we hear from are generally political re-appropriators, trying to turn what the mainstream takes as a defect into a marker of virtue by reframing personal failure as political oppression. 2/

but until “queer” had very clearly been retaken as a proud marker of identity, most gay people resisted calling themselves queer, it was still associated with humiliation. 3/

similarly, until it’s the mainstream view that economic disappointment is political rather than personal failure, many people will resist characterizing themselves as economically disappointed, i think. /fin

maybe one “advantage” of our current moment is we have a hard time imagining a future, so when it doesn’t pan out we won’t have anything to painfully abandon. 1/

much of our current convulsion comes from clinging hopelessly to retrofutures of the 1950s-1990s, giving up on which means admitting much of what we’ve done is waste, including our very homes and the habits that constitute for many of us “ordinary life”. /fin