that’s precisely what distinguishes social insurance from market insurance. people buy market insurance voluntarily, knowing everything they know. 1/

social insurance is compelled or subsidized, because the people who participate already know whether they’re more likely to get better deals or worse out of it, but collectively we have an interest in compressing outcomes, so we compel participation. /fin

Really? Here are the Michigan Consumer Survey questions from 2015. data.sca.isr.umich.edu/fetchdoc.php... 1/

Do they capture what we care about, in terms of long-term economic welfare? Are you financially better off or worse off than five years ago? How are business conditions? What do you expect of inflation? How's the housing market? 2/

Is that "economic welfare" in any meaningful sense? If you have more savings than five years ago, but you're struggling to make ends meat 'cuz your kid's in college and rent's gone up, are you "financially better off"? 3/

If you think gas prices are going to decline, what's the relationship between that and economic welfare? 4/

These measures were never intended or designed to be used in the manner you are using them. They are intended to help make short-term predictions about the business cycle. That's what they were developed for. 5/

I agree the suicide rate is a very dirty measure. But it is more condign to the task of measuring welfare, the object of economics, than short-term consumer sentiment surveys. Yes. It's a bad measure! All the measures are bad! That is real life. 6/

You don't get to trump an argument because you have a measure, a very bad measure, but it is quantitative and you can find it on FRED! That is cargo cultism, not intelligence. /fin

I never said people were always upset and anxious. I said a lot of people have been upset and anxious since at latest 2016, and it's obviously true. 1/

There are all kinds of "measures if economic optimism", but we had a national debate over deaths of despair during that period, and an election in 2020 where one major political party's primaries were devoted very disproportionately to the cost of health care. 2/

Trump's first term may not be by some measures the worst of times economically, but we've been in a period of widely expressed dissatisfaction and disillusionment with the US economy since at least the financial crisis, through the volatility of the business cycle. /fin

i sometimes run into Freedom on Mastodon, but not too recently alas. i’ve been less abroad the last decade and a half or so, but may be more abroad soon. i’m not so likely to make it to an ML thing in Spring, though i enjoyed a flurry of texts from the recent reunion. 1/

how have you been all these decades, this blink of an eye? /fin