I’m sick of “affordability”

How about economic growth and rising incomes?

Let’s focus on how much stuff middle-class families can afford. (Photo by Fotografia Inc.)

For as long as I can remember, everyone has agreed that voters care at least somewhat about questions of material prosperity. They care about other things too, of course. But most voters prefer to have a job to being unemployed, they feel better when businesses are opening rather than closing, and they like to have more stuff and higher incomes rather than less stuff and lower incomes.

More recently, though, I’ve had two updates to my view of this.

The first is that back during the Obama years, older people warned me that voters get angry about inflation per se. That even if a wonk might say that 4 percent income growth and 2 percent inflation is the same as 10 percent income growth and 8 percent inflation, most people have a strong preference for the former. This has been vindicated by events, and I think we have a couple of pretty good psychological explanations for it.¹

The second is that we’ve always known that people’s understanding of the world is mediated by news consumption. But the internet-era shift in the news environment has made the tone of coverage more negative, which I think has generated more negative assessments of economic conditions. Lakshya Jain pretty successfully debunks the idea that social media platforms mechanically induce negative economic assessment, but I think he’s underrating the extent to which the entire media climate has been reshaped by having to compete on the internet.

Regardless, these are both relatively minor updates. The second is entirely a messaging point. As an opposition party, your job is now easier. As a governing party, it is now harder. The inflation thing is relevant mostly because there used to be a lot of policy wonks who thought raising the official inflation target to 4 percent was a good idea. I don’t think I ever met a politician or campaign operative who was willing to touch that with a 10-foot pole, and I now think they were right all along.

But instead of just taking advantage of the negativity to beat Trump and win the midterms, everyone in left-of-center politics has become obsessed with “affordability.”

Not just in the sense that politicians use the word “affordability” (it’s as good a word as any), but that every advocacy organization on the planet is spinning up policy ideas on “affordability” to address an “affordability crisis.”

And the problem is this term doesn’t really mean anything.

The ability to afford stuff is certainly not meaningless. But when your income is higher, you can afford more stuff; an affordability agenda is just an agenda for more economic growth and higher incomes.

Which is great! I am all for refocusing policy on those things — it’s literally the first item on my Common Sense Democrat Manifesto. But I don’t think most of the people talking about “affordability” are actually admitting that this really just means we should care a lot about economic growth and rising incomes.

Growth is controversial, affordability is slop

Again, I don’t want to get too hung up on the terminology here. If people want to say “affordability,” that’s fine.

But in terms of factional controversies, “economic growth” — the thing that makes stuff more affordable — has a meaning that is specific and contentious.