A few things. First, you asked the question I think earnestly as to whether Trump, Trump syscophants and Trump voters actually believed the ludicrous story that if we get rid of all immigrants, we’re going to get all sorts of “real” Americans who will work in meat processing plants and as nanny’s just like “good ole days”. You express confusion at this idiotic mindset, but I don’t think it’s confusing; I think you underestimate the number of voters who have “drank the kool-aid”. And more importantly, I think you underestimate the number of college educated/elite voters who “drank the kool-aid”. It’s one of my biggest issues with your take that people like Elon or other Silicon Valley types are actually very smart so we should see their pro Trump public pronouncements as 4-dimensional chess gambit. And yes that certainly some of what’s going on. But you really need consider that when Marc Anderson or Bill Ackman say something on Twitter that’s objectively idiotic that they actually believe what they are saying.
Second, what happens in the all too likely scenario that a lickspittle cooks the books with both jobs numbers and CPI data (companies have been waiting to raise tariffs due to TACO and building up inventories but it’s pretty likely the dam is going to break soon on this. If CPI comes in hot next month I think we have to assume more firings)? Honest to god I think we are underrating the economic catastrophe this could be. How do you plan anything without basic reliable data?
The economy has powered along better than expected last 3 months due to TACO and AI investment. But I think we are reaching the limits of how long wile-e-coyote can keep running on air before he realizes there is no ground underneath.
The desire for people to believe in they could live like kings on one income 'like in the 1950s' is incredible. Claims coming from both left (Sanders...) and right about x% of Americans are 'living paycheck to paycheck' are fatuous. The desire to blow everything up to get back to some golden age is frightening.
I’ve had this take percolating for a while but I kind of think we need to see 50s television and media as having a sort of “first mover advantage” when it comes to shaping American culture.
The 50s was the first time mass numbers of middle and working class households had televisions. And this is also a time when it was pretty hard to know what life was really like in other parts of the country. So here’s this new fangled device beaming into 50 million homes a version of what a “typical” American family is actually like. And that then becomes imprinted in people’s brains as to what a “normal” family in America should really be like.
"... imprinted in people’s brains as to what a “normal” family...."
And the message was not simply, "this is what everyone is doing these days." The message was, "this is what everyone has always done in the distant past, and what everyone will do in the distant future."
Stone Age tribes? They were just like us -- look at Fred and Wilma with their comical foot-driven automobile! Future millennia?They will be just like us with their car-shaped jet transports and their family pets named Astro. The 50s suburban ideal colonized all times past and future -- part of why speculative sci-fi worked so hard to explore genuinely different possibilities.
It's a weird thing to think about, but two the greatest TV shows ever made are basically using the same template, but as a way of sort of peeling back the surface to see the ugliness underneath; the father who knows best is capo in the mob or secretly a meth kingpin. But it's still using the same 50s sitcom structure as a way of making commentary about American life.
Game of Thrones is *actually* a family sitcom about the Lannisters. All the other stuff that happens is just events that the Lannister family reacts to.
I mean Mad Men in so many ways is a commentary on just how "false" the 50s style veneer of the perfect American family was. In some ways, it was almost too over the top in its commentary.
A lot of takes about the show criticize January Jones as the weak link in the show. And I'll let others decide if there was an actress with better acting chops that would be good for her role. But I think it's underestimated how much the reason she was cast was she was almost a ringer looks wise for the Mimi Van Doren archetype.
Also, I'm not sure there is a show or movie where I've rooted harder for a character to have an affair than Betty in Mad Men. Which again, was sort of the point; this idealized 50s household was actually just a veneer. She feels trapped, her husband is a cad sleeping around with anyone and everyone, so no wonder she feels tempted.
I'm not convinced that television is as responsible for 50's nostalgia as you propose.
At the same time, though...neither the Sopranos nor Breaking Bad are remotely realistic, according to pretty much anyone with firsthand knowledge of the subject matter. Yet Breaking Bad, despite even the relatively accurate components being extremely out of date even ten years later, stands out as many people's basic understanding for drug dealing. It seems like television, and the hyperreality it generates, drops people in the worst possible position on the Dunning-Kruger graph.
Yeahhhh, but . . . if you actually look at what was depicted, it's pretty immediately obvious that the characters in those shows live materially impoverished lives compared to 21st Century Americans. They only ever own one car, one TV (tiny), etc. They almost never eat out and when they do it's clearly presented as a major expense. When the mother makes dinner it frequently involves canned goods and cheap/"stretched" protein like meatloaf. Their kids share a single bedroom. Etc., etc.
The eating out thing is so real. The average American family these days eats out how many days a week? Maybe 2? (The data I found in a quick google suggests 8/month if you combine takeout from fast casual/fast food and actually eating out in a restaurant). The level of luxury and casual waste implied by this is genuinely insane by 1950s standards.
Also, underrated, but the food that the sitcom family would've eaten was probably complete ass compared to food the average middle class family can eat today in terms of flavor. That might actually be a bad thing (the deliciousness might be why people overeat and also eat out too often in general) but strictly taken as a measurement of living standards it seems relevant.
I'm skeptical Americans on average eat worse now than in the 50s. My uninformed guess is that a person in 2025 who bothers to plan and cook meals eats better, but that many people are eating packaged stuff out of a box or can because they don't know how to cook. Having most women expect to be homemakers had a lot of downsides, but it did encourage some specialization, and mom probably would at least be making a hot meal every night. Maybe that's meatloaf and mashed potatoes and canned green beans, but it's still a hot meal and it's not just something that got popped into the microwave or something.
Something Megan McArdle talked about a while ago is germane here: The death of the Bad Home Cook.
In an era when most people could very rarely afford to eat out, and processed food was much worse than it is today, there was a huge category of people (mostly housewives) who hated cooking, were terrible at cooking, would rather do anything else, but had to cook 3 meals a day anyhow.
That’s something you don’t see anymore; when all else fails, you can have some medium-quality takeout or frozen food.
Nobody eats like my wife did growing up: She wasn’t poor, but her mother’s specialty was soup made from green peas and macaroni boiled in unsalted water.
"My uninformed guess is that a person in 2025 who bothers to plan and cook meals eats better [than in the '50s], but that many people are eating packaged stuff out of a box or can because they don't know how to cook."
Achieving the same level of food quality without learning to cook is itself an improvement in living standards.
The real difference is almost certainly portion size.
Again, you actually are falling to the trap of letting media depictions of this time period overshadow actual reality. While it's true that working class and middle class people today are more likely to be eating processed microwave food, they are way way way less likely to literally struggling to feed themselves. Not only are Americans richer today (even working class Americans) than 1955 adjusted for inflation, but food costs have fallen dramatically adjusted for inflation.
Whatever unhealthier lifestyles that exist today as a result of technological change have to be weighed against the number of people literally not getting enough to eat.
Fast food is cheaper than cooking at home most of the time! I feel like most dinners we make at home are at least $20 and frequently $40 for 2 (well now 3 since my BIL moved in) people.
But we eat better than they did in the 50s. My grandparents weren’t cooking Indian or Moroccan food, I know that much.
It is absolutely possible to cook homecooked meals for less than 40 dollars for 2 portions.
You generally have a pantry of ingredients so you’re not buying all ingredients separately for each meal, so calculating the actual cost can be complicated. But 40 dollars for 2 portions it a high end home meal, not a day to day homecooked meal for most people.
I think the 50s nostalgia is more than TV vibes. Housing costs were lower, labor force participation was higher - most importantly, Americans' view of their economic well-being was colored by their immediate history, surviving global war in the 1940s, crippling depression for a decade in the 1930s. Plus we were a postwar global manufacturing titan while our European and Asian competitors were still rebuilding. Our grandparents weren't nuts, comparatively speaking, it was good times. #IlikeIke
Outside of MAGA world, who has nostalgia for the 50s? And even MAGA doesn't have nostalgia for the 50s; they just like a cudgel to beat their enemies over the head with.
As with most stuff, there were some things that were better in the 50s than now, but most stuff is worse. My equivalent in 1955 probably had a much more close-knit and vibrant community...but also, one car that would make it to 100000 miles only by enormous good luck and would likely kill you in a 40 mph crash.
I think the source of 50s nostalgia has a pretty clear answer: postwar boom. America went from war rationing to all that industrial capacity being unleashed on the domestic sector. Most people would have experienced a rapidly improving quality of life.
The mistake, as usual, is confusing the economic cause with its aesthetic trappings. White picket fences and beehive hairdos weren't culturally superior, they were the cultural choices of an economically superior nation.
Yeah, I mean it was a very small house with 1 bathroom, but my grandfather was an autobody repairman with a 3rd grade education who supported a wife who didn’t work and sent 5 kids to college, all of whom graduated without loans.
My grandmother did feel trapped though - she loved the big family but always wanted to have a job. She was the valedictorian of her high school! But the great grands wouldn’t pay for a mere daughter to go to school as in their view it would have been a waste to send a woman - what do you need a college degree for just to get married?
I'm hesitant to accept this theory because this nostalgia seems to be growing as we get further away. How many Gen Y/Z have watched TV shows from the 50s?!
See my follow up as to how many shows still use the 50s nuclear family template. There's likely very few people (even Boomers) still watching "Leave it to Beaver" reruns. But even more recent shows still use the same basic formula, even if it's used in much more creative ways (see Modern Family).
Also, this sort of stuff can just become permanent parts of the discourse even if very few people know the history or where certain things come from. Possibly the ultimate example is everything about Christmas. How many people really get that a lot of Christmas "traditions" are pretty recent inventions or even tell you where they come from? Or to bring it back to impact of movies/tv; how many people are aware the term "Gaslighting" is actually from a real movie called "Gaslight"?
Christmas is also interesting because it’s really the only part of contemporary American culture that preserves pre-1950s pop culture. (I guess Thanksgiving dinner too, preserving 19th century meal structure, with sweet and savory dishes mixed together rather than separated.)
I thought most American Christmas traditions came from Victorian England? (Sometimes indirectly from Germany, as in the Christmas tree?)
IIRC Christmas used to be a more disreputable and rowdy holiday, with gangs of people roving the town getting drunk. The Victorian era sought to domesticate Christmas, to associate it with "respectable family, including children, gathered around the table/Christmas tree" rather than "bunch of drunk hooligans running around." And it worked.
Specifically "A Christmas Carol"... the Dickens version of Christmas depicted in the book (serialized originally?) did not exist in Victorian England; he willed it into being with his pop culture product. That, plus the Coca-Cola Santa, "Twas the Night Before Christmas", and "Rudolph the Rednosed Reindeer" set the template for everything going forward.
It's like Roman roads -> railroad track gauge. Everything sets the track down for what will come after.
Right. How many people are aware that if you really wanted to celebrate Xmas in a traditional manner you'd be celebrating in a much more debauched fashion (Though I'm sure some people celebrate this way).
Given Christmas is give or take about 2024 years old, in the grand scheme of things, these Victorian traditions regarding how Christmas should be celebrated are pretty young.
I think you have it backwards. The nuclear family was used in the TV shows because it was "the norm" for most people. But it's usually been given a more positive spin - much like living conditions in NYC for young single people are shown to be much better on TV (e.g. Friends, Sex in the City, etc.) than they are in real life.
Even situations that diverge from the "nuclear family" are shown more positively because most people don't watch scripted TV shows to see real life. They have plenty of that already. They watch it to enjoy it and laugh along with the characters.
It was because of the Hays Code which enforced morality in movies and in TV shows. Just like it abolished the word "pregnancy" because apparently humans come from spontaneous generation.
Ozzie and Harriet (Did Ozzie even have a job?). Leave it to Beaver. Denace the Menace, Lassie... interesting point! Although I will say this, we did live on my Dad's income (manufacturing supervisor) just fine while Mom got us through the first few years in the late 50s/early 60s. I say just fine but Mom did go back to teaching when the youngest was over 5. Sidenote: we also witnessed the stagnation in manufacturing wages, not only did we have inflation in the 70s but Dad's income went steadily down...he retired at 62, said all he was doing was paying for the commute from the suburbs to the Los Angeles industry parks.
And we did fine on a single teachers family in the 60's. Of course, we ate meat 1.5 times a week and we depended on my grandfather shipping moving-box sized boxes of canned food 2x per year. I hope that I never eat canned salmon again (or powdered milk).
I'm not convinced that television in the 50's shaped culture. As others have mentioned, the nuclear family was the norm which television adopted, not the other way around.
I think 50's nostalgia is built around three components.
The first is basic economics. The US was the only major nation to come out of WW2 relatively untouched, and ready to export to the rest of the world. And through a combination of sexism from employers and societal expectations, households primarily had one earner, reducing the labor pool and thereby raising earnings per person.
The second is simple rose tinted glasses. People have glorified the past ever since there was a past to glorify.
And the third is survivorship bias. Recorded suicide-even without accounting for poorer reporting-was higher in the 1950's than any point since. Pre safety net, there was a greater likelihood of someone at the bottom of the bell curve-through any combination of personal failings or misfortune-dropping out of the running, with or without intentionally removing themselves. And with limited mass media, those who reached the picket fence middle class were disproportionately likely to have their stories recorded and retold, especially when their descendants were the ones who, in a Darwinian fashion, made up more of the next generation.
I'd also argue much of the "doom and gloom" outlook of the modern day is due to the internet. Statistics indicate homeownership is not much more difficult for millennials and zoomers than has been historically the case; however, if you only talk to people who assume they can't own a home, the prospect seems far bleaker. My best look at this is comparing conversations with my coworkers to what I hear from my extended groups of friends, who I primarily know via the internet. My coworkers all expect they either can or soon will be able to own a home, in part because we can easily talk to actual people who have gone through the process. One group of friends casts a very wide net, across careers and socioeconomic boundaries, and while the assumption isn't there, people understand the possibility exists. Another group is more concentrated, and the perception is rather bleaker.
People live paycheck to paycheck because of lifestyle creep and ever increasing levels of consumption.
One just has to look at the amount of money spent on food prepared outside the home over time to see this. Or the fact there are many more restaurants per capita than 10 and 20 years ago.
I didn't mean it as insulting, I have often cooked for one. But I do think that there are clearly huge economies of scale (especially on the time use front) in cooking for groups of 3-8 people and that's a much more traditional format. It used to be that singles would either live with their parents or live in rooming houses, and either way there would be group cooking.
N = 1, but I cooked for myself frequently when I lived alone. I would cook a batch and freeze most of it. That way I had homemade food and still benefited from economies of scale when cooking.
I'm not sure about economies of scale actually. I currently cook primarily for a family of five, but I cooked for one in grad school and I occasionally cook for very large groups for parties.
There are some things that are very easy to cook for one that do not scale up well without different infrastructure. One of the things I like to eat if it's just me is a fried egg with a sort of frico crust. If I had a griddle I could do enough of these to feed a whole family, but I do not and I therefore don't make them for my family. Grilled cheese is similar --- I have enough space in a pan to make maybe three, but not really more than that unless I want to mess with multiple pans and burners, which I do not enjoy.
Similarly, if you have ever cooked for a large crowd you know that it's actually quite hard to just scale up your normal food. There are some different kinds of things you can cook that can feed a lot of people (e.g. pork shoulder), but it's basically impossible to scale up something like carbonara pasta for 30.
Long story short, I think the issue is actually that all of our cooking infrastructure (pan sizes, stove sizes, recipes that have been developed) is aimed at people cooking for 3-8 people, not that there's something inherently easier about cooking for that number of people or that cooking continues to accumulate economies of scale as you try to serve more and more people.
I love cooking. I'm in charge of dinner every night and cook most of them. I'm constantly frustrated that my small children's limited pallet (not surprising, just frustrating) because I WANT to cook fun and interesting things for the family.
When I lived alone, I basically never cooked and ate out almost constantly because cooking for one is just not a good value proposition in terms of time, variety (leftovers for a week off one cook!), or ingredients (impossible to go through specialty items in a timely fashion). Cooking for one is, in fact, weird.
I'll admit that when I was a single man, I ate out a lot and ate badly when I cooked at home. Having a family was a strong motivation to learn how to cook!
Re: cooking, I somewhat disagree. Cooking scales up incredibly well because a lot of the labor inputs reflect high static overhead but relatively low marginal labor requirements for additional quantities made, but the implicit corollary of that is that cooking scales *down* very poorly. Cooking for one person is like 70%-90% of the effort of cooking for four people rather than 25%.
Lotta replies talking about advantages of scale are just doing it wrong. Yes there are things you want to do in bulk. Now, you could just full on meal prep for the whole week to solve this problem, but I'm perfectly happy to be lazier than that. Just prep some base protein. Once you've got a pile of well marinated cooked chicken strips in your fridge it's trivial to throw together a huge variety of things for any given meal. Make a bunch of chili and you can turn it into tacos or pasta or nachos or chili dogs or whatever in a lot less time than going to Starbucks.
"Make a bunch of chili and you can turn it into tacos or pasta or nachos or chili dogs or whatever in a lot less time than going to Starbucks."
In 2012 ,80% of Americans lived within 20miles of a Starbucks (most recent distance data I can find) and there are 2x as many Starbucks as there were then. I would be a majority of Americans live less than 10minutes from a Starbucks..
They'll have their Starbucks before you even get the water boiled for your weird chili noodles.
I cook lunch for myself all the time when working from home and the time required to boil some pasta is just about the maximum time it ever takes me to bullshit something together.
I suspect this comes down to whether or not you like cooking. Two of my kids are (more-or-less) out on their own. The older kid doesn't really like cooking, but can make some simple things for himself and his roommate. The younger one loves cooking, enjoys making food for his friends, and cooks up big batches of food to eat during the week in his apartment at college.
When I got an apartment as a college student, I basically knew how to boil water and make toast. I ate a lot of really lousy food because I didn't know how to cook and didn't even know what I didn't know.
I chose to interpret it as an indictment of living single, which says more about my hang-ups (not about living single per se, but about the implied judgement) than what I'm pretty sure the intention was (i.e. not a moral judgement).
Cooking for one is both disappointing and lazy. It’s like bland chicken breasts and microwaved cheese tortillas. I put in a lot less effort when I am the only one eating.
I want some of your recipes, but as a lazy cook married to a lazy cook, I am guessing that you may still over estimate how truly “easy” they are, just based on my experiences with all people who both cook a lot and enjoy it
You don't have to though, you can quite easily do very tasty and healthy stir fries and curries that require minimal effort and can be batch cooked! The real problem is that without the social pressure of other people its easy to just default to the easier but more expensive options of ready meals and food delivery
The viral paycheck to paycheck stat that everyone likes to trot out is fake. It's a stat a company that benefitted from debt used to make their business more attractive that political commentators grabbed onto without context.
This is true but my sentiment comes from how many people misinterpret the paycheck to paycheck. It is after retirement savings and other voluntary expenses. The number of people driving $60k plus trucks in this country and share of folks paying over $1000 a month for a car feels very voluntary.
There is a huge cultural component behind the living paycheck to paycheck claim and there are lots of well to do people that have put themselves into this mindset.
The answer is you're both right. There really is a decent contingent of people who if they lost their job tomorrow would really struggle to pay their bills.
I think the key is trying to distinguish between the people who's paycheck only just barely covers rent, groceries, utility bills and car payment on a moderately priced car and people who wouldn't be able to pay bills because they clearly made a choice to live beyond their means on luxuries they can't really afford. The former is a pretty sizable number of people but the problem is so is the latter. I'm thinking about those ludicrous CNBC articles that seem to come out like once every 6 months that try to make the claim that John Doe making $500K has no money left for savings because NYC living is just that expensive. And then you look at the supposed budget of said person and you see that a pretty significant amount of money is going to house payments on a multi-million dollar Coop, live in nanny costs, private school tuition and BMW payments (considering these likely fake people are usually living in Manhattan, the luxury car payments are especially absurd).
The CNBC stuff is an extreme (and likely fake) example of what I'm getting at, but I think there really is a sizable number of people that paying for a lot of what are ultimately luxuries due to lifestyle creep or keeping up with the joneses. Basically, why this is my favorite commercial of all time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0HX4a5P8eE
The paycheck to paycheck thing is a meme propagated by young people. And it’s way harder for young people to get ahead - nearly everyone under 35 is living paycheck to paycheck. But the majority of the over 60 crowd isn’t because they bought their home a while ago and don’t have student loans and their kids are grown and if they aren’t retired they’re probably at a decent place in their career. The paycheck to paycheck stat is false but reflects the truth that it is much harder for young people to get ahead than it was for the Boomers or X or elder Millennials
The bank isn’t going to let you offer 75% of your salary for a mortgage even if the 25% covers rice & beans & a Corolla.
If they did, it would only make existing homes more competitive… households in excess of “neighborhood character” must necessarily find housing unaffordable, even if their non-housing budgets were competed down to $0.
This is truly food for thought! The social aspect of cooking for more than one makes the process more filling for everyone while the social aspect of keeping up with the Jones next door insures the paycheck to paycheck rat race. Social media’s information flood doesn’t encourage living within your income and investing the rest.
I feel the housing pinch too. Though compare houses build in the 1950s to those in the 70s, 90s, or today. Think about the amenity decisions folks have made. Think about expectations of space per person. There is an expectations creep. It’s subtle, but pervasive.
I agree with you but these commentators must have some circumstances. Kids? Living in an expensive part of town?
Case in point: It’s surprising how expensive some parts of town are with housing. I live in a lovely but not popular area. Housing is 50% cheaper. Going out is 50% cheaper than the other area. Oh and my friends property tax is 3* mine even though the house is the same size.
So even though they’re earning 2* as much household income, when you take into account their income taxes, housing costs, property taxes and eating out then I’m in positive cash flow and they’re not.
Fortunately Trump is doing his best to ensure that housing becomes more affordable, with his trademark combination of higher taxes err tariffs, higher interest rates due to massive deficit spending and tanking the size of the construction labor force.
The number of people who believe this is incredible. Like, they just hold this belief that “things were easier in the past”. Pointing out the statistics showing that literally everything is better now does not seem to matter.
The size of the anti Biden-Harris vote in every place exposed to pressure from migrants and the relatively short-lived inflation spike suggests to me that the 'living paycheck to paycheck' theme is real.
Most Americans are rich on paper (due to home values) but are illiquid which is why they take on massive amounts of debt even for very regular everyday spending. Those in the top 20% who subscribe to SB think everything is OK but it is clearly not.
It's almost like blind, naked populism is a cancer no matter which side of the political aisle it is coming from. It also sets up voters for more extreme types of politicians who will actually try to fulfill the promise of the decades of bad faith lying and rhetoric that have been tossed around for decades for the short-term gain of people trying to get elected to a seat.
You need to keep in mind that people have very different world views.
Nannies are not a feature of most American lives. A large percentage of children are looked after by parents, extended family, family friends, and church childcare centers. Those types of arrangements are especially common in exurban and rural areas.
Meat packing has a couple of elements you should conside. One, it used to be a highly unionized and reasonably well paid job that was FAR more geographically dispersed around the country. Two, a pretty decent percentage of rural or rural-adjacent males have personally field dressed a deer or other game animal, so the job is not going to have quite the ick factor to them that it has to people with different life experiences. Doesn’t mean they want it, but it is not going to seem implausible to them that someone would.
"... decent percentage of rural or rural-adjacent males have personally field dressed a deer or other...."
See, now this is just morally repugnant. People should not be making wild animals wear human clothes, in any circumstance. It's probably part of some sexual fetish, and it's all just deeply troubling. If you want to know "what's wrong with our boys," this sort of reverse animal cosplay is a good place to start.
And for those who don’t get the joke, field dressing is how hunters cleanly remove the internal organs of a game animal in a way that avoids contamination of the meat with intestinal contents. It’s done in the wild, thus “field.”
"Dressing" in this older sense could describe any stage in the preparation of foods, esp. meats (we still "dress" salads). So, "field dressing" was the first stage in a sequence of dressings -- it was the dressing one did in the field, as opposed to the dressing one did in the kitchen, at the table, and so on.
Little known fact - Tywin Lannister’s first onscreen appearance doesn’t involve him saying “yabba dabba doo”, but instead involves him making Jamie put his sister’s clothes onto a stag, representing Robert Baratheon.
As someone in a state full of these people, the problem with this labor sector tends to be that they can't pass a drug test. (They also aren't nearly as facile with outdoors activities as they purport to be). Every company that tries to locate in West Virginia to take advantage of the cheap labor tends to hit that wall.
No, but meth does... the number of employees my plant has had to fire for meth usage (weed is now mostly a case of, "don't come to work high") is staggering.
The companies need to make sure that their employees aren't still high when they come to work. "Have you done drugs in the past week? / No" is sufficient. You're correct that it is not necessary, but we don't have drug tests with better temporal specificity and the situation is such that false positives are better than false negatives.
So the nanny point is really just because Matt brought it up as an example. Now the fact that Matt though of nannys when trying to make his more general point perhaps speaks to Matt's own blind spots as to the type of people.
As far as the fact that meat processing plans used to be geographically dispersed is an interesting point. Because that actually makes it different than a lot of other "classic" blue collar industrial jobs. Coal mining almost by definition had to be geographically concentrated (can only mine coal where the actual coal is). Steel making was famously (and actually still is to an extent) geographically concentrated in Pennsylvania. Car manufacturing was concentrated in Detroit, with car part factories concentrated in Ohio (ironically today car manufacturing is probably more geographically distributed than it used to be).
My point is, the geographic concentration of particular industries meant that while things like free trade and automation were on net good for most Americans, the pain was acutely concentrated in very particular geographic locations. So instead of having 50,000 workers who no longer had a job dispersed across America, there were 50,000 workers out of work in one city or town. I think my point is, I don't think people really want the old jobs to come back if you were to really talk to them, I think what they really want is for their old towns and communities to come back. Now in some cases, these cities can come back. In a lot of ways large parts of Brooklyn and Queens were no different from "rust belt" America in the 70s and for a lot of the same reasons; but since NYC became a superstar city starting in the 80s, those previously devastated neighborhoods like DUMBO and Red Hook are now trendy neighborhoods. Pittsburgh is another one. But I'm not sure how replicable this is across the entire country.
And if you read this paper, it's about housing prices. The reality is (and I would never dare tell a Dem politician to run on this idea), a lot of these towns should be even emptier than they are and they are being propped up by net transfers from basically 7 metros.
Actually blue collar industrial jobs were also VERY widely dispersed. You are correct in that there absolutely were regional superclusters, but there were also manufacturing plants all over rural America, and many of the clusters were in rural areas (furniture and textiles, for example.)
Focusing solely on the geographic concentration of a major industries around major metros is a mistake, IMO, because a LOT of the pain is coming from the loss of those more widely dispersed manufacturing plants. In Virginia, we had regional clusters of textile manufacturing in rural areas around Danville and furniture around Martinsville and Galax. None of those are major cities. They have still not recovered from NAFTA. Virginia, not generally considered a big manufacturing state, lost over 130k manufacturing jobs net, about 36% of Virginia manufacturing jobs.
Depending on the job and the region, yes, some people would want the old jobs back. Keep in mind that modern manufacturing plants are more automated, so the reality of any manufacturing return is fewer, and more highly skilled, jobs for equivalent output.
This pattern was seen nationwide, with people especially moving to places that are less dense, scenic, with available outdoor activities, near colleges and universities, near bodies of water, near parks, etc. Often they moved to places where they or their parents had previously left.
Internal migration in general is a mixed bag for human wellbeing. Moving disrupts family support for childcare and eldercare that can increase costs by thousands. Most two parent families have two careers to think about. It disrupts schooling for kids, and friendships for kids and parents alike. Economics are not the only argument, and reduced internal migration probably reflects the best interests of the people involved.
Spreading people out to more communities lets us productively use housing and infrastructure that’s already available. It frees up housing for people who prefer to live in cities. More educated people in more areas moderates political divides and decreases polarization. Remote work has really helped this.
To me, the reality is that emptying these towns hurt people and damaged our politics in ways that greatly offset the economic benefits.
Yeah. It’s interesting that Matt seems to be pro-internal migration while being pro-natalist. You don’t get a higher birth rate without extended family in town. Grandma shouldn’t be more than 15 miles away *in the worst case* because her entire raison d’etre is to be a free babysitter, preferably one that makes backhanded comments about your parenting…
It’s not good for the parents or the kids or the family or the bank account to have widely dispersed family. Sometimes your family sucks and it’s best to get as far away as possible, sometimes there are no opportunities and it’s the only way to do it, but it’s at best a necessary evil. There’s a reason magnet cities have lower birth rates.
The baby boom coincided with i believe the highest number of moves on record (though they only started keeping track in the Census in 1948).
Of course for someone who grew up in the Dust Bowl or 1930s Central Valley, living in the San Fernando Valley or like Richmond, CA probably felt like a garden of eden in terms of prosperity.
The thing about magnet cities is interesting as well... historically port cities have had a lot of net external migration but as families became settled they would generally move to other places in the interior of the country. But 2008-20 there was a reversal of that with a lot of people moving to what you might call "magnet cities" (though I believe Utah, Idaho, North Carolina, etc. were actually the biggest attractions for movers, and those places do not have low birth rates like NY/SF).
“By the early 1960s, 95 percent of meatpacking workers outside the South were unionized, and wages were comparable to those in auto and steel production. Between the 1960s and 1980s, the wages of meat-slaughter and -processing workers remained significantly higher than the average in nondurable manufacturing.”
And, as noted in the article, “By the early 1960s, 95 percent of meatpacking workers outside the South were unionized, and wages were comparable to those in auto and steel production. Between the 1960s and 1980s, the wages of meat-slaughter and -processing workers remained significantly higher than the average in nondurable manufacturing.”
Low wages and poor working conditions in meat packing are a CHOICE, not inevitable.
Essentially by switching to low wage more assembly-line style processing and improving equipment companies reduced the price f chicken by 50%, at the same time the price of beef nearly doubled (then fell again as the beef industry adopted similar technology).
So yes it is a choice, but the old model of meat production had meat that was twice as expensive, which I doubt consumers would be willing to tolerate.
If you reread the article, it’s total improvements from conception to raised to slaughter to market that halved the cost. Processing labor was not half the cost of meat.
Most of the historic savings are from things like better genetics, lower cost methods of raising meat (confinement operations), efficiencies in feeding, and for processing, better equipment and processes and the increased productivity it allows.
A processing plant worker can handle up to 2000 chickens per day, but keep in mind, there are multiple steps to process a chicken. Cattle numbers are up to 390 IIRC, same caveat.
Retail markup after that is 25-50% of price.
Going cheap on labor does not halve the price. Each one of those workers is processing a LOT of animals, and even with multiple steps, their daily salary is divided by thousands of tons of meat.
If there’s anything worth the government subsidizing it’s that. Sounds like a terrible job that should have good wages and benefits, but also USDA prime ribeyes should be $3.50
You make very good points, but "have field dressed a deer" != "am willing to work on an assembly line gutting and skinning animal carcasses day in, day out, as a full-time job that is notorious for crappy worker health & safety conditions"
My point is that, with the wages, benefits, and working conditions equivalent to those offered in the eighties, more people would take these jobs. There wasn’t a shortage of workers applying for union meat packing jobs. It was a dirty, physical job that paid well, had good benefits, and union protection for working conditions.
In a functioning market, difficult or unpleasant jobs should have a higher wage, not lower.
Heck, I'm a vegetarian, so from my perspective, "meat packing jobs pay better = meat is more expensive = people eat less meat = fewer animals are raised in horrible conditions/lower environmental impact of animal husbandry" is a pure win!
But tell the average American that they must pay more for meat, and watch them get all pissy about it.
It's not only that, but labor is a market. Nannies and meat are less expensive than they otherwise would be because immigrant labor is cheaper. Americans would take those jobs if wages for them rose enough. But the catch is that rising wages would increase the costs and result in fewer jobs for nannies and meat factory workers. Would that theoretically be better than the status quo? I don't think so, but reasonable people can disagree on that.
If you want to have a permanent underclass with no rights and no opportunity, while also keeping wages lower for local workers, sure. That doesn't sound ideal to me.
Most paid childcare workers (approx 80%) are not immigrants, legal or illegal.
Around half (estimates range from 45-65%) of meat packing employees are not immigrants, legal or illegal.
Meat prices would probably go up, but probably not disastrously, given that there is quite a decent market for local humanely slaughtered meat. I have to question the ethics of apologizing for objectively really horrible working conditions in meat packing plants and other occupations. Hard physical work is one thing, abusive treatment of employees is quite another.
Or we just perfect lab grown meat ("or we just", ha!) and we stop engaging in such a ridiculously wasteful and labour intensive enterprise. This would not result in decent paying jobs for large numbers of people, but seeing as we're not a communist country I don't see why unnecessary jobs should be maintained.
I don't disagree with that. And yes, prices would go up. I have no idea how much and what ultimate new equilibrium would be established. I just think the idea that "Americans won't do those jobs" is mainly true because wages are low.
Prices would go up a bit, then probably back down as plants invested in increased automation. US plants tend to use significantly less automation than European plants do, for many of the reasons you'd expect.
The poor media diet or even the idea that people have a personal responsibility about their media sources is core to understanding the strange behavior. All kinds of people don't seem to understand the bias of the sources they are consuming. Having talked to people and surprised about some stupid stance that is right out of Fox or worse, it is clear that many of these folks don't have a feed of any substance that disagrees with their regular media.
One of my consistent takes as to why so many Trump scandals don’t seem to move his soft supporters (the hardcore will be with him no matter what) is we underestimate how much right wing media is literally a different universe.
I still think to many MSM pundits and reporters operate under the assumption that whatever big controversy is in the news must also be the news of the day at Fox or Newsmax if just from a different angle. Like if we asked Peter Baker (my stand in for all things bad with MSM) what do you think Fox is saying about Epstein, he’d probably have some elaborate answer about the different ways pundits are spinning the story when the real answer is they are not even talking about it at all.
My in law family are pretty conservative but not MAGA and even they are concerned about grandma in law’s consumption of Fox News - she literally just watches it all the time and asks my wife weird questions…
I feel like what social media did to GenZ is more or less happening to a lot of old conservative ppl with Fox News or NewsMax…
If you don't read Fox News daily, you're doing yourself a disservice. It is definitely a completely different planet. They have been talking for days about some fight in Cincinnati that I assume is too inconsequential for most other news to report. But a Fox News loyalist would take this as a case of MSM ignoring violence on our streets.
I think the difference is that conservative media outlets basically consider it their job to be spokesmen for Trump and GOP while left of center media almost takes it as an insult that their being too supportive of Dems (the bias charge from the right is as much about shaping MSM coverage as it is about convincing regular people).
And it's not even just MSM. I'm pretty sure David Dayen at The American Prospect would bristle at the idea that his publication is about boosting the Democratic Party. The outlet may openly want Dems to win over GOP, but they will absolutely attack Dems if they think it's called for.
This is how you get the dynamics of the idiotic Sydney Sweeney controversy*. Get a few lefties bringing up the supposed racial dog whistle angle*. Get some right wingers with large Twitter followings to highlight the most insane lefty takes and watch Newsmax and Fox News run with it to the point you get Trump talking about it. The serious of events that led to this is just not happening in the same manner with the parties or controversy flipped.
*Can I just say, I actually don't think the angle that there is a subtle eugenics message to the ad is a terrible take. I think the idea this commercial needs to be a national topic of conversation is dumb. But I think American Eagle knew exactly what it was doing putting blond haired blue eyed Sydney Sweeney as their spokeswoman and having her say the dialogue she says. There's at least to me a "wink wink, nod nod" aspect to the ad.
It's probably more plausible that they knew deranged leftists would stroke-out about it and make the ad more viral than it had any business being.
I had no idea who she was and haven't even bothered to find out what she looks like (other than blonde, blue-eyed, and pneumatic) and yet she's been mentioned on pretty much every podcast I've listened to in the last couple of weeks. Easily one of the more successful ad campaigns out there.
Matt buried the lede a little bit by only talking about the implications of cooking the books right at the end of today's post, but he's still right. I don't think we can begin to comprehend what a disaster that will be. How much of what we read (including today's post!) uses economic data without a thought about, well, what if these numbers are just made up?
Trump has now made it clear that he won't accept bad economic numbers -- that's the only reason to fire the BLS commissioner. Maybe they'll start cooking the books* immediately or just faking the BLS press release, or maybe they'll discover some deep corruption that requires them to cease publishing all reports, you know, until they "get to the bottom of things." But imagine a world where there's no objective general judge of how the economy is doing. Private sources won't do; people's "feelings" from what they see around them won't do either. We will truly be in terra incognito and, like we take the air around us for granted, we simply aren't ready to deal with the tsunami-like effects of making us all blind.
* I understand how hard it will be to fake all the thousands of numbers that go into building these reports. I also understand that BLS employees will also be leaking what's happening. I'm just not sure that's as meaningful as people may think. Just remember: Trump fired the BLS commissioner because he didn't get the numbers he wanted. Why would he stop there, if future numbers aren't to his liking? One way or another, that shocking development has carved the heart out of objective reporting system and it will never recover as long as Trump, or a Trump-like person, is president. From this moment on, if you fully accept any economic report from this administration, you are acting on unjustified blind faith. Even bad numbers have to make you think, "Are the numbers even far worse than reported?"
I mean in the South back then, it was common for working class white families to have a black lady that came in to do the laundry and especially ironing. I bet that was pretty common up north too. Not that this is a desirable arrangement but it was common.
The more common argument now seems to be “without immigrants all these jobs will be automated instead.” Which feels even more racist, like you’re okay losing your job to a robot but not a brown person, you are effectively assigning negative value to brown people’s utility.
Historically automating low skill jobs has been what has enabled economies to zoom ahead of their competitors. Britain had massive supplies of draught-horses and poor people but replacing them with atmospheric engines and mechanical looms turned Britain into an economic superpower after the capital costs were paid off. It being presently cheaper to kneecap productivity with cheap labour isn't a good thing and is partly why China is dominating in several industries. The pro growth mindset should favour automation where practical and immigration where not.
This is of course before you get into the fact a machine doesn't need the government to pay for education, policing and the various other functions of state, here in Britain high state responsibility along with low automation has meant that you have to get to the sixth decile (originally I typoed as percentile) of worker income before people start net contributing and that includes if they arrive at the age of 21.
If I understand the argument correctly, it’s that automation increases productivity and does not increase housing demand or need for social welfare or other government support. Both housing and government services are hot topics in conservative debate.
I don’t think very many of those voters are arguing job loss.
But even low skilled immigration [Why can't we make "immigration" mean mainly attracting high income earning potential people?] make a positive contribution to non-immigrants income even new of "social welfare and social support."
"But even low-skilled immigration make[s] a positive contribution"
You can lead a horse to accurate ideas, but you can't make it believe them. Social scientists have been pointing that fact out for decades now, and conservatives have responded by losing trust in social scientists instead.
"You believe that you are special, Mr. Anderson. That the rules do not apply to you..."
(I assume you mean @pmarca, Marc Andreesen of a16z infamy? Certainly agree that VC's been doing a fine job of proving the EMH is false over the last few years.)
>How do you plan anything without basic reliable data?
Obviously what Trump is doing is bad, but that throat clearing aside, if there was no reliable economic data coming from the government, the private sector would very quickly fill this void because there would be a huge profit incentive to do so.
"Huge profit incentive" doesn't suggest that these figures would be provided in a reliable, timely way to the general public. Just the opposite - their value would be the competitive edge of no one else having them. BLS and other statistical bureaus produce classic public goods, and no private entity will ever be incentivized to provide them at the same level of scale, rigor, transparency, or publication.
Yeah I think "Allan" is underestimating the likelihood that if the only reliable economic data is from private sources than those private sources are going to start finding ways of monetizing this data given how valuable a commodity this is going to be absent "free" (and better) government data.
Bigger companies will happily pay and gain an advantage over smaller competitors. Or even more likely, the private entities will make deals with companies but not others that will give a few "connected" companies a huge competitive advantage that likely will be economically harmful given how much it's likely to lead a handful companies being able to use this info to crush competitors.
Even if there were a superior private source of data (and that's a huge if), its consumption would be privatized because that's what private means (i.e., profit seeking). So actual knowledge of the economy would be a scarce resource and its maldistribution by itself would skew the economy into winners (those who pay for the data) and losers.
Let's not paper over the incalculable damage Trump has just done to how we're able to see the economy by believing in such Panglossian nonsense.
"the private sector would very quickly fill this void because there would be a huge profit incentive to do so"
No, this is infamously the sort of situation that generates market failure, as Kenneth Arrow pointed out in 1973 ("Information and Economic Behavior", available at https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/AD0768446.pdf). Someone with accurate information about the economy has tremendous advantage over everyone else (who has inaccurate information), and so economics researchers are strongly incentivized to keep their results secret. Then everyone spends their time duplicating everyone else's basic-but-secret work, rather than building to measure more subtle phenomena.
>Honest to god I think we are underrating the economic catastrophe this could be. How do you plan anything without basic reliable data?<
The evisceration of the government's capacity to produce accurate economic data is obviously pretty alarming—a low motion car crash is how I view it.
Maybe I'm wearing rose-colored glasses, but I think this one aspect of MAGA horribleness is likely to stop short of "catastrophe" simply because there are other number crunchers besides the ones who work for the White House. There's CBO, which Trump doesn't control, the Fed, the Congressional Research Office, state/local data collection entities, universities, ADP, etc. To be sure, data collection is a big challenge if we can't rely on the executive branch. It's bad. But Trump's going to find it hard to fool the rest of the world as to what's going on under the hood of the US economy.
I think the real danger is the Fed. So, so much of the Fed's power so to speak is credibility; if inflation really is a danger the Fed will step in and do what's necessary to get it under control.
If Trump is going to fire the BLS head because he doesn't like the numbers, what's going to happen when CPI shows inflation increasing again given how much he's been threatening Powell. He puts a sycophant in, even if the other Fed governors still vote to keep rates high, how much of Fed credibility is lost. I just really think too many Trump fans who should know better (i.e. those in finance world) are underrating the possibility the 10-year (which is what really guides pricing) would go up not down if Powell is fired and a sycophant cut rates.
Or what if, after the Senate approves the nomination of Barron Trump as the new BLS commissioner, the inflation report next month or so shows inflation dropping to 0.0001%? Your assumption that the "CPI shows inflation increasing again" is based on the idea that we believe any economic number coming out of the Executive Branch ever again. What would be our basis for trusting their numbers now?
What he can do is choke off the flood of reliable data. He might not even fake the reports; he may just cease having them at all and burying the raw data. My understanding is that the CBO, Fed, CRO, etc etc all rely on these federal government collection efforts. Take them away and the bottom drops off.
There's a consistent finding in decision science that people overestimate their knowledge in areas where they are ignorant and underestimate their knowledge in areas where they are expert.
I think the Musk/Andreesen/etc. comments depend on the field. There are lots of areas where Musk's opinion is extremely smart. But he obviously had ignorant or idiotic views on how government actually functioned, an area in which he had little expertise.
>"How do you plan anything without basic reliable data?" China doesn't provide basic, reliable economic data and they don't have trouble attracting investment, even from countries that claim to care about human rights and democracy.
If that's a defense of what Trump is doing to our economic data, I don't know what to say. How about, don't screw with a damn good system that's the wonder of the world just to satisfy the narcissistic sociopath?
If your point is that China is succeeding despite not having world class economic data but your mileage may vary if you try the same thing so beware, well, sure, OK, I guess.
It's not a defense of what Trump is doing. What is Trump is doing is awful. My point is that China is legally a horrible place to invest in, yet firms are banging at China's door begging to be let in. Similarly, if the economic information environment in America worsens firms will still want to do business here.
But, man, what a terrible own goal it is, just to massage the ego of the stupidest, worst person on the planet.
And where all the business leaders who clearly did not troop to Trump's office insisting that he reinstate the commissioner and swearing not to interfere in BLS operations anymore? No, instead, the stock market zoomed the next business day (Monday). I'm beginning to think Lenin was right about capitalists' sense of self-preservation.
The american stock market (NYSE + NASDAQ) is worth almost 10x the Shanghai stock exchange despite US GDP being 10-35% larger depending on how you want to measure it. If the US stock market were valued on similar terms to the Chinese stock market it would have catastrophic consequences for American companies.
Would it? The stock’s already issued. It’d be bad for American pensioners, executives, and startups - and the secondary effects of that are large - but a change in a company’s stock price doesn’t affect their financials unless they want to issue new equity and that doesn’t happen too often. They’d issue debt instead if the stock price were too low, right?
It helps to be doing catch-up growth, because even if you don’t know the details, you can be pretty confident that some old things that are new here will work.
There are alternatives to either having native born Americans doing undesirable but necessary jobs and tolerating illegal and undocumented immigration to fill those jobs.
I do not understand why these are discussed as the only options.
"I think you underestimate the number of college educated/elite voters who “drank the kool-aid”.
Living in Florida I'm surrounded by people like this. Most of my friends and acquaintances are college educated Trump supporters who are otherwise pretty smart but the types who went to FSU and UF - and not elite universities. They, for the most part, genuinely believe Trump's policies will be good for the economy.
"Take this guy from the Montana Knife Company, who initially reacted with enthusiasm to tariffs because they would boost his made-in-America products … only to discover that his costs are rising due to tariffs because he relies on imported equipment and supplies."
I refuse to believe that even the most MAGA of small business owners is so stupid that he doesn't understand where the inputs *for his own products* come from, or what the impact of tariffs on those inputs would be.
I think a lot of people conceptualized tariffs as a kind of consumption tax on foreign-made end products and didn't think about the taxation of intermediate components and capital goods.
Don’t discount the capacity of people to not think things through and stick with their default assumptions. People are amazing at cognition, but also often complete morons
I believe it. Most small business owners aren’t operations specialists, they’re product people. They know just enough about their supply chain to run their business, but they’re concentrating on products or marketing or whatever.
My vague memory is that all the Montana Knife guy’s suppliers are American companies, so he sees that he’s buying American and figures that means he doesn’t need to pay for tariffs. He doesn’t think about the fact that his suppliers are importing steel or machinery from overseas, because he’s just looking at his invoices and seeing entirely American companies.
One of the most important developments in the modern history of popular music is soundscan. The reason is, there was actual real hard data has to what albums and singles people were buying as opposed to just asking record store owners. And lo and behold, turns out there was actually way more fans of rap and grunge than people realized.
In other words, there was an entire industry that literally didn't understand who was buying their product or which that one of their product lines was actually way more popular than they realized.
Another good example that Matt brings up all the time is parking minimums. Specifically, there is often news reports in places like NYC of small business owners who are against getting rid of parking requirements because they worry how their customers are going to get their store when in reality the vast majority of their customers are either walking, biking or taking public transit to get to their business (what's really likely going on is the small business owner in question is worried about where he/she personally is going to park).
Point being is I think you underestimate the number of business owners who don't exactly have a deep understanding of all the mechanics of their business.
This might be out of date, but even the corporate buyers at Walmart aren't product experts. There often 25-year-olds who are shifted from product to product every few months and whose career depended on just yelling at suppliers to provide increasingly cheaper products even if the manufacturing capacity didn't exist anywhere cheaper than where the existing factories were located.
Yeah. I mean, I'd expect more of a small business owner who makes a very small number of products that all depend on more or less the same inputs, but I suppose one doesn't necessarily think beyond one or two degrees of separation.
I'd also hazard a guess that the people in charge at Montana Knife Company know a lot more about knives than they do about supply chains and economics.
I think it's quite possible that he bought from a bunch of american companies that happened to do the importing for him, and so he didn't think much about it
His business skill is building a macho brand on Insta / TikTok, and we're all here talking about the Montana Knife Company so he's doing a really friggin' good job of that.
I know a fair number of small business people who really only have a surface knowledge of all that underpins their business.
From his perspective he's not buying goods from overseas, he's buying goods from ABC supplier. Until tariffs make the exact country of origin important, it doesn't matter to him, and he probably didn't notice, what country his materials come from.
Small business owners generally are people who are very good at the technical aspect of their field. They get an entrepreneurial itch, and if they can combine some good sales technique with a decent sense of operating savvy they become successful. But none of that requires a deep understanding of the economics or complexity of the systems and webs that underly their business.
In the 2000s, Medicare implemented a new pricing system for healthcare Durable Medical Equipment (DME) services (the healthcare providers that supported people needing oxygen, CPAP, wound care at home, etc., not the manufacturers of the devices). Instead of Medicare setting a price, they auctioned contracts for each metro area. Before this went into effect, it was obvious and well covered that prices would plummet and that many smaller companies would fail. That is exactly what happened. The larger and smaller companies were my customers at the time.
90% of the smaller DMEs were in complete denial about what was coming. There were multiple root causes:
1) An assumption that it wouldn't go into effect. Not unreasonable as this often happens. Today, some are likely thinking, "yes, this would be bad if passed, but I'm sure Trump will figure out a way to do it that doesn't hurt me."
2) A narrow view of business performance / ignorance. Most small DMEs built their businesses based on providing very high service levels. In the auction system, this was irrelevant. But they just couldn't conceive of a world where operational efficiency was the only way to survive. With the Montana Knife Company, it's possible he realizes the situation but just underweights the impact. "I've built a company despite higher costs, so I can keep doing it." It's only when he discovers how much higher that things sink in. But don't underestimate how many small business owners just got lucky by executing a business strategy that worked, but they don't understand.
3) Pure subconscious denial. Many knew deep down that they were doomed, but just couldn't handle the cognitive dissonance. They kept running their companies at a loss until they went bankrupt.
Yeah, good point. I don't really have a reason other than I assume that someone competent enough to start a semi-successful business in the first place knows something about how their business works.
In that regard, _This American Life_'s Iowa State Fair episode, Act III: "Limp Biscuit" (https://www.thisamericanlife.org/839/meet-me-at-the-fair/act-three-16) is quite illuminating. Many small business owners aren't hyper-knowledgeable experts in their industry; they're perennial entrepreneurs that start and close businesses until they find one that sticks.
Not unreasonable for someone to think X is a good idea without realizing that X isn't good for them personally.
Besides, a 10% across the board tariff with the revenue going to reduce the deficit probably DOES benefit the Montana Knife Company if they sell more domestically than they export. The actual tariff on steel would be another unhappy story.
So many chickens will be coming home to roost of the next few months. I expect more failing, more lashing out, and doubling down on destructive policies will continue was inflation worsens and unemployment rises. I am just waiting to hear about layoff attributed to the administration's actions. Bezos showed he had the power to really hurt the administration by highlighting how these tariffs affect every purchase consumers make.
If everything hits right, no amount of gerrymandering will save Republicans. Democrats will just need to learn to listen to voters and make voter's priorities their priorities.
Very few people are capable of accepting that their life's work is failing, especially if they've made big sacrifices (such as harming others) in pursuit of it. So post-WW1 Germany develops the "stab in the back" myth, and there's the "communism has never been tried" cliche due to all the denials of its failures by its proponents.
The Israeli government seems to be pretty fully in alternative reality right now: the clearer the failure of its project becomes, the harder they double down.
The real and obvious problem is that if a new chief of a statistical organization is appointed and the numbers improve (ie are more Trump friendly) there is going to be lingering doubt that these improvements came from political pressure. This undermining of confidence in numbers is serously corrosive.
Large private sector companies that can in-house statisticians will probably need to make their own numbers for internal purposes, but keep those as industry secrets to avoid direct retaliation from Trump.
I was about to respond to you asking what sources of data do they use, and how reliant are they on government-generated information, but then I read Jeff Mauer's post on how we can move to privatized data to replace the BLS and now I understand better. For example, as Jeff illustrates, we can take the temperature of the job market to see how hot it is if that never lasts more than a week bozo Craig has a real job.
Yes indeed, the firing of the BLS chef is materially BAD. This is the route to being an Argentina.
Of course equally it is going to lead the Administration to being blind to data for course corrections, which is likely to be both materially bad for the economy and materially bad for their own electoral results as the feed through of re-acceleration of inflation plus job destruction is going to put them behind and 8-Ball.
Now, can the Democrats get out of their rhetorical incompetence and get 100% into effectively attacking the unpopular (overcoming their internal tariff favorabilities on the 'Prog Left')... (and stop the eggheaded Oligarchy nonsense discourse in favor a focused attack on Trump as Leader without dilution with arch academic inflected terms)
I think this administration is already blind to the idea of course corrections, because this administration is Trump and his sycophants. In a normal admin there would be subject matter experts who would call upon their resources to marshal data and bring to the President both accurate predictions of the future and possible steps to take to improve it. Absolutely no process like this exists or is even really possible in this administration.
Is the audience for the bls is bias just crank realignment + cult of personality?
It seems like no one has ever doubted any of these technocratic statisticians were doing hard work on getting the numbers right until five minutes ago.
If you look at the work of Nate Silver, a key challenge for him is convincing people of what confidence intervals are and how their existence doesn't make data bad. People really really struggle with them.
People have a really hard time with statistics in general. There's no way a random sample of 500 people can generate good population estimates. It's too small!
Oh no - I had a discussion with someone back during Obama's first term that was convinced by the then common theory that there was massive inflation and the Obama administration was cooking the books.
I ended up using historic car prices - a Toyota 4Runner was 30,000 and 5 years later it's 32,500 so that's slightly less than 2% a year just like the government says. It actually convinced him.
I also remember someone telling me that the Obama administration somehow changed the definition of unemployment to make the numbers look better.
I don’t think this was true, but there was some criticism of how the metrics worked. Google’s AI summary ended with: “while the Obama administration did not alter the formal definition of the official unemployment rate, the economic conditions during that period led to increased scrutiny of the U-3 rate's comprehensiveness and highlighted the importance of considering broader indicators like the U-6 rate for a complete picture of the labor market.”
It wasn't just rhetoric. The right has built an entire economy around selling stuff to people who think Democrats are bad. Fox News was full of ads for gold while their pundits were predicting Obama hyperinflation. This piece by Rick Perlstein captures the dynamic well.
I think it has always been reasonably mainstream, it's just that with Trump it has escaped containment to the elites. For two decades I've seen similar, less conspiracy theory takes, from reasonably normal people on Bogleheads, Reddit, Twitter, etc. "Gas is up 15% but CPI is 1%???" "Rent in my city is up 12% but CPI is 2%?" And once anyone learns about quality adjustments.....
My feeling is that very few people actively trust the numbers. People either never think about them at all (95%) or think they are fake (4%).
Everyone also insists that gas prices always go up and never go down, and yet they don’t remember that the huge price increase they’re complaining about now is the same price as the huge price increase they’re complaining we’re complaining about a year or two ago.
As I've said before, the difference between the Republican Party of say 1995 and 2025 isn't that much different at the 'base' level though there's been some movement there - the difference is the elites of the GOP in 2000 didn't believe the BS they were selling at the same level, while in 2025, it's people who grew up in the miasma of right-wing media basically their entire lives.
You can also see this in the downfall of some conservative elites of the past 25 years - Rudy, Alito, etc. and you can tell whose pickled themselves in Fox News and who hasn't.
The audience is the type of people who are suspicious of anything government does, especially if it's competent at it, and suspicious of anything that makes Trump look bad.
As to whether people "understand" the statistics (as the commenters below argue), this is irrelevant. Most normal people will just take the numbers as given and not worry about the details which, if the source is generally reliable as the BLS was, is a rational position.
I propose the following plan for national greatness:
1. Statistics exist to prove success, not to measure economic performance.
2. Administrators who do not produce correct figures that prove policies are successful must be purged. They are enemies of the people.
3. We need a Central Statistical Administration to report on the truth.
These are bulletproof and have been demonstrated to work.
In a 25 year period they led to a 16 fold increase in industrial output, a 50 fold increase in machine building, a 10 fold increase in national income.
For details please see Central Statistical Administration (TSSU) report on the Soviet economy in 1956.
I often wonder why more critics don't use the term "The Trump Tax Hikes" with regards to tariffs, or call them "MAGA Marxists." This president really is the most anti-business and anti-consumer president we've had in half a century.
This is another incidence of "Trump doesn't care about the reasoning you use to support him." The people who attempted to intellectualize Trumpism told everybody that life isn't all about GDP and made some vague noises that reducing the number of immigrants and stifling trade would bring back US manufacturing and give us "meaning" or something. Ok, how's all that "meaning" going? And of course if you want to stay in Trump's good graces, you can't point out that we're not actually bringing back manufacturing, this all has to be part of the plan.
The people who tried to polish Trump's intellectual turds (CNBC is full of them) look like fools but it does not matter. They are tied to Trump at an emotional level via in-group solidarity. Just tax the hell out of them if we ever get a chance. That is the right thing to do economically and morally in my view.
This is why MAGA, and conservatives in general are hacks. They think the only important factor in life is "does this person love America" in this really performative way, where you spam as many american flags as possible. It's like building your team in basketball by having the best cheering section. Every time they talk about merit, it's cover for nepotism, purely and simply.
Yet ironically they are the ones who want Americans to live harder lives, kicking out immigrants who do hard but necessary work and blowing up a global trade system where foreigners give us valuable stuff in exchange for paper we print.
I am optimistic the US will SURVIVE Trump's idiocy. The idea that it's not damaging is idiotic. Of course it's damaging. There are a myriad of ways that Trump's boorish nature hurts us the big ones being:
1. He's made the US an unreliable partner, which undermines our ability to act as a leader in the future. Why should anyone trust the US right now? The only reason Trump can get away with this is that they have little choice...for now. But 'for now' is not inevitable to last forever.
2. He's dragging down the economy. Sure, we can still grow in spite of Trump: but we could have had more. That hurts us even if it's not 'that bad' for most Americans.
3. He's destroying our ability to make better policy later. Instead of having a stable foundation on which to build: the next President (God willing: not a Trumpist) will have to repair a lot of damage instead of build higher.
Trump is such a freaking clown. It still boggles my mind so many Americans duped themselves into voting for him.
The underlying fundamentals are hard to shift even with the likes of Trump. Bush was super unpopular abroad and then Obama. It doesn’t take much to revive American popularity
Bush was unpopular, but I don’t think he unilaterally broke many (any?) agreements other countries were counting on. Now that Trump has directly done things like end NAFTA and the Iran agreement, and then broke every rule of the WTO, and canceled contracts with domestic grantees, no one will have any interest in relying on agreements with the American government any more.
Not really a comparable situation. Trump is the proof of concept that American democracy and institutions are fundamentally weak and unstable. Also, there's no Obama v. 2 waiting in the wings.
A poorer, weaker United States with no guaranteed rights for non-citizens (or even many citizens) is not going to be a magnet for talent and skilled immigration. And that, much more than anything else, has been the engine of American success for the past century.
Can't say I agree on AI and Energy being strong suits for the US going forward. Both rely on physical infrastructure which the US is woefully underequipped to build out. Plus AI success is in many ways a worse problem than AI failure, as ending huge numbers of white collar jobs will make the US far less receptive to immigration, not more. And not all paper-pushers are Democrats.
"the White House is happy to brag that it has transformed immigration from a major source of labor force growth to a slight drag. MAGA fans get defensive when you point this out. But slow growth in aggregate employment and a negative hit to GDP growth are obvious results of this policy choice"
An important and underrated point imo. GDP is roughly a function of a country's population and technology. With immigration becoming a net negative and birth rates below replacement, GDP growth will continue to be anemic for the foreseeable future
"Tariff revenue is now a non-trivial piece of the economic pie."
Yes, this as a permanent state of affairs is exactly what Congress meant to authorize the President to do, in an emergency powers statute that doesn't even mention tariffs.
I'd be more confident the Supreme Court will do the obviously correct thing and strike this down under some flavor of nondelegation/major questions doctrine, if Democrats weren't so confusing and wishy-washy on this issue themselves, that they give the Supreme Court no cover if it did so.
This is when I am so glad that our current justices restrain themselves to the text of the Constitution, and that our founding fathers had the wisdom to write the phrase "major questions" into that document.
Okay, so dispense with the doctrinal labels and say how you would decide this, based on your first principles or however you would? The bare text of the Constitution, which explicitly assigns the power to "lay and collect" tariffs to Congress and not the Presidence? The principle that free trade is good and tariffs are bad? The principle that whether tariffs are good or bad, it's bad to concentrate this kind of economically destabilizing power in the hands of one person?
What I can see is that if the Supreme Court is courageous enough to take Trump on over this, that he has made his signature issue that will embarrass him worldwide if it is struck down, the Court will likely face blowback from the Administration of crisis proportions. Then who will have their back?
Like the present Court, I would decide it in accordance with the penumbras cast by the emanations from the document's actual text. Unlike the present Court, I would admit that this is what I am doing.
"... if the Supreme Court is courageous enough....Then who will have their back?"
You're asking me whether I personally will stand up for those courageous defenders of the Constitution in their brave defiance of Trump? What sort of fan-fic is this? The corrupt Republican politicians on the current Court have proven repeatedly that they will enable Trump in any way that they can. There may be some future Court that deserves to be defended by those who love America and the Constitution. This group has not earned that privilege.
That doesn't seem true any more. The lower courts are still trying to do what they can, but SCOTUS seems to have mostly caved. I'm too lazy to look up the exact stats, but the District courts have held against the administration a large percentage of the time, but SCOTUS has overturned those decisions, usually on the emergency docket and without explanation, an amazingly high percentage of the time.
I fund it hard to believe the lower courts are just so consistently wrong on their reading of the law, rather I think we see a SCOTUS fully on side with, or intimidated by, Trump.
I think even if you have a more judiciary-friendly take than the rest of us here, this clearly isn't true. The most functional opposition to Trumpism is the markets, which Trump is terrified of. The Court is about to allow Trump to invent entirely new powers out of nothing and rule in favor of him rejecting the obvious plain text of the 14th Amendment. You can argue this is because of political pressure rather than because the justices themselves are malicious actors who don't care about the Constitution, but that doesn't exactly redeem them as a source of opposition.
What's your evidence that the markets are the most functional opposition to Trump? Yup, there was that brief panic after Liberation Day, but that's ancient history now. The markets (both equities and bond) have done just fine since Trump won/was inaugurated. When he fired the BLS commissioner, stocks went up 1.5% the next business day.
I'd say that markets are enabling his behavior and will only act in the face of economic deterioration after the fact and when it is patently obvious to everyone.
The easiest way to strike the tariffs down would be on straightforward statutory interpretation grounds, without having to resort to a much weaker nondelegation argument. I get the impulse to force Dems into having to choose between opposing tariffs and maintaining the administrative state, but it's a false choice.
That's the major questions side of the non-delegation coin -- interpret the statute narrowly as not delegating a power that would be an unconstitutional delegation if the statute did delegate it. And yes, for IEEPA, that doesn't even mention tariffs, that's the easiest way. But not all of Trump's tariffs are under statutes that don't mention tariffs, so it's not so easy to completely dance around the question of whether Congress did and may delegate its tariff taxing power to Trump. And more importantly, why would somebody want to dance around that question?
To answer your last question, I would guess the answer is that we genuinely want a lot of tariff policy to be delegated to the executive because tariff schedules are so absurdly detailed that it’s ridiculous to expect Congress to directly interface with them through legislation. Any actually-passed legislation would end up either so high-level that it called for a separate implementing agency to call balls and strikes (this is AIUI basically what we have now, ex Trump) or else would be a bunch of specific rates set in such a level of granularity that they’d just be an arbitrary mishmash set by lobbyists and not even pretending to reflect considered legislative will.
Unpopular take, but dems making economic policy on the basis that it's good for poor people is what got us into this mess to begin with. I feel like a broken record but the median voter isn't poor and the dem coalition's reverse trickle down thesis (basically all boats rise on policies good for economic security at the low end) have generated little political return thus far. Seriously - we ran the experiment, voters saw the ACA, more attention paid to labor laws, antitrust, SNAP increases, etc and said nope. We need popularism as a governing thesis if dems want to win.
Yeah, the American middle class dwarfs the American poor class. And policies that hurt the middle class to help the poor will face electoral backlash just because of the size of the middle class.
And especially the relative voting propensity of the classes. On the other hand, helping the upper middle class at the expense of the lower middle class has done well for democrats in local elections.
Do our trading partners wait it out 3 years, risking a possible President Vance, or soon look for more reliable partners as Matt suggests? The value of the dollar relative to other currencies has already plummeted 10% with another tariff deadline looming. I worry this worsens our relations with global trading partners but more so exacerbates income inequality here and abroad.
Noah Smith put out a though provoking piece about the next economic bubble festering in AI data centers funded by private credit. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Trump have to fumble his way through another recession before his term is up.
The problem with looking for more reliable partners is that the CCP is not resolving the core issues that made everyone skeptical of overreliance on them in the first place, i.e. an export-focused growth model powered by financial repression and industrial subsidy. It's not just America that has come to realize in the last 10 years that cheap Chinese goods are a double edged sword. I'm not saying no one will turn to China, indeed I expect Europe to do exactly that after some hemming and hawing, but in the long run that will only exacerbate deindustrialization and boost the protectionist tendency internationally. If liberal parties double down on free trade with China due to American actions, I fear that will just leave us in an even worse crisis for liberal democracy by 2035.
The dollar plummeting is probably good for income inequality abroad because it increases the purchasing power of people in poorer nations relative to Americans. According to the latest IMF estimate, emerging market economies will grow 2.2% faster than American in 2025 compared to only 1.5% in 2024. It’s a pleasant surprise that so far the tariffs have backfired and actually reduced global inequality.
It is hurting our popularity a lot though, the US is now more unpopular than China and only slightly less unpopular than Russia, while Donald Trump personally is more unpopular than even Putin: https://www.politico.eu/article/usa-popularity-collapse-worldwide-trump-return/. But elites abroad are still largely pro-American like we saw with Van Der Leyen’s humiliating capitulation. If Trump keeps things up then different elites will be elected in other countries who will not be as reflexively pro-American. Heck, even in Taiwan, the relatively more China-friendly faction has been gaining in recent elections.
It's hard to view the USD "plummeting 10%" in isolation as the Yuan has fallen to its weakest levels in ~ 20 years. If China is going to competitively devalue to boost / try to boost exports ... that's the move the global trading partners will be most concerned about.
It actually doesn’t seem to directly apply to the Covid vaccines (though he may have separate actions where he is refusing to approve updated versions of those?). It seems to be actually about a contract to develop new mRNA based flu vaccines that could be updated faster (and perhaps more broadly targeted) than the current egg-based system. (The article had some weirdness about “whole cell” vaccines, which obviously doesn’t make sense for viruses, that don’t have cells.)
The NYT article looks like it’s a rejection of mRNA vaccines in general. This will hamper plans to develop mRNA vaccines against pancreatic and colon cancer, among other things.
Yeah the long term damage from research cuts will be hard to reverse. We have to hope that Europe will pick up some of the slack created by this insanity.
A few things. First, you asked the question I think earnestly as to whether Trump, Trump syscophants and Trump voters actually believed the ludicrous story that if we get rid of all immigrants, we’re going to get all sorts of “real” Americans who will work in meat processing plants and as nanny’s just like “good ole days”. You express confusion at this idiotic mindset, but I don’t think it’s confusing; I think you underestimate the number of voters who have “drank the kool-aid”. And more importantly, I think you underestimate the number of college educated/elite voters who “drank the kool-aid”. It’s one of my biggest issues with your take that people like Elon or other Silicon Valley types are actually very smart so we should see their pro Trump public pronouncements as 4-dimensional chess gambit. And yes that certainly some of what’s going on. But you really need consider that when Marc Anderson or Bill Ackman say something on Twitter that’s objectively idiotic that they actually believe what they are saying.
Second, what happens in the all too likely scenario that a lickspittle cooks the books with both jobs numbers and CPI data (companies have been waiting to raise tariffs due to TACO and building up inventories but it’s pretty likely the dam is going to break soon on this. If CPI comes in hot next month I think we have to assume more firings)? Honest to god I think we are underrating the economic catastrophe this could be. How do you plan anything without basic reliable data?
The economy has powered along better than expected last 3 months due to TACO and AI investment. But I think we are reaching the limits of how long wile-e-coyote can keep running on air before he realizes there is no ground underneath.
The desire for people to believe in they could live like kings on one income 'like in the 1950s' is incredible. Claims coming from both left (Sanders...) and right about x% of Americans are 'living paycheck to paycheck' are fatuous. The desire to blow everything up to get back to some golden age is frightening.
I’ve had this take percolating for a while but I kind of think we need to see 50s television and media as having a sort of “first mover advantage” when it comes to shaping American culture.
The 50s was the first time mass numbers of middle and working class households had televisions. And this is also a time when it was pretty hard to know what life was really like in other parts of the country. So here’s this new fangled device beaming into 50 million homes a version of what a “typical” American family is actually like. And that then becomes imprinted in people’s brains as to what a “normal” family in America should really be like.
"... imprinted in people’s brains as to what a “normal” family...."
And the message was not simply, "this is what everyone is doing these days." The message was, "this is what everyone has always done in the distant past, and what everyone will do in the distant future."
Stone Age tribes? They were just like us -- look at Fred and Wilma with their comical foot-driven automobile! Future millennia?They will be just like us with their car-shaped jet transports and their family pets named Astro. The 50s suburban ideal colonized all times past and future -- part of why speculative sci-fi worked so hard to explore genuinely different possibilities.
It's a weird thing to think about, but two the greatest TV shows ever made are basically using the same template, but as a way of sort of peeling back the surface to see the ugliness underneath; the father who knows best is capo in the mob or secretly a meth kingpin. But it's still using the same 50s sitcom structure as a way of making commentary about American life.
Game of Thrones is *actually* a family sitcom about the Lannisters. All the other stuff that happens is just events that the Lannister family reacts to.
"...events that the Lannister family reacts to...."
Or provoke.
Like when Tywin used to skid into the Small Council on one foot, shouting "yabba dabba doo!"
Mad Men, similar story. The Americans!! How deep does this thing go?
I mean Mad Men in so many ways is a commentary on just how "false" the 50s style veneer of the perfect American family was. In some ways, it was almost too over the top in its commentary.
A lot of takes about the show criticize January Jones as the weak link in the show. And I'll let others decide if there was an actress with better acting chops that would be good for her role. But I think it's underestimated how much the reason she was cast was she was almost a ringer looks wise for the Mimi Van Doren archetype.
Also, I'm not sure there is a show or movie where I've rooted harder for a character to have an affair than Betty in Mad Men. Which again, was sort of the point; this idealized 50s household was actually just a veneer. She feels trapped, her husband is a cad sleeping around with anyone and everyone, so no wonder she feels tempted.
I presume you're referring to “I Love Lucy” and “The Andy Griffith Show”
I'm not convinced that television is as responsible for 50's nostalgia as you propose.
At the same time, though...neither the Sopranos nor Breaking Bad are remotely realistic, according to pretty much anyone with firsthand knowledge of the subject matter. Yet Breaking Bad, despite even the relatively accurate components being extremely out of date even ten years later, stands out as many people's basic understanding for drug dealing. It seems like television, and the hyperreality it generates, drops people in the worst possible position on the Dunning-Kruger graph.
Yeahhhh, but . . . if you actually look at what was depicted, it's pretty immediately obvious that the characters in those shows live materially impoverished lives compared to 21st Century Americans. They only ever own one car, one TV (tiny), etc. They almost never eat out and when they do it's clearly presented as a major expense. When the mother makes dinner it frequently involves canned goods and cheap/"stretched" protein like meatloaf. Their kids share a single bedroom. Etc., etc.
The eating out thing is so real. The average American family these days eats out how many days a week? Maybe 2? (The data I found in a quick google suggests 8/month if you combine takeout from fast casual/fast food and actually eating out in a restaurant). The level of luxury and casual waste implied by this is genuinely insane by 1950s standards.
Also, underrated, but the food that the sitcom family would've eaten was probably complete ass compared to food the average middle class family can eat today in terms of flavor. That might actually be a bad thing (the deliciousness might be why people overeat and also eat out too often in general) but strictly taken as a measurement of living standards it seems relevant.
Why are you knocking on congealed salads, meatloaf, American goulash and ambrosia salad??
Tomato aspic. People actually made tomato soup into jello. Ick.
I'm skeptical Americans on average eat worse now than in the 50s. My uninformed guess is that a person in 2025 who bothers to plan and cook meals eats better, but that many people are eating packaged stuff out of a box or can because they don't know how to cook. Having most women expect to be homemakers had a lot of downsides, but it did encourage some specialization, and mom probably would at least be making a hot meal every night. Maybe that's meatloaf and mashed potatoes and canned green beans, but it's still a hot meal and it's not just something that got popped into the microwave or something.
Something Megan McArdle talked about a while ago is germane here: The death of the Bad Home Cook.
In an era when most people could very rarely afford to eat out, and processed food was much worse than it is today, there was a huge category of people (mostly housewives) who hated cooking, were terrible at cooking, would rather do anything else, but had to cook 3 meals a day anyhow.
That’s something you don’t see anymore; when all else fails, you can have some medium-quality takeout or frozen food.
Nobody eats like my wife did growing up: She wasn’t poor, but her mother’s specialty was soup made from green peas and macaroni boiled in unsalted water.
"My uninformed guess is that a person in 2025 who bothers to plan and cook meals eats better [than in the '50s], but that many people are eating packaged stuff out of a box or can because they don't know how to cook."
Achieving the same level of food quality without learning to cook is itself an improvement in living standards.
(Ace-K scooped me on this, but less pithily.)
My comment is on the quality of restaurant food/takeout, not the quality of home cooking.
The real difference is almost certainly portion size.
Again, you actually are falling to the trap of letting media depictions of this time period overshadow actual reality. While it's true that working class and middle class people today are more likely to be eating processed microwave food, they are way way way less likely to literally struggling to feed themselves. Not only are Americans richer today (even working class Americans) than 1955 adjusted for inflation, but food costs have fallen dramatically adjusted for inflation.
Whatever unhealthier lifestyles that exist today as a result of technological change have to be weighed against the number of people literally not getting enough to eat.
Fast food is cheaper than cooking at home most of the time! I feel like most dinners we make at home are at least $20 and frequently $40 for 2 (well now 3 since my BIL moved in) people.
But we eat better than they did in the 50s. My grandparents weren’t cooking Indian or Moroccan food, I know that much.
It is absolutely possible to cook homecooked meals for less than 40 dollars for 2 portions.
You generally have a pantry of ingredients so you’re not buying all ingredients separately for each meal, so calculating the actual cost can be complicated. But 40 dollars for 2 portions it a high end home meal, not a day to day homecooked meal for most people.
I think the 50s nostalgia is more than TV vibes. Housing costs were lower, labor force participation was higher - most importantly, Americans' view of their economic well-being was colored by their immediate history, surviving global war in the 1940s, crippling depression for a decade in the 1930s. Plus we were a postwar global manufacturing titan while our European and Asian competitors were still rebuilding. Our grandparents weren't nuts, comparatively speaking, it was good times. #IlikeIke
"labor force participation was higher"
Not so. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART
Male LFPR
Yes! But that's not what he said.
Outside of MAGA world, who has nostalgia for the 50s? And even MAGA doesn't have nostalgia for the 50s; they just like a cudgel to beat their enemies over the head with.
As with most stuff, there were some things that were better in the 50s than now, but most stuff is worse. My equivalent in 1955 probably had a much more close-knit and vibrant community...but also, one car that would make it to 100000 miles only by enormous good luck and would likely kill you in a 40 mph crash.
I think the source of 50s nostalgia has a pretty clear answer: postwar boom. America went from war rationing to all that industrial capacity being unleashed on the domestic sector. Most people would have experienced a rapidly improving quality of life.
The mistake, as usual, is confusing the economic cause with its aesthetic trappings. White picket fences and beehive hairdos weren't culturally superior, they were the cultural choices of an economically superior nation.
Yeah, I mean it was a very small house with 1 bathroom, but my grandfather was an autobody repairman with a 3rd grade education who supported a wife who didn’t work and sent 5 kids to college, all of whom graduated without loans.
My grandmother did feel trapped though - she loved the big family but always wanted to have a job. She was the valedictorian of her high school! But the great grands wouldn’t pay for a mere daughter to go to school as in their view it would have been a waste to send a woman - what do you need a college degree for just to get married?
I'm hesitant to accept this theory because this nostalgia seems to be growing as we get further away. How many Gen Y/Z have watched TV shows from the 50s?!
See my follow up as to how many shows still use the 50s nuclear family template. There's likely very few people (even Boomers) still watching "Leave it to Beaver" reruns. But even more recent shows still use the same basic formula, even if it's used in much more creative ways (see Modern Family).
Also, this sort of stuff can just become permanent parts of the discourse even if very few people know the history or where certain things come from. Possibly the ultimate example is everything about Christmas. How many people really get that a lot of Christmas "traditions" are pretty recent inventions or even tell you where they come from? Or to bring it back to impact of movies/tv; how many people are aware the term "Gaslighting" is actually from a real movie called "Gaslight"?
Christmas is also interesting because it’s really the only part of contemporary American culture that preserves pre-1950s pop culture. (I guess Thanksgiving dinner too, preserving 19th century meal structure, with sweet and savory dishes mixed together rather than separated.)
I thought most American Christmas traditions came from Victorian England? (Sometimes indirectly from Germany, as in the Christmas tree?)
IIRC Christmas used to be a more disreputable and rowdy holiday, with gangs of people roving the town getting drunk. The Victorian era sought to domesticate Christmas, to associate it with "respectable family, including children, gathered around the table/Christmas tree" rather than "bunch of drunk hooligans running around." And it worked.
Specifically "A Christmas Carol"... the Dickens version of Christmas depicted in the book (serialized originally?) did not exist in Victorian England; he willed it into being with his pop culture product. That, plus the Coca-Cola Santa, "Twas the Night Before Christmas", and "Rudolph the Rednosed Reindeer" set the template for everything going forward.
It's like Roman roads -> railroad track gauge. Everything sets the track down for what will come after.
Right. How many people are aware that if you really wanted to celebrate Xmas in a traditional manner you'd be celebrating in a much more debauched fashion (Though I'm sure some people celebrate this way).
Given Christmas is give or take about 2024 years old, in the grand scheme of things, these Victorian traditions regarding how Christmas should be celebrated are pretty young.
I think you have it backwards. The nuclear family was used in the TV shows because it was "the norm" for most people. But it's usually been given a more positive spin - much like living conditions in NYC for young single people are shown to be much better on TV (e.g. Friends, Sex in the City, etc.) than they are in real life.
Even situations that diverge from the "nuclear family" are shown more positively because most people don't watch scripted TV shows to see real life. They have plenty of that already. They watch it to enjoy it and laugh along with the characters.
And what they learned was that even loving couples apparently slept in twin beds with a night stand in between.
I've always wondered if that was actually the norm at the time. Presumably if it wasn't people looked at the tv and considered it quite strange.
It was because of the Hays Code which enforced morality in movies and in TV shows. Just like it abolished the word "pregnancy" because apparently humans come from spontaneous generation.
Ozzie and Harriet (Did Ozzie even have a job?). Leave it to Beaver. Denace the Menace, Lassie... interesting point! Although I will say this, we did live on my Dad's income (manufacturing supervisor) just fine while Mom got us through the first few years in the late 50s/early 60s. I say just fine but Mom did go back to teaching when the youngest was over 5. Sidenote: we also witnessed the stagnation in manufacturing wages, not only did we have inflation in the 70s but Dad's income went steadily down...he retired at 62, said all he was doing was paying for the commute from the suburbs to the Los Angeles industry parks.
And we did fine on a single teachers family in the 60's. Of course, we ate meat 1.5 times a week and we depended on my grandfather shipping moving-box sized boxes of canned food 2x per year. I hope that I never eat canned salmon again (or powdered milk).
I'm not convinced that television in the 50's shaped culture. As others have mentioned, the nuclear family was the norm which television adopted, not the other way around.
I think 50's nostalgia is built around three components.
The first is basic economics. The US was the only major nation to come out of WW2 relatively untouched, and ready to export to the rest of the world. And through a combination of sexism from employers and societal expectations, households primarily had one earner, reducing the labor pool and thereby raising earnings per person.
The second is simple rose tinted glasses. People have glorified the past ever since there was a past to glorify.
And the third is survivorship bias. Recorded suicide-even without accounting for poorer reporting-was higher in the 1950's than any point since. Pre safety net, there was a greater likelihood of someone at the bottom of the bell curve-through any combination of personal failings or misfortune-dropping out of the running, with or without intentionally removing themselves. And with limited mass media, those who reached the picket fence middle class were disproportionately likely to have their stories recorded and retold, especially when their descendants were the ones who, in a Darwinian fashion, made up more of the next generation.
I'd also argue much of the "doom and gloom" outlook of the modern day is due to the internet. Statistics indicate homeownership is not much more difficult for millennials and zoomers than has been historically the case; however, if you only talk to people who assume they can't own a home, the prospect seems far bleaker. My best look at this is comparing conversations with my coworkers to what I hear from my extended groups of friends, who I primarily know via the internet. My coworkers all expect they either can or soon will be able to own a home, in part because we can easily talk to actual people who have gone through the process. One group of friends casts a very wide net, across careers and socioeconomic boundaries, and while the assumption isn't there, people understand the possibility exists. Another group is more concentrated, and the perception is rather bleaker.
People live paycheck to paycheck because of lifestyle creep and ever increasing levels of consumption.
One just has to look at the amount of money spent on food prepared outside the home over time to see this. Or the fact there are many more restaurants per capita than 10 and 20 years ago.
"Cooking at home is more expensive than DoorDash!" has got to be one of the stupidest things I've ever heard.
Edit: Also, Matt's quip a week or so ago that (paraphrased) "cooking for one is weird" is also very stupid and needlessly insulting.
Also edit: toned down my counter-insult.
I didn't mean it as insulting, I have often cooked for one. But I do think that there are clearly huge economies of scale (especially on the time use front) in cooking for groups of 3-8 people and that's a much more traditional format. It used to be that singles would either live with their parents or live in rooming houses, and either way there would be group cooking.
N = 1, but I cooked for myself frequently when I lived alone. I would cook a batch and freeze most of it. That way I had homemade food and still benefited from economies of scale when cooking.
Fair enough, I take cooking seriously, so I overreacted. Can't argue about economies of scale.
I'm not sure about economies of scale actually. I currently cook primarily for a family of five, but I cooked for one in grad school and I occasionally cook for very large groups for parties.
There are some things that are very easy to cook for one that do not scale up well without different infrastructure. One of the things I like to eat if it's just me is a fried egg with a sort of frico crust. If I had a griddle I could do enough of these to feed a whole family, but I do not and I therefore don't make them for my family. Grilled cheese is similar --- I have enough space in a pan to make maybe three, but not really more than that unless I want to mess with multiple pans and burners, which I do not enjoy.
Similarly, if you have ever cooked for a large crowd you know that it's actually quite hard to just scale up your normal food. There are some different kinds of things you can cook that can feed a lot of people (e.g. pork shoulder), but it's basically impossible to scale up something like carbonara pasta for 30.
Long story short, I think the issue is actually that all of our cooking infrastructure (pan sizes, stove sizes, recipes that have been developed) is aimed at people cooking for 3-8 people, not that there's something inherently easier about cooking for that number of people or that cooking continues to accumulate economies of scale as you try to serve more and more people.
Same! And cooking for one is *great,* you get to have exactly what you want exactly the way you want it
I love cooking. I'm in charge of dinner every night and cook most of them. I'm constantly frustrated that my small children's limited pallet (not surprising, just frustrating) because I WANT to cook fun and interesting things for the family.
When I lived alone, I basically never cooked and ate out almost constantly because cooking for one is just not a good value proposition in terms of time, variety (leftovers for a week off one cook!), or ingredients (impossible to go through specialty items in a timely fashion). Cooking for one is, in fact, weird.
I'll admit that when I was a single man, I ate out a lot and ate badly when I cooked at home. Having a family was a strong motivation to learn how to cook!
With 3-8 people you also get into territory where it’s worth it to belong to Costco or Sam’s Club! For 2 people or less it’s not worth it.
Re: cooking, I somewhat disagree. Cooking scales up incredibly well because a lot of the labor inputs reflect high static overhead but relatively low marginal labor requirements for additional quantities made, but the implicit corollary of that is that cooking scales *down* very poorly. Cooking for one person is like 70%-90% of the effort of cooking for four people rather than 25%.
Lotta replies talking about advantages of scale are just doing it wrong. Yes there are things you want to do in bulk. Now, you could just full on meal prep for the whole week to solve this problem, but I'm perfectly happy to be lazier than that. Just prep some base protein. Once you've got a pile of well marinated cooked chicken strips in your fridge it's trivial to throw together a huge variety of things for any given meal. Make a bunch of chili and you can turn it into tacos or pasta or nachos or chili dogs or whatever in a lot less time than going to Starbucks.
I often oven-poach a few pieces of salmon and bam - can adapt those to two or three meals over a couple of days.
"Make a bunch of chili and you can turn it into tacos or pasta or nachos or chili dogs or whatever in a lot less time than going to Starbucks."
In 2012 ,80% of Americans lived within 20miles of a Starbucks (most recent distance data I can find) and there are 2x as many Starbucks as there were then. I would be a majority of Americans live less than 10minutes from a Starbucks..
They'll have their Starbucks before you even get the water boiled for your weird chili noodles.
I cook lunch for myself all the time when working from home and the time required to boil some pasta is just about the maximum time it ever takes me to bullshit something together.
I cook for one a lot and it _is_ weird. I didn't find that statement insulting or stupid at all!
I suspect this comes down to whether or not you like cooking. Two of my kids are (more-or-less) out on their own. The older kid doesn't really like cooking, but can make some simple things for himself and his roommate. The younger one loves cooking, enjoys making food for his friends, and cooks up big batches of food to eat during the week in his apartment at college.
When I got an apartment as a college student, I basically knew how to boil water and make toast. I ate a lot of really lousy food because I didn't know how to cook and didn't even know what I didn't know.
I chose to interpret it as an indictment of living single, which says more about my hang-ups (not about living single per se, but about the implied judgement) than what I'm pretty sure the intention was (i.e. not a moral judgement).
Cooking for one is both disappointing and lazy. It’s like bland chicken breasts and microwaved cheese tortillas. I put in a lot less effort when I am the only one eating.
I have so many easy recipes to share:
- Pasta e fagioli
- West African-style chickpea and sweet potato stew
- Oven-poached salmon
- Lentil bolognese
- Punched-up ramen (add e.g., edamame, tofu, bok choy, kimchi, shiitake mushrooms)
- Chipotle (as in the pepper) refried beans
...and much more!
I want some of your recipes, but as a lazy cook married to a lazy cook, I am guessing that you may still over estimate how truly “easy” they are, just based on my experiences with all people who both cook a lot and enjoy it
Oh I am a good cook.
I just lazy when it’s by myself. Salads, potato chip sandwiches, yogurt.
I lived on chicken vegetable soup, stir fries, and beer. Got all the major food groups😁
You don't have to though, you can quite easily do very tasty and healthy stir fries and curries that require minimal effort and can be batch cooked! The real problem is that without the social pressure of other people its easy to just default to the easier but more expensive options of ready meals and food delivery
The viral paycheck to paycheck stat that everyone likes to trot out is fake. It's a stat a company that benefitted from debt used to make their business more attractive that political commentators grabbed onto without context.
A lot of people live paycheck to paycheck because housing is expensive and food is expensive. It’s not avocado toast.
This is true but my sentiment comes from how many people misinterpret the paycheck to paycheck. It is after retirement savings and other voluntary expenses. The number of people driving $60k plus trucks in this country and share of folks paying over $1000 a month for a car feels very voluntary.
There is a huge cultural component behind the living paycheck to paycheck claim and there are lots of well to do people that have put themselves into this mindset.
The answer is you're both right. There really is a decent contingent of people who if they lost their job tomorrow would really struggle to pay their bills.
I think the key is trying to distinguish between the people who's paycheck only just barely covers rent, groceries, utility bills and car payment on a moderately priced car and people who wouldn't be able to pay bills because they clearly made a choice to live beyond their means on luxuries they can't really afford. The former is a pretty sizable number of people but the problem is so is the latter. I'm thinking about those ludicrous CNBC articles that seem to come out like once every 6 months that try to make the claim that John Doe making $500K has no money left for savings because NYC living is just that expensive. And then you look at the supposed budget of said person and you see that a pretty significant amount of money is going to house payments on a multi-million dollar Coop, live in nanny costs, private school tuition and BMW payments (considering these likely fake people are usually living in Manhattan, the luxury car payments are especially absurd).
The CNBC stuff is an extreme (and likely fake) example of what I'm getting at, but I think there really is a sizable number of people that paying for a lot of what are ultimately luxuries due to lifestyle creep or keeping up with the joneses. Basically, why this is my favorite commercial of all time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0HX4a5P8eE
Candle budget $3200/month, please my family is starving.
The paycheck to paycheck thing is a meme propagated by young people. And it’s way harder for young people to get ahead - nearly everyone under 35 is living paycheck to paycheck. But the majority of the over 60 crowd isn’t because they bought their home a while ago and don’t have student loans and their kids are grown and if they aren’t retired they’re probably at a decent place in their career. The paycheck to paycheck stat is false but reflects the truth that it is much harder for young people to get ahead than it was for the Boomers or X or elder Millennials
When it comes to personal consumer debt specifically, Dave Ramsey is more correct than he is incorrect.
If you can't pay cash for your car ... you can't afford the car. It's really as simple as that.
The bank isn’t going to let you offer 75% of your salary for a mortgage even if the 25% covers rice & beans & a Corolla.
If they did, it would only make existing homes more competitive… households in excess of “neighborhood character” must necessarily find housing unaffordable, even if their non-housing budgets were competed down to $0.
This is truly food for thought! The social aspect of cooking for more than one makes the process more filling for everyone while the social aspect of keeping up with the Jones next door insures the paycheck to paycheck rat race. Social media’s information flood doesn’t encourage living within your income and investing the rest.
Fair.
But a lot of it is how much money we blow on housing.
Because housing is way too expensive
All our cars our 20+ years old.
Maybe we go out 2 eat once a week.
We don't go on vacations
I make good money
And we are still in negative cash flow right now
I feel the housing pinch too. Though compare houses build in the 1950s to those in the 70s, 90s, or today. Think about the amenity decisions folks have made. Think about expectations of space per person. There is an expectations creep. It’s subtle, but pervasive.
I agree with you but these commentators must have some circumstances. Kids? Living in an expensive part of town?
Case in point: It’s surprising how expensive some parts of town are with housing. I live in a lovely but not popular area. Housing is 50% cheaper. Going out is 50% cheaper than the other area. Oh and my friends property tax is 3* mine even though the house is the same size.
So even though they’re earning 2* as much household income, when you take into account their income taxes, housing costs, property taxes and eating out then I’m in positive cash flow and they’re not.
Usually those prices differences are due to crime to quality of schools
My last house was still a 1960's built house with no AC. Price went from $100k ish in the 1990's to 600k or so today
Fortunately Trump is doing his best to ensure that housing becomes more affordable, with his trademark combination of higher taxes err tariffs, higher interest rates due to massive deficit spending and tanking the size of the construction labor force.
The number of people who believe this is incredible. Like, they just hold this belief that “things were easier in the past”. Pointing out the statistics showing that literally everything is better now does not seem to matter.
The size of the anti Biden-Harris vote in every place exposed to pressure from migrants and the relatively short-lived inflation spike suggests to me that the 'living paycheck to paycheck' theme is real.
Most Americans are rich on paper (due to home values) but are illiquid which is why they take on massive amounts of debt even for very regular everyday spending. Those in the top 20% who subscribe to SB think everything is OK but it is clearly not.
It's almost like blind, naked populism is a cancer no matter which side of the political aisle it is coming from. It also sets up voters for more extreme types of politicians who will actually try to fulfill the promise of the decades of bad faith lying and rhetoric that have been tossed around for decades for the short-term gain of people trying to get elected to a seat.
You need to keep in mind that people have very different world views.
Nannies are not a feature of most American lives. A large percentage of children are looked after by parents, extended family, family friends, and church childcare centers. Those types of arrangements are especially common in exurban and rural areas.
Meat packing has a couple of elements you should conside. One, it used to be a highly unionized and reasonably well paid job that was FAR more geographically dispersed around the country. Two, a pretty decent percentage of rural or rural-adjacent males have personally field dressed a deer or other game animal, so the job is not going to have quite the ick factor to them that it has to people with different life experiences. Doesn’t mean they want it, but it is not going to seem implausible to them that someone would.
"... decent percentage of rural or rural-adjacent males have personally field dressed a deer or other...."
See, now this is just morally repugnant. People should not be making wild animals wear human clothes, in any circumstance. It's probably part of some sexual fetish, and it's all just deeply troubling. If you want to know "what's wrong with our boys," this sort of reverse animal cosplay is a good place to start.
LOL
And for those who don’t get the joke, field dressing is how hunters cleanly remove the internal organs of a game animal in a way that avoids contamination of the meat with intestinal contents. It’s done in the wild, thus “field.”
"Dressing" in this older sense could describe any stage in the preparation of foods, esp. meats (we still "dress" salads). So, "field dressing" was the first stage in a sequence of dressings -- it was the dressing one did in the field, as opposed to the dressing one did in the kitchen, at the table, and so on.
Little known fact - Tywin Lannister’s first onscreen appearance doesn’t involve him saying “yabba dabba doo”, but instead involves him making Jamie put his sister’s clothes onto a stag, representing Robert Baratheon.
"...a stag, representing Robert...."
And Jamie therefore is giving Robert horns.
I don't remember that scene, Kenny.
Are you sure he didn't say "yabba dabba doo?" Maybe I'm confusing it with the time he waved his fist and said, "to the moon, Cersei!"
As someone in a state full of these people, the problem with this labor sector tends to be that they can't pass a drug test. (They also aren't nearly as facile with outdoors activities as they purport to be). Every company that tries to locate in West Virginia to take advantage of the cheap labor tends to hit that wall.
Why should they have to pass a drug test
Life is hard drugs help you cope
Tell that to the insurance companies!
OK, but that particular coping mechanism interacts poorly with wielding a butcher's cleaver.
No it doesn't. Smoking a joint on the weekend doesn't impair you anymore come Monday than drinking a beer does.
No, but meth does... the number of employees my plant has had to fire for meth usage (weed is now mostly a case of, "don't come to work high") is staggering.
The companies need to make sure that their employees aren't still high when they come to work. "Have you done drugs in the past week? / No" is sufficient. You're correct that it is not necessary, but we don't have drug tests with better temporal specificity and the situation is such that false positives are better than false negatives.
So the nanny point is really just because Matt brought it up as an example. Now the fact that Matt though of nannys when trying to make his more general point perhaps speaks to Matt's own blind spots as to the type of people.
As far as the fact that meat processing plans used to be geographically dispersed is an interesting point. Because that actually makes it different than a lot of other "classic" blue collar industrial jobs. Coal mining almost by definition had to be geographically concentrated (can only mine coal where the actual coal is). Steel making was famously (and actually still is to an extent) geographically concentrated in Pennsylvania. Car manufacturing was concentrated in Detroit, with car part factories concentrated in Ohio (ironically today car manufacturing is probably more geographically distributed than it used to be).
My point is, the geographic concentration of particular industries meant that while things like free trade and automation were on net good for most Americans, the pain was acutely concentrated in very particular geographic locations. So instead of having 50,000 workers who no longer had a job dispersed across America, there were 50,000 workers out of work in one city or town. I think my point is, I don't think people really want the old jobs to come back if you were to really talk to them, I think what they really want is for their old towns and communities to come back. Now in some cases, these cities can come back. In a lot of ways large parts of Brooklyn and Queens were no different from "rust belt" America in the 70s and for a lot of the same reasons; but since NYC became a superstar city starting in the 80s, those previously devastated neighborhoods like DUMBO and Red Hook are now trendy neighborhoods. Pittsburgh is another one. But I'm not sure how replicable this is across the entire country.
Which brings things back to our old friend "The Housing theory of everything". Internal migration is actually lower than it used to be https://www.nber.org/digest/202405/house-prices-and-declining-internal-migration-united-states.
And if you read this paper, it's about housing prices. The reality is (and I would never dare tell a Dem politician to run on this idea), a lot of these towns should be even emptier than they are and they are being propped up by net transfers from basically 7 metros.
Actually blue collar industrial jobs were also VERY widely dispersed. You are correct in that there absolutely were regional superclusters, but there were also manufacturing plants all over rural America, and many of the clusters were in rural areas (furniture and textiles, for example.)
Focusing solely on the geographic concentration of a major industries around major metros is a mistake, IMO, because a LOT of the pain is coming from the loss of those more widely dispersed manufacturing plants. In Virginia, we had regional clusters of textile manufacturing in rural areas around Danville and furniture around Martinsville and Galax. None of those are major cities. They have still not recovered from NAFTA. Virginia, not generally considered a big manufacturing state, lost over 130k manufacturing jobs net, about 36% of Virginia manufacturing jobs.
Depending on the job and the region, yes, some people would want the old jobs back. Keep in mind that modern manufacturing plants are more automated, so the reality of any manufacturing return is fewer, and more highly skilled, jobs for equivalent output.
I think in general, yes, not only can old towns and communities come back, but also, with remote work, they are already coming back organically. I have seen a good bit of that firsthand. See https://www.coopercenter.org/research/remote-work-persists-migration-continues-rural-america In fact, rural and exurban growth is often outstripping urban growth. See https://cardinalnews.org/2025/05/13/rural-communities-are-the-ones-that-are-keeping-virginia-from-becoming-an-exporter-of-people/
This pattern was seen nationwide, with people especially moving to places that are less dense, scenic, with available outdoor activities, near colleges and universities, near bodies of water, near parks, etc. Often they moved to places where they or their parents had previously left.
Internal migration in general is a mixed bag for human wellbeing. Moving disrupts family support for childcare and eldercare that can increase costs by thousands. Most two parent families have two careers to think about. It disrupts schooling for kids, and friendships for kids and parents alike. Economics are not the only argument, and reduced internal migration probably reflects the best interests of the people involved.
Spreading people out to more communities lets us productively use housing and infrastructure that’s already available. It frees up housing for people who prefer to live in cities. More educated people in more areas moderates political divides and decreases polarization. Remote work has really helped this.
To me, the reality is that emptying these towns hurt people and damaged our politics in ways that greatly offset the economic benefits.
Yeah. It’s interesting that Matt seems to be pro-internal migration while being pro-natalist. You don’t get a higher birth rate without extended family in town. Grandma shouldn’t be more than 15 miles away *in the worst case* because her entire raison d’etre is to be a free babysitter, preferably one that makes backhanded comments about your parenting…
It’s not good for the parents or the kids or the family or the bank account to have widely dispersed family. Sometimes your family sucks and it’s best to get as far away as possible, sometimes there are no opportunities and it’s the only way to do it, but it’s at best a necessary evil. There’s a reason magnet cities have lower birth rates.
The baby boom coincided with i believe the highest number of moves on record (though they only started keeping track in the Census in 1948).
Of course for someone who grew up in the Dust Bowl or 1930s Central Valley, living in the San Fernando Valley or like Richmond, CA probably felt like a garden of eden in terms of prosperity.
The thing about magnet cities is interesting as well... historically port cities have had a lot of net external migration but as families became settled they would generally move to other places in the interior of the country. But 2008-20 there was a reversal of that with a lot of people moving to what you might call "magnet cities" (though I believe Utah, Idaho, North Carolina, etc. were actually the biggest attractions for movers, and those places do not have low birth rates like NY/SF).
Well, having grandma for free childcare and housework is less important when mom stays at home, too.
I thought meatpacking tended to be fairly clustered into major rail hubs? Not so?
Meat packing historically was far more widely dispersed than it is now. However, there have always been centers of meat packing activity.
I know a number of doctors who can work because of nannies. For mom to work she has to be able to drive in at night etc.
You might not need a nanny, but if you dont want to see a drop off in high skilled labor, nannies are important.
Meat packing has been dominated by low cost immigrant labor as long as it’s existed as an industry.
That is factually incorrect.
“By the early 1960s, 95 percent of meatpacking workers outside the South were unionized, and wages were comparable to those in auto and steel production. Between the 1960s and 1980s, the wages of meat-slaughter and -processing workers remained significantly higher than the average in nondurable manufacturing.”
https://daily.jstor.org/why-does-meatpacking-have-such-bad-working-conditions/
The main characters in "The Jungle" from Upton Sinclair is a Lithuanian immigrant family fresh off the boat.
Correct.
And, as noted in the article, “By the early 1960s, 95 percent of meatpacking workers outside the South were unionized, and wages were comparable to those in auto and steel production. Between the 1960s and 1980s, the wages of meat-slaughter and -processing workers remained significantly higher than the average in nondurable manufacturing.”
Low wages and poor working conditions in meat packing are a CHOICE, not inevitable.
This is an interesting treatment of food processing in particular.
https://www.ers.usda.gov/amber-waves/2006/june/meat-processing-firms-attract-hispanic-workers-to-rural-america
Essentially by switching to low wage more assembly-line style processing and improving equipment companies reduced the price f chicken by 50%, at the same time the price of beef nearly doubled (then fell again as the beef industry adopted similar technology).
So yes it is a choice, but the old model of meat production had meat that was twice as expensive, which I doubt consumers would be willing to tolerate.
If you reread the article, it’s total improvements from conception to raised to slaughter to market that halved the cost. Processing labor was not half the cost of meat.
Most of the historic savings are from things like better genetics, lower cost methods of raising meat (confinement operations), efficiencies in feeding, and for processing, better equipment and processes and the increased productivity it allows.
A processing plant worker can handle up to 2000 chickens per day, but keep in mind, there are multiple steps to process a chicken. Cattle numbers are up to 390 IIRC, same caveat.
Retail markup after that is 25-50% of price.
Going cheap on labor does not halve the price. Each one of those workers is processing a LOT of animals, and even with multiple steps, their daily salary is divided by thousands of tons of meat.
If there’s anything worth the government subsidizing it’s that. Sounds like a terrible job that should have good wages and benefits, but also USDA prime ribeyes should be $3.50
You make very good points, but "have field dressed a deer" != "am willing to work on an assembly line gutting and skinning animal carcasses day in, day out, as a full-time job that is notorious for crappy worker health & safety conditions"
My point is that, with the wages, benefits, and working conditions equivalent to those offered in the eighties, more people would take these jobs. There wasn’t a shortage of workers applying for union meat packing jobs. It was a dirty, physical job that paid well, had good benefits, and union protection for working conditions.
In a functioning market, difficult or unpleasant jobs should have a higher wage, not lower.
Heck, I'm a vegetarian, so from my perspective, "meat packing jobs pay better = meat is more expensive = people eat less meat = fewer animals are raised in horrible conditions/lower environmental impact of animal husbandry" is a pure win!
But tell the average American that they must pay more for meat, and watch them get all pissy about it.
It's not only that, but labor is a market. Nannies and meat are less expensive than they otherwise would be because immigrant labor is cheaper. Americans would take those jobs if wages for them rose enough. But the catch is that rising wages would increase the costs and result in fewer jobs for nannies and meat factory workers. Would that theoretically be better than the status quo? I don't think so, but reasonable people can disagree on that.
Or you could have a guest worker program to fill those jobs…with people with documents and a status.
I think that would be ideal.
If you want to have a permanent underclass with no rights and no opportunity, while also keeping wages lower for local workers, sure. That doesn't sound ideal to me.
A guest worker program would not create a permanent underclass IMO, especially compared to the situation with undocumented workers we have now.
I lived and worked abroad on a visa. I was not a underclass even though I didn’t have citizenship there.
What kind of logic is that.
Undocumented immigration creates a underclass of people who have to live in the shadows. That is far worse
Most paid childcare workers (approx 80%) are not immigrants, legal or illegal.
Around half (estimates range from 45-65%) of meat packing employees are not immigrants, legal or illegal.
Meat prices would probably go up, but probably not disastrously, given that there is quite a decent market for local humanely slaughtered meat. I have to question the ethics of apologizing for objectively really horrible working conditions in meat packing plants and other occupations. Hard physical work is one thing, abusive treatment of employees is quite another.
Or we just perfect lab grown meat ("or we just", ha!) and we stop engaging in such a ridiculously wasteful and labour intensive enterprise. This would not result in decent paying jobs for large numbers of people, but seeing as we're not a communist country I don't see why unnecessary jobs should be maintained.
I don't disagree with that. And yes, prices would go up. I have no idea how much and what ultimate new equilibrium would be established. I just think the idea that "Americans won't do those jobs" is mainly true because wages are low.
Prices would go up a bit, then probably back down as plants invested in increased automation. US plants tend to use significantly less automation than European plants do, for many of the reasons you'd expect.
Which is easily fixed by raising wages.
The poor media diet or even the idea that people have a personal responsibility about their media sources is core to understanding the strange behavior. All kinds of people don't seem to understand the bias of the sources they are consuming. Having talked to people and surprised about some stupid stance that is right out of Fox or worse, it is clear that many of these folks don't have a feed of any substance that disagrees with their regular media.
One of my consistent takes as to why so many Trump scandals don’t seem to move his soft supporters (the hardcore will be with him no matter what) is we underestimate how much right wing media is literally a different universe.
I still think to many MSM pundits and reporters operate under the assumption that whatever big controversy is in the news must also be the news of the day at Fox or Newsmax if just from a different angle. Like if we asked Peter Baker (my stand in for all things bad with MSM) what do you think Fox is saying about Epstein, he’d probably have some elaborate answer about the different ways pundits are spinning the story when the real answer is they are not even talking about it at all.
My in law family are pretty conservative but not MAGA and even they are concerned about grandma in law’s consumption of Fox News - she literally just watches it all the time and asks my wife weird questions…
I feel like what social media did to GenZ is more or less happening to a lot of old conservative ppl with Fox News or NewsMax…
The few times I go looking at Fox, this is what I see. And admittedly it does surprise me every time.
If you don't read Fox News daily, you're doing yourself a disservice. It is definitely a completely different planet. They have been talking for days about some fight in Cincinnati that I assume is too inconsequential for most other news to report. But a Fox News loyalist would take this as a case of MSM ignoring violence on our streets.
Agreed. But this definitely applies to the left as well
I think the difference is that conservative media outlets basically consider it their job to be spokesmen for Trump and GOP while left of center media almost takes it as an insult that their being too supportive of Dems (the bias charge from the right is as much about shaping MSM coverage as it is about convincing regular people).
And it's not even just MSM. I'm pretty sure David Dayen at The American Prospect would bristle at the idea that his publication is about boosting the Democratic Party. The outlet may openly want Dems to win over GOP, but they will absolutely attack Dems if they think it's called for.
This is how you get the dynamics of the idiotic Sydney Sweeney controversy*. Get a few lefties bringing up the supposed racial dog whistle angle*. Get some right wingers with large Twitter followings to highlight the most insane lefty takes and watch Newsmax and Fox News run with it to the point you get Trump talking about it. The serious of events that led to this is just not happening in the same manner with the parties or controversy flipped.
*Can I just say, I actually don't think the angle that there is a subtle eugenics message to the ad is a terrible take. I think the idea this commercial needs to be a national topic of conversation is dumb. But I think American Eagle knew exactly what it was doing putting blond haired blue eyed Sydney Sweeney as their spokeswoman and having her say the dialogue she says. There's at least to me a "wink wink, nod nod" aspect to the ad.
It's probably more plausible that they knew deranged leftists would stroke-out about it and make the ad more viral than it had any business being.
I had no idea who she was and haven't even bothered to find out what she looks like (other than blonde, blue-eyed, and pneumatic) and yet she's been mentioned on pretty much every podcast I've listened to in the last couple of weeks. Easily one of the more successful ad campaigns out there.
Nah, the left's idiocy is obstinate second-option bias. But in order to be a contrarian, you have to at least be aware of what you're contradicting.
Matt buried the lede a little bit by only talking about the implications of cooking the books right at the end of today's post, but he's still right. I don't think we can begin to comprehend what a disaster that will be. How much of what we read (including today's post!) uses economic data without a thought about, well, what if these numbers are just made up?
Trump has now made it clear that he won't accept bad economic numbers -- that's the only reason to fire the BLS commissioner. Maybe they'll start cooking the books* immediately or just faking the BLS press release, or maybe they'll discover some deep corruption that requires them to cease publishing all reports, you know, until they "get to the bottom of things." But imagine a world where there's no objective general judge of how the economy is doing. Private sources won't do; people's "feelings" from what they see around them won't do either. We will truly be in terra incognito and, like we take the air around us for granted, we simply aren't ready to deal with the tsunami-like effects of making us all blind.
* I understand how hard it will be to fake all the thousands of numbers that go into building these reports. I also understand that BLS employees will also be leaking what's happening. I'm just not sure that's as meaningful as people may think. Just remember: Trump fired the BLS commissioner because he didn't get the numbers he wanted. Why would he stop there, if future numbers aren't to his liking? One way or another, that shocking development has carved the heart out of objective reporting system and it will never recover as long as Trump, or a Trump-like person, is president. From this moment on, if you fully accept any economic report from this administration, you are acting on unjustified blind faith. Even bad numbers have to make you think, "Are the numbers even far worse than reported?"
Nobody cares if the upper classes can't get cheap nannies. Listing that as a reason shows that you don't actually understand any of this.
What was nice about the 1950s was that everyone* had really cheap live-in nannies, maids and cooks.
* Well, if you were of the XY chromosome persuasion.
I mean in the South back then, it was common for working class white families to have a black lady that came in to do the laundry and especially ironing. I bet that was pretty common up north too. Not that this is a desirable arrangement but it was common.
Did the nannies, maids, and cooks, have nannies, maids, and cooks?
No, but they also weren't "of the XY chromosome persuasion." The gerrymandering Marc's claim necessitates is his point.
The more common argument now seems to be “without immigrants all these jobs will be automated instead.” Which feels even more racist, like you’re okay losing your job to a robot but not a brown person, you are effectively assigning negative value to brown people’s utility.
Historically automating low skill jobs has been what has enabled economies to zoom ahead of their competitors. Britain had massive supplies of draught-horses and poor people but replacing them with atmospheric engines and mechanical looms turned Britain into an economic superpower after the capital costs were paid off. It being presently cheaper to kneecap productivity with cheap labour isn't a good thing and is partly why China is dominating in several industries. The pro growth mindset should favour automation where practical and immigration where not.
This is of course before you get into the fact a machine doesn't need the government to pay for education, policing and the various other functions of state, here in Britain high state responsibility along with low automation has meant that you have to get to the sixth decile (originally I typoed as percentile) of worker income before people start net contributing and that includes if they arrive at the age of 21.
The pro growth mindset should favour automation where practical and immigration where not.
The pro growth mindset should favor both. Period.
Yeah, but the nostalgia economics people hate automation as well.
Sixth or ninety-fourth? Sixth doesn’t seem especially impressive.
Good catch, I typoed decile as percentile.
If I understand the argument correctly, it’s that automation increases productivity and does not increase housing demand or need for social welfare or other government support. Both housing and government services are hot topics in conservative debate.
I don’t think very many of those voters are arguing job loss.
But even low skilled immigration [Why can't we make "immigration" mean mainly attracting high income earning potential people?] make a positive contribution to non-immigrants income even new of "social welfare and social support."
"But even low-skilled immigration make[s] a positive contribution"
You can lead a horse to accurate ideas, but you can't make it believe them. Social scientists have been pointing that fact out for decades now, and conservatives have responded by losing trust in social scientists instead.
They will not be automating the lower level health care jobs any time soon, which have been the main source of job growth for some time.
"You believe that you are special, Mr. Anderson. That the rules do not apply to you..."
(I assume you mean @pmarca, Marc Andreesen of a16z infamy? Certainly agree that VC's been doing a fine job of proving the EMH is false over the last few years.)
Yes Andreeson. Stupid autocorrect. lol.
>How do you plan anything without basic reliable data?
Obviously what Trump is doing is bad, but that throat clearing aside, if there was no reliable economic data coming from the government, the private sector would very quickly fill this void because there would be a huge profit incentive to do so.
"Huge profit incentive" doesn't suggest that these figures would be provided in a reliable, timely way to the general public. Just the opposite - their value would be the competitive edge of no one else having them. BLS and other statistical bureaus produce classic public goods, and no private entity will ever be incentivized to provide them at the same level of scale, rigor, transparency, or publication.
Yeah I think "Allan" is underestimating the likelihood that if the only reliable economic data is from private sources than those private sources are going to start finding ways of monetizing this data given how valuable a commodity this is going to be absent "free" (and better) government data.
Bigger companies will happily pay and gain an advantage over smaller competitors. Or even more likely, the private entities will make deals with companies but not others that will give a few "connected" companies a huge competitive advantage that likely will be economically harmful given how much it's likely to lead a handful companies being able to use this info to crush competitors.
Really though? Companies will pay for jobs numbers?
It’s more of restatement of the efficient market hypothesis more than anything
And they would also risk retaliation from Trump if they made the data public.
That is so wrong.
Even if there were a superior private source of data (and that's a huge if), its consumption would be privatized because that's what private means (i.e., profit seeking). So actual knowledge of the economy would be a scarce resource and its maldistribution by itself would skew the economy into winners (those who pay for the data) and losers.
Let's not paper over the incalculable damage Trump has just done to how we're able to see the economy by believing in such Panglossian nonsense.
"the private sector would very quickly fill this void because there would be a huge profit incentive to do so"
No, this is infamously the sort of situation that generates market failure, as Kenneth Arrow pointed out in 1973 ("Information and Economic Behavior", available at https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/AD0768446.pdf). Someone with accurate information about the economy has tremendous advantage over everyone else (who has inaccurate information), and so economics researchers are strongly incentivized to keep their results secret. Then everyone spends their time duplicating everyone else's basic-but-secret work, rather than building to measure more subtle phenomena.
>Honest to god I think we are underrating the economic catastrophe this could be. How do you plan anything without basic reliable data?<
The evisceration of the government's capacity to produce accurate economic data is obviously pretty alarming—a low motion car crash is how I view it.
Maybe I'm wearing rose-colored glasses, but I think this one aspect of MAGA horribleness is likely to stop short of "catastrophe" simply because there are other number crunchers besides the ones who work for the White House. There's CBO, which Trump doesn't control, the Fed, the Congressional Research Office, state/local data collection entities, universities, ADP, etc. To be sure, data collection is a big challenge if we can't rely on the executive branch. It's bad. But Trump's going to find it hard to fool the rest of the world as to what's going on under the hood of the US economy.
I think the real danger is the Fed. So, so much of the Fed's power so to speak is credibility; if inflation really is a danger the Fed will step in and do what's necessary to get it under control.
If Trump is going to fire the BLS head because he doesn't like the numbers, what's going to happen when CPI shows inflation increasing again given how much he's been threatening Powell. He puts a sycophant in, even if the other Fed governors still vote to keep rates high, how much of Fed credibility is lost. I just really think too many Trump fans who should know better (i.e. those in finance world) are underrating the possibility the 10-year (which is what really guides pricing) would go up not down if Powell is fired and a sycophant cut rates.
Or what if, after the Senate approves the nomination of Barron Trump as the new BLS commissioner, the inflation report next month or so shows inflation dropping to 0.0001%? Your assumption that the "CPI shows inflation increasing again" is based on the idea that we believe any economic number coming out of the Executive Branch ever again. What would be our basis for trusting their numbers now?
What he can do is choke off the flood of reliable data. He might not even fake the reports; he may just cease having them at all and burying the raw data. My understanding is that the CBO, Fed, CRO, etc etc all rely on these federal government collection efforts. Take them away and the bottom drops off.
There's a consistent finding in decision science that people overestimate their knowledge in areas where they are ignorant and underestimate their knowledge in areas where they are expert.
I think the Musk/Andreesen/etc. comments depend on the field. There are lots of areas where Musk's opinion is extremely smart. But he obviously had ignorant or idiotic views on how government actually functioned, an area in which he had little expertise.
>"How do you plan anything without basic reliable data?" China doesn't provide basic, reliable economic data and they don't have trouble attracting investment, even from countries that claim to care about human rights and democracy.
If that's a defense of what Trump is doing to our economic data, I don't know what to say. How about, don't screw with a damn good system that's the wonder of the world just to satisfy the narcissistic sociopath?
If your point is that China is succeeding despite not having world class economic data but your mileage may vary if you try the same thing so beware, well, sure, OK, I guess.
It's not a defense of what Trump is doing. What is Trump is doing is awful. My point is that China is legally a horrible place to invest in, yet firms are banging at China's door begging to be let in. Similarly, if the economic information environment in America worsens firms will still want to do business here.
You're right.
But, man, what a terrible own goal it is, just to massage the ego of the stupidest, worst person on the planet.
And where all the business leaders who clearly did not troop to Trump's office insisting that he reinstate the commissioner and swearing not to interfere in BLS operations anymore? No, instead, the stock market zoomed the next business day (Monday). I'm beginning to think Lenin was right about capitalists' sense of self-preservation.
The american stock market (NYSE + NASDAQ) is worth almost 10x the Shanghai stock exchange despite US GDP being 10-35% larger depending on how you want to measure it. If the US stock market were valued on similar terms to the Chinese stock market it would have catastrophic consequences for American companies.
Would it? The stock’s already issued. It’d be bad for American pensioners, executives, and startups - and the secondary effects of that are large - but a change in a company’s stock price doesn’t affect their financials unless they want to issue new equity and that doesn’t happen too often. They’d issue debt instead if the stock price were too low, right?
It helps to be doing catch-up growth, because even if you don’t know the details, you can be pretty confident that some old things that are new here will work.
There are alternatives to either having native born Americans doing undesirable but necessary jobs and tolerating illegal and undocumented immigration to fill those jobs.
I do not understand why these are discussed as the only options.
I’m wondering if private businesses get in the business of CPI estimation and jobs reporting
my understanding is even most "private" data is ultimately benchmarked to BLS stats so it's just a snake eating its own tail.
"I think you underestimate the number of college educated/elite voters who “drank the kool-aid”.
Living in Florida I'm surrounded by people like this. Most of my friends and acquaintances are college educated Trump supporters who are otherwise pretty smart but the types who went to FSU and UF - and not elite universities. They, for the most part, genuinely believe Trump's policies will be good for the economy.
"Take this guy from the Montana Knife Company, who initially reacted with enthusiasm to tariffs because they would boost his made-in-America products … only to discover that his costs are rising due to tariffs because he relies on imported equipment and supplies."
I refuse to believe that even the most MAGA of small business owners is so stupid that he doesn't understand where the inputs *for his own products* come from, or what the impact of tariffs on those inputs would be.
I think a lot of people conceptualized tariffs as a kind of consumption tax on foreign-made end products and didn't think about the taxation of intermediate components and capital goods.
Sure, but also people whose business relies directly on intermediate components and capital goods?
Another eventually-dissatisfied voter for the leopards eating peoples' faces party.
Don’t discount the capacity of people to not think things through and stick with their default assumptions. People are amazing at cognition, but also often complete morons
He trusted that, because Trump's heart was in the right place (so to speak), Trump would sweat the details once in office.
It was a poor bet.
A lot of people also believe that foreigners pay the tariffs, not Americans.
Usually tariffs are placed on goods on industries you want to protect, not across the board to try to alter trade balances.
Their new use as economic sanctions is a bit unusual as well.
Good thing I'm not much of a coffee drinker.
I believe it. Most small business owners aren’t operations specialists, they’re product people. They know just enough about their supply chain to run their business, but they’re concentrating on products or marketing or whatever.
My vague memory is that all the Montana Knife guy’s suppliers are American companies, so he sees that he’s buying American and figures that means he doesn’t need to pay for tariffs. He doesn’t think about the fact that his suppliers are importing steel or machinery from overseas, because he’s just looking at his invoices and seeing entirely American companies.
“I refuse to believe that even the most MAGA of small business owners is so stupid…”
Oh sweet child of summer.
Ok fine, fine, substitute “poorly informed” for “stupid,” to be less elitist.
I guess Flooey's point above is the explanation. But still, when your business is making stuff out of other stuff...?
If you refuse to believe that people could be stupid enough to believe X stupid thing, your model of the world will be bad.
Can't argue with that.
One of the most important developments in the modern history of popular music is soundscan. The reason is, there was actual real hard data has to what albums and singles people were buying as opposed to just asking record store owners. And lo and behold, turns out there was actually way more fans of rap and grunge than people realized.
In other words, there was an entire industry that literally didn't understand who was buying their product or which that one of their product lines was actually way more popular than they realized.
Another good example that Matt brings up all the time is parking minimums. Specifically, there is often news reports in places like NYC of small business owners who are against getting rid of parking requirements because they worry how their customers are going to get their store when in reality the vast majority of their customers are either walking, biking or taking public transit to get to their business (what's really likely going on is the small business owner in question is worried about where he/she personally is going to park).
Point being is I think you underestimate the number of business owners who don't exactly have a deep understanding of all the mechanics of their business.
This might be out of date, but even the corporate buyers at Walmart aren't product experts. There often 25-year-olds who are shifted from product to product every few months and whose career depended on just yelling at suppliers to provide increasingly cheaper products even if the manufacturing capacity didn't exist anywhere cheaper than where the existing factories were located.
Yeah. I mean, I'd expect more of a small business owner who makes a very small number of products that all depend on more or less the same inputs, but I suppose one doesn't necessarily think beyond one or two degrees of separation.
I'd also hazard a guess that the people in charge at Montana Knife Company know a lot more about knives than they do about supply chains and economics.
I think it's quite possible that he bought from a bunch of american companies that happened to do the importing for him, and so he didn't think much about it
Yeah, I think Flooey nails it above. Still surprising, but I guess there's an explanation of sorts.
His business skill is building a macho brand on Insta / TikTok, and we're all here talking about the Montana Knife Company so he's doing a really friggin' good job of that.
This guy is literally that stupid, as are millions of other Americans.
I know a fair number of small business people who really only have a surface knowledge of all that underpins their business.
From his perspective he's not buying goods from overseas, he's buying goods from ABC supplier. Until tariffs make the exact country of origin important, it doesn't matter to him, and he probably didn't notice, what country his materials come from.
Small business owners generally are people who are very good at the technical aspect of their field. They get an entrepreneurial itch, and if they can combine some good sales technique with a decent sense of operating savvy they become successful. But none of that requires a deep understanding of the economics or complexity of the systems and webs that underly their business.
In the 2000s, Medicare implemented a new pricing system for healthcare Durable Medical Equipment (DME) services (the healthcare providers that supported people needing oxygen, CPAP, wound care at home, etc., not the manufacturers of the devices). Instead of Medicare setting a price, they auctioned contracts for each metro area. Before this went into effect, it was obvious and well covered that prices would plummet and that many smaller companies would fail. That is exactly what happened. The larger and smaller companies were my customers at the time.
90% of the smaller DMEs were in complete denial about what was coming. There were multiple root causes:
1) An assumption that it wouldn't go into effect. Not unreasonable as this often happens. Today, some are likely thinking, "yes, this would be bad if passed, but I'm sure Trump will figure out a way to do it that doesn't hurt me."
2) A narrow view of business performance / ignorance. Most small DMEs built their businesses based on providing very high service levels. In the auction system, this was irrelevant. But they just couldn't conceive of a world where operational efficiency was the only way to survive. With the Montana Knife Company, it's possible he realizes the situation but just underweights the impact. "I've built a company despite higher costs, so I can keep doing it." It's only when he discovers how much higher that things sink in. But don't underestimate how many small business owners just got lucky by executing a business strategy that worked, but they don't understand.
3) Pure subconscious denial. Many knew deep down that they were doomed, but just couldn't handle the cognitive dissonance. They kept running their companies at a loss until they went bankrupt.
why?
Yeah, good point. I don't really have a reason other than I assume that someone competent enough to start a semi-successful business in the first place knows something about how their business works.
In that regard, _This American Life_'s Iowa State Fair episode, Act III: "Limp Biscuit" (https://www.thisamericanlife.org/839/meet-me-at-the-fair/act-three-16) is quite illuminating. Many small business owners aren't hyper-knowledgeable experts in their industry; they're perennial entrepreneurs that start and close businesses until they find one that sticks.
most small business owners are not competent enough to start a semi-successful business, which is why most small businesses quickly fail
Not unreasonable for someone to think X is a good idea without realizing that X isn't good for them personally.
Besides, a 10% across the board tariff with the revenue going to reduce the deficit probably DOES benefit the Montana Knife Company if they sell more domestically than they export. The actual tariff on steel would be another unhappy story.
There are many reasons small businesses fail, but being bad at running a business is certainly a common one.
#FellForItAgainAward
So many chickens will be coming home to roost of the next few months. I expect more failing, more lashing out, and doubling down on destructive policies will continue was inflation worsens and unemployment rises. I am just waiting to hear about layoff attributed to the administration's actions. Bezos showed he had the power to really hurt the administration by highlighting how these tariffs affect every purchase consumers make.
If everything hits right, no amount of gerrymandering will save Republicans. Democrats will just need to learn to listen to voters and make voter's priorities their priorities.
Very few people are capable of accepting that their life's work is failing, especially if they've made big sacrifices (such as harming others) in pursuit of it. So post-WW1 Germany develops the "stab in the back" myth, and there's the "communism has never been tried" cliche due to all the denials of its failures by its proponents.
The Israeli government seems to be pretty fully in alternative reality right now: the clearer the failure of its project becomes, the harder they double down.
So, could be quite a ride for the US ahead.
Agree, but now I am even more depressed about what our near future will look like when you put it like this.
The real and obvious problem is that if a new chief of a statistical organization is appointed and the numbers improve (ie are more Trump friendly) there is going to be lingering doubt that these improvements came from political pressure. This undermining of confidence in numbers is serously corrosive.
Large private sector companies that can in-house statisticians will probably need to make their own numbers for internal purposes, but keep those as industry secrets to avoid direct retaliation from Trump.
How will they have their own numbers for general economic trends? Based on what?
Big companies can do their own surveys - they probably already do surveys about market sentiment and customer preferences.
I literally know people who do that job.
I was about to respond to you asking what sources of data do they use, and how reliant are they on government-generated information, but then I read Jeff Mauer's post on how we can move to privatized data to replace the BLS and now I understand better. For example, as Jeff illustrates, we can take the temperature of the job market to see how hot it is if that never lasts more than a week bozo Craig has a real job.
https://www.imightbewrong.org/p/five-economic-metrics-to-track-now?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=375183&post_id=170087945&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=7kzmy&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
Yes indeed, the firing of the BLS chef is materially BAD. This is the route to being an Argentina.
Of course equally it is going to lead the Administration to being blind to data for course corrections, which is likely to be both materially bad for the economy and materially bad for their own electoral results as the feed through of re-acceleration of inflation plus job destruction is going to put them behind and 8-Ball.
Now, can the Democrats get out of their rhetorical incompetence and get 100% into effectively attacking the unpopular (overcoming their internal tariff favorabilities on the 'Prog Left')... (and stop the eggheaded Oligarchy nonsense discourse in favor a focused attack on Trump as Leader without dilution with arch academic inflected terms)
"...This is the route to being an Argentina...."
Without a sense of rhythm.
On the Democratic side, it’s for the most part not the Prog Left defending the tariffs but “moderates” like Fetterman and Golden.
I think this administration is already blind to the idea of course corrections, because this administration is Trump and his sycophants. In a normal admin there would be subject matter experts who would call upon their resources to marshal data and bring to the President both accurate predictions of the future and possible steps to take to improve it. Absolutely no process like this exists or is even really possible in this administration.
I mean yeah, Argentina literally did this once inflation became obvious. It remained high since then.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Institute_of_Statistics_and_Census_of_Argentina#Controversy
Is the audience for the bls is bias just crank realignment + cult of personality?
It seems like no one has ever doubted any of these technocratic statisticians were doing hard work on getting the numbers right until five minutes ago.
If you look at the work of Nate Silver, a key challenge for him is convincing people of what confidence intervals are and how their existence doesn't make data bad. People really really struggle with them.
The presence of confidence intervals annoy amateurs and the lack of confidence intervals annoy professionals.
People have a really hard time with statistics in general. There's no way a random sample of 500 people can generate good population estimates. It's too small!
Oh no - I had a discussion with someone back during Obama's first term that was convinced by the then common theory that there was massive inflation and the Obama administration was cooking the books.
I ended up using historic car prices - a Toyota 4Runner was 30,000 and 5 years later it's 32,500 so that's slightly less than 2% a year just like the government says. It actually convinced him.
I also remember someone telling me that the Obama administration somehow changed the definition of unemployment to make the numbers look better.
I don’t think this was true, but there was some criticism of how the metrics worked. Google’s AI summary ended with: “while the Obama administration did not alter the formal definition of the official unemployment rate, the economic conditions during that period led to increased scrutiny of the U-3 rate's comprehensiveness and highlighted the importance of considering broader indicators like the U-6 rate for a complete picture of the labor market.”
It wasn't just rhetoric. The right has built an entire economy around selling stuff to people who think Democrats are bad. Fox News was full of ads for gold while their pundits were predicting Obama hyperinflation. This piece by Rick Perlstein captures the dynamic well.
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-long-con
Nah there were always TONS of people who doubted it. Look up the long sordid history of shadowstats.com
I'd wager that a very sizeable minority of Americans think why government data that affects them is faked.
I was going to bring Shadowstats up. It has a long lineage, it's just that only under Trump does it enter the mainstream.
I think it has always been reasonably mainstream, it's just that with Trump it has escaped containment to the elites. For two decades I've seen similar, less conspiracy theory takes, from reasonably normal people on Bogleheads, Reddit, Twitter, etc. "Gas is up 15% but CPI is 1%???" "Rent in my city is up 12% but CPI is 2%?" And once anyone learns about quality adjustments.....
My feeling is that very few people actively trust the numbers. People either never think about them at all (95%) or think they are fake (4%).
Everyone also insists that gas prices always go up and never go down, and yet they don’t remember that the huge price increase they’re complaining about now is the same price as the huge price increase they’re complaining we’re complaining about a year or two ago.
I've had the experience where I look at the price of gasoline and think "wait, what? Wasn't it much higher before?"
I wish that were more universal/remembered.
As I've said before, the difference between the Republican Party of say 1995 and 2025 isn't that much different at the 'base' level though there's been some movement there - the difference is the elites of the GOP in 2000 didn't believe the BS they were selling at the same level, while in 2025, it's people who grew up in the miasma of right-wing media basically their entire lives.
You can also see this in the downfall of some conservative elites of the past 25 years - Rudy, Alito, etc. and you can tell whose pickled themselves in Fox News and who hasn't.
Does no one remember the drumbeat of "inflation is wore that 'elites' claim" aspect of the "vibecession" during Biden's term?
The audience is the type of people who are suspicious of anything government does, especially if it's competent at it, and suspicious of anything that makes Trump look bad.
As to whether people "understand" the statistics (as the commenters below argue), this is irrelevant. Most normal people will just take the numbers as given and not worry about the details which, if the source is generally reliable as the BLS was, is a rational position.
I propose the following plan for national greatness:
1. Statistics exist to prove success, not to measure economic performance.
2. Administrators who do not produce correct figures that prove policies are successful must be purged. They are enemies of the people.
3. We need a Central Statistical Administration to report on the truth.
These are bulletproof and have been demonstrated to work.
In a 25 year period they led to a 16 fold increase in industrial output, a 50 fold increase in machine building, a 10 fold increase in national income.
For details please see Central Statistical Administration (TSSU) report on the Soviet economy in 1956.
And yet the common folk still insist that they're starving. How do we convince them that their bellies are, in fact, full?
If their stomachs growl, let it be a song of loyalty.
If their mouths are dry, let them drink deeply from the well of ideological purity.
The Party nourishes not with bread alone, but with truth.
Their hunger is not suffering—it is devotion.
Send them on vacation to our far eastern republics so they come to understand what starvation actually looks like.
I often wonder why more critics don't use the term "The Trump Tax Hikes" with regards to tariffs, or call them "MAGA Marxists." This president really is the most anti-business and anti-consumer president we've had in half a century.
People HAVE tried that.
Google "Trump tax hikes" and you'll find hundred of results.
That you didn't know that shows why it hasn't caught on. It is so unviral it is invisible even to a person who claims they want to see it.
Needs the right viral promoter probably. Someone of a Roganesque communication
I mean, there's "MAGA Maoism," but that doesn't seem to have caught on outside of The Bulwark.
Probably too abstract, outside of the educated not many people probably really click with Maoism.
This is another incidence of "Trump doesn't care about the reasoning you use to support him." The people who attempted to intellectualize Trumpism told everybody that life isn't all about GDP and made some vague noises that reducing the number of immigrants and stifling trade would bring back US manufacturing and give us "meaning" or something. Ok, how's all that "meaning" going? And of course if you want to stay in Trump's good graces, you can't point out that we're not actually bringing back manufacturing, this all has to be part of the plan.
TLDR stop trying to intellectualize the guy.
The people who tried to polish Trump's intellectual turds (CNBC is full of them) look like fools but it does not matter. They are tied to Trump at an emotional level via in-group solidarity. Just tax the hell out of them if we ever get a chance. That is the right thing to do economically and morally in my view.
This is why MAGA, and conservatives in general are hacks. They think the only important factor in life is "does this person love America" in this really performative way, where you spam as many american flags as possible. It's like building your team in basketball by having the best cheering section. Every time they talk about merit, it's cover for nepotism, purely and simply.
Yet ironically they are the ones who want Americans to live harder lives, kicking out immigrants who do hard but necessary work and blowing up a global trade system where foreigners give us valuable stuff in exchange for paper we print.
It isn't the cheerleaders who bring the wins, after all.
I am optimistic the US will SURVIVE Trump's idiocy. The idea that it's not damaging is idiotic. Of course it's damaging. There are a myriad of ways that Trump's boorish nature hurts us the big ones being:
1. He's made the US an unreliable partner, which undermines our ability to act as a leader in the future. Why should anyone trust the US right now? The only reason Trump can get away with this is that they have little choice...for now. But 'for now' is not inevitable to last forever.
2. He's dragging down the economy. Sure, we can still grow in spite of Trump: but we could have had more. That hurts us even if it's not 'that bad' for most Americans.
3. He's destroying our ability to make better policy later. Instead of having a stable foundation on which to build: the next President (God willing: not a Trumpist) will have to repair a lot of damage instead of build higher.
Trump is such a freaking clown. It still boggles my mind so many Americans duped themselves into voting for him.
The underlying fundamentals are hard to shift even with the likes of Trump. Bush was super unpopular abroad and then Obama. It doesn’t take much to revive American popularity
Bush was unpopular, but I don’t think he unilaterally broke many (any?) agreements other countries were counting on. Now that Trump has directly done things like end NAFTA and the Iran agreement, and then broke every rule of the WTO, and canceled contracts with domestic grantees, no one will have any interest in relying on agreements with the American government any more.
Bush withdrew from ABM and the Kyoto Agreement. He went to war across the Middle East. People have short memories. So they will with Trump.
I think Trump has done more damage than Bush
And that’s saying a lot
Not really a comparable situation. Trump is the proof of concept that American democracy and institutions are fundamentally weak and unstable. Also, there's no Obama v. 2 waiting in the wings.
A poorer, weaker United States with no guaranteed rights for non-citizens (or even many citizens) is not going to be a magnet for talent and skilled immigration. And that, much more than anything else, has been the engine of American success for the past century.
“…also there’s no Obama v2 waiting in the wings…”
Comparable to 2004-2006 in the USA. The fundamentals in the USA: AI and Energy are strong.
People are forgetful. Plus money talks. Once Obama v2 comes along and the above companies are offering big salaries, talent will come back.
As of yet, I haven’t seen any evidence in history to the contrary but sure Trump 2 could be the president that breaks USA streak.
Can't say I agree on AI and Energy being strong suits for the US going forward. Both rely on physical infrastructure which the US is woefully underequipped to build out. Plus AI success is in many ways a worse problem than AI failure, as ending huge numbers of white collar jobs will make the US far less receptive to immigration, not more. And not all paper-pushers are Democrats.
Sure. I’d buy that as a probable scenario.
"the White House is happy to brag that it has transformed immigration from a major source of labor force growth to a slight drag. MAGA fans get defensive when you point this out. But slow growth in aggregate employment and a negative hit to GDP growth are obvious results of this policy choice"
An important and underrated point imo. GDP is roughly a function of a country's population and technology. With immigration becoming a net negative and birth rates below replacement, GDP growth will continue to be anemic for the foreseeable future
"Tariff revenue is now a non-trivial piece of the economic pie."
Yes, this as a permanent state of affairs is exactly what Congress meant to authorize the President to do, in an emergency powers statute that doesn't even mention tariffs.
I'd be more confident the Supreme Court will do the obviously correct thing and strike this down under some flavor of nondelegation/major questions doctrine, if Democrats weren't so confusing and wishy-washy on this issue themselves, that they give the Supreme Court no cover if it did so.
"...major questions doctrine...."
This is when I am so glad that our current justices restrain themselves to the text of the Constitution, and that our founding fathers had the wisdom to write the phrase "major questions" into that document.
Okay, so dispense with the doctrinal labels and say how you would decide this, based on your first principles or however you would? The bare text of the Constitution, which explicitly assigns the power to "lay and collect" tariffs to Congress and not the Presidence? The principle that free trade is good and tariffs are bad? The principle that whether tariffs are good or bad, it's bad to concentrate this kind of economically destabilizing power in the hands of one person?
What I can see is that if the Supreme Court is courageous enough to take Trump on over this, that he has made his signature issue that will embarrass him worldwide if it is struck down, the Court will likely face blowback from the Administration of crisis proportions. Then who will have their back?
"... say how you would decide this...."
Like the present Court, I would decide it in accordance with the penumbras cast by the emanations from the document's actual text. Unlike the present Court, I would admit that this is what I am doing.
"... if the Supreme Court is courageous enough....Then who will have their back?"
You're asking me whether I personally will stand up for those courageous defenders of the Constitution in their brave defiance of Trump? What sort of fan-fic is this? The corrupt Republican politicians on the current Court have proven repeatedly that they will enable Trump in any way that they can. There may be some future Court that deserves to be defended by those who love America and the Constitution. This group has not earned that privilege.
The federal judiciary remains by far the most functional opposition to Trumpism.
That doesn't seem true any more. The lower courts are still trying to do what they can, but SCOTUS seems to have mostly caved. I'm too lazy to look up the exact stats, but the District courts have held against the administration a large percentage of the time, but SCOTUS has overturned those decisions, usually on the emergency docket and without explanation, an amazingly high percentage of the time.
I fund it hard to believe the lower courts are just so consistently wrong on their reading of the law, rather I think we see a SCOTUS fully on side with, or intimidated by, Trump.
The Court has ruled in Trump's favor in virtually all the emergency orders it has issued (18 times in his favor to date).
https://www.stevevladeck.com/p/bonus-170-a-reply-to-professor-adler
"...The federal judiciary remains ...."
Or at any rate, parts of it do.
I think even if you have a more judiciary-friendly take than the rest of us here, this clearly isn't true. The most functional opposition to Trumpism is the markets, which Trump is terrified of. The Court is about to allow Trump to invent entirely new powers out of nothing and rule in favor of him rejecting the obvious plain text of the 14th Amendment. You can argue this is because of political pressure rather than because the justices themselves are malicious actors who don't care about the Constitution, but that doesn't exactly redeem them as a source of opposition.
What's your evidence that the markets are the most functional opposition to Trump? Yup, there was that brief panic after Liberation Day, but that's ancient history now. The markets (both equities and bond) have done just fine since Trump won/was inaugurated. When he fired the BLS commissioner, stocks went up 1.5% the next business day.
I'd say that markets are enabling his behavior and will only act in the face of economic deterioration after the fact and when it is patently obvious to everyone.
Nah, the markets have fully bought into the Taco "nothing is real" thing and are gonna keep on cruising right into a brick wall.
The easiest way to strike the tariffs down would be on straightforward statutory interpretation grounds, without having to resort to a much weaker nondelegation argument. I get the impulse to force Dems into having to choose between opposing tariffs and maintaining the administrative state, but it's a false choice.
That's the major questions side of the non-delegation coin -- interpret the statute narrowly as not delegating a power that would be an unconstitutional delegation if the statute did delegate it. And yes, for IEEPA, that doesn't even mention tariffs, that's the easiest way. But not all of Trump's tariffs are under statutes that don't mention tariffs, so it's not so easy to completely dance around the question of whether Congress did and may delegate its tariff taxing power to Trump. And more importantly, why would somebody want to dance around that question?
To answer your last question, I would guess the answer is that we genuinely want a lot of tariff policy to be delegated to the executive because tariff schedules are so absurdly detailed that it’s ridiculous to expect Congress to directly interface with them through legislation. Any actually-passed legislation would end up either so high-level that it called for a separate implementing agency to call balls and strikes (this is AIUI basically what we have now, ex Trump) or else would be a bunch of specific rates set in such a level of granularity that they’d just be an arbitrary mishmash set by lobbyists and not even pretending to reflect considered legislative will.
Agreed that the tariffs aren't gonna hold up in court. It's very clear.
I suspect all this tariff revenue will be forced to be paid back to companies. It will help their profits, consumers get no refund.
Unpopular take, but dems making economic policy on the basis that it's good for poor people is what got us into this mess to begin with. I feel like a broken record but the median voter isn't poor and the dem coalition's reverse trickle down thesis (basically all boats rise on policies good for economic security at the low end) have generated little political return thus far. Seriously - we ran the experiment, voters saw the ACA, more attention paid to labor laws, antitrust, SNAP increases, etc and said nope. We need popularism as a governing thesis if dems want to win.
Yeah, the American middle class dwarfs the American poor class. And policies that hurt the middle class to help the poor will face electoral backlash just because of the size of the middle class.
And especially the relative voting propensity of the classes. On the other hand, helping the upper middle class at the expense of the lower middle class has done well for democrats in local elections.
Do our trading partners wait it out 3 years, risking a possible President Vance, or soon look for more reliable partners as Matt suggests? The value of the dollar relative to other currencies has already plummeted 10% with another tariff deadline looming. I worry this worsens our relations with global trading partners but more so exacerbates income inequality here and abroad.
Noah Smith put out a though provoking piece about the next economic bubble festering in AI data centers funded by private credit. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Trump have to fumble his way through another recession before his term is up.
The problem with looking for more reliable partners is that the CCP is not resolving the core issues that made everyone skeptical of overreliance on them in the first place, i.e. an export-focused growth model powered by financial repression and industrial subsidy. It's not just America that has come to realize in the last 10 years that cheap Chinese goods are a double edged sword. I'm not saying no one will turn to China, indeed I expect Europe to do exactly that after some hemming and hawing, but in the long run that will only exacerbate deindustrialization and boost the protectionist tendency internationally. If liberal parties double down on free trade with China due to American actions, I fear that will just leave us in an even worse crisis for liberal democracy by 2035.
The dollar plummeting is probably good for income inequality abroad because it increases the purchasing power of people in poorer nations relative to Americans. According to the latest IMF estimate, emerging market economies will grow 2.2% faster than American in 2025 compared to only 1.5% in 2024. It’s a pleasant surprise that so far the tariffs have backfired and actually reduced global inequality.
It is hurting our popularity a lot though, the US is now more unpopular than China and only slightly less unpopular than Russia, while Donald Trump personally is more unpopular than even Putin: https://www.politico.eu/article/usa-popularity-collapse-worldwide-trump-return/. But elites abroad are still largely pro-American like we saw with Van Der Leyen’s humiliating capitulation. If Trump keeps things up then different elites will be elected in other countries who will not be as reflexively pro-American. Heck, even in Taiwan, the relatively more China-friendly faction has been gaining in recent elections.
It's hard to view the USD "plummeting 10%" in isolation as the Yuan has fallen to its weakest levels in ~ 20 years. If China is going to competitively devalue to boost / try to boost exports ... that's the move the global trading partners will be most concerned about.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-10/yuan-drops-to-weakest-since-2007-as-us-china-trade-war-deepens
In other fun news, Bobby Brainworms has cancelled nearly $500 million worth of contracts for mRNA vaccines. It's in the NYT.
Is this only for COVID or in general for the mRNA platform?
It actually doesn’t seem to directly apply to the Covid vaccines (though he may have separate actions where he is refusing to approve updated versions of those?). It seems to be actually about a contract to develop new mRNA based flu vaccines that could be updated faster (and perhaps more broadly targeted) than the current egg-based system. (The article had some weirdness about “whole cell” vaccines, which obviously doesn’t make sense for viruses, that don’t have cells.)
The NYT article looks like it’s a rejection of mRNA vaccines in general. This will hamper plans to develop mRNA vaccines against pancreatic and colon cancer, among other things.
Yeah the long term damage from research cuts will be hard to reverse. We have to hope that Europe will pick up some of the slack created by this insanity.