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TRESSIE any questions.
My name is Tressie McMillan Cottom. I’m an opinion columnist for “The New York Times. I’m also a sociologist and a professor. I study, I write, and I think a lot about inequality.
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I have concerns about the way we talk about the economy, specifically how the media is covering it and the stories we are being told about it. Kyla Scanlon coined “vibe session” last year to describe this gap between perception and economic indicators, trying to describe the sort of general malaise that the public had about the economy despite all of the major indicators about the economy’s health trending upward.
And the way that we were talking about the economy as being a vibes session or a vibes-based recession really struck me as being a bit diminutive, frankly, which is that it was diminishing the way that people have this really intuitive sense about the way the world works around them, even if they don’t always have a very sophisticated analysis for understanding why things around them are happening the way that they are in economic terms. And both of those things matter.
It really came down to me that what we were really looking at here was that this was a conflict between bad economic storytelling and good economic storytelling. And by bad economic storytelling, I don’t mean economic storytelling about bad economic indicators or about bad economic events. I mean economic storytelling that does not convey what the economic fundamentals actually mean to people. And there’s a difference between giving people the statistics and then putting those statistics in a context that tells people what they can do.
One way to get at a good economic story is to say there isn’t a perception gap between the macroeconomic indicators and how people perceive them, but there is a version of the story where both people’s perceptions and the indicators can be true.
If you are a consumer today, being a consumer doesn’t feel very good. On one level, there’s a consuming that we have to do to survive. Things like housing, groceries, energy, gas, transportation, all of those things are actually not trending in directions that people find positive. And they have not trickled down for all Americans, even the ones that are maybe nudging in slightly positive directions. In the case of gas prices, for example, are offset by things like the cost of maintaining vehicles or other high transportation costs. Grocery bills at the individual level for people at the grocery store still feel pretty high.
Then there’s the consuming that we do to maybe manage all of the rest of that. So one indicator that people talk about the growth of the economy is low unemployment. That means more people are working. And more people are working for higher wages, by the way. More Americans working means there are more Americans living with the day-to-day tradeoff of the costs of going to work. Paying the cost of working looks like traveling to and from work, and it also looks like doing things like managing the cost of your home while you’re working, child care, elder care being the two big ones.
You got to have someone to do all that other stuff at home. So no matter how much you might be making or how grateful you may be to not be unemployed, you could be feeling the sort of shock of what it means to be in the paid labor market and its effect on your day-to-day life.
The American Rescue Plan in 2021 was, for many Americans, their first experience of the government entering into a really strong relationship with them to help them live their daily lives, right? It made their economic situations tangibly better. So you had things like moratorium eviction stays that allowed more people to be housed. You had an extension of the Earned Income Tax Credit that helped lift millions of people out of poverty, many of them children and young adults. You had stays on student loan repayments.
So for a lot of Americans, this was just an expansion of the social safety net. And when those benefits started to expire, Americans saw that pullback of state investment in helping them manage sort of their economic security. And I think you can understand how people would feel more anxious about their ability to navigate the economy without that support when they have such a recent example of what it feels like to have that support.
And I think this is why we see such particularly high dissatisfaction numbers across Americans, across income groups, and across racial categories, and age groups. And what this should tell us is that there is a version, then, of economic storytelling that can get at people’s economic anxiety without saying that you’ve all been manipulated by a story that discounts your understanding of the economic indicators.
Good economic storytelling tells people that there isn’t someone to blame, but there is someone who is responsible. There is a responsible authority for what you are experiencing. And a version of that story would sound something like this. Look what happens when we invest in America’s middle class and working class. Look what happens when partnerships between your government and your community creates not just investment in individuals and families, but capacity for communities to have the services that those communities need.
When we did that for this shining moment, even if that shining moment was in response to global crisis, we lifted millions of Americans out of poverty. We allowed more of women and people of color to enter into the labor market a more equal footing. We were able to open up these avenues of participation for people. We were able to do these things.
If you can tell this story that says your anxiety is not misfounded, it is just founded in a version of America that was temporary, but that we can and should shore up, that we shouldn’t be focused on what we have lost with the expirational parts of the American Rescue Plan, but that the American Rescue Plan was a vision for what could happen.
When we forget that storytelling piece, we leave open a lot of space for a lot of nefarious ideas about the economy. And as the data and polling has shown time and time again, the economy matters to people. Not necessarily the economic data, the economy, how people feel about it. So it should matter to us to tell a really good, true, empowering story about the economy.
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