How I Think About the Economy Now

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Hold on, I’m going to say something dramatic.

This is the last post I’m going to write as an economist.

Now go ahead and laugh with me, before we get to the serious stuff. I mean it in a gentle way. We all have to grow up, and me? Well. The gap between the way I think about the economy, and the rest of my peers do—it’s grown to the point where I wonder if maybe I’ve outgrown this old identity of mine as an economist. 

Do Economists Make Any Sense to You Anymore?

What do you see when you look at economists talking about the economy?

Here’s what I see: gobbledygook. It’s not that it’s wrong, but it’s far from right, either. It just…makes no sense to me anymore. Does it to them?

They keep telling us the economy’s great, booming, etcetera. But the indicators I look at don’t tell me that story at all. They tell me a story of an age in a world crying out in great distress.

Here are a few of those.

• Half of parents find it overwhelming to raise kids, financially.
• Half of people struggle to pay the bills.
• Half of young people feel numb, with financial worries at the top.
• 80% of people live on the edge, one step away from losing everything.

That’s in America, which is the richest country on the planet.

…Because They Don’t To Me

So. What’s going on here?

My peers look at economic stats, and we’ve discussed this before, at the aggregate level. Growth, unemployment, etcetera. They take a cursory glance, and conclude that all’s well.

I can’t do that.

And I wonder why they can’t, either. 

That questions leads me in uncomfortable directions. One answer I wonder about is: maybe they’re just die-hard “capitalists,” and they don’t care that people are encountering such hardship. I put capitalists in quotes because none of us are actual capitalists, least of all economists—we just earn salaries or incomes, but just maybe 0.1% of us can live off of capital income.

Another answer I wonder about is: maybe they’re just avoiding asking these questions for political reasons. Or maybe for ideological ones. Maybe to them this sort of hardship isn’t even hardship at all. It’s just “character-building,” or a feature-not-a-bug, or just something to shrug at. Hey, that’s life. Who wants to challenge the status quo?

For me, though, the story is very different. Let me sum it up this way.

The Bar is Too Low, or, Eudaimonia vs Mass Low-Level Despair

If this is a “good” economy, the bar’s too low.

Now, it’s easy to shrug at that. But I want you to pay attention.

Here are another dire set of statistics. Fresh graduates and job-seekers are having an incredibly difficult time right now. That’s because the economy isn’t creating stable white collar jobs anymore. Gains are concentrated in low-wage service work. So what, you ask? 

So everything. Because if that’s the case, then consumption is of course not going to grow, but fall, and as that happens, everything falls apart, right down to the sainted stock market, eventually, not to mention, the banking system. If people can’t have stable careers anymore, then what even is an economy? At least in a modern sense? And not just white collar ones, really, but of nearly any sort? 

Are we all to cobble together portfolio careers of side hustles and second slash third gigs? What kind of life is that? A guy that works at a store who’s great friends with Snowy told me today, as we were on our walk, he recently had to do just that. And as a result, he doesn’t get to see his kids anymore. What kind of a life is…

The way I think about the economy now.

I’ve always thought the bar should be eudaimonic. The ancient Greek word for a good life. That should be what we want from a “good” economy. One in which people, by and large, are living good lives.

And anything less than that should, well, worry us. It tends to lead to political instability, social disintegration—the rupturing of social bonds—and emotional distress. As those multiply, because they do, creating vicious cycles, they begin to eat away at a society’s confidence, optimism, and even sense of identity and cohesion. And as that happens, of course, demagogues cast their dark spell, and weave lurid fantasies on which to rise to power.

So. That’s my little theory of how the world works.

The question to me is: how did I end up alone in this fight, I guess?

How I Stopped Being a Thing I Never Was

My perspective isn’t shared by my peers. Almost none of them will sort of lend it credence. I’m comforted by the fact, I suppose, that the world’s better economists, many of whom are much, much older than me, are more sympathetic to my sort of reading than the other one, in which even if Things Are Still Pretty Bad, That’s Good Enough. 

Still, the question remains. Why don’t economists think much about the economy anymore? How can it be the case that when there are so, so many signals of such widespread and fairly profound distress—half of parents, half of young people, half of people period—that’s still good enough? If a doctor saw a patient on the table, took their pulse, concluded everything was fine, but blood was pouring from giant gashes on their legs…

I don’t have the answer, but I do observe the predicament. And that’s one of a field that isn’t quite engaging with reality very deeply. It’s seeing what it wants to see, and sort of ignoring data that points to deeper issues, uncomfortable ones, which would, of course, raise paradigmatic questions about whether any of this is really working out very well.

Why Economists Don’t Make Any Sense to Me Anymore

My bar is eudaimonia.

And when I look at the economy through that lens, it’s severely, severely lacking. It’s not near “good,” and not even at “good enough.” 

You’ve come across much of the sort of data I’ve cited in your daily reading, no doubt. This percentage of people feel this sort of distress. It’s never a low or marginal figure, is it? These sorts of figures have become widespread enough to be almost Just Another Statistic. But people aren’t statistics, and I think that just ignoring this by now sea of numbers telling us the brutal realities of where we are…that’s unwise.

Who does it help? It killed Biden’s credibility to keep on trumpeting that the economy was good. Most people who are on the wrong side of these numbers end up aligning deeply with Trump, who at least seems to recognize the issue, to empathize with it, even if the rest of his schtick is increasingly alienating and wrong. Kamala and Tim are sort of sidestepping the issue, which is OK. But it’s still not wise, if you ask me.

The point is that economists don’t make any sense to me anymore. Like, none. I doubt they do to most people. They’ve never felt more like they’re in their own world than they do right now. I don’’t even bother arguing anymore, I just kind of roll my eyes, and flip the channel, or turn the page. I’m not interested anymore. And neither are they, in the rest of us. Don’t you think that’s weird, though?

I think that we should be clear. And just say: a good economy is one in which people live good lives. Not can. Not should. But do. And until that much is true, we should be clear, and say: the economy isn’t good yet.

Why is that complicated or controversial? Isn’t it just…common sense? 

Otherwise, we end up in this fantasy land, this sort of Schrodinger’s world. Is the economy “good”? Economists and pundits say it’s fantastic. But the average person doesn’t feel that way. Truth ends up contested. And when that’s the case, demagogues tend to win, because in their Big Lie remains the seed of a truth. When Hitler rose, Germany’s economy really was in shambles. And so on. It’s a tale as old as time.

How I Think About Economics Now

I said it was funny earlier, this being the last post I’d write as an economist. I wasn’t kidding, but…

That doesn’t mean I won’t discuss the economy anymore.

It just means that I suppose I have to stop thinking of myself as one. Or maybe even saying that I am one. I’m just…whew. What a mess, huh?

The truth is that my peers have never accepted me as one anyways, because my interpretation of social reality strays too far from theirs.

And now the gulf between us feels unbridgeable. It’s been all these years, and here I still am, foolishly still pointing out the rocks on the shore. There they are, on the shore, pointing at me. It’s sort of funny.

I’ve almost never heard economists say, and here I have to be honest, much of anything I find true. I don’t mean that in an unkind way—it’s an observation about me, not them, and I’m coming to that. Except the very very best ones—Stiglitz, Sen, Piketty, and so on. When I read most economic commentary in the news, or see it on TV, I used to frown, and now I sort of chuckle, and like I said, next. It just feels, sounds, is absurd to me. The economy’s great! Because unemployment’s low! 

Never mind the fact that decent jobs aren’t being created anymore. I guess everyone can drive an Uber, then work at a Walmart, and then do Doordash on the way home, and who cares if 50% of that society can’t pay the bills. That’s good enough for them, my fellow economists? 

I don’t ask that question much anymore. Because it’s self-evidently true.

And that’s funny to observe in myself.

It means that I’ve learned to accept it over the years, this sort of astounding level of failure to ask some pretty basic questions? That they really appear not to care about these things. They’ll look at quantity, but never quality. They’ll look at aggregates, but never breakdowns. They’ll glance at headline numbers, but never dig into the meaning of the constructs. It’s as if they were doctors who didn’t see patients at all, only test results, naked of context, emptied of human concern.

That sounds critical of them, but it’s not. I’m merely observing that I don’t even ask these questions anymore. All this used to baffle me. I’d look at America’s long stagnant trajectory in many indicators, from mobility to cohesion to income, and be utterly puzzled why I was the only one worried about these.

But over the years…like I said. I don’t even ask the question anymore. What’s the point anymore? I’m me, they’re them, this is how it is. So I’ve come to take it for granted, in other words, that I’m the odd one out.

And that’s not good for any of us. Not for the discipline, not for paradigms, not for me. A discipline should be more interested than this in its basic questions and its empirical findings. A paradigm should be rich and vibrant, not this dead and stale.

How I Think About the Economy Now

So I don’t think of myself in this way anymore, as an economist, I guess. As I’ve come to take not asking these questions—hey don’t you guys see all this?—for granted, I’ve changed. Maybe they were right. I never was an economist. Because if this is all it entails, telling everyone this is good enough—hey, wait, is that Jean Valjean’s ghost over there?

Thinking of myself that way now, still, would be just a pretense. But I suppose that when you change like this, you surrender, in a way. This field isn’t going to progress, move, grow. Your peers feel alien to you. You’re not on the same planet anymore.

The way I think about the economy now encompasses all of that. 

I still think about the economy a lot. I pull it apart, try to tease out its truths, understand its hidden secrets. I want to see the reality of it, the human experience of it. What else is it? It’s not just money, numbers, symbols, “resources,” stuff. None of that is real. The reality is whether or not we are living good lives, rich in dignity, meaning, truth, grace, selfhood, relationships, love. 

Even as I write that, I chuckle, and understand how far beyond economics I’m asking it to go. It’s like asking a rowboat to travel to the stars. Like I said, I’ve changed.

It’s unfair, I suppose. But in that way, I think about the economy. And sometimes I wonder, looking at economists, even as I give up on the questions that the young man in me once had: why don’t they?

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