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TRESSIE has questions.
My name is Tressie McMillan Cottom. I'm an opinion columnist for The New York Times. I am also a sociologist and 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, particularly the way the media covers it and the stories we are told about it. Kyla Scanlon coined the term “vibe session” last year to describe this gap between perception and economic indicators. She tried to describe the kind of general malaise the public had about the economy, even though all major indicators of the economy's health were trending upward.
And the way we talked about the economy as a vibes session or a vibes-based recession honestly seemed a little tiny to me, meaning that the way people have this really intuitive sense of the way the world around them works, even if they don't always have a very sophisticated analysis to understand why things around them happen the way they do in economic terms. And both things are important.
What really came down to this for me was that what we were really dealing with 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 bad economic events. I mean economic storytelling that doesn't convey what the economic fundamentals actually mean to people. And there's a difference between giving people the statistics and then putting those statistics into a context that tells people what they can do.
One way to get to a good economic story is to say that there is not a perception gap between the macroeconomic indicators and people's perceptions, but rather that there is a version of the story where both people's perceptions and the indicators can be true.
If you're a consumer today, being a consumer doesn't feel particularly good. On one level, we must consume to survive. Things like housing, food, energy, gas, transportation, all of these things don't actually trend in directions that people perceive as positive. And they have not been reflected in all Americans, even those who may be moving in a slightly positive direction. In the case of gasoline, the prices are offset by costs for vehicle maintenance or other high transportation costs, for example. Food bills on an individual level for people at the grocery store still seem pretty high.
Then there is the effort we put into perhaps managing the rest. One indicator that people are talking about economic growth is low unemployment. This means more people are working. And by the way, more people are working for higher wages. More Americans working means more Americans living with the daily costs of commuting. Paying work expenses looks like traveling to and from work, and it also looks like doing things like managing the costs of your home while at work, with child care and elder care being the two most important.
You have to have someone to do all the other things at home. No matter how much you earn or how grateful you are to not be unemployed, you might be in for a shock about what it means to be in the paid job market and the impact it has on your daily life.
The American Rescue Plan in 2021 was the first experience for many Americans of the government building a really strong relationship with them to help them manage their daily lives, right? As a result, their economic situation noticeably improved. So there were things like moratoriums on evictions that made it possible to house more people. They had an expansion of the earned income tax credit that has helped lift millions of people out of poverty, including many children and young adults. You have had suspensions on your student loan repayments.
So for many Americans, this was simply an expansion of the social safety net. And as those benefits expired, Americans saw government investment decline, helping them maintain some economic security. And I think you can understand that people are more concerned 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 that's why we see such particularly high levels of dissatisfaction among Americans, across all income groups, across all racial and age groups. And that should tell us that there is a version of economic storytelling that can appeal to people's economic anxiety without saying that you've all been manipulated by a story that degrades your understanding of economic indicators.
Good economic storytelling tells people that there is no one to blame, but that there is someone who is responsible. There is a responsible authority for what you experience. And one version of this story would sound something like this. Look what happens when we invest in middle and working class America. Look what happens when partnerships between your government and your community not only create investments in individuals and families, but also create the ability of communities to provide the services those communities need.
In doing so for this shining moment, we lifted millions of Americans out of poverty, even if this shining moment was a response to the global crisis. We have given more women and people of color equal access to the labor market. We were able to give people these opportunities to participate. We were able to do these things.
If you can tell that story that says your fear isn't unfounded, it's just based on a version of America that was only temporary but that we can and should sustain, that we shouldn't focus on what we What was lost was not the expiring parts of the American Rescue Plan, but rather that the American Rescue Plan was a vision of what could happen.
When we forget this part of storytelling, we leave room for many nefarious ideas about the economy. And as the data and surveys show time and time again, the economy is important to people. Not necessarily the economic data, the economy, how people think about it. That's why it should be important to us to tell a really good, true and powerful story about the economy.
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