When I read Christopher Ingraham’s Wonkblog piece in the Washington Post:
In 2008, fewer than half of Americans said their life was good enough to be considered “thriving,” according to Gallup. But that’s changed: “The 55.4% who are thriving so far in 2016 is on pace to be the highest recorded in the nine years Gallup and Healthways have tracked it,” according to the report.
Not only that, members of each ethnic or racial group in Gallup’s study feel better about their lives.
I was reminded of two things. The first was this passage from George Orwell’s Animal Farm:
On Sunday mornings Squealer, holding down a long strip of paper with his trotter, would read out to them lists of figures proving that the production of every class of foodstuff had increased by two hundred per cent, three hundred per cent, or five hundred per cent, as the case might be. The animals saw no reason to disbelieve him, especially as they could no longer remember very clearly what conditions had been like before the Rebellion. All the same, there were days when they felt that they would sooner have had less figures and more food.
and the second was my beloved How to Lie With Statistics. One of the niftiest ways of lying with statistics is by selecting your baseline carefully. Gallup didn’t start asking this particular set of questions until 2008 when the country was in the midst of the worst recession since the 1930s. Not only does that mean that comparing 2008 with today is a meaningless comparison, there is no baseline to which it might be compared. As a statistic to promote a partisan line, it’s perfect.
Bryan Caplan, pointing to the same passage from Animal Farm, sees the opposite:
In a totalitarian state, there’s a chasm between daily life and the media. Daily life is awful, but the media trumpets the glory of the status quo.
The West now has a comparable chasm between daily life and the media, but it goes in the opposite direction. Daily life is wonderful: Unless you actively hunt for outliers, you’re surrounded by well-fed, healthy, safe, comfortable people enjoying a cornucopia of amusement. The media, however, uses the vastness of the world to show us non-stop terror, hate, fear, brutality, and poverty – not just in the Third World, but right here at home.
How can you reconcile three things: that most people feel better about their lives than they did eight years ago (at the depth of the recession), that “daily life is wonderful”, and that more than 90% of U. S. counties haven’t recovered seven years after the recession has ended?
Here’s the story I’d tell. Life is wonderful if you’re among that relatively small segment of the population, the topmost 3% of income earners, the upper middle class and the wealthy, and all that you know about anyone who isn’t in that sliver is what you can glean as they empty your dustbin or mow your lawn. Life is better for most of us than it was at the lowest point of the late recession but most people’s lives today aren’t better than they were in 2006. And for the longest of the long-term unemployed or those who expected to enter or remain in the middle class but are only able to barely keep body and soul together, it’s not very good at all.
That’s how I reconcile the manifest anger that’s abroad with the economic statistics. That things aren’t going well is not just bad press.
