The toffs-and-swells in the box seats experience one game. The folks in the cheap-seats experience a different game. The athletes sitting in the winning-team's dugout experiences a very different game than the team sitting in the loser's dugout. And the custodians who clean up the bleachers after the game will have their own impressions.
Sorting through the options
One possibility is that the comment was submitted by a troll or an animated spam-bot and should be summarily dismissed out of hand.
The other option is that the person who wrote the comment truly believes what they wrote. So ERJ is going to put on his Forensic Psychologist's hat and paint a picture of that true-believer commenter.
The commenter was a guy
Not a huge leap. At least 80 percent of my readers are men. That is not good or bad, it just is.
The commenter is younger than fifty
Maybe much younger. It is hard to be casual about inflation after you had first-hand experience with it. My first house cost 50% of my (single-income) annual gross pay. I purchased it three years after I graduated from college. It was in a "safe" neighborhood and the majority of my neighbors were widows and very-young families.
The current median HOUSEHOLD income is about $60k/year and the median house price in the US is over $400k. To a young person, that kind of ratio is "normal" because they never knew anything different. That isn't 50%, it is 667% of annual income. Big difference!
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| Median house price last two years of Trump and 3.7 years of Harris/Biden |
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| 30 year mortgage rates last two years of Trump and 3.7 years of Harris/Biden (Source) |
The commenter (or a family member) works in the public sector or for a public-sector affiliate
As-of 2023, three-quarters of all Federal Employees worked at least two-days-a-week from home and many worked five-days-a-week from home. It is very easy to think about crime-rates as "somebody else's problem" when you can cocoon in your swanky house in Bethesda, MD and phone-in your work performance.
Affiliates would include healthcare, road-construction and military equipment vendors. They are extremely insulated from the buffeting of the "real" economy.
Other affiliates include NGOs who are drinking from the money-firehose to import thugs from shit-hole countries.
The commenter does not have a gut-feel for lag-times in human judgement
Alan Greenspan coined the term "virtuous cycle". The psychology of inflation is the opposite of that. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. Stores adjust prices to sell goods based on the price they EXPECT to have to pay for the replacement stock. Employees demand wages based on the prices they expect to have to pay next year, next month, next week and tomorrow as inflation heats up.
Obama famously blamed George W. Bush for problems even after being in office for seven years, so the idea that some kinds of problems need time to fester and incubate is not totally foreign to Progressives.
Depending on your perspective
Every "doomcast" predicted in 2020 came true
or
Not a single dire prediction came true.
Your blog never fails to amaze me! Always something to learn.
ReplyDeleteThis blog is my therapy. ADD runs in the family. A wide range of topics at the dinner-table is an expectation.
Delete"A wide range of topics at the dinner-table is an expectation."
ReplyDeleteI would LOVE to have that experience. I am 71 and open to the idea of adoption., Mr. ERJ, sir.
ADD explains a lot of things ... nah, to be honest, I suspect I'm merely procrastinating.
Seriously, ERJ, your musings are educational. Thank you.
ReplyDeleteWho knew defining "toffs-and-swells" was such an ADD rabbit-hole?
Wow, timescale and perspective indeed.
ReplyDeleteAs an aside when you were young enough for that 1st house, I BET you KNEW at least the names and quite a lot of details about your neighbors.
You know the social changes since then.
I wonder if "Doomcasting" could say much at all about his neighbors?
Isolation and "othering" aren't a bug it's a feature of the social engineering and education system (but I repeat myself).
Directly to the north, Elizabeth and Alice M. Elizabeth had been an operating nurse at the hospital a half-mile away. The next home north was Leona who loved roses and went to Mass and swept her sidewalk every day. To the south were Chuck-and-Marcia with three kids. Across the street was Kate who worked as a Social Worker at Highlands. Then the McIntoshs and he worked at the Post Office. Next to them was Sandy and Ken. South of them lived a family with a 12 y-o named Cypress who ran into some tough sailing a few years later. Round the corner were the Abrahams with three kids and two grandkids living with them.
DeleteI'm assuming ERU is really ER JOE.
DeleteConnection with neighbors is not as common as it was just 20 years ago.
Social isolation is a root cause of much people problems. Lack of connections makes it easier to ignore or mistreat folks .
Michael
Happily in NH rural areas helping neighbors with snow and such keeps most of us speaking with neighbors.
An optimist always calls a realist a pessimist (though I doubt that, unless you are one of the people dependent on the Government in one form or another for your living, many people are optimistic).
ReplyDeleteWhich is a shorter way of saying what you said.
Phil B
ERJ, I have to admit even I - the most non-reactive of people - tend to react poorly now to the drive-by commenter. Or as I just read not too long ago, a statement without facts is an opinion. To the question of your doom casting -as indicated above even now - there are plenty of data points. To ignore every one of them because your portion of the world is not disturbed is disingenuous at best.
ReplyDeleteDoom casting, ha, the poor little feller, you made him think. Probably gave him a nose bleed.
ReplyDeleteWife has been pretty strident on not accepting negativity as to the path of economy and culture. She just joined a prep facebook group. Finally, the company we keep in the homeschool/Christian School circle is sinking in though that is the wrong venue for info. First house I bought, also three years of graduation was $40,000 and only stood because the termites were holding hands. Made it into something. How I learned carpentry. Banked it three times. Knew the people around me. And we do in the neighborhood we live in now for 12 times the cost. Dogs and not snow bring us together. Roger
ReplyDeleteDoom casting about Joe was correct. 20-30 Million free loaders. Please tell me one good program from old Joe? Woody
ReplyDeleteAnother very good post ERJ.
ReplyDeleteI support the analysis you present, especially about the person being young and therefore thinking current statistics are normal.
I di disagree with you on one point: Even many government workers are feeling the pinch, where I am the young ones feel it the most - on the federal side, there has been a distinct push for lower pay rates and higher workloads at those rates than used to be the case, leading to lower pay than comparable work in the private sector.
Of course, I'm talking the field people who do much of the real work in many agencies, not the state/ regional/ HQ people who mostly supervise and set policy.
I'm younger than you and my first house cost 3 times my then salary - it still seems cheap for what I got.
I've worked to work in areas with reasonable housing but even that is getting expensive.
Another reason people think things are going great is that the believe certain highly touted statistics and don't bother to look into what is actually being measured.
For example, the U3 unemployment rate measures those who are actively looking for work and who are getting unemployment checks - not everybody unemployed, not those who took a lower paying job , not those whose unemployment ran out of those who didn't qualify for it.
Jonathan
I do remember buying our first home at a 14.7% mortgage rate and Jimmy Carter couldn't get the hostages released. Gas was pricey for the time and you couldn't always get it. I was self employed and pretty pessimistic.
ReplyDeleteWhen I told my dad the world was going hell he just laughed. He survived the Great Depression and spent WWII in the CBI theater.
Be smart and you can ride it out. Good and bad times come and go the same as night and day was his motto. Reagan won and thing swung back to a positive outcome.
My big concern is if the election results are not clear cut, any faith in our government will be completely lost.
If you have ANY faith in .GOV, you have not been paying attention.
DeleteGood analysis, in my opinion. Just the cost of housing and groceries is out of reach for many people. And many don’t know or realize how much inflation, or Democrats or whatever, has really changed our lives.
ReplyDeleteSouthern NH
To the commentor concerning ERJ's "doomcasting:" ERJ was RIGHT. If you can't see that, try moving out of Mom's basement. The added light and REALITY will make things easier to see. You've been in the dark WAY too long!
ReplyDeleteWe've seen reality up close and personal. And that drives our means/methods of dealing with what is going on. Obviously yon commenter does NOT understand us nor our perspectives.
ReplyDeleteYour gentle and thoughtful response ERJ; will hopefully gain some traction, though I suspect some semi-bot agent provocateur as have been appearing from time to time on the best blogs.
ReplyDeleteThankful to have lived long enough to learn; but not so long that I can't take an active part in the remediation.
Boat Guy