Judged

I'd worked up something of a long diatribe for this post, diving into how social desirability bias leads people to deny things happened, rather than admit that they're excusing them, but it occurred to me that I could distill the point down into something simple. So here goes:

No legal system can legislate how people see themselves, or those people they see themselves reflected in.

For all that Donald Trump has spent the past eight years or so loudly proclaiming that he can flout rules and get away with it, when push has come to legal shove, he hasn't claimed a right to be pardoned. Rather, he's claimed a scrupulous adherence to the rule of law that contradicts nearly every aspect of the persona that he's built for himself.

And because his supporters understand themselves as upright and law-abiding, he must be, too, and so they believe it, despite the evidence, and despite the persona. Because the laws of reality can't legislate how people see themselves or their heroes, either.

Inflated

One of the problems that small businesses have is controlling their costs, given their limited buying power. The above is a sign for a small hotdog stand not very far from where I live. I've never actually gone there for a hotdog, because it's sort of out of the way, but also because it's not much farther to go to Costco, where a 1/4 pound hotdog and a fountain drink with free refills is $1.50. Granted, in Costco's case, they make their own hotdogs to keep prices down, but still, with a $9.00 differential in price, one could buy a rather large bag of chips to have with lunch.

Imperceptive

There's a new poll out, Anthony, a Harris poll, showing a huge misperception amongst Americans on how the economy is doing. 56% of Americans think the county's in recession; it's not. 49% believe the S&P 500 stock index is down for the year, even though it went up by about 24% in 2023 and is up again this year. An 49% believe that unemployment's at a 50-year high; it's actually at a 50-year low.

So there is this kind of misperception in America about the state of the U.S. economy under Joe Biden.

Katty Kay, The Rest Is Politics, U.S.

I'm going to quibble with Ms. Kay's understanding that many Americans misperceive the current state of the national economy. Mainly because the word "misperceive" presumes, at least in my mind, that people are actually looking at the economy. I would submit that what's actually in play here is a combination of people's personal/local circumstances and simple partisanship. The latter especially in the age of Donald Trump.

If one is a Republican partisan, of course the nation is in recession, the stock market is in free fall and unemployment has skyrocketed; there's a Democrat in the White House, and Democrats have control of the Senate. It's a wonder that anything is still standing. And as the political class labels any information to the contrary as deliberate lies on the part of government agencies and media outlets, as a means of demonstrating their support for Donald Trump (and, by extension, the people who support him) the echo chamber is in full swing, with people competing to gain status by reinforcing the message that the Biden Administration and Democrats in Congress are undermining the nation though gross incompetence or deliberate evil.

And even for non-partisans, since the most recent round of inflation started after President Biden took office, it clear must be because of something he did. And just as importantly, many people seem to be under the mistaken impression that end of inflation is deflation. Expecting that prices (although not their paychecks) will revert to 2019 levels, people still think that the relatively high inflation of 2020 to 2022 persists. The steady drip of reporting on layoffs in the technology sector isn't helping things, even though it's nowhere near indicative of the broader economy.

This isn't a result of looking at the various economic indicators and drawing incorrect conclusions; this is a matter of not looking at those indicators. It's simply a measure of people's current levels of economic optimism. If Donald Trump wins this November's election, the shoe is going to be on the other foot. Democratic partisans will become pessimistic, and that economic pessimism will prove to be impervious to the facts on the ground; while any hiccups that occur will be laid at his feet, no matter when the policy or policies that caused the difficulties were actually put into place.

The average member of the public doesn't judge the performance of the economy based on statistics and data. The judgement is made on how they personally feel at the time they are asked. Accordingly, perceptions of anything broader than a person's own opinions don't really play much of a role.

Bad Finance

Not how this would work.

The difficulty with being suspicious of systems that one doesn't understand is that it's easy to imagine all sorts of malfeasance that can't actually take place. Anyone who has a general understanding of how finance works would realize that the scheme laid out in the meme above simply wouldn't work. But if all one knows about the topic is what one has been told about the workings of private equity companies, and how some of them have looted businesses they've purchased, it might seem that this is how it works.

It's the downside of the general pattern of disengagement that one sees in the United States, and it's one of the things that leads to such low social trust; the idea that people one doesn't like have found ways of enriching themselves that are barred to everyday people, and /or are simply shady/illegal.

But avoiding the trap means taking the time to understand any number of subjects that don't otherwise have any bearing on a person's day-to-day life. Which goes a long way towards explaining why comparatively few people make the effort.
 

Humor Me

Over on LinkedIn Dan Ariely made the point that "Comedians should make offensive jokes," because "Because we avoid difficult topics. Humor makes it easier for us to think about them."

I don't know that "Comedians should make offensive jokes" was the best wording to open with. Firstly, it implies that comedians should set out to offend people as an end in itself, which I don't think is helpful. Secondly, "offensive" is not an objective determination; not everyone understands the same things as being offensive. "Comedians should be willing to point out the humor, and the absurdity, in complex, controversial, divisive and/or painful topics" might be a better framing. Even, or especially, when that entails the perception that one is laughing (and encouraging others to laugh) at people, rather than with them.

Using humor to address difficult topics is not the same as being offensive. Likewise, one can be offensive without doing anything to make difficult topics easier. Simply pushing back on "self-censorship" (sometimes known as "tact") or "political correctness" doesn't really assist with making that distinction.