• mozz@mbin.grits.dev
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    5 months ago

    the fact that people’s opinion of the economy is

    This is a fascinating little construction that I’m just gonna let speak for itself

    more pessimistic than ever

    Are you under the impression, also, that we should measure vaccine effectiveness by asking people whether they feel optimistic that their vaccine is working?

    There’s a fascinating little window into the flaws of this type of analysis, to be had in that the same people who report the nation’s economy doing badly, also report by quite a large margin the incorrect idea that their own state and their own family are doing much better than the nation as a whole. So they’re doing okay, but they’re still convinced that the nation as a whole is fucked and Biden’s definitely responsible.

    • mommykink@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      This is a fascinating little construction that I’m just gonna let speak for itself

      Please don’t. I want to hear your real rebuttal here. “Official reports of the economy disagree with the polled sentiments of the majority of Americans” is an indisputable fact.

      Are you under the impression, also, that we should measure vaccine effectiveness by asking people whether they feel optimistic that their vaccine is working?

      False equivalency, but if every official body said that the vaccinated were much less likely than the unvaccinated to fall ill, yet every relevant poll showed that the vaccinated became ill at a rate similar to the unvaccinated or said that they or most people they knew were vaccinated yet had become ill, and that every person felt like their vaccines were ineffective, the sane thing to do would be to question the premise.

      Your last bit is a rebuttal for an argument that I’m not making; strawman.

      • mozz@mbin.grits.dev
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        5 months ago

        I can’t explain it any different way than what I already said in quite a few messages now. If you want to measure economic performance, then you should measure people’s wages, inflation, housing costs, and other concrete numbers.

        Asking people whether they feel like the economy is good is also relevant, for a few different reasons, sure. And you need to make sure you’re measuring the right metrics (e.g. wages at particular percentiles and not the stock market), sure. But you obviously shouldn’t let how people feel things are going, override the actual numbers of how things are going, when you’re talking about how to make economic progress.

        You can disagree with that if you like (and it seems like you do), but I don’t feel like going back and forth with you about it any further.