By Chris Satullo
OK, to review: Facts don’t matter. Verified, on-point statistics don’t matter. Only aggrieved feelings – and anecdotes that flatter those feelings – matter.
“Everyone” knows the economy sucks, no one can get ahead, and that it’s all Joe Biden’s fault. Never mind Friday’s news that unemployment dropped – again – in November to a rock-bottom 3.7 percent. Never mind that the other key economic number, the inflation rate, is even lower than that: 3.2 percent. Or that, meanwhile, average hourly wages – i.e. not billionaires’ fortunes, but the actual incomes of ordinary Americans – were up 4 percent, handily outpacing inflation. And that was actually the lowest monthly increase in hourly earnings recorded this year.
None of that seems too matter.
Here’s what does: Vast numbers of Americans, for a variety of reasons, prefer to feel miserable, angry, oppressed, screwed, cornered. And eager to blame the president, the guy on whose watch all those real economic measures improved, for how they feel.
It’s a “vibecession” and many apparently feel that the only way to lift us out of these doldrums is to bring back the guy who told us to drink bleach to cure COVID.
You don’t think the American household budget is a disaster zone? You should spend more time on TikTok.
I mean, c’mon, haven’t you heard about the $16 Big Mac that a guy in Idaho bought? It’s all over TikTok and YouTube, more than 2 million views. What more proof do you need that Biden has cratered the economy and that the little guy is screwed?
It was in late 2022 when an Idaho man named Topher Olive went into a McDonald’s and ordered a “limited edition” item called a “smoky, double QuarterPounder BLT” as part of a super-sized meal. (We can talk about the health prospects for Topher’s heart another time.) The bill came to 16 bucks plus a dime, which shocked him, so he grabbed a video of the monstrous burger with the receipt next to it. He added some generic “man, this inflation is out of control” commentary and hit “post.” He got a lot of views. Then someone else resurrected his video on YouTube this year, where it grabbed millions more eyeballs and spawned a horde of anti-Biden screeds.
So that’s where we are now, a place where a video of a “limited edition” fast food burger has more impact on people’s grasp of the economy than any 87 factual reports full of happy stats from government agencies.
OK, fine, let’s play Battle of the Anecdotes:
Here’s this from a news outlet, the Cleveland Plain Dealer: People in the Forest City (yes, that’s its nickname – I grew up there, so I know) are regularly paying anywhere from $700 to $3,500 to have tradespeople like landscapers or roofers string Christmas lights on their houses. Yes, I know, rich people have always paid scads of dough to avoid having to dirty their fingernails, but the story is clear that this trend is mostly middle-class homeowners. And, let’s be honest, Cleveland is not exactly Palm Springs or Boca Raton; no swarms of fat cats living there.
Yet, somehow, people who are otherwise so crushed by Bidenomics that they barely can feed their families or keep gas in their SUVs are finding an average of $1,100 to pay someone to put up their holiday LEDs.
Here’s a detail from this story I love: One reason for the trend is that many people recently bought into new developments where houses have high roof lines that are scary to navigate. But wait…I thought no one could afford to buy a house anymore.
Yes, all right, I’m overdoing it. But this is the Battle of the Anecdotes, remember? You don’t have to be fair, logical or rigorously accurate when sucking all the rhetorical juice you can out of your favorite anecdote. For example, somewhere early on in the deluge of online comments about Topher’s burger, the fact that it was an over-the-top specialty item got lost and people were screeching, “15 bucks for a Big Mac?!?! Outrageous!”
While acknowledging that facts no longer matter, I just this moment heeded an atavistic urge and Googled a factual point: In my home state of Pennsylvania, the current average price of a Big Mac is…$4.29.
My search also turned up this tidbit: In 2018, a food writer for the Albany Times-Union wrote a story with this headline: Why Do Burger and Fries Meals Cost $15?
Wait – who was president in 2018? Oh yeah, that other guy.
So, maybe we instead should be blaming Donald Trump for the shocking imaginary price of two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onion on a sesame seed bun?
I’ll stop now.
Here’s the thing about anecdotes: Stories are authentically powerful. They can nail, in a few words, situations, feelings, and trends that are otherwise hard to capture. And if the anecdote actually happens to be true and is rendered faithfully (i.e. not describing Topher’s bliss as a generic Big Mac), it can be a legitimate tool of political discourse.
But you know what you call millions of true anecdotes? A statistic.
Any accurate, verified statistic should be more persuasive than a random anecdote. But when a dueling statistic and anecdote bump up against the human penchant for confirmation bias, the anecdote usually wins.
My own millennial son was moaning to me the other day about how the price of housing today shuts him out of buying a house. And I’ve certainly read that housing prices are one significant part of the official market basket of goods where inflation isn’t tamed.
But another stat, from a study by the real estate giant Redfin, tells me that fully 30 percent of 25-year-old Americans own a house. I admit that stuns me. I sure didn’t own a house at that age, and neither did hardly any of my peers. (See, I, too, can parry facts with anecdotes.)
Which is to say: It’s complicated. The economy is vast and comprises a multitude of trends and factors, which bump up against each other in complex ways. Inside that maelstrom of data, you can always cherry pick some stat to confirm your preconceptions. I do it; you do it; we all do it.
If you’re bound and determined to be gloomy and mad, you can find a way. For example, you could fulminate, Bernie-style, about how the largest share of the real, huge growth in personal wealth in the last couple years has gone to the richest quintile of Americans. But in doing so you’d be ignoring the wonderful news that the wealth of the middle quintiles also went up more than it has in quite a while.
Bottom line: Any objective analysis of the current situation will tell you that, on balance, more of the standard, meaningful, verified economic metrics are trending in the right direction.
That’s why it’s so maddening that, all across the political spectrum, from Fox News to progressive Twitter and even to the relentless Eeyores of the New York Times, Americans seem determined to ignore those facts and cling to their gloomy vibe.
If the impact were only that you have to read and hear a lot of ill-informed moaning and griping, that would be irritating but tolerable. But right now, this mass depressive neurosis sweeping the land looks like it might well return to the Oval Office a fascist, a crooked megalomaniac who already tried trashing our Constitution once and is itching to try again, only more extremely and more successfully.
So, I can’t stop – and neither should you – insisting to the Eeyores: Wake up. There’s not much that’s wrong right now with Joe Biden’s economy. What’s all messed up is your heads. Please try filling them with more facts – and fewer ignorant hot takes and phony anecdotes.
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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia