The latest economic indicators show a historically strong economy. Over the past couple of years, the unemployment rate has consistently stayed below 4%, real wages have been growing faster than they have in decades, and economic growth has been strong. And yet, public opinion surveys consistently show dissatisfaction with economic conditions. Aaron Sojourner, a labor economist from the Upjohn Institute, joins us to discuss his research findings into why Americans are so displeased with the economy. Aaron helps us unpack the complicated relationship between news coverage of the economy and its effect on consumer sentiment.
Aaron Sojourner is a labor economist and senior researcher at the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. His research focuses on the effects of labor-market institutions, policies to promote efficient and equitable development of human capital, and behavioral economic approaches to consumer finance decisions. He’s also served as the senior economist for labor on the U.S. Council of Economic Advisers for Presidents Obama and Trump.
Twitter: @aaronsojourner
BlueSky: @aaronsojourner.bsky.social
Threads: aaronsojourner
Why are Americans so displeased with the economy?
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/why-are-americans-so-displeased-with-the-economy/
Aaron’s thread on within-worker real wage growth on Threads:
https://www.threads.net/@aaronsojourner/post/C3OVo8FrDgV/?igshid=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ==
Tax Subsidies for Journalism Are Only for Rich People: Perry Bacon Edition
https://cepr.net/tax-subsidies-for-journalism-are-only-for-rich-people-perry-bacon-edition/
Website: https://pitchforkeconomics.com
Twitter: @PitchforkEcon
Instagram: @pitchforkeconomics
Nick’s twitter: @NickHanauer
Nick Hanauer:
The rising inequality and growing political instability that we see today are the direct result of decades of bad economic theory.
President Joe Biden:
It’s time to build our economy from the bottom up and from the middle out, not the top down.
Nick Hanauer:
Middle out economics is the answer.
President Joe Biden:
Because Wall Street didn’t build this country. Great middle class built this country.
Nick Hanauer:
The more the middle class thrives, the better the economy is for everyone, even rich people like me.
Speaker 3:
This is Pitchfork Economics with Nick Hanauer, a podcast about how to build the economy from the middle out. Welcome to the show.
Goldy:
I was talking to my daughter the other day, Nick, and she’s, it’s a busy life. She’s 26, almost 27 into her second year of grad school, getting ready to graduate in May, and obviously anxious about entering the job market with a master’s. And at some point she got a little quiet and in a hushed voice, she said to me, she asked, “Dad, are we in a depression?”
Nick Hanauer:
Are you serious?
Goldy:
And I’m like, “Wait. What? A depression.”
Nick Hanauer:
What?
Goldy:
No, this is one of the best economies in history. Why? And again, I think some of it just is personal because she’s anxious. She just spent two years in grad school spending all that money learning a profession, and now she’s worried about whether she’s going to get a job that will help her pay her student loans. But also she told me this is her cohort, not all of them, but some of them are struggling. They’re having trouble finding jobs or jobs in their fields or jobs that they want to do or that pay them enough to get by. And so that’s the world she’s living in. And what she’s wondering whether we’re in a depression. Nick, are we in a depression?
Nick Hanauer:
I don’t think we’re in a depression. It’s so funny, Goldy, because we’re not in an economic depression. But as you know, young people in mass are depressed and have anxiety. Right. Psychologically, she may very well be in a depression.
Goldy:
For what reason? It’s not like our environment is collapsing, our democracy is collapsing.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. That’s right. Social media, all the rest. No, I mean, so that is a fascinating, and I would call it a hilarious anecdote if it wasn’t so sad. And by the way, it must have floored, given what we do for a living, it must have floored you to hear that from your daughter. You don’t listen to anything I say ever.
Goldy:
Well, I’m her dad. So that’s,-
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah.
Goldy:
Well, she listens to me, but I don’t think she’s listening to the podcast, Nick. Unless we did the podcast as background track to Japanese anime, I don’t think they’re reaching her.
Nick Hanauer:
I think that’s probably true. But to the point, the disconnect between what’s actually happening in the economy and what consumer sentiment is, is just demonstrably nuts. Right. That disconnect between how well the economy really is doing and how people think the economy is doing is really profound. And because it’s such an interesting question, we’ve asked Aaron Sojourner, who’s a labor economist and senior researcher at the Upjohn Institute to share a recent paper he did with our friend Ben Harris on this disconnect. Right. They actually analyzed why sentiment about the economy has decoupled from what’s actually happening in the economy because your daughter is not alone in not,-
Goldy:
No. No, and,-
Nick Hanauer:
Getting what’s going on.
Goldy:
Yeah. Yeah. And to put this in perspective, you look at this consumer sentiment index, it’s about where it was shortly after the start of The Great Recession. It’s not at the depths of The Great Recession, but not far above that. And yet, let’s be clear, we’ve had 10 straight months of real wage growth. We have had two years, 24 straight months of unemployment below 4%. We have had a year of disinflation, which we got down from like 8% inflation to 3.1% inflation without the huge spike in unemployment that the no nothings were all saying that we had to have to get inflation under control. Consumer sentiment is still strong, the economy is growing. Job growth is much higher than economists were predicting. And it keeps going like this month, after month after month to the point where now even economists are admitting that, well, maybe it looks like we’re not going to have that recession after all, let alone the depression that my daughter wondered if we might be in.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, it’s a fascinating question. In any case, this report that Ben and Aaron wrote is absolutely fascinating. And so why don’t we jump into a conversation with him and find out what they did.
Aaron Sojourner:
I’m Aaron Sojourner. I’m a labor economist at the Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. Follow me on Bluesky or Threads.
Goldy:
Yeah. So speaking of the social media in general and the economy, you recently did a report with Ben Harris about this disconnect between people’s perception of the economy and the economy itself. What’s going on?
Aaron Sojourner:
Yeah, well, I think there’s been a lot of conversation about the contrast between how good the economy looks on the fundamentals. If you track the official data that based on surveys of businesses and employees all over the country and collecting that scientifically, representative samples over time, the economy looks quite strong in many ways, but then if you go talk to people about their impressions of the economy, they’re very pessimistic, they misunderstand, they’re misinformed about the fundamentals of the economy, and people are trying to figure out why that is. One candidate that I think a lot of people have pointed to is the role of the news media in talking to people, translating the official statistics, the systematic evidence into meaning for people that they consume in their day-to-day life about things beyond their own neighborhood and their own job. And so that’s what we tried to hone in on is like, how can we understand what the media has been doing in their coverage of the economy?
Goldy:
And what have they been doing or not been doing?
Aaron Sojourner:
Yeah. So what we wanted to test was whether economic news coverage had gotten more negative in recent years than you’d expect based on the economic fundamentals. And we figured out a way to test that. And it looks like that’s what’s been happening, especially over the last six years since 2018, economic news coverage has gotten much more negative than you’d expect based on the fundamentals.
Nick Hanauer:
Does that obtain whether a Democrat or a Republican is in office?
Aaron Sojourner:
Yeah, that’s a good question. Yeah, so it started really opening up in 2018, it looks like when a Republican was in office and it was before Covid, so a lot of people bring up Covid, but you could see it happening for a couple of years before that. The gap has gotten bigger in recent years while a Democrat’s been president. But it may be something that’s more general than partisan.
Goldy:
Is it a if it bleeds, it leads type thing, that they’re covering the economy like they used to cover local crime?
Aaron Sojourner:
That’s a good theory. I don’t know exactly why. I mean, I can tell you some of the things that we have looked at and what do we do to try to buttress this thing, but we haven’t been able to study yet why it’s happened exactly. And this is a big area for more research in the future.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah.
Aaron Sojourner:
I think that is a leading theory is, I guess my best theory for why it’s happened is that there is this maybe taste from consumers for more negative news. As you said, if it bleeds, it leads on crime. Maybe in the past, economic news reporters and editors were kind of insulated from that pressure a bit and just sort of followed the official statistics more and let that inform their writing. But maybe in recent years they’ve gotten more tuned into audience analytics, social media analytics, and sort of noticed more.
Nick Hanauer:
They’re competing for clicks too, right?
Aaron Sojourner:
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And so maybe they can see and feel more pressure to get those clicks any way they can than they used to, and maybe that leads to more negative tone.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. So Aaron, in the piece that you wrote with Ben, you explored a bunch of possibilities. One of them was the fundamentals. And in our work on political economy, I would say that one of the biggest learnings I’ve had over the last 10 years is that for nine out of 10 Americans or something like that, the economy does not exist as an abstraction. Right.
Aaron Sojourner:
Yeah.
Nick Hanauer:
They are not listening to this podcast. They do not know what GDP is or what it means or how it affects their life. The only thing the economy is to most people is my job and the expenses, that’s it. And the statistics that I believe are true is that in basic terms, Americans per capita disposable income since Biden took office has increased by five, five and a half percent. But after adjusting for inflation per capita income is down by 8.1%, right?
The reality is that we’ve had this significant set of price increases caused by this global supply chain shock. And for most people, if the prices they’re paying are higher than they used to be and their incomes have not exceeded that, then that is their definition of whether the economy is good or not. Right. Their spending power has declined in real terms, and that has affected their lives in real ways. And I think that’s just true. It’s not President Biden’s fault. It’s a very unfortunate artifact of the biggest economic conflagration in 100 years. But it is true, and I think your thesis is almost certainly correct too, that when you layer on massively increased partisanship and the need for the news business to spice things up by being ever more negative, and I don’t know, controversial, those things combine to create this gap between what’s really happening in the broader economy and how people feel about it. I mean, does that make sense to you? I mean…
Aaron Sojourner:
Well, I have a couple of reactions. So first, just on the basic economic realities. So I think seniors have had it tough because they’re largely on a fixed income, retirees who are relying on social security have had it tough, and that’s a big group, and they don’t have a lot of control over their income nor their expenses, and they get increases at the end of the year, but it can be tough and scary in the middle. For workers, the statistics are, it takes some nuance to interpret. So the usual statistics people use are things like average hourly earnings over time. If you look at that, it does look like since the beginning of 2021, real wages have fallen, but part of that is compositional. So part of that is that a bunch of low wage workers got laid off at the beginning of the pandemic, and so it looked like wages spiked in that series. And then as more and more people got hired back, it looked like average wages were falling, but they weren’t really falling. It was just that different people were getting hired.
Nick Hanauer:
It was the mix, yeah, changed.
Aaron Sojourner:
Yeah.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. Yeah.
Aaron Sojourner:
The mix of who was working. And if you look at the growth rate of wages within worker, so if you follow the same worker at the beginning and then 12 months later and you calculate within the worker how much did your wage change? And then you take the average of that across all the people who are working both times, and you do that every month and you compare that to change in average consumer prices, wages have been keeping up or exceeding price inflation.
Nick Hanauer:
Okay.
Aaron Sojourner:
Now, the usual thing that we look at again is this average hourly earnings, and it gets it wrong for another reason too, which is that retirees leave every month and they tend to be paid a lot, and new entrants come in every month, but they tend to be paid less. And so every month it understates the wage gain by about one and a half or two percentage points, whereas if you look within worker over time, you don’t get that. And so that’s just a basic thing about the changes in real wages. It’s not been as bad as it looks, but I don’t want to in any way deny that real wage growth stalled and people were used to seeing gains and they’re seeing gains again now. But there was a year and a half, two years where things were stalled on that measure.
Goldy:
Thank you, Aaron, because I wanted to argue with Nick over that assertion that he made, but I had no idea how, and you just explained it.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. I mean, to be fair, it is complicated. Right.
Aaron Sojourner:
Yeah. Absolutely.
Nick Hanauer:
These numbers are pretty complicated and the inflation numbers are very difficult to parse in many ways and how people are feeling about gas relative to milk versus other things. But I do think we’re missing part of the picture if we’re not acknowledging that prices went up a lot over a couple of years.
Aaron Sojourner:
Yeah, really fast.
Nick Hanauer:
Really fast. And wages certainly didn’t instantaneously keep pace. In fact, lots of people kind of lost work and freaked out and so on and so forth. And so it was a very strange economic moment.
Goldy:
It’s been a strange six, seven, eight years.
Aaron Sojourner:
Yeah, exactly. Another point is that look, this gap between predicted sentiment in economic news and observed sentiment in economic news is conditional on these fundamentals. And so maybe I could take a second and just sort of try to describe what we did in the analysis because we’re not saying that things are great and it’s a shame that the news is negative. What we’re saying is that after accounting for how the economy is, even though it went through some very rough times there with a very fast inflation taking account of how the news should have responded to that, it was even more negative than it would’ve been if things had been working the way they did in the past. That’s basically the results of the study. So we wanted to test this idea that the sentiment, the emotional content and tone of economic news coverage is more negative than you’d expect on the fundamentals in recent years compared to the past.
So we found out about this measure of economic news sentiment that economists at the San Francisco Fed created that goes back to 1980. And so we can model from 1988 to 2017, if you pick some economic fundamental variables, just four variables change in GDP over the year, that’s change in economic, the size of the economy over the year, change in consumer prices over the year, change in the stock market over the year, and the current unemployment rate. And those are like four stats that get covered in the news a lot, drive a lot of the news coverage. Variables explain about 70% of the variation in news coverage over time. And so you can build a really good model that predicts how the news during that time. Now you have a prediction. You say, well, if the same relationship holds going forward and we plug in the new fundamental variables, the new change in consumer prices, the new change in economic growth, unemployment rate, what would we predict?
And during Covid, we see a huge decline. We see a big decline in the predicted sentiment, and we see a big decline in the observed sentiment. And once we got through that and we started the expansion, the recovery, you see a big increase in predicted sentiment. And we see a big increase in observed sentiment, but not as much as you would predict. So that’s kind of the heart of the matter, is that in recent years you’ve seen this negative gap. The coverage, the tone of the coverage has become increasingly unmoored from the fundamentals and increasingly negative.
Nick Hanauer:
Is this negative sentiment in the news the same as, or is it the same as partisanship? I mean, let me phrase the question in a slightly different way. It certainly feels true to me that there are many, many, many more people in the United States today that will simply not accept under any circumstances that the economy is good under a Democrat.
Aaron Sojourner:
Right.
Nick Hanauer:
Right.
Aaron Sojourner:
Right. Yeah.
Nick Hanauer:
They will just reject that idea.
Aaron Sojourner:
And you can see that in the consumer sentiment data that once Biden became the president among Republicans, there was a huge fall in their consumer sentiment.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. And so given that maybe one in three Americans simply will not accept the idea that the economy is doing well under a Democrat, and that was only true for 10% of Americans 20 or 30 years ago or 40 years ago or 50 years ago, does that account for it? And if it does, are we talking about kind of the same thing?
Aaron Sojourner:
So I don’t think it does. I mean, I think they’re related, but I do want to distinguish them because I think there’s what the population thinks and their views of the economy that’s measured by consumer sentiment or just sort of public opinion polls and this thing. This thing is different. This is about the editorial choices that reporters and economic news editors make when they’re writing news stories. They’re covering an economic data release. The Bureau of Labor Statistics spent a month going out talking to 60,000 American households, 120,000 randomly selected business establishments to try to get systematic representative evidence about how the economy’s changing. They did all their calculations and now today they’re reporting that news, and that’s real news that nobody has known in a systematic way until today. And they’re seeing what the statistics are, and they saw it the month before and the month before and the year before, and they’re making a choice about what words to put on that.
And certainly they’re talking to sources. Right. So when I talk to reporters about this, they say, “Well, our coverage reflects the news, the official stuff, but it also reflects what people tell me.” Right. And I go, and I interview workers and businesses and consumers, and they’re more negative. So I think it does come in, but they also have choices to make about who to interview, what narratives to advance, how to frame it. So I think they’re related, like consumer sentiment effects news coverage, news coverage effects consumer sentiment, consumer sentiment effects the economic fundamentals. Right. And hopefully the economic fundamentals affect both of those things. So these are really complex relationships, but they are distinct, measurably distinct things, and I think it behooves us to come up with a better understanding of how they relate to each other and sort of what’s driving, what.
Goldy:
Could it be as simple as financial reporting? Reporting on the economy is so much more negative now simply because the lived experience of journalists is so much worse than it used to be, that they are in an industry that is in a perpetual recession and they all fear for their jobs and their livelihoods. And so that is coloring their coverage of the economy at large. I mean, I know they’re all fair and balanced and objective in their own minds, but we know that’s impossible. So that subjectivity and lived experience might be leaking through.
Aaron Sojourner:
It’s a theory. I don’t know. I think it would be good to test. This is something that hasn’t been studied very much, and I think we have a lot to learn. If you had the underlying data on all the news stories, we could measure which reporters are writing the story and which editors are editing the story and which outlets are publishing the story, and precisely how much was the change in the unemployment rate this month compared to last month or expectations. And we could start to answer some of those things in a more careful way. But for now, I’d say it’s a plausible theory, but I’m not sure.
Goldy:
There’s one other thing I’m wondering about, and that is whether there’s actually a disconnect between consumers’ perception of the economy and their actual behavior, because consumer sentiment is really low, but that doesn’t seem to have an impact on consumer spending, and it certainly hasn’t had an impact on hiring.
Aaron Sojourner:
Yeah, I think that’s right. I mean, that’s a fourth important thing, which is yeah, consumer behavior and economic fundamentals. Maybe that relationship has changed too. There’s a lot of moving parts here and we have a lot to learn. I do think it’s really important though, to try to understand, because Americans now are quite misinformed negatively about the economy. So when people are polled about basic facts, which one grew faster over the last year, wages or prices, 90% of people get it wrong. So we say prices went up faster, but actually wages went up faster. If you poll Americans and ask, are prices rising faster now or were they rising faster a year ago? Three quarters of people get it wrong. They’re rising slower now. So we need some shared understanding of reality as a democracy to make decisions together.
Nick Hanauer:
Absolutely. Yeah, high functioning social systems are epistemic, right? They run on truth.
Aaron Sojourner:
Yeah.
Nick Hanauer:
And if people don’t know what the truth is, you can’t organize yourself in an effective way. All of this is getting far afield of economics, obviously, but I just wonder how much of this is how news is reported and how much of it is the peculiarities of just the psychology of humans, like loss aversion, for example. People care about losing four times as much as they care about winning by way of example. And if that kind of psychological proclivity is embedded in some of this stuff. In any case, what do you think we should do? Do you have a thought about how to make this better? Because I do think that we all, whether you’re a partisan or not, I think we all do have a big stake in having a public which believes facts, right, their beliefs and the facts are roughly the same.
Aaron Sojourner:
Yeah, we really do. And we don’t have to agree with each other on values or on policies, but if we can’t just agree about the nature of reality, like that’s,-
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, that’s bad.
Aaron Sojourner:
That’s a really fundamental problem. And constructive policy debates should be built on a shared set of facts. And then, yeah, sure, we have different values, we have different priorities, but if people don’t understand what’s happening around them, then it’s really hard to make good judgments personally. It’s really hard to make good judgments collectively. I think it’s a great question. In terms of the loss aversion stuff, I think that could explain maybe why there’s maybe a taste for more negative news, but it doesn’t explain why there’s been a change lately because that’s a constant.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, you’re right.
Aaron Sojourner:
So I think you need something that interacts with that. That was my speculation that I had about maybe at the end of the 2010s, newsrooms got more plugged into and aware of social media analytics or media analytics, audience analytics, and so there was always this underlying latent tendency, but they just weren’t that tuned into it. And then they got under more pressure to get more clicks, get more views, get quick feedback, and they noticed this kind of story does better. This kind of story does worse.
I talked to one economics reporter from a high profile newspaper, he said, even 10 years ago, they didn’t hear that much directly from readers, but now he gets deluge with feedback, and especially whenever he writes positive stories, he gets deluge with negative feedback. And honestly, it feels kind of like bots are swarming on these positive stories. I feel that sometimes about social media, but of course, I don’t know if it’s bots or real people. I don’t know. It’s hard to tell. And so I think this is just a really fundamental challenge for our societies, and it’s not just America. It’s all over the place. Figuring out how to create credible connections between reality and people’s views, and so we can build shared analysis of what’s happening, much less what we should be doing together in the future.
Nick Hanauer:
I’m so disappointed that you don’t have a ready solution to this problem.
Aaron Sojourner:
I knew. See this is why I was reluctant to come on because you were going to ask me this and,-
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah.
Aaron Sojourner:
And I don’t know.
Nick Hanauer:
But I mean honestly, do you have any other thoughts about what we might do collectively? Is there a way to…
Aaron Sojourner:
This is new for me, Nick.
Nick Hanauer:
Okay.
Aaron Sojourner:
I’m a labor economist. I’m used to studying what determines wages, what determines employment levels, what determines education levels. I’m not used to putting economic news sentiment as a why variable in my model. This is the first time I’ve ever done that. So I think we have a lot to learn, and I think it’s a cop out, but as a researcher, it’s always true. More research is needed, and I think it really does take cross disciplinary expertise here too.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah.
Aaron Sojourner:
So I think there’s a lot of journalism scholars, there’s a lot of media scholars, there’s a lot of psychologists, and we need to focus more resources on this. There are people who are doing this work about how do you create trusted sources of news and persuade people to believe them, but it’s not my field. Ask me about unions. I can tell you a lot but.
Goldy:
We’ll have to,-
Nick Hanauer:
We’ll have you,-
Goldy:
We’ll have to do that another time.
Nick Hanauer:
Back on to talk about unions. Yeah.
Goldy:
So you have solutions for us. Yeah. But I have a suggestion for you because the Orthodox neoclassical solution to this problem would just simply to be to replace these difficult to model factors with an assumption, and then you don’t have to worry about it anymore.
Aaron Sojourner:
Yeah. Data is expensive.
Goldy:
I mean, markets are perfectly rational. So why do you need to model the subjectivity of economic news reporting?
Aaron Sojourner:
Yeah.
Goldy:
It can’t have an impact.
Aaron Sojourner:
Laissez-faire definitely helps the power fault. Just stay hands off.
Nick Hanauer:
It does. Yes, it does. Well, Aaron, one final question. Why do you do this work?
Aaron Sojourner:
I started my career as a union organizer. I did that for about five years, and I learned so much about how the economy works and how working people’s struggles to get by and to improve their conditions, and that’s kind of propelled me across my whole career. Later I realized I’m a better researcher than I am an organizer. And I went to the University of Chicago, studied economics for the first time and,-
Nick Hanauer:
Oy vey.
Aaron Sojourner:
Yeah. And it was very confusing because I would read all these articles and I would be like, wow, that’s a super interesting question and seems like a cool way to get at it in the introduction. And then I’d get to the middle and it was all Greek, and I was like, I have no idea what’s happening. And then I’d get to the conclusion and the conclusion was always, Aaron, you’re wrong. Everything you think is good is bad. And I was like, what happened in the middle?
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. Exactly.
Aaron Sojourner:
Honestly, then I was like, okay, I have to get a PhD because I got to figure out that middle part. And then I did that, and I’ve been working on labor economics ever since, so.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s right. Yeah.
Aaron Sojourner:
Just trying to figure it out. Trying to bring forward evidence to help make better policies and better decisions together.
Nick Hanauer:
That’s right. And trying to push back on all that nonsense that made up the middle for so many decades. Well, fantastic. Well, thank you for your work. The article was fascinating, and it’s cool that you got to do it with our friend Ben Harris, who is an awesome dude.
Aaron Sojourner:
Yeah, he’s great. He’s great.
Nick Hanauer:
And well, thank you very much for being on.
Aaron Sojourner:
Yeah, thank you. It’s great to be on the show. I listened for a long time, and thank you for your work too, all of you for producing the podcast.
Nick Hanauer:
Here’s why I think that’s a really important conversation. And obviously if you’re a partisan, and we are and want people to give the Biden administration credit for the remarkable accomplishments of the last several years, you care about this issue, this disconnect between what’s happening in the economy and how people feel about it. But as I said to Aaron, and I think it’s really worth underscoring, successful societies are evolutionary and epistemic. They run on truth. Right. And that at anytime perception and reality diverge greatly for long periods of time, terrible things tend to happen in human societies. The truth matters in terms of how you process information and the decisions you make about what to do in the future. And if people don’t know the truth, they tend to make terrible decisions about how to behave and what to do.
Goldy:
Nick, the economy might not be in a depression, but now you have me in one.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah. Yeah, there you go. It really matters a lot that people know facts and can agree on them. And the way in which reporters are reporting more negatively, I think is probably a real problem. And the degree to which so many Americans have become so partisan that facts don’t matter to them anymore, that’s also a huge problem. And I think it’s going to be tough to have a high functioning society if we can’t find a way to resolve those issues.
Goldy:
I think that the economics reporters, journalists who are covering the economy, they should read this and they should take a little responsibility because there clearly is a difference in how the media is covering the economy now than it was covering it in the past. And I’ve said this before, and I think that journalists, as a former journalist, I want to remind my colleagues that there’s a difference between meteorology and journalism. Right. Meteorologists, when they report on the weather and they get it wrong, it doesn’t change the weather, right? You’ve got the weatherman out there saying that it’s going to snow when it doesn’t snow. He hasn’t changed the weather at all. He was just wrong. But when a journalist gets the economy wrong, when a journalist is doing, it bleeds, it leads headlines at a time when we have one of the strongest economies we’ve had in decades and a presidential election coming up where this is the main issue in the election.
Well, that ends up not just changing the economy, it changes elections. I mean, they have a responsibility to close that gap between subjective public perception and the truth. And I think it requires a little, I don’t know, introspection on the part of our media because I know that most of them think they’re being objective, that they’re going out of their way to be objective, but clearly they’re not. The data says that. Their headlines, their coverage is much more negative, not a little more, much more negative than the economy itself. And it is leading the public to have this huge misperception about how the economy is performing right now, and therefore how the policies of our president and our congress and legislators and council people everywhere is performing. So I don’t know. I’ve got a solution, Nick. I know you were upset that he didn’t have a solution for this. How about this one? I think that benevolent billionaires should,-
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, good luck with that.
Goldy:
Step in by investing in building a healthy news ecosystem.
Nick Hanauer:
Good luck.
Goldy:
Yeah. Yeah, in the end. See what I did here? I blamed you.
Nick Hanauer:
Yeah, there you go. Yeah. Anyway, really interesting conversation and a really interesting report that people should read.
Goldy:
We’ve provided a link in the show notes to Why Are Americans so Displeased with the Economy by our guest, Aaron Sojourner and his co-writer, Ben Harris.
Speaker 6:
Pitchfork Economics is produced by Civic Ventures. If you like the show, make sure to subscribe, rate and review us wherever you get your podcasts. Find us on Twitter and Facebook @Civicaction and Nick Hanauer. Follow our writing on Medium @civicskunkworks, and peek behind the podcast scenes on Instagram @pitchforkeconomics. As always, from our team at Civic Ventures, thanks for listening. See you next week.