Why might there be hundreds of thousands of fewer people in the workforce post-COVID? Must be laziness caused by all those thousands of free dollars people are still riding high on! No other explanation I can think of!
Why might there be hundreds of thousands of fewer people in the workforce post-COVID? Must be laziness caused by all those thousands of free dollars people are still riding high on! No other explanation I can think of!
When you're in the middle of a bad situation there's a tendency to just push forward and not appreciate how bad it's going for you. Then when you finally get out you can suddenly realize. After that tiny moment where not all of us got to separate ourselves from our work lives, this kind of perspective was gained by a lot of people. I heard Dave Anthony make that point on an old Dollop I listened to the other day, catching up on them.
I don't expect American pundits to be wise and clever but you don't need to be an oracle understand the concept of people viewing the world as they are pushing forward versus them being in a better place.
I think Chris Hayes is one of the better pundits. He is actually intelligent and sometimes he shows hints of still having a soul. But on a recent show - I had to stop watching after ~5 minutes. It was clear that at least the first ~20 of his show was going to be on his paraphrase - "What's wrong with Americans? Why they all aren't positive about the economy? The numbers are great!"
It's like a covid and the million plus deaths from it and the wild swings in people's circumstances didn't just fucking happen. And even if they did - everybody should look at the world and their own lives dispassionately like Paul Krugman' POV in his op-eds.
And if they don't do that, it's presented as evidence of how irrational and mathematically illiterate the peasants are. They're absolutely desperate to convince people that anyone pointing out how most people are struggling to pay for food and housing is spouting propaganda designed to mislead the benighted citizens who are too stupid to know how well they're doing. It's amazingly arrogant, and it's not going to work (but that's not going to stop them from trying).