Kevin Drum thinks I’m all wrong about why Americans are sour on this economy. I wrote that it’s probably because the real average wage has dropped. Drum argues that it hasn’t dropped, and that Americans aren’t unhappy about the economy to begin with — only Republicans are.
He raises four objections.
First, he claims I’ve “cherry-picked” the time period to look at. In comparing wages in recent years to the pre-pandemic trend, I look only at the unusually strong wage growth of 2017–19. If you look at a longer period, from 2011 to 2019, wages are right on the trend line.
What Drum is missing is the purpose of the exercise: explaining why people feel the way they do about the economy. I focus on 2017–19 because that is the only recent period during which Americans gave the economy a strongly positive rating. Hence the conclusion of my article: “Americans have to cast their minds back only a few years to remember what a good economy looks like, and this isn’t it.”
It is no answer at all to this explanation to say that wages are doing as well as they were during a long period when Americans were mostly unhappy about the economy.
Second, he says that it’s unfair to judge current wages against the artificial peak of April 2020. That’s “a result of lots of low-wage earners losing their jobs during the early months of the pandemic.” While Drum writes as though I had ignored that issue, I in fact explicitly noted it and compared wages to the pre-pandemic trend instead to correct for it.
Third, he says that my article adjusts wages for inflation using the wrong measure of the latter. He says it uses CPI inflation instead of the more accurate PCE. He’s just wrong about that: The wage numbers were adjusted using PCE inflation, as they should have been.
Fourth, he claims that it’s only Republicans who are dissatisfied with the economy. His evidence: a Quinnipiac poll from August that shows that 58 percent of Democrats give the economy a high rating while only 5 percent of Republicans do, leading him to conclude that the overall numbers are low only because of Fox News brain-poisoning. The same Q-poll release, though, shows that only 27 percent of independents believe it’s a good economy. It’s Democratic voters who are the outliers in viewing this economy positively.
Drum is, of course, free to argue that the public as a whole should adopt the views of Democrats. But I think there’s a reasonable explanation for its rejection of those views, even if he doesn’t want to hear it.