• In this thread: “Biden did not have a 1-on-1 conversation with my manager that resulted in a massive raise, so I declare these statistics invalid!”

    This seems to happen a lot on Lemmy, makes me miss the Economics subreddit.

    I know that not everyone has had the opportunity to take classes in economics, but the amount of people who are unable to see past their own nose is incredible.

    How would we prefer our leaders to make policy decisions? Should they pick a random 10 people and ask what they think, or would it be better to gather a wide range of data on the topic to build an understanding of the economic impacts for 300M+ people? I’d argue that it would be irresponsible for policymakers to ignore the aggregate statistics, but commenters in this thread seem dead set on asserting that because their personal circumstances don’t follow the narrative, the statistics must be a lie.

    • @Ferrous@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      153 months ago

      Good luck trying to explain to working-class people that the struggle they’re feeling is only because they don’t understand economics well enough.

      • mozz
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        3 months ago

        Good luck trying to explain to tech-savvy upper-income Lemmy users that average income adjusted for inflation, at the bottom end of the scale, has actually been rising faster than the grocery prices, and that that’s a good thing.

        I’ve been trying for a couple of days now with apparently no success.

        • @LostWon@lemmy.ca
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          63 months ago

          Working class doesn’t mean poor, it means you don’t own business assets and generally that you don’t profit off the labour of others. It’s a convenient method of control to keep working class people so divided that the fight remains amongst ourselves instead of it being focused on improving things for everyone.

          • @Cryophilia@lemmy.world
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            03 months ago

            Working class doesn’t mean poor,

            No, but a lot of upper middle class people are sure happy to exploit the connotation of poverty from the phrase.

            People making $30k/yr and people making $300k/yr have nothing in common except they both hate they people making $1m/yr. They don’t belong to the same class. They just have a mutual enemy.

            • @LostWon@lemmy.ca
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              43 months ago

              Workers with higher incomes are definitely buffered from a lot, but they easily have more in common with people making 30k than with people who are set up for life. Further, people making 30k have more in common with higher income workers than they do with people with no current income who are struggling with being unhoused. Also, everyone living as part of a community suffers together from the increased crime, health issues, and lack of opportunities promoted by economies with extreme class hierarchies.

            • Between my wife and I we make a little over 200k USD a year.

              I do not own the fruit of my labor. If I am unemployed for an extended period of time I will lose my home. Sure I am not struggling to pay my bills (for now, but I could be hot with a layoff at any time), and sure the numbers that flow through my bank account are unmanageable for a lot of people. But at the end of the day I have a lot more on common with someone making federal minimum wage then I have with someone who owns the means of production.

    • @stoly@lemmy.world
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      113 months ago

      Sorry, but Lemmy is full of libertarian chodes. They got no clue, just a sense of moral superiority.

      • GladiusB
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        -83 months ago

        I’m not a Libertarian nor a chode. Big words from someone that has to leave the basement to count as socializing.

    • mozz
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      3 months ago

      They should ask TwoRandom_english_words_username whether that particular person is spending more at the grocery store than they were in 2019.

      That seems to be the metric, a lot of people feel very strongly about it

      • It feels like lots of people holding their breath until “prices go back down”, passing out from a lack of oxygen, waking up, asking why the prices are still so damn high, then holding their breath again when they’re told, “this is just the price now, deal with it”.

        I mean don’t get me wrong, it would be neat if we could go back to 1990 prices, but that just isn’t how this works, nor should it be our goal.