Americans Are Suddenly Feeling Way Better About the Economy | Hacker News Reader

Americans Are Suddenly Feeling Way Better About the Economy

msn.com

14 pointsMilnerRoute12 comments

Each month, the university conducts a minimum of 500 phone interviews across the continental U.S.

Phone interviews are laughably inaccurate in the present day and a count of 500 is totally inadequate to capture what the entire US thinks about the economy. The left keeps trying to tell people that the economy is fine and that everyone is actually very happy about sky-high rents, unending layoffs, and astronomical grocery prices as if we can't see what's going on with our own bank accounts. This strategy of "don't believe your own eyes or ears" is straight out of 1984.

Even worse, they use phone area codes to correspond respondents to area[0]. This survey is stupid.

[0]https://data.sca.isr.umich.edu/fetchdoc.php?docid=57449

The issues are mostly systemic, not random. The numbers from one survey aren't particularly meaningful, differences between surveys are meaningful.

Don't forget medicine shortages

> unending layoffs

Sounds like a frog in the well mentality, big tech is a very small part of the economy, even if you add companies like CitiGroup it's still tiny compared to everythign else where hiring is still strong. A good chunk of the laid off folks have savings from high salaries so they will keep on spending like normal so even those don't affect the larger economy too much.

Yah, I still see help wanted signs in every restaurant window. OTOH, we're hiring and we're getting some fabulous resumes. win-win from my perspective, but if I was the one applying rather than interviewing, I know I'd have a different perspective.

With random sampling, a sample size of approximately 400 provides a ±5% margin of error for a population of 331,000,000. A ±3% margin can be reached with about 1,000 respondents.

Here are a few links that explain why this works:

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2017/05/12/methods-1... https://www.surveymonkey.com/curiosity/how-many-people-do-i-... https://www.cloudresearch.com/resources/guides/statistical-s...

Big wake-up coming in 2024...

Why?

This reads like pre-election propaganda. Looking at sky high cost increases and a pretty poor job market (despite what the job reports try to tell you), I don't see how there could be such a huge leap in confidence.

It's hilarious that they even say it's the best in decades... Give me a break.

- "Consumer sentiment leapt 13% in the first half of January from December...on the heels of a sharp rise in December, causing the index to surge a combined 29% from November, the biggest two-month increase since 1991.

- "The pickup in sentiment was broad-based, spanning consumers of different age, income, education and geography."

- "Other gauges also show that Americans are at last emerging from their funk. The share of consumers in December who expected to be financially better off a year later reached the highest level since June 2021, according to a Federal Reserve Bank of New York survey."

- "A separate consumer confidence measure last month saw its biggest one-month gain since March 2021, according to the Conference Board."

How is "sentiment" and "confidence" measured?

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/consumer-sentiment.asp

Reply on news.ycombinator.com