Hacker News Reader

Comment by Retric | Hacker News Reader

Americans have noticed how little the overall economy correlates with their lives. That doesn’t mean they are making accurate statements about the economy, but rather that the economy isn’t something that matters to them.

Many things are done that are hypothetically good for the economy, and bad for most Americans. That’s objectively true but runs into ideological issues and the pocketbooks of those who do benefit.

On the flip side you have things that are bad for the economy and benefit millions of Americans like farm subsidies which are rarely attacked on economic grounds. It’s used more as a political talking point than an actual rational stance.

View on HN

I think it's just a terminology or definition problem then. I think when the average person talks about if the economy is doing good or bad they are mostly thinking about their own wallet and what they can buy etc and how much things cost compared to previously.

If things keep getting more expensive and they don't feel like they can afford as much as before, they might think that the economy must be doing bad if all these companies need to raise their prices so much just to survive or make a profit.

I think most people would associate things being cheap and plentiful as a good economy, and things being expensive and hard to get (out of stock, long lead times, etc) as a bad economy.

I don’t think it’s that. I think it’s the coarse, high level statistics provided by the article aren’t in line with what the majority of Americans are experiencing.

For instance, crime may be decreasing, but it could be increasing where there are more people, meaning more people think crime is increasing. I’m not sure if that is true or not, but I feel like it is with perceptions of the economy.

Crimes way down in populated areas. EX: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_New_York_City#/media/... Note that’s absolute numbers not rates.

I know people who have noticed the massive reduction in crime inside cities, and still think it’s up overall. Part of the issue is news stories harp on bad news when rates are slightly higher than last year, but not when they drop so random noise ends up looking like a steady increase.

I don’t understand the crime one personally. Just a guess:

1) people who migrate to larger cities are exposed to more crime

2) not many people from the 1950s around that can really compare accurately

NYC crime only really fell in the 90’s, that’s in living memory for a large chunk of the population and there where noticeable improvements up until COVID.

Though you could be right with how many young people moved to cities after things improved.

In my city I could very much believe overall crime is down, but due to recent social events crime is far more spread out. Areas that used to experience very little crime are now seeing far more. Areas that saw crazy levels of crime leveled off some.

Crimes that were basically unheard of in my neighborhood 5 years ago (carjackings and armed muggings, for example) are now a weekly common occurrence. This will absolutely create the impression for residents in my neighborhood that crime is up. It went from something you barely thought about, to something you now plan your night around to not be walking home alone in the dark.

Reporting is also a problem. I know of two people who were violently mugged to the point of one being hospitalized who did not report it to the police since they knew it was utterly pointless to do so.

When you all say “crime down not crime up” you are not saying compared to what. If you want to compare against the worst crime levels in American history, congratulations. But crime has been up in major cities due to the George Floyd effect, that’s just reality. The leftist incredulity does not change reality.

Yes, but this starts to get into semantics. If a person complains about the economy (as in the relative-to-the-past QoL of common citizens), and an economist says the economy is great, they're talking past each other by using the word economy differently (colloquial vs formal).

In this situation, though, it's economists who are using an out-of-the-norm term and upset when people don't immediately abandon existing usages. Economy literally means "home management," after all.

That confusion is born of ideology: there's an abstraction, which economists think should capture the usual meaning in a more rigorous way, and when it doesn't, it's upsetting. So it's the people who must be wrong.

The primary definition of the word "economy" in the Oxford is:

> the wealth and resources of a country or region, especially in terms of the production and consumption of goods and services.

so, yes, it does have other meanings too, but it does not "literally mean home management".

The sense of "wealth and resources of a country" (short for political economy) is attested from 1650s That’s long before economists became a thing.

Kings looked about the economy in terms of tax revenue, so it’s not just some arbitrary abstraction.

> Economy literally means "home management,"

No, it doesn't.

"Etymologically derives from an older term that meant" is not the same as "literally means", though for some reason the confusion of etymology and meaning is common on HN.

You're wrong, here. Words are defined by how people use them, and the way people actually use the term "economy" is much closer to the original etymological meaning than how economists use it.

Economists are free to take a term and redefine it for their own purposes, but the public meaning is every bit as valid. They don't have a trump card that invalidates every other meaning because they want to use it to designate a particular abstraction.

There’s two definitions of the same word both of which predate economics, but the slightly older one mostly died out.

“Home economics” was used in the 1950’s to distinguish it from the more common use of the term back then, while economics classes don’t need that clarification. Today few people are aware of the older definition.

When do you think it died out? People have used economical to mean things like affordable or thrifty for a long time.

By died out I meant the household aspect is gone, the original meaning included things like paying a carpenter to fix your roof which just seems like an alien use of the term. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oeconomicus Outside any transaction playing a role in the overall economy.

I suspect it shifted with the rise of companies and machinery. So I agree people talk about a ships fuel economy they are referring to efficiency, but the non efficiency aspects of the original definition is absent. Meaning people talking about the economy being good because they got a raise isn’t referring to household budgets but the wider economic system.

"economical" is a different word than "economy", and also "affordable" or "thrifty", while a related concept to either the original sense of "economy" in English from the 15th C or the even older Greek root (the two are different) is not either off those simply transformed from a noun to an adjective without other shift of meaning.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com