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TIL every year with a rent increase is a recession. Whenever housing prices increase faster than income that's a recession. When college tuition goes up faster than incomes that's a recession.
I'm reading this to That's Amore.
Wheeeeeen youuuuuur
Bank accounts dry
And it makes-a you cry
Thats Recessiooooon
when the world seems on fire
but you're told that it's fine
that's depression
Yeah, we've been in a recession since the 70s and never stopped.
pretty much. sometimes did not seem so since we racked up debt to offset. At one point it was considered unsustainable for a country to function with debt/gdp over 100%
That was a right-wing talking point in the years following 2008. After Bush had flooded the banks with money, Obama took office and suddenly Republicans decided they were fiscal conservatives again.
The paper that said a debt/gdp ratio over 100% created a death spiral (I believe it was more like 125%) had a problem: nobody else could reproduce their results. Didn't matter, Republicans had to remind people that Obama was a spend and tax liberal.
Then an econ student asked the authors for their Excel spreadsheet (econ does everything in Excel; everything). He found a coding error in one of the formulas. Once corrected, the whole conclusion evaporated.
What im talking about goes back to when japan was predicted to go over. Japan was supposedly going to fall apart. Fact is that since reagan we have been running more and more on debt and less and less on income (taxes) and the longer we do so the more will need to tax in the future.
Even by this definition of recession, we're not. Real wages are up since that time.
Wages have not been keeping up with productivity increases. They're going to billionaires, not the workers.
correct.
It seems like you're really close to figuring out why a massive portion of the United States is willing to vote for anything as long as it's not the status quo.
It's your own personal recession, aren't we lucky?
Your own / personal / recession
Someone to stall your sleep
Someone who creeps
Reach out, charge me!
I have had this dream for a while now that the major media networks displayed real income changes next to the Dow and other stock tickers. Just so normal people are reminded of how their money is doing compared to rich people's money.
Do you have the formula for that? I might be up for doing that here on Lemmy locally once a month or so.
holy shit! Both of you! PLEASE DO THIS! That'd be AMAZING!
I'm not much a math person or econ person. Do you have any ideas on what that would like like? The Econ professor in the video said the real income is aka GDP. He was loosely speaking though, so I don't know if that's a one to one. I guess I could put something up and people will tell me how it's wrong? I don't mind that.
lol that's the BEST way to get the RIGHT answer on the internet. Put something up, say it's X and someone will tell you you're wrong and it's Y. Easier than asking how to do X. :-D
Whelp, here you go. It only does a quarterly GDP or "real income" analysis.
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There is a variable called Gross National Income (GNI) corrected for inflation which is likely the variable Wolfers refers to. You can report it, but it will not be very different from GDP corrected for inflation which the media writes about all the time. Essentially production =income except for some small nuances.
GDI is supposed to be basically equivalent to GDP, so it's not a better number to use. Sometimes the numbers diverge (see here for a discussion of this issue in 2022) because they use different methodologies to determine the number, but that's usually a sign that some kind of measurement is off, not that there's some kind of actual divergence in the true numbers of what they purport to measure.
And we moved away from Gross National Product/Income to Gross Domestic Product/Income because it was a better look at the domestic economy. We care more about the production/income within national borders rather than the production/income of a particular nation's residents.
GNI still gives a slightly better measure of income which is what OP was asking for. For instance if an American gets dividend income from a foreign company that’s part of GNI but not GDP, and vice versa if a US company pays dividends to a foreign shareholder. But yeah in practice all of this will be negligible.
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There is no formula. You're mainly interested in wages, and those are negotiated.
And if real income falls, that’s called a recession.
But by that metric, rich people would never experience a recession. If that's the case, why do we allow them to cause a recession for the rest of us? Madness.
It's a huge example of the bystander effect. It would only take a handful of people to change the situation.
By doing what? Posting where the CEOs live so people can .... protest. Yea, dox them and/or track movements to organize totally non-violent protests.
Stalk the shit out of them and show up carrying signs. Work in shifts if they come to your area.
It felt like "shoot them in the streets" was plainly obvious a few months ago but that's harder than an Instagram story.
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Why indeed
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Unless it’s a Democrat in the White House. Then it’s totally fine! What do you mean you can’t afford food?!! The economy has never been better!!
/s
Democrat in office: "Who cares you can't buy food and pay rent? Many people live paycheck to paycheck! The stocks are up, who cares what the plebs have?"
Republicans in office: "I don't give two shits about you, the stock must go up."
Almost like they have the same goals of "line must go up". It is baffling how people can ignore various national issues because of the economic system the government props up when their favorite group is in office.
Propaganda and wedge issues are super effective in a population of adults that peaked in the 8th grade.
Oh I know, decades of propaganda and teaching people that ignorance is strength has worked wonders for the fascists.
Found this one: https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/
I think I have seen similar or parts of that type of data before, but not all of it in one place
This is a good analysis, but it's slightly different from OP's statement.
Median real wages actually are up since 1979. It became something of a meme post-2008 to say that median wages have been flat since that time. That was true for a few years following the Great Recession, but they caught up and went quite a bit higher. It's possible the numbers will cycle around to that again, but it's not where we're at right now.
What the graphs in the article are arguing is that wages over that time are much lower than they should be given productivity increases.
Let's say you work for one hour making a widget, and you get $1 for that time. Your boss sells the widget for $5 and pockets the difference. Now there's an increase in productivity, and you can make two widgets in the same hour. You still get paid $1 for that hour, but your boss is selling those two widgets for $10 total now. You're not getting a raise just because of that productivity increase.
You might get a raise due to inflation. With 4% inflation, you get to make $1.04/hour, but your boss is now selling those widgets for $5.20 each. This is more or less the story since 1979.
That difference between productivity and real wages is what's charted out above. It tells you exactly who the real moochers are in society.
This all tracks very neatly with a decline in union membership.
Does the median income track the boss's newly increased wages, then?
It's something I've been thinking about for awhile now. That labor wages are stagnating but because "management" level, and higher, salaries are increasing with productivity, these Median Real Wage statistics are skewed, showing the increase.
I would have no way of separating out labor wages from the management level wages though, was just curious how it's calculated.
It's all included, but median tends to be less susceptible to a few outliers skewing the numbers. That's why it's preferred over averages.
That's great info, thanks. I'll pursue that angle next time.
That isn't really the definition though. Real income can fall in a recession but it's not necessarily a recession just because incomes fell. Real income can increase or decrease both during a recession and not during a recession. It's a lot more complicated than "when your income declines there is a recession".
The U.S. has been in a recession since Reagan according to the wording right? Housing and such vs wages shows its been in downfall since.
...that isn't what a recession means. I mean decreasing buying power is concerning but there are lots of times when that can happen when the economy is hot. In fact, a weakening economy can lead to deflation which increases buying power.
…that isn’t what a recession means. I mean decreasing buying power is concerning but there are lots of times when that can happen when the economy is hot. In fact, a weakening economy can lead to deflation which increases buying power.
You can't say all that and not tell us what you think it is. Also, I think they're talking overall, not the top 10% buying power.
Well, the official definition is when GDP contracts for 2 straight quarters (although apparently the fed can fudge that a little bit if the decline is negligible and unemployment goes up, like what happened under Biden)
That's not actually the official definition. It's more complicated than that, and it's not the Fed but the National Bureau of Economic Research: https://www.nber.org/research/business-cycle-dating/business-cycle-dating-procedure-frequently-asked-questions
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oh shit....
Economics just redefines terms as needed for the moment. Recession is really a label that can't really be applied until after you're in it anyway.
Inflation has also gotten watered down to be less meaningful once it started being a problem.
Inflation got watered down, what do you mean? It's just math for inflation. Capitalism uses inflation as a tool to expand the economy but at the end of the day by the definition listed on the post they are just saying if your wage doesn't increase faster than the inflation your life resources are in recession. That's at least how I read it. If you can't buy as much shit as you used to, you're doing worse. Which happens to individuals without happening to everyone, but if the average person can't buy as much shit as they could before, then it seems like recession is an adequate term.
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this post was submitted on 01 May 2025
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