The banks know it. Why don’t more Americans?
Those folkloric man-on-the-street (or in a rural diner) puff pieces are as infuriating as they are uninformative. They do, however, reinforce false, often minority, impressions of what’s really happening in the country, Timothy Noah argues in The New Republic. Misinforming tales abound (his mock example): “People Believe Stuff That Isn’t True, but They Feel Like It Is True, So Let’s Give Them a Hearing Because We Don’t Want to Seem Elitist.”
Outlets such as The Wall Street Journal regularly hand Joe Everyman a megaphone and let him expound on microchips in vaccines, schoolteachers “trying to turn your children gay or trans,” and the crappy Biden economy that isn’t. Given a platform, uninformed views steer public opinion by making the wrong seem right.
Polling later confirms that people think the economy sucks. It doesn’t. Ask Morgan Stanley. The firm was “obliged to nearly quadruple its previous estimate of gross domestic product growth for the first six months of 2023” and double “its GDP growth prediction for October–December 2023, to 1.3 percent, and predicts 1.4 percent growth in 2024.”
“We have now reached the point where the Wall Street titans on whom Biden wishes to raise taxes maintain a higher opinion of Biden’s economic stewardship than the public at large,” Noah wryly observes.
But you won’t find that out by asking the red-hat in the diner.
How voters feel about the economy has more to do with partisanship than reality, Noah writes. Raw public polling on Bidenomics is meaningless without examining the party affiliation of respondents.
In 2016, Gallup polled voters on the economy one week before the election and one week after. During the week preceding the election, with President Obama in the White House and Hillary Clinton widely expected to win, only 16 percent of Republicans thought the economy was improving, compared to 61 percent of Democrats. One week after the election, fully 49 percent of Republicans suddenly thought the economy was improving, compared to only 46 percent of Democrats. Note how much greater this postelection swing was for Republicans: 33 percentage points, compared to 15 for Democrats.
Huh? Noah suggests, “Republicans were twice as mindlessly partisan as Democrats when they opined about economics. My unscientific guess is that the spread has gotten much wider since then.”
Very likely. Last week’s Monmouth poll found public opinion split on Biden’s handling of the economy (47 percent approve, 48 percent disapprove). But studying the crosstabs for the partisan split renders those figures near-meaningless.
The inescapable conclusion is that when you ask somebody whether the economy is doing well, you won’t get an answer about the economy. You may not even get an answer about that individual’s personal experience (which may or may not reflect broader economic trends as compared to one, two, or 10 years ago). Most of the time, you’d be better off just asking, “Are you a Democrat or a Republican?” Because these days, that determines how people—especially Republicans—feel about pretty much everything. If the man on the street sounds like a blowhard, hyperpartisanship explains why. The rest is just noise.
Fine. Now what?
We do not counter the fact that the platformed uninformed spread misinformation by carping about bad or slanted coverage. And yes, the right has the bigger media megaphone. But as Anat Shenker-Osorio points out, many people form their opinions by listening to what people in their communities think. They get a finger-in-the-air sense of what’s normal. The way to counter misimpressions is by reinforcing your normal, by spreading your view of the economy at every casual opportunity. Not with statistics but with your own man-on-the-street testimony.
Anand Giridharadas explains in this clip from a longer YouTube.
A quote from Bill McKibben’s 2005 “The Christian Paradox – How a faithful nation gets Jesus wrong” has stayed with me on how uninformed opinion works to warp perception. He was writing about American Christianity, but the distinction between the Christian right and the Republican right today is also near-meaningless:
The power of the Christian right rests largely in the fact that they boldly claim religious authority, and by their very boldness convince the rest of us that they must know what they’re talking about. They’re like the guy who gives you directions with such loud confidence that you drive on even though the road appears to be turning into a faint, rutted track.
Guess where authoritarian Republicans want to lead this country?