Krugman discusses why people people believe things that just aren’t true:
Remember “American carnage?” Donald Trump’s 2017 inaugural address was peculiar in many ways, but one of the most striking oddities was his obsession with a problem — urban crime — that had greatly diminished over the past generation. For reasons we still don’t fully understand, violent crime in America fell rapidly from around 1990 to the mid-2010s:
True, there was a crime surge after the pandemic, which now seems to be ebbing. But that lay in the future. Trump talked as if crime was running rampant as he spoke.
Yet if Trump had false beliefs about trends in crime, he had plenty of company. Gallup polls Americans about crime every year, and all through the great decline in violent crime a majority of Americans said that crime was increasing:
Were the crime statistics misleading? Homicide numbers are pretty solid. And people behaved as if crime were falling; notably, there was a wave of gentrification as affluent Americans moved into newly safe central cities. But all the same, people told pollsters that they believed crime was rising.
Why am I talking about public perceptions of crime? Well, last week, I wrote about the gap between public perceptions of a terrible economy and the reality of an economy that is doing very well by normal standards. I also noted that Americans seem relatively upbeat about their own financial circumstances; they just think that bad things are happening to other people.
Not surprisingly, I got a lot of pushback. That’s OK; after all these years writing for The Times I have a pretty thick skin, although I have to admit to being annoyed at pundits who try to cut off discussion by asserting that anyone who questions widely held beliefs is an “elitist” who thinks Americans are stupid. For the record, I don’t think Americans are stupid. I think they have jobs to do and children to raise and lives to live. They don’t have time to study policy issues, so most of them get their sense of what’s happening to the country from what they see on TV or hear from politicians. Unfortunately, some of what they’re told isn’t true.
But in any case, I thought it might be useful to draw parallels with the discourse on crime, where there is a similar disconnect between what people tell pollsters they believe is happening and what the available facts say. In fact, the resemblance between how people talk about crime and how they talk about the economy is eerily strong.
Many of those talking about a disconnect on views about the economy cite, among other sources, Federal Reserve data that compares household views of their own financial situation with their views of the economy (highlighting added):
Notice that the survey also asks people about the state of their local economy, where they are likely to have at least some personal experience of what’s going on; these views are much more favorable than their views of the national economy. Now look back at that chart on perceptions of crime. Gallup also asks Americans about crime “in your area,” and sure enough, people’s perceptions of local crime were much more favorable than what they said about the nation as a whole.
Wait, there’s more: Perceptions of crime, like perceptions about the economy, have become strongly partisan, with people becoming more pessimistic when the party they don’t support holds the White House:
And there are huge partisan gaps in assessments of how safe cities are:
As it happens, the Republican perception of Los Angeles and New York as unsafe compared with southern cities is wildly off base. Both have low homicide rates — half as high as Miami’s — and New York City is overall one of the safest places in America.
What does all this tell us, besides the fact that Americans are very confused about crime? It shows that on an important public issue, people can hold beliefs about what is happening to other people — people who live in other places, or in the nation as a whole — that are not just false but also at odds with their personal experience.
Why should this kind of disconnect be restricted to crime? There are, in fact, strong reasons to believe that there’s a similar disconnect when it comes to the economy. And we shouldn’t be afraid to say that out of fear that we’ll be considered elitist.
He doesn’t mention the media in this but they play a huge part. If you are watching local TV in the morning as you get ready for work to see the traffic or the weather, all you see is the old “if it bleeds it leads” and doom and gloom about the economy. If you follow the right wing media or have people on social media who feed you that stuff you’ll get the same thing. For a lot of busy people the idea that the country is falling apart from crime and recession is just conventional wisdom.
By the way, Trump has an instinct for this. Steve Benen writes:
During Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, the Republican faced a dilemma. On the one hand, the economy was relatively healthy at the time, and the unemployment rate was steadily improving in the runup to Election Day. On the other hand, Trump wanted voters to believe the United States was in the midst of an economic disaster, which only he could fix.
The GOP nominee settled on a specific rhetorical strategy to resolve the tension: Trump would simply peddle nonsense and tell the public to believe him, instead of reality. As we discussed at the time, at different points during the campaign, the Republican publicly argued, for example, that the unemployment rate was 20% — or possibly 42% — even as reality pointed to a rate below 5%.
After the election, at a pre-inaugural press conference, Trump declared there are “96 million really wanting a job and they can’t get,” which was ridiculous, even for him. Around the same time, the then-president-elect declared that the unemployment rate was “totally fiction.”
Soon after, as Trump settled into the White House, and the economic conditions he inherited continued to improve, the then-president decided he believed economic data after all.
That was nearly seven years ago. Now, wouldn’t you know it, the Republican has re-embraced the same outlandish rhetorical tactics he used during his successful candidacy in 2016. At a campaign event in South Dakota on Friday night, for example, Trump told attendees, in reference to economic data on employment:
“Now you’re given phony numbers — because far fewer people are looking for jobs. … They throw around 3.5%, 3.6%, 3.7%, but it’s a different group of people. … So it’s a fake number.”
He went on to describe the unemployment rate as “crooked,” before declaring, “During Biden’s first 30 months in office, just 2.1 million new jobs have been created.” As part of the harangue, the former president concluded, “The fact is, we’re probably heading into a Great Depression.”
So, a few things.
First, the unemployment rate is not “phony,” “fake,” or “crooked.” Yes, it fluctuates based on people looking for work and exiting the workforce, but that was true during Trump’s term, too, and it didn’t stop him from touting the data when he saw encouraging jobs reports.
Second, during the first 30 months of Joe Biden’s presidency, the U.S. economy created 13.6 million jobs, not 2.1 million. (If we start the count in February 2021, instead of January 2021, economy created 13.5 million jobs over Biden’s first 30 months.) Trump and some of his allies apparently want the public to believe that the rapid economic recovery that began after Trump left office led to job growth that doesn’t really count, but that’s not a serious argument.
Third, there is literally zero evidence of the domestic economy “heading into a Great Depression.”
But as relevant as these details are, let’s also not forget that the incumbent Democratic president has recently taken some rhetorical shots at his predecessor’s weak record on job creation. On Friday night, Trump was apparently eager to return fire.
The problem, of course, was that the Republican, unable to rely on facts, was firing imaginary bullets.