> nonsensical conspiracy theories that match their ideological priors
People's lived experiences in many parts of the country don't match what they're being told. If macro trends go one way but microtrends all over the country go the other way, then the macrotrend analysis is functionally meaningless for millions of people. That's not a conspiracy theory, and hand-waving so many people's lived experiences away because it doesn't match YOUR ideological prior is not taking the discussion seriously and fundamentally and possibly wilfully misunderstanding the issue. Insisting that people everywhere saying life is harder than it was pre-pandemic or 10 years ago or whatever are wrong "because the charts say so" is silly.
I think people get too hung up on the aggregate numbers which can hide large populations experiencing things differently. Wage growth may have been higher than inflation for some quintiles overall, but for literally millions of people in those quintiles who didn’t job hop and got typical raises or got laid off or whatever, the average experience wasn’t their experience. And when prices are obviously going up, most people will feel like they are falling behind even if they objectively are treading water.
The official inflation numbers have shown high inflation over the past few years. If you feel like prices have gone up a lot the CPI does not contradict your lived experience in any way.
People's lived experiences in many parts of the country don't match what they're being told. If macro trends go one way but microtrends all over the country go the other way, then the macrotrend analysis is functionally meaningless for millions of people. That's not a conspiracy theory, and hand-waving so many people's lived experiences away because it doesn't match YOUR ideological prior is not taking the discussion seriously and fundamentally and possibly wilfully misunderstanding the issue. Insisting that people everywhere saying life is harder than it was pre-pandemic or 10 years ago or whatever are wrong "because the charts say so" is silly.