The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Recession
The public has visual agnosia about Bidenomics. Here's why.
In the 1985 book The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, Oliver Sacks wrote about a man with visual agnosia, a condition caused by damage to the anterior cortex that leaves a person unable to translate what he can see perfectly well into an accurate perception of what he’s looking at. At one point in the narrative, a man with this condition does indeed grab his wife’s head thinking it’s his hat.
The public beholds an economy that’s improving—perhaps not in one’s own life, because of persistent economic inequality, but certainly in the economy as a whole. The Covid epidemic is over. Restaurants have reopened. Traffic jams have returned. And although there’s quite a lot of worry about inflation, unemployment is low, job creation is high, and inflation itself is coming down.
And yet, polls continue to show people believe that the economy is in terrible shape and that President Joe Biden is to blame. The public is suffering from visual agnosia. The cause is not damage to the anterior context, but rather a contemporary phenomenon familiar to us all that I identify in my latest New Republic piece.
That Republican perceptions have little to do with reality is dog bites man. I love this headline and lede graph though.
There is a core of reality behind Biden's low ratings on the economy. Sure, Republicans are going to say it's bad, but they should be countered by Democrats saying its good, leaving the determining factors to be the perceptions of people who don't like either party. The fact that Biden is president means he got more than half of these folks to vote for him so they are not as a group polarized against all things Democratic. So, it is *possible* for Biden to be in positive territory on the economy.
What you do not note it that real wages have not risen over Bidens term. We have extremely low unemployment and yet real wages have fallen while profit margins *expanded.* If workers cannot get wages rising at the expense of profit margins *now* with unemployment at 3.5%, they never will.
The reason why this is happening seems clear to me. Employers simply are choosing to operate with fewer workers than they would like. Go to a restaurant today and you are expected to pay 20% or more as tip to you servers because their employers expect their customers to pay their labor bill. When I was a kid it was 10%. That's not inflation. Servers put up with it because there's no other options. Fast food chains who paid fixed wages simply run understaffed, to hell with customer service, rather than pay a wage that would keep them properly staffed.
The evidence is all around you of the forces against rising real wages. Workers know Republicans are the party of the rich; they used to be pretty up front about it, plus unions support Democrats, providing a signal. But the reality is that the situation for workers doesn't really change when party control of the Presidency changes. There is a reason for this. My substack discusses this and other things related to our current times.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/how-economic-culture-evolves
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/the-capitalist-crisis
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/how-the-new-deal-order-fell