social insurance is compelled or subsidized, because the people who participate already know whether they’re more likely to get better deals or worse out of it, but collectively we have an interest in compressing outcomes, so we compel participation. /fin

that’s precisely what distinguishes social insurance from market insurance. people buy market insurance voluntarily, knowing everything they know. 1/

You don't get to trump an argument because you have a measure, a very bad measure, but it is quantitative and you can find it on FRED! That is cargo cultism, not intelligence. /fin

I agree the suicide rate is a very dirty measure. But it is more condign to the task of measuring welfare, the object of economics, than short-term consumer sentiment surveys. Yes. It's a bad measure! All the measures are bad! That is real life. 6/

These measures were never intended or designed to be used in the manner you are using them. They are intended to help make short-term predictions about the business cycle. That's what they were developed for. 5/

If you think gas prices are going to decline, what's the relationship between that and economic welfare? 4/

Is that "economic welfare" in any meaningful sense? If you have more savings than five years ago, but you're struggling to make ends meat 'cuz your kid's in college and rent's gone up, are you "financially better off"? 3/

Do they capture what we care about, in terms of long-term economic welfare? Are you financially better off or worse off than five years ago? How are business conditions? What do you expect of inflation? How's the housing market? 2/

Really? Here are the Michigan Consumer Survey questions from 2015. data.sca.isr.umich.edu/fetchdoc.php... 1/

The first Trump term was a cyclical uptick among a secular downturn. You'll object, by what measure? It's a hard question! Consumer sentiment surveys are weak predictors of anything, designed to capture cyclical not secular changes. Here's a measure, also dirty. www.nimh.nih.gov/health/stati...

Trump's first term may not be by some measures the worst of times economically, but we've been in a period of widely expressed dissatisfaction and disillusionment with the US economy since at least the financial crisis, through the volatility of the business cycle. /fin

There are all kinds of "measures if economic optimism", but we had a national debate over deaths of despair during that period, and an election in 2020 where one major political party's primaries were devoted very disproportionately to the cost of health care. 2/

I never said people were always upset and anxious. I said a lot of people have been upset and anxious since at latest 2016, and it's obviously true. 1/

(we had populist revolts, from the left and the right, in 2016, which many people understood at the time in materialist terms. there were arguments about it, you might remember. i think "everyone seemed pretty optimistic" until 2021-ish is not a defensible claim.)

“just asking questions”

This is like the classic Chinese Finger Trap of political economy. Fear of individual loss drives the desire for control and obstructs collective action, the manifestation of an intelligent response.

**See also the spiritual CFT. Fear of the loss of ego obstructs higher consciousness.

The problem from their point of view is that rapid decarbonization requires public, collective decisions about the organization of production, in a way that threaten capital-owners' authority over both the production process and the political system.