This is fair, it seems like Maine values its political independence

This is almost wish-casting, but potentially in a wave election, as the macroeconomy worsens, it's plausible that libs can both hold-the-line and pick up a few seats.

This answers the @mattyglesias.bsky.social question of "how do liberals win the senate in 2026?" but likely would not be replicable.

Baldwin was so stylish

So when we communicate to a public-facing audience that "CEOs need a raise" or in Autor, et al.-way that "low wage folks got big raises" when the economic starting place of most folks is more of a Chetty-style "I'm in a worse position in life than my dad was" the academy looks out-of-touch.

I think part of the economic discontent by the public, especially wrt affordability crisis stuff, is the public does not feel like the data reflects their lived experience. And I think most of that is a "what are we actually measuring?" issue.

There's a lot of "correctly measuring the wrong thing"

Not only does these cross-section somewhat misrepresent longrun trends, I also don't think that is not how normal people think about the economy.

I think people have more vague notions of economic trends, closer to Chetty's mobility work, like "my dad made this much when he was my age" etc

Having not been around for that debate, I would say the full 1950-2000 would have been better, for exactly your impulse of usually including the full horizon.

The recent Autor, Dube, McGrew work that discussed wage compression from 2015 to present, I found frustrating for exactly this horizon issue

Realized/granted instead of something closer to net wealth means the numerator is relatively deflated, using average $ of full time workers instead median $ of all workers means the denominator is relatively inflated, and starting the clock at 2000 hides the longer trend.

I get that we all work with the data we have not the data we need want.

But the results depend on: the horizon, how you truncate the data e.g. industries of top 350 firms vs top 100, realized/granted instead of net wealth, and average full-time $ instead of median $ of all worker.

Yeah, my friends will share memes that are like “You know your [insert group] when” and it’s just universal stuff.

It’s actually super sad because it means most people live such isolated lives, without real enough connections to other folks, they don’t realize there’s a lot of shared values.

I made an image of all the art posted by US DOL on X since approximately Labor Day

Elon Musk was recently given a pay package that puts him on pace to be the first trillionaire; but has technically “realized” ~$0 from that deal.

So while there’s issues with any measure, bc the top-end is weird, using “realized” gains like this feels like we’re precisely measuring the wrong thing.