Anxiety and Interest Rates: How Uncertainty Is Weighing on Us
Anxiety and uncertainty are weighing on individuals even where the overall economy is growing.
Some of this angst is the fallout from advances in information technology. The Internet, ubiquitous computing, robotics, 3-D printers and the like are wonderful advances, yet they may also be personal threats: For some, the technologies may eliminate our jobs or potential future jobs, or make them less lucrative. For others, they may bring new riches.
Even people with moderately high incomes have reason to be uncertain. Some college professors, tenured or not, might lose their jobs in the face ofmassive open online courses, while others prosper from them. Lawyers might find less demand for services that can be supplanted by computerized legal research tools. News and entertainment media have already faced huge technology-related job losses.
Such fears are not measured by the usual consumer confidence indexes. The University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index reached its highest level since 2004 in January. But this index, and others like it, look ahead only into the short term and report about perceived aggregate conditions rather than individual risks.
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