{"id":21594,"date":"2016-09-10T14:15:47","date_gmt":"2016-09-10T19:15:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=21594"},"modified":"2016-09-10T14:15:47","modified_gmt":"2016-09-10T19:15:47","slug":"if-everythings-doing-so-great-how-come-im-not%c3%b7","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=21594","title":{"rendered":"If Everything’s Doing So Great, How Come I\u2019m Not?\u00f7"},"content":{"rendered":"

If Everything’s Doing So Great, How Come I\u2019m Not?<\/a><\/h3>\n
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Are you better off than you were 10 years ago?<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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We’re ceaselessly told\/sold that the U.S. economy is doing phenomenally well in our current slow-growth world \u2014 generating record corporate profits, record highs in the S&P 500 stock index, and historically low unemployment (4.9% in July 2016).<\/p>\n

While GDP growth is somewhat lackluster by historical standards\u2014less than 2% in 2016\u2014it’s growth nonetheless. And the rate of consumer-price inflation is hovering around 1%; negligible by historical standards.<\/p>\n

But this uniformly positive statistical view of the U.S. economy raises a question among those not in the top 0.1%:\u00a0If everything\u2019s going so great, how come I\u2019m not?<\/em><\/p>\n

Whether it’s struggling to keep up with the rising cost of living, a 0% return on savings, working longer hours while real wages stagnate, scrimping to pay back education loans, despairing at the abuses of power in our banking and political systems, or lamenting the loss of nourishing social interaction in our increasingly isolated and digital lifestyle\u00a0\u2014 most “regular” people find their own personal experiences to be at odds with the rosy “Everything is awesome!” narrative trumpeted by our media.<\/p>\n

The Scorecard<\/strong><\/p>\n

To get a more concrete understanding of this gap, let\u2019s establish a scorecard we can individually fill in to make an assessment of just how well we\u2019re doing.<\/p>\n

The key point about such a scorecard is this:\u00a0We can only optimize what we measure<\/em>. If we don\u2019t measure (for example) leisure time and well-being in our assessment of\u00a0Are we doing better than we were 10 years ago?\u00a0<\/em>then those issues simply aren\u2019t considered.<\/p>\n

And this is the flaw in using broad, easily-fudged statistics such as the unemployment rate as the primary measures of how great we\u2019re doing (or not). What actually matters in life\u2014our experiences, our stress level, our leisure time, our well-being and our sense of security, to name a few\u2014is completely ignored by statistics such as GDP and unemployment.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If Everything’s Doing So Great, How Come I\u2019m Not? Are you better off than you were 10 years ago? We’re ceaselessly told\/sold that the U.S. economy is doing phenomenally well in our current slow-growth world \u2014 generating record corporate profits, record highs in the S&P 500 stock index, and historically low unemployment (4.9% in July […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[127,246,353,2218,1716,753,824],"class_list":["post-21594","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-charles-hugh-smith","tag-economy","tag-gdp","tag-peak-prosperity","tag-sp-500","tag-stocks","tag-unemployment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21594","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21594"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21594\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21595,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21594\/revisions\/21595"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21594"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21594"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21594"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}