Omar Marques/SOPA Images Sipa USA via AP
A Quinnipiac Poll from late this summer contained this conundrum: Asked to describe the nation’s economy, 28 percent said it was good or excellent (excellent was just 3 percent), while 71 percent described it as not so good or poor. Asked to describe their own financial situation, however, 60 percent said good or excellent, while 38 percent said not so good or poor.
Hmmm.
As a New York Times article points out, American consumers are now consuming at rates commensurate with renewed prosperity. Median weekly real earnings now exceed their 2019 levels. Inflation has subsided to roughly 3 percent. So, where’s the (still way overpriced) beef?
These figures can be read too rosily. Prices for necessities like food, gas, and housing remain high, and for some quadrants of the population, such as young people paying off student loans again and seeing their rent climb ever higher, the economy is indeed a major problem. In the Times/Siena poll of six swing states, 93 percent of those from the ages of 18 through 29 rated the economy “only fair” or “poor” (fully 59 percent answered “poor”). Thanks to the federal benefits in Biden’s American Rescue Plan Act, the after-tax income of Americans under 25 actually exceeded their expenditures in 2021, but expenditures only matched their incomes in 2022. (Still, their incomes reached record highs in 2022 in a very vibrant job market.)
Even so, the very real economic obstacles confronting the young fail to fully explain the gap between their popular perceptions of the economy and the actual economy where they work and spend. So what does?
How about how young people get their news, their view of the wider world? According to Pew, 43 percent of TikTok users say that’s where they regularly get their news, while just as many or more Americans get theirs from Facebook or X (formerly Twitter). Among all Americans age 18 through 29, fully 32 percent get their news on TikTok.
That means we’re far from the nation that once got its news from Cronkite, Huntley, or Brinkley. Imperfect as those portals on the world may have been, they were largely reality-based. They went through editing by experienced professional journalists, imperfect as they were (and as we are still).
As the Times reported last week, however, much of TikTok talk consists of “Silent Depression” memes, conveying a sense of despair over the economy. Actual economic news, not so much.
That doesn’t mean Biden and the Democrats should counter this by choruses of “Happy Days Are Here Again”; far from it. It does mean, however, that their highlighting of his very real economic achievements, or economists’ assessment of the economy, reaches an audience that has shrunk as the old Cronkite media have steadily diminished sway. It means that actual economic news may barely make it onto TikTok at all. What will make it onto TikTok, one can only hope, is the Democrats’ contrast of Biden with Trump—on economics, on social policy, on abortion, on climate change, on democracy.
McLuhan shouldst not just be living at this hour, but ruing it. The medium is, way too much, the message.
