During the past year, much ink has been spilled over the mystery of why Americans seem so down on the economy, despite the many things trending in the right direction. We appear to have staved off a much-anticipated recession, even as the Fed has raised interest rates in an effort to cool the economy; wages have gone up; unemployment is at historic lows; inflation is cooling... So why is everyone still miserable and angry?
A multitude of theories has been proposed. I've always thought that maybe the fundamental issue is that people hate inflation, and yet the policies that are needed to tame inflation themselves make inflation harder to live with—putting policymakers into an impossible bind. After all, people have been clamoring for the government to do something to lower prices; yet, the only way to do this on a sustainable basis is to loosen the labor market, increase competition for jobs, and otherwise cut down on people's discretionary income—so they can't afford to pay higher prices. And who likes that?
Another theory held for a time that the only people benefiting from the surprisingly positive economic news were the relatively wealthy, who had money to invest in stocks; everyone else—so this theory went—was actually worse off, even as wages were climbing and unemployment remained low, because the cost of living was rising faster than their pay. Yet, this has changed in recent months: real wages have started climbing again too. Pay is now outpacing inflation. So that theory doesn't appear to explain what we're seeing now.
Another theory—more psychologically astute, perhaps—posits that people are unhappy about the current state of the nation, because the positive things that the current economy is delivering are exactly the ones that people tend to attribute to their own efforts and intrinsic merits, whereas the negative things about the current economy are the ones they tend to associate with external forces. (I recall seeing this take in the New York Times somewhere last year, but I can't now track down the reference; I'll try to summarize it here as best I can recall it.)
After all, this theory goes, the worse thing about the present economy is its elevated prices (and they do remain high, by recent standards, even as the pace of inflation has slowed to more manageable levels). And people tend to blame outside forces for high prices, whereas they applaud themselves for being employed or for getting a raise at work. Most people, when they get promoted or take home extra pay, don't think to themselves—ah, the economy must be looking up; thanks Joe Biden! Instead, they say: well, it's about time! I've always deserved this! Finally, people are seeing my true worth!
I do wonder, though, if this argument is a bit lacking in empathy. It assumes that other people are being irrational and tries to account for it by psychological factors. I wonder if a more fruitful approach might not be to start with ourselves. Let us look inward, and ask: are we happy with the economy? And in some ways, the answer for me is yes (just as confidence and optimism among other American consumers seem to be gradually improving in recent surveys as well). I've been positioned to benefit from the growth in the stock market, for instance, and in many respects I'm better off now than I was before the pandemic.
Yet, when I look inside, I too feel that there's something fundamentally worse about the present economy, versus the one we had before the pandemic. Maybe it's just our inveterate tendency to idealize the past—even the recent past. But I feel that there was some complacency that I had in, say, 2019, that I can't recapture now. It's not that my life was easier then: in many respects, it was actually harder. I was traveling nearly every other week for work; I was trying to take care of a condo; my life was in many ways more complicated and hectic than it is today. So it's not that my life got harder. To the contrary.
What then am I discontented about? Part of the answer seems to be that, hard as my life was before the pandemic, I accepted it. I worked hard, I traveled every other week, because I assumed I had to. This is what adult life was like. It was a series of burdens and responsibilities, which could not be escaped.
What changed with the pandemic was that, for a few brief months at least, I lost this conviction. It turned out: it didn't have to be that way. For that first period of the pandemic lockdown—we relieved each other and ourselves of the terrible burden of obligations. And we largely did so by lowering our expectations of ourselves and others. We said: you don't have to make a special effort; we're all in the same situation; we're all struggling; we're all in this together. If you can't make this meeting, no problem—we'll catch you up on it afterwards.
I even showed up to a Zoom room one time, during that era, with my hair sticking up at three ends because I'd literally just rolled out of bed, and I hadn't even bothered to look at myself in a mirror before opening the call. It was embarrassing, to be sure—but mostly just funny. Everyone laughed, but more fundamentally, accepted and forgave it. Because it was the pandemic.
I wonder then, if part of what Americans are responding to in the current economic malaise, is a sort of collective nostalgia for this brief period of freedom.
We may know, intellectually, that we can't stay home from work indefinitely. We may know the government can't afford to pay us not to work for the rest of time—at least not without driving up inflation and causing other negative downstream economic and social consequences. But that doesn't mean we are going to be happy about that fact. It doesn't mean we'll be turning cartwheels at the prospect of going back to the office and getting back on a plane every other week—or be expected once again to show up for meetings on time and in a fit condition for society.
We may realize too that, compared with life in 2019, life in 2024 is actually better. It's easier to find work now that it was then; the labor market is still tight; it's easier to get a raise; real wages are rising. As a whole, we are all more prosperous—the economy has grown since then, in spite of all the predictions to the contrary. But—inwardly—we aren't really comparing our lives now to life in 2019. We are comparing it to March-May 2020, when we all got to work from home and/or receive free stimulus checks and expanded unemployment payments in the mail.
We are comparing our lives today, that is to say, to that brief period of time when we were free. Why would we celebrate returning to the cage we had lived in before that time—even if, when we come back to the cage, we find that it is slightly more spacious than it was before; slightly better ventilated, with slightly more sunlight? It's still a cage. We still resent having to return to it.
In one of his many wonderfully wrathful satirical poems, "Wages," D.H. Lawrence compares working in the economy to a universal prison; and who does not feel that way about it now—who is excited that we can step back into that prison, even if conditions there have improved since our last visit? All the world's a stage, Shakespeare said; but perhaps it would be better to say—following Lawrence—that all the world's a cage. And who likes a cage?
But—we always lived in and tolerated that cage before, right? So why should we have such trouble adjusting to it now? Why can't we accept what had always seemed natural and inevitable to us before? Why can't we just fall back into our previous routine—office, commute, travel, repeat?
The answer is, surely, that it is far harder to return to a prison after one has escaped it, than it is to simply accept a cage that one has never left. In his novel Elective Affinities, Goethe writes of "the delusion you can return to an earlier, more circumscribed condition once you have left it, that the forces you have once set free will let you tie them down again." (Hollingdale trans.) He was talking in that case about marriage—his central couple, Eduard and Charlotte, find they cannot return to the complacency of their prior marital state, after introducing two disruptive new love interests into their midst. But the point surely applies to the economy too.
If the government thinks we will all be pleased about the fact that we can find jobs again, that we can take home higher wages—they are forgetting that we all hate jobs; and that we wish we didn't have to earn wages in the first place. We resent the good things about the current economy, therefore, above all because they are precisely the type of economic goods that serve to remind us of our servitude. We don't want to have to go back inside the prison walls. We don't want to "return to an earlier, more circumscribed condition," as Goethe puts it. Please, don't make us go back! Let is stay in the lockdown!
"But," society replies—"how can you want to return to the pandemic lockdown? Was that not the most unfree era of them all? Are you not glad to be able to earn your living again; to find a job; to go to the office; to travel all over the country again?" And society has a point. To be free to earn a wage is a whole lot better than the known alternatives. But that doesn't mean we'll actually be glad about that fact.
As Lawrence sardonically ends his poem, after summing up the prison condition of the global economy: "This is called universal freedom."
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