By many metrics, the US economy is humming along. The jobs market is robust; consumers are spending again; and inflation has eased to a three-year low.
No doubt many people are suffering. But wages for the lowest quintile have been outpacing inflation for the past year. Which means that overall, most of those in the lowest quintile are better off now than they were a year ago. Of course, doing better is not the same as doing well.
This isn’t new. The cost of living always goes up. It’s supposed to. Because when it goes down, you are in a recession and probably about to lose your job.
The goal of public policy is to benefit the public as a whole. So the average will always be a more useful metric than the experience of an individual, or even a hundred individuals.
Removed by mod
No doubt many people are suffering. But wages for the lowest quintile have been outpacing inflation for the past year. Which means that overall, most of those in the lowest quintile are better off now than they were a year ago. Of course, doing better is not the same as doing well.
They were still in a horrible situation a year ago, so they’re better off but still bad.
Meanwhile the CoL has only gotten worse year on year, every year.
This isn’t new. The cost of living always goes up. It’s supposed to. Because when it goes down, you are in a recession and probably about to lose your job.
Yes, and on average each human has roughly 0.98 testicles.
The goal of public policy is to benefit the public as a whole. So the average will always be a more useful metric than the experience of an individual, or even a hundred individuals.
By that logic, Medicare for All would only cover less than one testicle
Except testicle coverage is a policy, not a valid metric. A valid metric is the outcome of a policy, like average deaths from testicular cancer.
Yes, and if we simply remove the excess testicles from those who have them, we could halve testicular cancer rates.
That wouldn’t work unless the only metric you cared about was deaths from testicular cancer.