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**NOVEMBER 21, 2023**
On the Prospect website
Senator Warren: The Urgency of This Moment Demands a Ceasefire
A "humanitarian pause" is insufficient to deal with the Gaza crisis. BY
ZACHARY D'AMICO & JULIANA AMIN
The Commodification of Everything
Understanding the deeper dynamics of predatory capitalism BY ROBERT
KUTTNER
Tesla Faces Off Against Nordic Labor Solidarity
The company refuses to play ball with its Swedish mechanics' union. So
the labor movement is shutting it down. BY RYAN COOPER
Meyerson on TAP
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**** It's the Social Media, Stupid
Americans' economic views are at odds with Americans' economic
behavior. So, whence those views?
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?
[link removed]
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.
~ HAROLD MEYERSON
Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter
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