Explanatory Miseries

Let's ask why there was a market for stories about inflation in the first place.

Saw this interesting post by the excellent Mark Copelovitch and by Michael Wagner who I don’t know, but who I am sure is lovely. It shows pretty clearly that the anti-incumbent wave of the past year was driven not by the economy, but the perception of the economy. It builds off of their past research, where they found “the single greatest determinant of voters’ concerns with inflation in the US, in 2022, was not any measure of material well-being, but rather the amount of media – and especially conservative media like Fox News and talk radio – one consume[d].”

There are some new things in this post I had not seen elsewhere. For instance, people’s knowledge of current prices was actually quite good — it was their sense of increase which was bad. And as far as the “but with rent people are struggling” argument, the researchers found a clever question to route around the partisan dimension of such answers, asking if the respondents could pay a large unexpected bill of between 500 and 4,000 dollars, most said they could. Less than 20% expressed they would not be able to pay an unexpected bill of that size. While no level of precarity is great, this was not an electorate that felt on the whole particularly precarious.

And yet 40% or respondents think — or claimed to think — the economy is in recession. Over 70% think it has stayed the same or gotten worse.

There’s a couple places you can go with this. One is to say that people’s perceptions of the economy have been warped by the media that they consume. They feel pain and anger about things that are in fact imaginary, or that are much smaller problems than they believe. And I think that is a fine way of seeing it.

There’s another approach to this, though, and it comes back to one of my favorite nuggets from the history of rumor studies.

You see, back in the 1930s, there was a terrible earthquake in India. Entire communities were decimated. Researchers, seeing an opportunity for field work began to collect false rumors that were swirling around in India at that time.

Now what they anticipated was that the places that were hardest hit would have the most rumors. Instead, they found the opposite. The places that had been spared had the most rumors — about roving bands of looters about to descend on them, about reports of a coming second earthquake.

What a young researcher named Leo Festinger realized was that the people dealing directly with the tragic consequences of the earthquake felt a close match between the world outside their window and what they felt. They felt devastated, and they looked out their window and saw devastation. The people who had been spared, on the other hand, heard many stories of devastation from afar which unsettled them, but when they looked out their windows they saw ordinary life continuing in a normal way. This disconnect between their inner state and the outer world created a market for rumors to try to justify their unsupported feelings as reasonable. With the rumors provided, they weren’t simply nervous worriers — they were concerned about the second earthquake that was coming, and did you hear that a band of looters was headed this way?

These insights would later inspire cognitive dissonance theory, but the smaller observation is useful as well. In the 1970s, Terry Ann Knopf would show that similar dynamics drove rumors around race. People knew that their feelings about people of other races were not justified or socially acceptable. In a perfect world, they’d confront the fact that those feelings made them an unreasonable person driven by bias. But we don’t live in a perfect world, so the easier path is to seek out, consume, and spread false stories about what Black men (or Haitian immigrants) are doing.

It’s not that you’re racist, after all, it’s that they are eating dogs. It’s that they are planning a violent overthrow. It’s that they are truly dangerous. There’s all these stories, you see.

And the same pattern exists in election process rumor as well. A person believes themselves to be a defender of democracy, but they also don’t want to abide by the result of an election. They can decide they are not who they claim to be (hard). They can decide that they are who they claim to be and accept the results (hard). Or they can seek out and consume lies that say really the true winner of the election was the person they supported (easy). One simple trick and you can preserve your self-image that you are a defender of democracy — while seeking autocratic rule.

I’ve gotten further afield of the inflation question than I meant to here. But to bring it back — it’s possible that people were told they were hurting from inflation, and felt that hurt was real, and reacted to that hurt. That’s almost certainly an ingredient here. But it could also be that the stories about inflation were welcome because they helped justify other feelings or behaviors.

What could that be? I’m not writing question panels, so I don’t really know. And to be clear, I am not saying the experience of inflation was fully imaginary, or anything like that. But the sheer number of stories people consumed about it remind me a bit of that rumor market that developed in India post-earthquake.

I think status anxiety is always a candidate, of course. And claims of economic hardship are sometimes used to justify votes for people that you know you shouldn’t be voting for. It’s a respectable thing to claim economics to defend what your social circle may think is a disrespectable vote for other reasons. Even if its the disrespectable reasons that deep down you support. The fact that the more you tune into the right-wing media ecosystem, the more you buy this story is an indication of that. That ecosystem is a well-honed justification engine that has long served exactly this purpose.

But the election wasn’t just about those people, but about those that stayed home. For those not in that ecosystem, I do wonder if there is something else going on as well. After the inflation died down many of us had made it through the pandemic, after all. We were, in some ways, the people the earthquake had spared. And yet I think a lot of us did not feel restored to what we were, for a variety of reasons that are not psychologically simple. We look outside, like those spared by the Indian earthquake, and see a world that is whirring with innovation, activity, and commerce. We look at what we’re earning and we know it’s better.

I’m not committing to this idea, but I do want to raise it — what if we know we should be feeling better, and we just don’t? What if we can see that things are stabilizing, and yet things still feel precarious?

We could do some deep psychological digging to find out what that is all about. Or we could look at the grocery bill, and think — oh, right, that’s what it is.

We’re not broken after all. It’s just those high prices. It’s just this damn recession.