Is the Bidenconomy “Bad” if You’re an Educated Worker?
An inquiry, by a man armed with vibes and iffy statistics
The unending online discourse war between the center-left and the left has many fronts. They are bloody. This week, nowhere has the battled raged more fiercely than on the topic of how much people hate the Bidenconomy.
They really do hate it! Everyone does. Even many Democrats.
Meanwhile, people think the Trumpconomy absolutely rocked.
Inquiring center-left minds on Twitter are baffled by this.
They’re baffled, because by the numbers, the Bidenconony does have a lot going for it, enough to stave off an obvious Trump W on the issue. Wage-growth for lower income people in a tight labor market has been exceptionally strong, even in the face of inflation. In half of the country, the unemployment rate is at or near record lows. Inflation has continued to drop and drop from its 2021 peak, weakening its appeal as the sole culprit of widespread economic dismay.
The left has a ready explanation for the economic pessimism: people are displeased because of the existing inequalities and the many nightmares inherent to the American economy. Crushing debt of all kinds. An insanely expensive, totally-baffling healthcare system. An ongoing housing crisis. All of these grievances are broadly correct, and I completely agree with not missing the forest for the trees; little improvements don’t hide the big ugly reality a lot of people contend with every day in this country. Certainly, I’m someone who’s wistful for the days when progressives and socialists actually still talked about Medicare for All.
But it’s hard for me to see why it’s all so much more dire relative to the Trumpconomy in particular, rather than just in general. None of these valid grievances would explain why people love Trump’s economy more than Biden’s, who certainly was not making much headway on socialized medicine or wealth redistribution.
So what gives?
I mean, it’s not that hard to invent theories that square the circle: when you ask people “is the economy good?,” they answer as if what you’re actually asking is, “do you like the President?” And people haven’t liked the President since immediately after the Afghanistan withdrawal, a decidedly non-economic event that (stupidly) convinced many people he was out of his element. Biden’s also old as hell, which 77% of voters say they dislike. I would strongly agree that the left is correct about ongoing grievances about the economy the average worker should have, but again, it would be weird to argue that Trump was handling those issues well. Relative to 2019, Biden just has a bad case of Old and Bad Vibes.
But here’s the thing—who really knows? I can’t speak for The Common Workingman, since I’m an educated fancylad. Honestly, many of the people who opine on how everyday working people writ-large feel about the economy are also educated fancylads (or aspiring media figures, or both), which I find annoying. It’s just a very large group of people to speculate about.
But, I can speculate about why so many young-ish college educated workers insist (loudly and passionately) that things might just be worse than they were under Trump. We hear about from them a lot, because Twitter users are disproportionately younger, more educated, and more Democratic than the public in general.
Do a significant chunk of college educated young workers pine for the Trumpconomy? According to the Pew chart up above, it seems like it. 39% of Dem and Dem-leaning voters liked Trump’s economy, and that number has fallen to just 28% approving of Biden’s. Among these generally-Democratic voters, young people writ large have been very down on Biden for awhile. So it’s likely.
But I don’t think it’s only about money, exactly.
Most people can see that many college educated young workers feel they’ve got a raw deal in their careers. Getting a college degree is still pretty much worth it, in terms of lifetime earnings. But even setting aside the debt, vibes-wise, I’d say young college educated workers feel like they aren’t getting exactly what they expected out of the choices they’ve made. This idea has been sort of a fixation of mine, for awhile now.
Much ink has been spilled about the rise of “bullshit jobs,” and “email jobs,” how a more college-educated modern workforce in the U.S. has led to a lot of positions that might be decently comfortable day-to-day, but which, well, can seem pointless and unsatisfying to do. And for a class of educated people taught to aspire to find genuine personal meaning in what they do each day, this really does suck.
Office Space tried to warn us…
Anecdotally, I know a pretty large number of people with college degrees who are 1) Not using their degree to work in the field they got that degree in, but wish that they were, and/or 2) Are using it for email-jobs that have some cushy WFH benefits, but are worse paid and precarious-feeling compared to how the ideal of an educated profession had been sold to millennials. Back in 2013, only 27% of college graduates had a job related to their major, something that I can’t imagine has changed much since. According to one recent survey, 28% of recent college graduates are working at jobs that only require a high school diploma; 6% have jobs with no education requirements at all. And 84% of recent grads say finding a job was ‘very’ or ‘somewhat’ difficult.
This isn’t even touching on the actual economic precarity that college educated workers might be feeling and that—reasonable or not—they feel their educational efforts should have entitled them to avoid. That was the deal, after all.
This tweet got me thinking more about the issue:
Why do people talk about just “finding a job” in such generalized ways? A disproportionate majority of Twitter users are college degree holders, many of whom report difficulty finding employment. When someone like Swann says it’s never been easier to find a job, the numbers seem to indicate this is true. You can find a job. But for many educated types, I’m going to guess it’s hard to fine the job they were imagining for themselves when they went off to college.
By the numbers, it seems like the dreams don’t work out and everyone has an email gig, if they’re lucky. Does a glut of service or email jobs matter when your grievance is not enough people hiring academics or copy editors? This explains the many educated people on Twitter who get very upset if you say that it’s easy to find a job these days.
So, to summarize the stats-and-vibes casserole I’m throwing in the oven here: what we have are college workers-educated who feel uniquely aggrieved about where their careers put them in society relative to their educational efforts, both in terms of salary and job security, but also in terms of the social status and satisfaction their job grants them. These young educated people are overwhelmingly left-wing. They expect life to be bad under a GOP President and have an ideological predisposition to dislike the economic decisions a GOP President makes. Nobody’s blowing their top about it.
But thanks to ongoing education polarization, almost all of these young aggrieved people are crammed into one party, and have the expectation that this one party is the only one willing to able to fix things for them. Political trifectas are rare, and Joe’s came and went without the dramatic change highly-ideological young educated people might be craving. The economy sucks under a Republican, it’s natural and expected. It sucks for me under a Democrat (i.e., nothing about my life is fixed, my job is still unsatisfying, underpaid and bleak), it’s failure or malice on the part of Sleepy Joe.
And it doesn’t help that while some of these grievances are economic in a raw dollars-and-cents way, many grievances are about educated workers just not liking their jobs—and expecting that, as educated workers, they really should like their jobs.
So many such workers, when asked how they feel “the economy” is doing under Joe Biden, smash the Dislike button with a sense of vengeance. In my personal experience, young educated people under Trump were really much, much more worked up about rising white nationalist hate groups and the Muslim ban than they were about Trump not working to fix the more particular of the college educated young person economic-satisfaction grievances.
I think most of these upset young-ish people are very sympathetic, even if they shouldn’t report more dismay over the objective state of the Bideonconomy than Trump’s. There’s a really large number of college educated workers who have been totally screwed with debt, derailed by the ‘08 crash, and floundered around through high rents and a tough housing market that permanently put them on a worse economic trajectory in life. You can dislike an idealized vision of meritocracy and still feel something for people who made the “right” choices only to hate their job all day without much of an upward path in life. But, if we were on Earth 2 and several years into a Bernie Sanders presidency, I think a lot of these problems would still be unaddressed.
There’s also a small-ish yet, unsympathetic, and deep aggravating minority who seem to think their economic grievances would be fixed by a socialist economy—except they think that a socialist economy is one where basically nobody needs to work, or, where everyone will be entitled to a high-paid, high-prestige creative or academic gig. I would just ignore these people, they’ll make you sour. And some of them are 19 years old.
Bottom line, I expect that this unusual pessimism about Democratic-run economies in particular will persist within my demographic cohort independent of this or that reasonably encouraging economic trend. It will persist for as long as there is a cultural gap between the expectation of the comfort and satisfaction a college degree can earn you, and the reality of how our economy has made a college degree the new high-school diploma.