real median household income
2019: 83,260
2020: 81,580
2021: 81,270
2022: 79,500
2023: 82,690
2024: 83,730
cpi
2019: 1.81
2020: 1.23
2021: 4.70
2022: 8.00
2023: 4.12
prime age employment to population ratio:
2019: rises slowly from 79.8 to 80.4
2020: peaks at 80.6 in Jan, bottoms out at 69.6 in April
2021: rises steadily to 79.2
2022: around 80 most of the year, ends at 80.2 in dec
2023: around 81 most of the year, ends at 80.5 in dec
2024: around 80.5 most of the year (where it has roughly stayed since)
real personal consumption:
2019: 13,948
2020: 13,597
2021: 14,792
2022: 15,237
2023: 15,628
2024: 16,089
(for all of these i googled "FRED" + the statistic in question, if you want to check my numbers)
the beef i have with "‘23 and ‘24 were worse than ‘21 and ‘22 economically, and I was mad at economists for not understanding that" is that the core of the vibecession discourse is that almost every single economic measure showed that 23 and 24 were in fact way better than 21 and 22! the numbers bear this out! most measures you would ordinarily look at to check how most people were doing in the economy was way better in 23 and 24 than it was in 21 and 22.
and--not to relitigate the whole thing!--but these measures are in fact useful. and AIUIhistorically they are roughly correlated with economic sentiment. in 23 and 24, they became uncoupled entirely. this is weird! this requires an explanation! some explanations are "well, by some metrics the economy was not better in 23 and 24; household savings rates, housing affordability, and the poverty rate (especially post-expanded CTC expiry) were worse. price levels were certainly worse." but this is also a claim that requires a historical anomaly. historically these indicators do not track economic sentiment at all. so even if they explain the shift in economic sentiment, we have to explain why they became relevant suddenly in 2023, when historically they have not been very relevant.
is it 1) republican economic sentiment has always been quite sensitive to who is in power, and democratic economic sentiment was unusually underperforming in those years? is it 2) a social media effect catalyzed by people who really were still struggling in those years and other people noticing and it shaping their view of the economy, making previously unimportant economic indicators suddenly more salient? is it perhaps 3) mostly a social media effect moderated by cynicism enhanced by the fact that nobody really personally liked biden, and it was convenient to blame him for whatever was annoying you at the time?
maybe! but for all those explanations i would say the label "vibecession" is roughly appropriate, and the claim that "the economy really was worse in 23 and 24" is not, when applied generally, actually true. it was certainly worse for people dependent on the expanded CTC! is that enough to explain the general decline in sentiment, or the fact that people tended to report in surveys that they personally were doing fine (even their state was doing fine) but that the american economy in general was doing poorly, according to their perception? i am open to this explanation, but i will confess i am very skeptical, and i don't think people who advocate for this explanation have the data to really back that claim up!