9/7/20
Are you better off now than you were in July? On the face of it, that shouldn’t even be a question. After all, stocks are up; the economy added more than a million jobs in “August” (I’ll explain the scare quotes in a minute); preliminary estimates suggest that G.D.P. is growing rapidly in the third quarter, which ends this month. But the stock market isn’t the economy: more than half of all stocks are owned by only 1 percent of Americans, while the bottom half of the population owns only 0.7 percent of the market. But an economy’s success should be judged not by impersonal statistics, but by whether people’s lives are getting better. And the simple fact is that over the past few weeks the lives of many Americans have gotten much worse. Obviously this is true for the roughly 30,000 Americans who died of Covid-19 in August — for comparison, only 4,000 people died in the European Union, which has a larger population. between Labor Day and school re-openings, there’s a pretty good chance that the virus situation is about to take another turn for the worse. But things have already gotten worse for millions of families that lost most of their normal income as a result of the pandemic and still haven’t gotten it back. Despite job gains we’re in the midst of a huge increase in national misery.
In normal times a gain of 1.4 million jobs would be impressive, even if some of those jobs were a temporary blip associated with the census. But we’re still more than 11 million jobs down from where we were in February. And the situation remains dire for the hardest-hit workers. The pandemic slump disproportionately hit workers in the leisure and hospitality sector. In part because of where the slump was concentrated, the unemployed tend to be Americans who were earning low wages even before the slump. So the economy is still bypassing those who need a recovery most. Yet most of the safety net that temporarily sustained the economic victims of the coronavirus has been torn down. The bottom line here is that before you cite economic statistics, you want to think about what they mean for people and their lives. The data aren’t meaningless: A million jobs gained is better than a million jobs lost, and growing G.D.P. is better than shrinking G.D.P. But there is often a disconnect between the headline numbers and the reality of American life, and that is especially true right now. The fact is that this economy just isn’t working for many Americans, who are facing hard times that — thanks to political decisions by Trump and his allies — are just getting harder.
