RUCHIR SHARMA
A key question still looming over the US election is why voters give Joe Biden so little credit for an apparently robust economic recovery. Many observers dismiss this as a “vibecession” — a case of bad “vibes” created by partisan media and divorced from reality — with only occasional apologies for how condescending this sounds.
While it is a fact that the US economy has of late been growing at a relatively rapid pace, normal people don’t live for quarterly GDP numbers, and their loss of faith in the system is a generational story. Ninety per cent of Americans born in the 1940s grew up to earn more than their parents, but that figure fell steadily to half of those born in 1980, and today barely more than a third of US adults say they are better off than mom and dad.
With public debt at record highs, nearly half of Americans say they will depend on government help in retirement — but most don’t trust the government to deliver promised benefits. Nearly seven in 10 say the economic and political system needs “major changes or to be torn down entirely”.
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