In baseball, it’s commonplace to judge early-career pitchers by looking at the velocity with which they throw. Faster pitches are harder to hit, the thinking goes, and speed is relatively easy to measure. And it’s true that, all else being equal, speed is a useful tool for a pitcher.
But it isn’t a perfect indicator. Knuckleballs move more slowly than any other nongimmick pitch, but they can fool batters with their distinct wobble. (They can fool catchers, too. Bob Uecker was a catcher in his playing days and one of his pitchers was a knuckleballer. When a reporter asked Uecker if knuckleballs were hard to catch, he responded that they’re easy: All you have to do is wait for them to stop rolling and pick them up.) A good knuckleballer will fail the velocity test every time. Yet some knuckleballers go on to Hall of Fame careers.
Velocity is a partial indicator, but it’s not the goal. The goal is getting batters out, and there are other ways to do that. Teams that mistake the indicator for the goal put themselves at a disadvantage.
We’re making a similar error with the economy. We’re mistaking an indicator for the goal and, as a result, putting ourselves in a spot to make matters worse.
For instance, take the unemployment rate.
In the U.S., the official unemployment rate doesn’t count incarcerated people or people who aren’t actively looking for work. (Given that we have the highest incarceration rate in the world, that’s significant.) Sometimes the official rate actually ticks up for a bit during rapid economic expansions because more “discouraged workers” decide that the water is warm enough to jump back into the labor pool; once they start looking, they’re counted, and until they’re hired they’re counted as unemployed.
All of that is well-known, but there’s a more basic issue that doesn’t get nearly as much attention.
As any job seeker knows, there are jobs and then there are jobs. Someone who gets laid off from a professional job that pays enough to support a family and whose kids are in college or getting there probably doesn’t consider a minimum-wage part-time fast food job a realistic option. The issue isn’t employment per se; it’s about supporting a family at a culturally respected level while doing recognized work. That’s not the same thing. Low-end jobs pay so much less relative to the cost of living than they used to that “employment” per se doesn’t indicate what it once did.
As anyone born after about 1990 knows, housing affordability is a similarly flawed measure. In surveys it’s usually defined as paying less than 30 percent of one’s income for housing, whether in the form of rent or mortgage payments. But to someone who’s stuck renting with a roommate because solo apartments, let alone houses, are financially out of reach, affordability means something else: It means being able to live the way they consider appropriate. And those ways can change with life changes; a new job may require moving, and a new baby may require more space. It’s one thing to live like a student at 25; it’s quite another at 35 or 45. Someone stuck renting a room in a group house with a baby on the way might show up in the surveys squarely in the “affordable” column, but their frustration is real.
The common denominator to these examples is that measures that used to give a reliable sense of the economic climate don’t work as well as they used to. They paint a misleading picture, lending support to policies that are increasingly detached from most people’s daily reality. That detachment leads to frustration, providing the kindling with which bad-faith actors can try to burn it all down. If I’m looking to buy my first house with a baby on the way and everything costs twice as much as it did a few years ago, I don’t want to hear that the standard economic measures show that everything is fine. It clearly is not. If it were, I could afford a house. And I might lend an ear to someone who at least acknowledges the problem, even if their solutions are ridiculous or self-defeating.
In politics, the combination of official equality with unacknowledged inequality—and the privileges that come with that inequality—leads to a sense that the official language of politics is disconnected from reality. In theory, for instance, most of us probably agree that every child deserves a good school. But when it comes time to buy a house, there are “good” school districts and “bad” ones, for reasons we all sort of know but most of us don’t want to admit. Biases and judgments along lines of class and race are everywhere, but our politics—mostly—tries to pretend that they aren’t.
In that context, someone with an unofficial high rank who says the quiet part out loud can come across as a breath of fresh air: “Finally, someone who cuts through the BS!” But that approach, which is essentially an assertion of raw power, does much more damage than might be obvious at first glance. The tension between aspirational ideals—liberty, equality—and reality on the ground can be frustrating, but it can also be motivating. People have taken bullets for ideas. Insisting on taking high-minded language literally is a way to make the world better. Movements for equality have relied on taking aspirational language seriously and on holding to account the people who’ve used it instrumentally.
When the brash bully takes power, his appeal rests on giving up aspirations towards things getting better. Instead, his appeal relies on resolving the tension between aspiration and daily reality by giving up on aspiration. Why aren’t things better? It’s not because we’re failing to live up to our ideals, that we need to try harder to walk the walk—it’s because of those people. We’re blameless! We’re perfect! It’s all their fault!
Of course, political coalitions based on a strong leader crushing scapegoats need a constant supply of new scapegoats. What happens when the first group is thoroughly crushed, but most people notice their lives haven’t gotten any better? A new enemy has to be created. Every time a new enemy is created, the group of “good” people gets a little bit smaller. And even the “good” people start to notice that their real problems are only getting worse. With each new iteration of purging, it gets harder to sustain the illusion that this round will be different than all the others, that this round will finally bring the promised land. After all, they stopped believing in promised lands some time ago. That was the point.
The impulse to look for scapegoats is understandable, but it gets the problem wrong. The less powerful are not leeches on the more powerful; that’s not how power works. The problem is that we aren’t talking honestly about what’s wrong. Some of that is rooted in deliberate evasion, but some, I hope, comes from measuring the wrong things. That leads to solutions that only make matters worse.
We’re measuring velocity when the point is getting batters out. Those are not the same thing.
