Joe Biden and the Inversion of Reality

Americans are terribly misinformed about the state of the economy—at the expense of Joe Biden—and the media is partly to blame for it.

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I: Ignorance is not bliss

One of the problems with democracy is that people vote even if they are incredibly apathetic, ignorant, misinformed, or stupid. This isn’t an argument against democracy. Winston Churchill was right when he said that “democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” But it is a problem with democracy nonetheless.

A recent poll, for example, showed that only 56 percent of voters said that Donald Trump was to blame for the loss of the constitutional right to abortion in the United States, whereas 17 percent blamed Joe Biden. A further 13 percent didn’t know.

There is an incredibly clear-cut answer to this question.

Before Trump’s presidency, Roe v. Wade was established precedent. Then, Trump appointed three justices who all wanted to overturn Roe v. Wade. Subsequently, they did so. Biden had nothing to do with it. Trump had everything to do with it. Trump even claims credit for it. And still, 30 percent of voters either blame Biden, or don’t know who to blame.

Many of them will vote.

Unfortunately the delusions extend beyond abortion rights, to the economy—one of the most decisive factors in any election. Those delusions cut against Joe Biden—and could decide a close election. And we need to understand where they come from.

II: America is seriously rich

Americans are now significantly richer than their counterparts in peer countries. This is not a fact that many Americans understand, often imagining that countries like France, or Germany, or the UK, are about as rich as they are.¹ The reality is rather different. Americans aren’t just marginally richer than their European counterparts in developed, rich democracies. Let’s look at some data.

Here’s GDP per capita—basically a measure of total economic output divided by the number of people in the population:

• France: $40,886

• United Kingdom $46,125

• Germany: $48,717

• United States: $76,329

Yes, you’re reading those numbers correctly; the United States, on a per capita GDP basis, is nearly twice as rich as France. Americans are 45% richer than Germans. That’s a big difference.

Admittedly, the US is more unequal than other peer countries, there’s a far worse safety net, and there are countless social problems—not least the cost of health care and the perils of getting shot at random in public places—so I’m not trying to explain away the many broken aspects of America. I’m just trying to insist on a cold, hard fact: the United States is incredibly rich.

Crucially, America has also gotten much richer under Joe Biden’s presidency. But nobody seems to realize it.

III: Joe Biden and the Delusion of Gloom

According to a Harris poll commissioned by The Guardian, perceptions of the American economy are completely at odds with reality—to the detriment of Joe Biden and his re-election prospects.

If you, like me, despair for a world that is again swayed by the whims of a certain Donald Trump, get ready for your blood pressure to rise, because here are some of the poll’s maddening findings:

• 55% believe the economy is shrinking, and 56% think the US is experiencing a recession, though the broadest measure of the economy, gross domestic product (GDP), has been growing.

• 49% believe the S&P 500 stock market index is down for the year, though the index went up about 24% in 2023 and is up more than 12% this year.

• 49% believe that unemployment is at a 50-year high, though the unemployment rate has been under 4%, a near 50-year low.

Many Americans put the blame on Biden for the state of the economy, with 58% of those polled saying the economy is worsening due to mismanagement from the presidential administration.

Pardon me, let me just nip off and slam my head against a wall again (a favorite pastime of people, like me, who study democracy and feel intensely unpleasant emotions when contemplating its ongoing breakdown in favor of authoritarian demagogues).

These aren’t just slight misperceptions. This isn’t a few people in the population being sort of wrong about objective reality. No, this is something much worse.

This is the inversion of reality, which is the worst kind of misinformation that exists. Up is down, black is white, the stock market is crashing, except—no wait—it actually hit THE HIGHEST LEVEL EVER…again!

Don’t get me wrong: there are serious economic hardships in the United States. Nearly 40 million people are stuck in poverty. Inequality is grotesque. Costs have soared. Housing and healthcare are disastrous for millions. These engines of despair can’t be explained away, reasoned out of genuine lived experience with a few golden statistics.

But that’s not what I’m suggesting. I’m just suggesting that people should have a reasonably accurate sense of reality before they vote. If you vote on the basis that the economy isn’t serving you well, that’s completely defensible. Who cares what the unemployment rate is or what the stock market is doing if you don’t have a job, or if you can’t afford a house, or if you are struggling to pay for child care. Fair enough.

But millions of people are basing their political viewpoints about the economy on abstract, incorrect perceptions of macro-economic indicators that are completely detached from the truth. How does this show up in the data? Well, get ready for more depressing stats. Here’s how Paul Krugman captured it:

In the latest poll, of Michigan voters, only 35 percent of people said that the national economy was excellent or good, while 65 percent said it was not so good or bad. But when asked about their personal finances the proportions were basically reversed, with 61 percent saying that they were in excellent or good shape and 38 percent saying they were in not so good or bad shape.

There’s a pretty decent chance Michigan voters will decide the 2024 election.

Similarly, half the country thinks that unemployment is soaring out of control when it’s actually around the lowest it has been since The Jackson Five and Grand Funk Railroad were topping the music charts. (Sorry head, it’s back to the wall with you, I’m afraid).

This is Joe Biden’s problem in a nutshell: let’s call it the delusion of gloom. Objective reality is now divorced from voter perception, in a systematically pessimistic direction. The economy is better than Americans believe it to be.

Chalk some of this up to apathy or ignorance; after all, just 27 percent of American voters said they knew a fair bit about The Inflation Reduction Act, one of the most successful cornerstones of Biden’s domestic agenda. As I’ve written previously, the biggest hidden bias in politics is apathy bias, in which people just aren’t that well-informed about politics. And some of this effect may be to blame for these jarring poll numbers.

But the problem runs deeper—and the media has played a role in the delusion of gloom.

IV: The View from Nowhere

Jay Rosen, a professor at NYU, and one of the clearest voices in modern press criticism, disdainfully describes the “view from nowhere” approach in American journalism, in which there’s this bizarre attempt to imagine that the press is somehow an aloof, disembodied entity, detached from the world, impassively observing it and reporting on it, without any people involved—a sort of Wizard of Oz fantasy. “There’s no man behind the curtain! We just passively report on what people believe without acknowledging our role in shaping those beliefs!”

This manifests itself in the most frustrating kinds of articles—repeated over and over in recent months—which follow one of two broad frames:

1. New data: Voters believe the American economy is bad and blame Biden!

2. Why do Americans believe the economy is bad when it is actually good?

The former entrenches misperceptions without critical analysis. It worsens the problem because it repeats a distorted picture of reality.

The latter kind of articles at least try to examine the problem, but almost always involve twisted, convoluted theories of how there could be such a profound disconnect between reality and perception. Most of those explanations fixate on the idea that measurements of the economy—the macro-economic stats—don’t match with the lived experience of individuals and families. This is the explanation that’s most sympathetic to Trumpian-style populism: “So much for those fancy statistics; voters care about their own finances and those aren’t captured in the numbers!”²

But the poll Krugman cites above completely demolishes that line of argument in this political moment. Most people in Michigan, for example, feel good about the US economy personally, but they wrongly perceive that it’s bad in general.

So, the problem that the press needs to explain in those articles is this: why do most voters wrongly believe that the economy is terrible even if their lived experience of it is generally positive? Rarely do these chin-scratching articles ever figure out the most obvious answer: that the press is partly to blame—and that America’s information pipelines are broken, giving millions of voters a dangerously inverted sense of reality.

Voters make sense of the world based on schemas, mental shortcuts for navigating the world. These impressionistic understandings can be swayed profoundly by what voters are told from the information pipelines that provide them with news. As I’ve highlighted repeatedly, many of those information pipelines are now toxic, spewing propaganda, misinformation, or outright lies.

When the stock market hit a record high under Trump, it dominated news coverage—and was often framed as a story about Trump’s economic successes. When the stock market hits record highs under Biden, it’s often covered in a more muted way, and the link to Biden is far more implicit. There are certainly fair, reasonable critiques of Biden, but it’s clearly true that Biden gets political credit for virtually nothing, even though his presidency has been one of the more consequential periods of domestic policymaking in modern history.³

Similarly, because of the “banality of crazy,” Trump’s worst transgressions often form a news blip, whereas Biden’s comparatively small gaffes are headline news. This week, for example, Trump posted a video on social media that referred to his plans to create a “unified Reich.” That seems like rather a big, important story, no? When I checked The New York Times, it was the thirteenth top news story. Twelve news stories were deemed more important than the leading candidate for president promising a “unified Reich.”

What are we thinking?

This isn’t to say that Biden should get a free pass; there’s plenty that’s objectionable about his presidency, but he certainly isn’t on par with Trump—who called for extrajudicial killings of shoplifters, floated the idea of executing America’s top general, was found liable for rape, incited a deadly, violent insurrection aimed at overturning a democratic election, committed mass fraud for personal enrichment, is facing 91 separate counts of felony criminal charges, and has overtly planned a variety of authoritarian strategies for governing if he returns to power.

So, how do we deal with the inversion of reality and the delusion of gloom?

V: Reverting to Reality

In addition to Jay Rosen, another great press critic,

Margaret Sullivan

, has highlighted the media’s failures in an article appropriately titled “The public doesn’t understand the risks of a Trump victory. That’s the media’s fault.” In it, she writes what the press must do:

Report more – much more – about what Trump would do, post-election. Ask voters directly whether they are comfortable with those plans, and report on that. Display these stories prominently, and then do it again soon.

Use direct language, not couched in scaredy-cat false equivalence, about the dangers of a second Trump presidency.

If I were a reporter or editor in an American newsroom and I read that poll from The Guardian—showing that voters have an inverted sense of reality about the most basic facts of the economy or fundamentally misunderstand who was responsible for the loss of the constitutional right to abortion—I would feel like I had failed to do the most basic part of my job: informing the public.

Of course, the press can’t fix every bit of the misinformed public—too many people get their news from garbage sources like TikTok or YouTube or conspiracy theory podcasts and the New York Times has no control over that. But elite press outlets set agendas in American politics—they focus public attention and political discourse on the stories that they consider newsworthy. The broader failure to accurately inform the public should produce some introspection. If the press wants to figure out why voters have such an inverted sense of reality, perhaps one place to look isn’t in an arcane, counterintuitive theory, but rather by looking in the mirror.

There are still many months to go before the election in November, so there is time to correct these misperceptions. Nobody believes the press should act like a shill for Joe Biden. But we should all be able to agree: democracy cannot survive if voters are making decisions based on an inverted perception of objective reality.

Whether or not the press is willing to take a bit of mea culpa in stride, all news outlets in the United States should have a strong interest in ensuring that votes are cast in November based on a clear-eyed, objective, and accurate understanding of how the world is. After all, voters must know how the world is before they can cast a ballot to answer that bedrock question that forms the basis of democracy: how the world should be.

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1. This goes both ways. In my experience of nearly 13 years living in Britain, British people are not aware that GDP per capita is nearly twice as high in the US.

2. Sometimes, this is definitely true. For example, when the British government is touting its record with foreign direct investment, but people can’t afford groceries or energy bills, it’s sort of missing the point.

3. Some of this is also the fault of the Biden administration, which has not been as effective at touting accomplishments, or forcing the media to cover stories that are damaging to Trump by using the power of the White House to set news agendas.