There’s No Place Like Home

It’s not quite the economy, stupid. Affordability has become the core issue and key buzzword of the upcoming midterms. But what do people, particularly young ones, mean when they say it? It turns out that when you ask people about affordability, they’re not necessarily talking about “the costs of goods that surged in the wake of the pandemic, like gas, cars and food.” In the NYT (Gift Article), Nate Cohn tries to make sense of the latest polling on the topic, and to explain why there’s a somewhat unusual disconnect between the concerns about affordability and the overall job market and economy. What people seem to be most disillusioned about is “the rising price of entry for a middle-class life: buying a home; paying for child care, college and health care; saving for retirement, and so on. These are familiar issues in American politics, but they add up to an entirely different problem under the all-encompassing label of affordability. The difficulty of purchasing a ticket to the middle class has created a sense that the economy isn’t working, even when the economy isn’t so bad by usual measures like growth or unemployment.” What Americans Really Mean by Affordability. Among young people, there seems to be a general sense that they can afford a hat, but they don’t believe they’ll ever have a place to hang it. “Around half of them said they worried most about affording housing, more than every other item combined, including retirement, health care, education, bills, cars and food.” (Attached ballroom, optional…)