Is the Coalition’s economic pitch out of date?
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So when Morrison warns us to fear Labor’s economic damage because “the economy is real, its impacts are real, and most importantly it’s all about people”, he neatly captures the most serious problem he faces. Yes, in a very obvious sense the economy is real. But in another sense it isn’t real at all. It’s an abstraction; an aggregation of millions of arrangements and interactions distilled into a series of numbers.
But people’s lives don’t exist in aggregate, they exist in the particular. What we call the economy is experienced in lots of particular ways by lots of different people. And mostly, the broad, overarching numbers we use to define the economy aren’t directly experienced by any of us.
Unless the circumstances are quite extreme, you do not experience an unemployment rate. What you experience is either your own employment or unemployment. What you definitely experience is whether or not you’ve had a meaningful pay rise in the last five years. And if you haven’t, it doesn’t mean much to be told the economy is growing. In fact, it’s probably irritating.
Once people make this cleavage between theory and experience, it’s the concrete things that begin to be more persuasive. And here it’s a major problem for the Coalition in that it has almost nothing to say about wages that isn’t simply more theory.
Article source: https://hollywoodlife.com/2018/11/19/ariana-grande-kisses-courtney-chipolone-instagram/
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