What economic issues matter to voters and how might these issues affect the 2024 election?

The latest episode of the Business & Society podcast, a joint production of the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business and Michigan News, explores those issues based on findings from the Ross Financial Times poll.

Business professors Brian Connolly, Jerry Davis and Erik Gordon discuss housing, inflation, the role of partisanship in processing information and the new tools and algorithms being used to raise prices.

Perceived vs. real inflation

“The numbers maybe do not capture the experience as lived by people,” Gordon said. “So, if you say to people, ‘Look, inflation numbers are down,’ people say, ‘Your number says what it says, but price increases are our number one issue.’

“(President Biden)’s got numbers on his side and keeps saying over and over again, ‘Listen up everybody, the numbers are good.’ And after hearing that month after month, people finally came to the conclusion of, ‘You’re just completely disconnected from us.”

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Gen Z & millennial housing crisis

“Based on the data that I’ve seen, wages have actually increased more in the last four years than a lot of prices, particularly for things like food and consumer goods,” Connolly said. “Housing prices have outpaced wage increases for a long time now, not just in the last three and a half years or four years of Biden being president. Home prices have outpaced wage increases, I think, over the last 20 or 30 years.

“We do see in the poll that … housing is the number one economic issue or top-two or three issue they’re concerned about. That’s probably because people in their 20s and 30s are thinking about buying a house. Whereas if you’re 60 and you’ve been living in your house for the last 30 years and you have no plans to buy a house, you may not be as concerned about that issue.”

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The role of partisanship in processing information

“Tribe seems to be one of the most important driving forces … basically we’re living in different worlds, paying attention to different news sources,” Davis said. “Our understanding of the facts of the case are really different, and it’s remarkable that I haven’t seen any movement towards coming to a common viewpoint.

“It’s hard to know what would be a news source that we all agreed, ‘Yeah, that one I believe.’ If you can’t believe government statistics about inflation, it’s gonna be really hard for us to come together with some common viewpoint. … It’s identity politics, but the identity that matters is party affiliation.”

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Business & Society is co-produced by JT Godfrey of the Ross School of Business and Jeff Karoub of Michigan News. The audio engineer is Jonah Brockman and editorial production is provided by Mads Henke. Listen to all episodes of the podcast.