Jared Bernstein takes on one of my favorite hobbyhorses today: the supposed anger of the American electorate. He concludes that, yes, the economy is in pretty decent shape, but:

For every statistic you can find, I can find one that tells if not a different story, a more nuanced one. Yes, the jobless rate is 5 percent, but the underemployment rate, juiced by 6 million part-timers who want full-time jobs, is a considerably less comfortable 9.7 percent. No question, wages are rising, but the major source of real income growth over the past year has been low inflation. Paychecks aren’t growing so fast as much as prices have been growing a lot more slowly.

….So I think I get why some people are unsatisfied with the economy and beyond. Growth hasn’t reached all corners by a long shot, and policymakers have too often been at best unresponsive to that reality and at worst, just plain awful.

I think this misses the point. Sure, no economy is perfect, certainly not this one. So of course you can always find plenty of things to kvetch about.

But why bother when you can just ask people directly how they’re doing? If you do that, you’ll find that their responses are fairly positive: better than in 2009, worse than in 1999. But overall, pretty unremarkable. No matter how many economic statistics you haul out, the bottom line remains the same: on average, Americans don’t say they’re any more or less happy about the economy than they usually are. So unless they’re lying, the economy just isn’t a big factor in the anger driving this year’s election.

So why are voters so angry? That’s a good question, except for one thing: it assumes that voters are angry in the first place. It’s true that if you go out and talk to people, you can find plenty of angry folks. That’s always the case, but it’s completely meaningless. The only interesting question is: Are Americans angrier than usual? It sure doesn’t look like it, does it?

You can take a look at every poll you want, and what you’ll find is that, generally speaking, Americans just aren’t unusually unhappy or unusually angry right now. They just aren’t. There’s virtually no serious data to suggest otherwise.

Except for one thing: Americans are pissed at the government. Especially Republicans. Among Democrats, trust in government since 1980 has bounced around a bit depending on who’s president, but it’s generally in the range of 20-40 percent. Among Republicans it’s more like a range of 10-60 percent:

Right now, trust in government is around 30 percent among Democrats, which is pretty average. But among Republicans it’s at a blood-boiling 10 percent—and has been for the past eight years. Obama’s presidency—presumably egged on by Fox News etc.—has sent them into an absolute rage about the government.

So if you want to know what’s going on, that’s it. In general, the economy is OK. Americans are fairly satisfied with their lives. Consumer sentiment is fine. Right track/wrong track has been pretty steady. Only one thing has really changed: The Republican base is furious about the Obama presidency.

That’s it. That’s your anger right there. That and nothing more.

Those newly unsealed documents in the Trump University case don’t paint a pretty picture of either the “university” or Donald Trump himself:

Jason Nicholas, another witness for the plaintiffs who worked as a sales associate for five months in 2007, also said he was appalled by what went on at the university. “They were unqualified people posing as Donald Trump’s ‘right-hand men,'” he wrote. “They were teaching methods that were unethical, and they had had little to no experience flipping properties or doing real estate deals. It was a facade, a total lie.”

In his sworn declaration, Mr. Schnackenberg [said] he quit his job after refusing to pitch the seminars to a couple that he thought couldn’t afford them. “They had no money to pay for the program but would have had to pay for the program using disability and taking out a loan based upon equity in his apartment.” He said another sales manager “talked them into buying a $35,000 seminar.”

And this:

Donald Trump was personally involved in devising the marketing strategy for Trump University, even vetting potential ads, according to newly disclosed sworn testimony from the company’s top executive taken as part of an ongoing lawsuit…“Mr. Trump understandably is protective of his brand and very protective of his image and how he’s portrayed,” Michael Sexton, Trump University’s president, said in the 2012 deposition. “And he wanted to see how his brand and image were portrayed in Trump University marketing materials. And he had very good and substantive input as well.”

And this:

Corrine Sommer, an event manager, recounted how colleagues encouraged students to open up as many credit cards as possible to pay for classes that many of them could not afford. “It’s O.K., just max out your credit card,” Ms. Sommer recalled their saying.

…Ms. Sommer recalled that a member of the Trump University sales team, who had previously sold jewelry, was promoted to become an instructor. He had “no real estate experience,” she said. She added that many of the instructors had the quality that the school seemed to value most: “They were skilled at high-pressure sales,” she said.

In other words, Trump was eager to squeeze every cent he could out of his students but played no role in choosing instructors or creating the curriculum. He cared about his image, but that was it. What a guy.

Elon Musk spends all his time on the Tesla factory floor these days. Based on what he’s learned, he says that “physics first” principles will soon produce a production revolution:

In a freewheeling talk before shareholders Tuesday, Musk said he and his Tesla team will completely rethink the factory process, hoping to bring “factors of 10 or even 100 times” in improvements in efficiency….“The most important point I want to make is … that we’ve realized that the true difficulty and where the greatest potential lies is in building the factory,” Musk said.

Charging the world’s best automotive factories with using outmoded and inefficient systems, Musk said, “We can make dramatic improvements to the machine that makes the machine. A lot of people will not believe us about this, but I am absolutely convinced this can be accomplished.”

Well, he’s right about a lot of people not believing this. Increasing the efficiency of an auto factory by 100x is way, way beyond anything Musk has ever done before. Compared to that, building a nice battery-powered car or landing a rocket at sea is child’s play. I’ll believe this when Musk does more than just talk about it.

Max Ehrenfreund points me today to a remarkable new study of vocational school students. We’re all aware in a sort of general way that for-profit vocational schools are basically a rip-off, but check out the chart on the right. On average, counting both grads and dropouts, students at for-profit schools earn less after leaving school than they did before. And even graduates don’t do very well: They earn only about $1,300 more than they did before, compared to $4,500 for community college grads.

The study was done by Stephanie Riegg Cellini and Nicholas Turner, and as usual, there are some caveats. Some of the negative effect may be driven by unreported tip income. The study ended in 2008, which means it might be picking up the first bits of the Great Recession. And it’s hard to infer causality: it’s almost certainly the case that better students enroll in community college programs in the first place.

All that said, however, the results are pretty stunning. Once you take into account the debt load from attending for-profit schools, virtually no one benefits. Even graduates probably never make up for the cost of the program.

With rare exceptions, there are three lessons here. First: Just don’t attend a for-profit vocational school. If you can’t attend a community college, skip the whole thing. Second: At the very least, don’t do it unless you’re absolutely, 100 percent sure you’re going to finish. If you drop out, you’ll most likely end up with a bunch of debt and a lower income than you had going in. Third: Don’t even think about going to a for-profit school to get a certificate in therapeutic services. That’s the biggest killer out there.

Donald Trump is pissed off again. Surprise! This morning he held a press conference to announce who was getting the money from his January veterans fundraiser, and immediately proceeded to tee off on the press for…lèse-majesté? I’m not sure what else to call it. Trump pretty plainly tried to avoid making the personal $1 million contribution he promised at the time, and now he’s outraged about being held accountable for this. Here’s a quick rundown.

Greg Sargent is a little tired of the current conventional wisdom about a Trump-Clinton general election:

Democrats should not underestimate Trump or imagine that defeating him will be easy….Democrats should obviously be prepared for any manner of attack that Trump will throw at [Hillary Clinton], and they’ll need to figure out how to create a more positive narrative around her.

Rather, the point is that we should stop over-inflating impressions of Trump’s strength. We should stop ascribing magical political powers to Trump based on the questionable notion that his “unconventional” and “unpredictable” campaign makes him a more formidable foe than anyone expected. Trump will be difficult to beat, but that might be mainly because these elections are always hard.

I’ll go a little further: chill out, people. Trump is likely to get at least 45 percent of the vote. That’s just the way our country works at the moment. Ditto for Hillary. There’s probably not much more than 10 percent of the electorate that’s really, truly undecided.

This means that at any given moment, all it takes is a tiny bump based on some outside event, combined with a little bit of normal poll error, to make either candidate look like a winner. Especially this early in the campaign, this stuff is meaningless. For what it’s worth, though, the very least you should do is rely on poll aggregations, not single polls. Sam Wang has personally investigated 2 quadrillion outcomes—and boy are his eyes tired—and figures that Hillary is currently likely to win the electoral college by 336-202. Likewise, Pollster puts Hillary ahead in the popular vote by 44-40 percent. This will flutter around, and there will be times when panic seems like the best response, but it’s probably not. It’s just life in 50-50 America.

Here’s a picture of the dashboard on my Mazda 3:

Answer: it points to the side of the car with the gas tank. This has become a standard feature of cars in the past few years, but apparently it’s still unknown to about 90 percent of the population. Not to readers of this blog, though. Now you know!

This may not seem very useful since you probably remember which side of the car your gas tank is on. But back in the day I used to drive a lot of rental cars, and this would have been pretty handy. I never paid attention to the gas tank, and you can’t see them from the side mirror, so about half the time I’d guess wrong and drive into gas stations on the wrong side. Mostly, of course, this was when I was headed back to the airport to turn in the car, and therefore in a little bit of a hurry, which made it all the more annoying.

But no more. No matter what car you’re driving now, you can instantly tell which side the gas tank is on. Progress marches on.

Over the weekend, Janell Ross interviewed a couple of experts in gender and politics to get their take on whether Hillary Clinton is held to a different standard than male candidates. Julie Dolan, a professor of political science at Macalester College in Minnesota, had this to say:

Clinton is the most experienced candidate in the field, but campaign rivals Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders are leveling attacks against her that she’s not qualified for the job. In doing so, they’re playing into a long-standing narrative that women lack what it takes to succeed in the male-dominated world of politics. The fact that two less-experienced male candidates are leveling this attack against her is telling. Neither Trump nor Sanders feels compelled to shore up their own credentials or justify their own relative lack of experience because they don’t need to; they benefit from a gendered double standard where men are automatically presumed qualified for public office and women are not.

This illustrates the problem of viewing politics through too narrow a lens. For starters, Hillary Clinton isn’t the most experienced candidate in the field. Bernie Sanders has served in Congress since 1991. That’s more experience than Hillary even if you count her years as First Lady. And while Trump has no political experience, he’s running on his business background—just as lots of other candidates have. This year alone Carly Fiorina and Ben Carson joined Trump in the Republican primary as candidates with no political experience at all.

Nor is it true that Hillary’s opponents have been slamming her for being unqualified—aside from the usual sense in which political candidates always claim to be better qualified than their opponents. There was a single incident in April where Hillary tiptoed a bit around the question of whether Bernie was qualified, which led to a misleading Washington Post headline (“Clinton questions whether Sanders is qualified to be president”), which in turn led to Bernie losing his temper and kinda sorta saying she’s not qualified if she’s taking lots of money from Wall Street. But even there, Bernie was pretty obviously using “unqualified” in the sense of “bad policies,” not in the sense of having too little experience.

As for Trump, again, there was a single incident a couple of weeks ago in which Hillary called him unqualified, and he naturally hit back in his usual nanner-nanner way: calling her judgment bad and saying she’s the one not qualified to be president. Just the usual Trump bluster.

Hillary Clinton simply isn’t the target of an unusual number of attacks on her experience and qualification. She’s rather famously running on the fact that she has more of those qualities than anyone else in the race, and no one has really disputed that. Quite the contrary: this year, having a lot of experience is something of a problem, one that both Sanders and Trump have capitalized on. If Hillary Clinton is being slammed for anything, it’s for being too qualified, not the opposite.

A few days ago Pew Research analyzed the latest census data and announced that we are now in record-setting territory: More adult children live at home with their parents than anytime in American history. This prompted a fresh barrage of hand-wringing about (a) the lousy economy and (b) the problems this is causing for millennials.

I’ll get to millennials and the economy in a bit, but first, here’s a chart that provides a longer-term look at young adults living at home:

That’s pretty odd, isn’t it? If the economy were the driving force behind kids moving into their parents’ basements, you’d expect to see these numbers go down during economic expansions and up during recessions. But that’s decidedly what we don’t see. The numbers went steadily up during both the Reagan and Clinton booms, with no trend change at all during the 1991 recession. Then the numbers fell from 1999 through 2005, which spans two expansions and one recession. Then they started up again, and kept going up even when the Obama expansion started to pick up some steam.

If the economy plays a role in this, it’s sure hard to see. So what’s really going on? Over at 538, Ben Casselman points us to Jed Kolko, who crunched a few numbers and concluded that it’s mainly about marriage and kids:

Alongside recent swings in the housing and job markets, there have been profound long-term demographic shifts that are related to young adults’ living arrangements….An especially important trend is that people are waiting longer today than in the past to get married and have kids — so the share of 18-34 year-olds who are married with kids has plummeted from 49% in 1970 to 36% in 1980, 32% in 1990, 27% in 2000, 22% in 2010, and just 20% in 2015. Unsurprisingly, married young adults and those with children are far less likely to live with their parents than single or childless young adults.

So what happens when you control for this, along with other demographic changes over the past few decades? Kolko: “Adjusted for demographic shifts, the share of young adults living in their parents’ home was actually lower in 2015 than in the pre-bubble years of the late 1990s. In other words, young people today are less likely to live with their parents than young people with the same demographics twenty years ago were.“

Kolko wisely recommends not trying to explain everything away with demographics: some of these demographic effects can interact with each other, while the causality of others might run in the opposite direction (maybe living at home makes you less marriageable material). Still, the declining marriage trend has been steady for nearly half a century and is obviously not the result of the Great Recession. Ditto for the other long-term demographic changes.

None of this is to say that the economy has nothing to do with living arrangements. Even adjusted for demographics, Kolko’s chart still shows a small increase in adult children living at home starting around 2010. This is likely due to a triple whammy affecting millennials: (1) their incomes dropped during the Great Recession and still haven’t fully recovered, (2) college grads are saddled with more debt than previous generations, and (3) the real cost of housing has increased nearly 10 percent over the past decade. Put all this together, and the average millennial today has less disposable income but faces higher rent than previous generations. This is a real problem, and it would be surprising indeed if it literally had no effect at all on the likelihood of 20-ish millennials living at home longer than they used to.

That said, the effect appears to be fairly small. The big driver of living at home in your 20s appears to be primarily demographic. The economy plays only a small role.

Jordan Weissmann reads the latest IMF report on Greece and calls this one of the saddest passages you’ll ever read about a developed country:

Greece will continue to struggle with high unemployment rates for decades to come. Its current unemployment rate is around 25 percent, the highest in the OECD, and, after seven years of recession, its structural component is estimated at around 20 percent. Consequently, it will take significant time for unemployment to come down. Staff expects it to reach 18 percent by 2022, 12 percent by 2040, and 6 percent only by 2060.

IMF staff projects this astronomical unemployment rate despite the fact that Greece’s working-age population is expected to decline by 10 percentage points over the next few decades. The IMF also projects that by 2060 Greece’s government debt will increase to 250 percent of GDP; financing needs will increase to 70 percent of GDP; and real GDP growth will be stuck at 1-2 percent.

That’s 45 years of projected misery. And only if nothing else goes south during that time.

The most remarkable part of all this is how quickly the IMF has changed its official mind. Last year, during Greece’s most recent funding crisis, the IMF projected that everything would soon be hunky dory. Now, a mere 11 months later, they’re projecting decades of catastrophe. Despite their claims that much has changed over the past year, one might well be suspicious that the 2015 projections were massaged no small amount to make them politically palatable.