Are we in a ‘silent depression’? TikTokers claim 2023 economy is worse than Great Depression

(WGN Radio) – Inflation is easing, unemployment is relatively low, and the stock market looks strong, economics experts say. So why does it still feel so bad?

A host of TikTokers have coined a name for it: “silent depression.”

They say the economy is bad – just as bad as it was during the Great Depression – but no one is acknowledging it.

One viral video compares 1930 prices with today’s, claiming the average home back then cost $3,900, a car was $600 and rent was $18 a month. Meanwhile, the average salary was $1,300, the TikToker says.

Today, those prices are all obviously much, much higher: $436,000 for a house, $48,000 for a new car, and about $2,000 a month for rent. Meanwhile, the average person is making $56,000, he says. (The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts that figure slightly higher at about $58,000 for someone working full time. The U.S. Census Bureau put the median household income last year at around $75,000).

In any case, the TikTok aims to point out that in 2023, those big ticket items cost a much larger percent of your annual take-home income than they did in 1930, when home prices were three times the annual salary and rent was a small fraction.

“We are in a silent depression,” the video concludes.

But journalists and researchers are quick to cast doubt on the numbers being spread around social media. New York Times reporter Jeanna Smialek dug into the stats and found one major problem: solid, reliable government data doesn’t really exist before 1940. So a lot of the numbers being used in these “silent depression” videos are from dubious sources.

It’s true housing has gotten much more expensive in the U.S. over the past 100 years, Smialek concedes, but that doesn’t translate into a depressed economy.

Jack Kelly, a senior contributor at Forbes, also wrote about the growing belief in a recent piece. Speaking with WGN Radio, he pointed out another flaw in the comparison between today’s economy and that of nearly 100 years ago.

“Back then, you didn’t have Social Security, you didn’t have welfare, you didn’t have food stamps, you didn’t have all those safety nets that we have now,” he said. “Let’s say the average young person has an iPhone, they’re going to Starbucks and having a latte – or whatever the heck they’re having – they’re leasing a car, they have a pretty good lifestyle.”

That’s not the case for everybody, he acknowledged, but said it still wasn’t a fair comparison to equate even the issues of today’s economy with those of the early 1930s.

Listen to Kelly’s full interview with WGN Radio below.

Young people today do face real challenges, Kelly said, like amassing student loan debt, sky-high rent, and the feeling that no matter how much you save, you’ll never have the American dream ideal of homeownership.

“I could understand why young people are looking around and saying, ‘Oh my gosh, this is terrible. This is awful.’ And, you know, for young people, they don’t really know what happened with the Great Depression. People jumped out of their windows. Banks closed down, people couldn’t get their money out of the banks. You had the ‘Grapes of Wrath’ kind of thing where you had to go in your jalopy across the whole country. So I think they left that part out.”