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There’s a new political buzzword when it comes to talking about the economy: affordability.
In the past few weeks, politicians from both sides of the aisle including President Donald Trump, New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and
Rep. Jim Clyburn of South Carolina have all discussed affordability.
Jessica Rett, a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Los Angeles, said “affordability” is “a much weirder” noun than “economy.” “We come to it via this indirect route. It starts off as a verb: afford,” Rett said. From there, it becomes an adjective adjective: affordable. Stick another ending on it to make it a noun: affordable. This path from a verb to an adjective to a noun means the word “affordable” holds lots of adjectival properties that “economy” doesn’t hold, Rett said.
“Nouns like economy often describe a bunch of dimensions all at once, but affordability is really honing in on a particular dimension,” she said.
This means the word “affordable” is easier to understand, since it’s just about one slice of the whole economy. All of this could add to the word’s political power. “The economy is something that you have to have a PhD in order to be a specialist in,” Rett said. “But everyone’s an expert in affordability, because it’s very subjective. It’s relative to their own personal experience, and it’s something that they have a daily interaction with.” Mihaela Pintea, chair of the economics department at Florida International University, said it captures the disconnect between macroeconomic indicators, which are pretty good, and
how people are feeling about the economy, which is not so good.
“People feel, ‘But what about me?’” she said. “Maybe somehow everybody else is doing OK, but why is it that I have a hard time just living my life?” Abdullah Al-Bahrani, an economist at Northern Kentucky University, said he knows people who talk about price increases on things like groceries, child care, and
housing when they talk about affordability.
“The reality is real wages have not kept up,” he said. “I think that’s what the average American is complaining about when they bring up the term affordability.” Like Rett, Al-Bahrani described the word affordability as subjective. “We spend money on different things and we have different priorities, and that’s where it gets a little complicated,” he said. There’s no one set economic definition for the term. For one person, affordability might include paying off student loans. For another, it might include feeding a family of five or paying off a mortgage.
People have different ways of defining affordability, but the term captures a feeling in this economy. | 
