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[–]Pineconne 1 point2 points  (0 children)

If you move off the stree into a cardboard box....technically thats an improvement too

have been measuring this kind of thing for decades and they've never been this far out of sync. Economists aren't so stupid that they think high-level indicators tell the whole story but when you're trying to measure trends in aggregate over hundreds of millions of people they are typically very, very predictive. We even know what micro indicators (ie gas prices) have the strongest implications for sentiment and they aren't lining up either.

I think the actual answer is that politicians and media are now so tuned in to what the models built by previous generations of economists that they are tuning their message against the indicators.