I very much agree with the premise that economists unduly focus on a few metrics of dubious quality - labor force participation, personal consumption expenditures, market capitalization, wage growth, etc - and overfit them to construct a coherent narrative about the "strength" of the economy and what the experience of living in that economy must be like.
There's a story right now being peddled by all the talking heads that the economy is "great", but consumers keep reporting feeling terrible, so consumers must not understand something.
I think this goes the other way around. Our method for understanding the economy is flawed and is not properly capturing what all consumers know intuitively, things kind of suck, even when you have a job and even when you're still buying things.
We need to start thinking about what information needs to be captured and how it needs to be reported to start making better sense of what's broken and how to fix it.
There's a story right now being peddled by all the talking heads that the economy is "great", but consumers keep reporting feeling terrible, so consumers must not understand something.
I think this goes the other way around. Our method for understanding the economy is flawed and is not properly capturing what all consumers know intuitively, things kind of suck, even when you have a job and even when you're still buying things.
We need to start thinking about what information needs to be captured and how it needs to be reported to start making better sense of what's broken and how to fix it.