I think the orthodox answer is that there's a lot of incentive for making the economy look like it's doing better than it is.

I've noticed that old discussions of the US economy talked about things like how many million tons of steel and concrete were produced. The number of houses and cars produced. Electric power generation per year.

Now all economists are interested in is GDP and the rise in nominal real estate, stock and bond prices. And they don't care about the things I mentioned above. Or things like 95% of real estate investments are for existing stock.