Both of your examples presume the sentiment is justified, but that isn’t a given. How do you account for a generally poor outlook that externally influences sentiment despite a well functioning economy?

Maybe everyone is miserable because they’re newly aware of the violence and injustice in the world generally. How is that useful when trying to understand the state of the economy specifically? It’s important to understand how people feel as a society, but this isn’t supposed to be that. How do you filter out the “noise”?

We can’t really use “vibes” to determine if interest rates should go back down, for example. That would be disastrous.

Exactly, take for example this graph.

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/wp-content/uploads/site...

The economy suddenly was awesome once a Republican was back in office, according to Republicans. Just turned on a dime.

Everyone is miserable because of interest rates and inflation. It's hitting the consumer right now and those are really obvious indicators how things are going. McDonalds costs as much as a meal at a proper restaurant did before the pandemic. That's not good.

Everyone is decidedly not miserable, and even if they were, your choice of highlighting inflation, a number that has been steadily decreasing for some time now, is curious.

You act like people would finally be happy if inflation were just under some number. No. People will just find the next thing to be miserable about. That’s how people are now.

People that watch Fox News/MSNBC and/or are addicted to social media.

> McDonalds costs as much as a meal at a proper restaurant did before the pandemic. That's not good.

This is not exactly true. They raised their prices, but they have a permanent 30% off coupon on their app.

Again, an individual “feeling” like the economy doing well shouldn’t be used as a measure for how an economy is actually doing. Like when they interview people on the streets to see how they “feel” the economy is doing.

God I feel like I’m in the Twilight Zone.

>If a bunch of people think the economy's not doing well, that seems like a pretty strong indication that it in-fact is not

People radically misreport this stuff for political reasons. "The economy is doing well" numbers will change radically in a week when a different party takes the White House, typically in a purely partisan fashion [1]. The economy didn't get better in that week, it's just that people "feel" differently about things when their preferred (resp. disfavored) candidate takes office.

[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/1609/consumer-views-economy.asp...

The reality is that for republicans, "how good the economy feels" is tied directly to the letter next to the guy in the white house. It's not even based on who controls the senate, where their senators have spent the last 5 decades ruining the economy every single time they have had a chance.

"But gas prices are low" so whatever apparently.