Derek Thompson

And another doctor says, you idiot, that's nothing like pneumonia.

And then another doctor says, you're both idiots because this machine isn't even good enough to diagnose pneumonia in the first place.

And the doctors start screaming at each other in the ER room about methodology and test sensitivity.

And you're still there on the stretcher like, hey, I can't breathe over here.

That is the labor market for young people today.

The experts are shouting at each other about evidentiary standards, and the patient is on the table getting worse by the minute.

Today's guest is Roger Karma.

He's a staff writer at The Atlantic where he writes about economics.

We talk about the labor market for new hires and why young college graduates seem so miserable.

But underneath that analysis, this diagnosis of a sick economy, Roger and I circle the theme of economic vibes.

A few years ago, the economic commentator, Kyla Scanlon, who's been on this show several times, coined the term vibe session, which captured the idea that Americans felt like the economy was in a recession, even though it was not technically in a recession.

When I speak with economists, I sometimes hear them disparage vibes as soft nonsense, and they hold up statistics to represent the cold, hard truth of reality.

I'm not sure that's the right way to see things.

I do not subscribe to the idea that, quote, feelings are not facts.

In fact, I think feelings are a very important kind of fact.

If, for example, Americans say they're miserable about the economy

It is a fact that they're saying that they're miserable and their misery has real world implications for elections, for policy, for the future of the economy.

A miserable electorate does not vote for the same people as a non-miserable one.

Sometimes when the statistics tell one story and the vibes tell another, it's not the vibes that are fake.

It's the design of our statistics that are failing to tell the full story of what it's like to look for a job in today's economy.