Derek Thompson

Their feelings elect people.

Those people make policy.

Those policies make economic reality.

And so I guess here's how I'll off-ramp it.

You also deal in a world with vibes and statistics where sometimes your job, your editor comes to you and they say,

you know, the surveys say this, but the economic statistics say this, make sense of it.

Are the people wrong?

Are Americans wrong?

And I wonder how you, as the woo-woo Californian in one of these two chairs, how you make sense of trying to take people's feelings about the economy seriously, even when the experts you talk to insist that those feelings are fake.

I think it's a great place to land, and I think there's an interaction effect between stuckness and uncertainty as you described it.

People, I think, feel more comfortable when external...

circumstances are predictable and internally you have a sense of day over day, year over year improvement.

You're saying that people are experiencing the opposite.

They think external circumstances are unpredictable and negative and internally they feel stuck.

There is no year over year improvement.

That seems to me to be a key part of the psychological disposition of the workforce.

And you add to that the fact that

between social media and ample access to news.

People have in their pockets access to a world that constantly seems like and sometimes is burning.

And you see other people from a social comparison standpoint that seem on social media to be the ones that have it all.